Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

120 reframing latin america
education. By the early twenty-fi rst century, in a complete turnaround in
events and in order to maintain a relative gender balance, Furman, as well
as many other selective liberal arts institutions in the United States, must
practice a sort of affirmative action for male students who are being outnumbered
and outperformed by female students across all fi elds, including
both the social and hard sciences.
A more contemporary example concerns the segregation of public restrooms
in North America according to sex category. Sociologists have long
pointed out that this segregation is a purely cultural arrangement, since
women and men have relatively similar ways of eliminating their bodily
waste and often share the same facilities at home. It is purely cultural also
because separate facilities (urinals for men, grooming fi xtures for women) are
not provided in all places and spaces. The equipment which might suggest
essential male and female natures varies across cultures and circumstances.
While we were teaching the seminar from which this book is derived, for
example, the hall leading to our classroom was undergoing renovation.
The women’s bathroom was turned into a men’s bathroom when a piece
of paper was taped to the door, directing users to “STOP! This restroom is
now for MEN.” This same space reverted just as easily back to a women’s
bathroom the next month when the fl ier was removed from the door. Each
time, equipment was neither installed nor removed from the restroom. Toilet
segregation most often serves to confi rm the illusion that separation of
the sexes is a natural consequence of their biological differences. In fact, the
act of dividing the sexes in this way contributes to the production of these
differences.
Just as racialist and classist thinking has varied over time and space, so
too has “genderist” thinking. Different cultures have different conceptions
of gender roles, just as they have changed and evolved their gender norms
over time. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, women have historically
worked in the fi elds; in Europe, cultural norms insist that they are not fi t
for such physically demanding labor.
Some feminists criticize postmodernism’s move to decenter the subject
and the author at the very historical moment when women are coming
into their own right as individuals and writers. Just as colonized peoples
helped to prompt postcolonial studies but also challenged the decentering
of nationhood as they embarked on their own independence, academic feminism’s
insistence that the (male) canon be revised questioned the intellectual
foundation upon which the idea of dead authorship was predicated. The
existence of many differences of approach and opinion attests to what some
have coined “feminisms” (plural, not singular). Women authors in much