Social Catagories and sterotyping, who am I?

After reading Identities and Social Locatoins: Who am I? Who are my people?, I was left with a lot of questions regarding myself and where I stand in terms of knowing, knowing when I am letting things taught to me by society interefere with my actions or who I communicate with. The reading talked a lot about how we change our personalities in order to be more acceptable to the people around us and if you think about it closely we do, and to me thats kind of scary. It also brings up the question in my mind of, are we ever able to achieve this sense of self and who I am? Also, is it ok to define yourself by things such as women, teacher, daughter etc...? The reading I think is trying to say that you can be definded as the things I listed earlier because its who you are but you have to be aware of how they affect your judgment on people and the world. It's important to read this early in the course because its this way of thinking and being aware that we have to read the texts and apply that thinking in order to understand where, racism and power come from.

Reading Response for, Lorber and Johnson

Both of these texts were really hard to understand simply because they are concepts that are so hard to understand. These authors are taking something that is so engrainded in our brains that it becomse difficult to seperate yourself from it and take a stop back to examine it. But with patience and a lot of concentration the authors really do explain the process well with examples and you can step back and go wow, this really does happen. Having already read, "The Social Construction of Gender" by Judith Lorber and having it explainded before, it was nice to look back at what she was saying and have it be more easily understood rather then going in blind. What I got from her piece was looking at how we construct gender and how race is also a part of it. Depending on who you are, it affects your role in society. It starts with gender, age and then ethnicity, making a strong point that the male is at the top and specifically the white male. It goes on to define social constructions as white males and women being opposites of eachother and then as you continue with ethnicity, the differences between male and female becomes less definded and they intermix. The piece by Alan G. Johnson, "Patriarchy, the System: An it, Not a He, a Them, or an Us" goes on to explain not only that we have different roles given to us and definded by society but why, where the come from and how to eliminate what he calls a patriachal society. His strongest message to me was that by doing nothing we contribute to this evil that allows for men to be on top and have superiority. He had many examples explaining how this system works and how we are a part of it whether we like it or not. One of my favorites was the example of the game monoply, it not only teaches us to put ourselves on top, by giving us rules it allows us to have an excuse to act in a way that puts others below you. In order to change the system that we are a part of is not necessarily easy and is not the answer that we would normally jump to. Johnson gives the examply of, when a man is accused of rapping a child, we very quickly blame him and the idea of him having a sick mind rather then examining the society that allows violence towards women in video games and movies. Its about looking at the roots. My question after all of this was, how do you not participate in a system like this that is so engranded in our heads and defines who we are? Johnsons answer for this was that you can't, he says, "we can no more avoid being involoved in it than we can avoid being female or male." (WL p.37) But what we can do he says, is we can control how we participate and the way we do that is up for discussion.