Race and Gender

     While reading these three articles by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Anna Julia Cooper, and Sue Hum, I couldn't help but notice the relation of race to the current understandings of gender. There is the idea that history repeats itself, and that is why we must study history to understand the world around us; but with these articles I kept coming back to the notions of gender specificity taking the place of race in these articles. I am by no way saying that the notions of race that are being addressed in these articles have been solved and it is time for a new ideological set to come to the forefront of society, but rather I present the notion of how gender terminology is now moving into the spotlight in society, as ideas of race become more known.
   
In Gates article "Editor's Introduction: Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes" he lays out many different ideas about what race is and how it changes meaning across different forms of text. In trying to understand this article I thought of race as a type of homophone. In this sense "race" is a word that is spelled the same way, pronounced the same way, but has a different meaning based on context. I am aware to the fact that race is not a homophone, but thinking about it in this way aids my understanding of Gates' concept of race. Gates starts out with notions of race saying that is "the source of feeling and thought," (Gates 3). This idea of a identification process can determine a persons feelings and thoughts to be confined in a similar group is something that first appears with ideas of race but I think now has evolved to the notions of gender. Sex is said to be the anatomy of a person's reproductive system, and gender is said to be either "social roles based on the sex of the person, or personal identification of one's own gender based on an internal awareness," (Prince, Sex vs. Gender). The notion that someone can self identify into their own grouping which can change their thought processes to reflect the feelings and thought processes of others in the group relates to race. Another large idea presented by Gates is an older idea that presents race as a thing, that could "determine the shape and contour of thought and feelings as surely as it did the shape and contour of human anatomy," (Gates 3). This idea of race being something that shapes thought and feelings as well as ideas about the human anatomy is very prevalent in the new gender ideology. The argument between sex and gender being interchangeable, and people aligning themselves with a gender they may not have been born into then changing their sex to fit that gender grouping is seen as a new progressive form of these older notions of race. This idea of old ideas of ideology is also prevalent in Coopers article.
     Cooper states "We do well if we can to illuminate just the tiny arc which we occupy and should be glad that the next generation will not need the lessons we try so assiduously to hammer into this," (Cooper 381).  Her background was very interesting to know when thinking of her viewpoint of race and how this applies to the new notion of gender. Since she was a slave and came from the exact essence of racism it is easier to empathize with her notions ideas of oppression through race and being a woman. She stated in her own time however that she was glad the next generation would not have to nearly deal as much with the frustration of the abolition of slavery, and focus more on individual rights and narratives of accurate portrayal of themselves. Those ideas are what is bringing on the new waves of gender fluidity and gender equality. The older generations stamping their mark in the equality time scheme of America history has lead to the opening of a new voice of a new generation. Sue Hum's ideas tie into this historical aspect of trying to undo wrongs in the portrayal of people.
     Sue Hum sets up in her article the notion of the "racialized design" which is a new theory that builds off of the theory of the "racialized gaze". In her article on the racialized gaze Hum talks mainly about perception and how people make sense of what they see based on historical context of representation. The racialized design is a similar idea that talks about three different ways of interpreting images in a three part process that is: methodological, theoretical, and pedagogical. With regards to race people assign stereotypes to different races and inscribe them in images without knowledge (or with knowledge) of the historical misinterpretation and offense that it might cause. The image pictured above is in regards to the recent acceptance of girls into the Boy Scouts of America. There was been a lot of bad publicity and backlash against the allowance of girls into the Boy Scouts, mainly due to the Girl Scouts of America. This does not take away from the idea of gender in regards to race and being able to use the racialized design to rhetorically interpret the political cartoon to analyze the authors intent. The idea of being able to analyze the stereotypes in all types of work is starting to become big outside of just racial conflicts and into gender based relations.

Works Cited   

Cooper, Anna Julia. "Experts from A Voice From the South" (1892). Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Anne E. Boyd. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 2009. 379-384

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes." Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 1-20.

Hum, Sue "Between the Eyes': Racialized Gaze as Design." College English 77.3 (2015): 191-215

Prince, Virginia. "Sex vs. Gender" International Journal of Transgenderism (2005): 8

Cartoon by Rick McKee: https://twitter.com/PolToons/status/920983127065006086