Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

The alien’s green colour tells of the visibility of the “other”, who is alwaysexposed to the gazes of those whose hegemonic position allows them to considerthemselves “normal” and not marked by “otherness”. 37 Furthermore, thegreen colour is an abstraction of the notion of skin colour. It shows the artificialconstruction behind “othering” rather than determining a particular skin colouror even suggesting that the green stands exclusively for skin colour. Theshape and bodily feature do not emphasise a particular gender in the “other”.The “stranger” can be seen as female or male, child or adult, hetero-, bi- orhomosexual, “white” or Black or “brown” or “yellow” or “red”. The examplehere also shows the “alienation” of the “other” since she/he/it is outside theairplane and therefore in a very vulnerable position, whereas people insidethe airplane can be considered as “safe” or at least we can believe that in caseof emergency they will be provided with assistance which can increase theirchances for survival. Through the shelter given by the airplane, the peopleare highly homogenised in terms of being insiders – though divided amongstthemselves by the ability to pay for extra services. The shelter of the airplaneprotects these people and they are invisible in the painting. The most visiblefigure in the painting is the person outside since she/he/it is excluded fromtaking up a seat among the other passengers. From inside, the passengers arehardly able to see the person excluded. Many of them would not even knowof the person outside or be aware of the difficult and dangerous situation the“stranger” is in. Some may know of the existence of the “alien” and considerthis “blind passenger” a parasite who illegally takes advantage of “their” system,whereas some may feel sorry for the inconvenient situation of the “other” oreven try to do something to help the person outside.As we have indicated, feminists learned to deconstruct power structures,but white feminists often tend to be blind to their own participation inreproducing unequal power relations. Including the stance of Critical WhitenessStudies into white feminist perspectives is associated on a personal levelwith uneasiness and resistance. A critical whiteness perspective demands are-thinking of white feminists’ privileges and a dismantling of such unequalpower relations within groups of feminists as are caused by differences in, forexample, ethnicity, race, sexuality, financial means and class. Of course, whitefeminisms have included these categories in their analyses in order to explainparticular problems related to their situatedness. The critique by scholars37The print in this volume only allows for a “white” and Black but in the original painting the figure/Alien is green.66