Marginalized Minorities

            Kimberlé Crenshaw’s article outlines a number of ways in which most women of color suffering from domestic violence are excluded from services which claim to protect them. Some of the reasons are less the fault of the service providers and more the fault of cultural and societal pressures. For instance, she says that as a result of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1990 which as designed to protect immigrant women being battered by the US citizens they moved to the United States to marry. It prohibits application for permanent residency until after at least 2 years of being “properly” married and it demands the application be filed by both spouses. This act caused many immigrant woman to be reluctant to leave their abusive partners because they did not want to be deported. Even after pressure to create a opportunity for these women to leave their spouses without fear of deportation it took a while for a waiver to be made available to claim domestic violence. Yet, most immigrant women have limited access to the resources to file the waiver and provide evidence that they are, in fact, being abused. Many cultural barriers also contribute to their inability to file the waiver and their reluctance to report domestic violence. Many minority women live with their extended families which means they have very little privacy and no opportunity to leave the home and communicate their distress to help centers. Additionally, they are often entirely dependent upon their husbands as a link to the outside world and for information regarding their legal status.

Even women who are permanent residents remain with their abusive partners because their husbands threaten them with the fear of deportation. They could not possibly be deported but they are unaware of the reality of the situation and rely on their husband’s manipulative misinformation. They often fear that they will put their entire family at risk of deportation if they call attention to themselves. Additionally, Crenshaw’s article focuses on the issue of language barriers. Many shelters limit their services to individuals who are English proficient. They turn away non-English speakers because they don’t have bilingual personnel or resources. Efforts to include women who are of minority cultures or who don’t speak English are often merely afterthoughts for these institutions and when the shelter in the article finally did begin to make efforts to include a Latina board, they ended up driving off their minority committee members by refusing to recognize their feminist credentials and forcing them to struggle with the bureaucracy of race and class issues instead of actively helping women suffering violence. The Latina women walked out of the program sick and tired of not accomplishing any good and returned to their own community programs. This was counterproductive, obviously because these women could not assist the program in diversifying its services because their hands were tied by politics.

Other women’s services which discriminate against women of color are organizations such as Planned Parenthood (traditionally anyway). I think recently they have removed themselves pretty substantially from their past of forced-sterilization and supposed goal of “killing black babies.” Another organization which I know of locally is SOS. The program has recently enforced a strict dress code and  appearance guidelines which transform their advocates from the tattooed, pierced, alternatively hair styled women (and men) into upper-crust white-collar, pristinely dressed and sanitized “representatives” of the program. This has driven many of my friends away from the role of advocates because they felt that the limitation of their free speech and individual expression would have a negative impact for the victims they were attempting to help. If I were a rape victim I’d be much happier talking to someone pierced and tattooed, someone I could relate to, who wasn’t looking down on me from above (literally and figuratively) but someone like me. The program worried that victims would be made uncomfortable by the alternative appearances of their advocates, but I think it is quite the opposite. I think victims would be made more uncomfortable by being approached by women (and men) dressed professionally with supremely tidy ‘caucasionised’ dress. The victims of rape in South Bend are often members of minority cultures and subcultures who do not relate to the white middle class image, yet the program insisted that its advocates take it up in the name of helping the recipients of their services feel “more comfortable.”

The white, upper-middle-class women who dominate the antiviolence movement have the power to determine whether the intersectional differences of women of color will be incorporated into the basic formulation of shelter policies but they often fail to dos. This, as the article pointed out, often becomes a matter of deadly seriousness which decides which victims will survive and which will not. The powerful boards of these programs need to be diversified so that their members have a variety of experiences and understandings of minority cultures and they need to reevaluate their policies which are often made with good intentions but end up marginalizing those who are not white-middle-class. Additionally, law enforcement and minority cultures need to become more open to sharing statistical information about rape, sexual and domestic violence within minority communities so that the need for prosecution and investigation as well as increased protections and services for minority women can be understood, recognized, and acted on. If everyone keeps pretending that these problems are much less of an issue than they really are, then they will never be brought to full light and they will never be effectively resolved.

Miss Representation

Please craft a blog post that reflects on the film “Miss Representation.”

You may use the questions below to guide your reflections.

What most surprised you about the film?

What did you learn from the film?

Miss Representation director, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and many of the

interviewees, such as Margaret Cho, Jane Fonda, Jennifer Lawless, and

Devanshi Patel, talk candidly about their experiences with sexism. What

connections or empathy did you feel with the experiences presented in the

film?

What strategies are working to promote more women to leadership

I think the thing that surprised me most about the film, “Miss Representation” were the statistics. I hadn’t noticed, until the film pointed it out, that most of the women on television and in films are only in their 20s and 30s. The idea that a woman is only useful/viable while she has potential to bear children and then can be thrown away after she has served that purpose is staggering. The statistics that support that claim are even more noteworthy. While women aging from 20-30 years old make up only 39% of the population of the United States, they comprise 71% of the figures on television. Where do all the old women go? The idea that the female actresses interviewed were pressured to lose excessive amounts of weight, get botox, and undergo minor plastic surgeries to improve their appearances for the sake of television programs is ridiculous. I must admit that my knowledge of popular culture is so pathetic that I’m not sure of the name of the actress who found the botox procedure so incredibly traumatizing (was that Jane Fonda?) but her description of her experience alone is enough to make one stop and consider how one supports these industries. She got the procedure done reluctantly and was so objectified and made to feel so insignificant and dehumanized by it that it has had a lasting impact on her. She has taken the stance for now of refusing to have it done again, but she did make herself a pretty loophole should she decide it’s important for her career to have it done in the future.

I learned a lot about the representation of women on cable television from the film. I don’t have cable, nor do I watch much television that I don’t hand choose from Hulu (Modern Family, 30 Rock…those are about the only two with random geek attacks of Terra Nova when I really want to shut my brain off) so I had no idea what cable news shows looked like. They’re a far cry from the BBC broadcasts I watch I can tell you. (And my NPR intake doesn’t really help with my visual understanding of how women are depicted in the media). Imagine the outcry if a male newscaster showed up on screen in a Chippendale’s outfit. The things (and lack of things) those women were wearing was absolutely astonishing. The idea that a woman is powerful and authoritative (and that in only a limited scope) so long as she is also sexually interesting and entertaining is absurd.

I also learned the neat tidbit that it is actually harder to induce men to watch television. That makes the programming being streamed today make so much more sense. Of course the advertisers are in cahoots with the producers of film and television (aren’t most of them produced by the same corporations anyway?) to make the programming appealing to men so that they will watch it so that they will see their ads. Yet, why do they undercut men to such a degree? Don’t they think there are any men out there who care about the content they view as much as they care about their visceral entertainment? Our media is undermining the intelligence and maturity of the men of our country. In so doing, they are producing generation after generation of men who don’t actually care about the more important things in life, who do only value women for their appearance and sexual utility, and who will only watch television if it is stimulating them on some base level. Yet, if we provided programming that was free from any of the superficial junk which we spoonfeed every member of our society day in and day out, maybe we’d all grow up a little. Maybe if the consumers demanded that the companies that produced their entertainment take a public interest, they really would.

Instead, we’re all happy to shut our brains off and veg out in front of television which objectifies and simplifies us all, especially women. I’m not saying we should “re-regulate” the industry. I think that the FCC was silly in a lot of ways in the ways it attempted to control freedom of expression. Yet, I think that it’s time for us to start voting with our remotes (especially where people are buying cable programming) and watching only things which promote the decency, respect, and civility of humanity. It might be hard to find shows which do that at first, but I’m pretty confident that once we decide as a whole, that’s what we want, that’s what they’d provide. Of course, with men in charge of the programming and men watching the programming provided for men and women watching it too because that’s all there is, this cycle should be difficult to break. However, steps are being taken to educate our younger generations about the harmful effects of what they’re seeing on television. They know the damage it can cause because they live with it every day. They’re voices are being heard and some of them at least are choosing to reject those messages of value rooted purely in appearance.

I, like most young women have struggled with my appearance, especially in terms of my weight. I have an on again off again eating disorder as a result of young men who took offense to my inability to live up to their expectations of femininity when I was younger. Their media intake caused them to produce output which was seriously damaging to my self image (which had been relatively unscathed by the media at large due to diligent parenting and free thinking). Yet, I didn’t manage to avoid the self-esteem problems associated with the warped media message being sent to young people because I operated within spheres with young people who were actively being shaped by it. Their perceptions of me in comparison to what the media had taught them to expect resulted in the message being passed down to me in a more personal way than simply subliminally through the advertising and programming of television and film. There is absolutely no escaping it.

When the population who is funding this kind of programming ceases to do so and ceases to stand up for individuals who condemn women in leadership because they are not perfect, things might begin to change. Those women who are in positions of power now are fighting for change and they’re being successful to some degree. They’re using their place to speak out and up for themselves and others like them so that they can carve a place of leadership in politics and in the media which is defined by intelligence and self-worth, not fashion and physicality. Respectable, strong women in positions of power are growing in numbers and as they become more and more visible, more young women of generations to come are seeing models they can follow to provoke change and to encourage them to follow in their footsteps.