Unit 5 Selling Love

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Unit 5Selling Love

• Week 12 November 19, 2002
•  
• (Reading Silko and Lonawaima in RWL, 261-270
  271-293.)

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Reading Lonawaima

• 1. Not educated in any significant fashion
• 2. Their labour was appropriated and exploited
• 3. trade preparation as domestic labour or wife
  and mother outside Chilocco cultural norms

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Reading Lonawaima

• 1. Removed children from homes in order to
  further the assimilation and destruction of
  native cultures and language
• 2. Native American women were trained to be
  submissive and obedient to authority, and
  authority in large measure was held by white
  settler governments
• 3. Fit into governmental plans for a fundamental
  alteration of Indian peoples relationship to the
  land

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Unit 5 Selling Love

• understanding women as sexual beings virgin,
  whore, or within family location mother,
  grandmother and so forth
• Feminist theory and queer theory
• political nature of sexuality
• Shaping bodies and minds of women

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1. Introduction Power, Sex and Love

• Pornography definition -
• two basic issues
• 1. Women matter
• 2. Pornography is a practice
• pornography practice of sexual subordination
• feminist political ethics

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1. Introduction Power, Sex and Love

• Romantic Love
• assumptions of dependence/power
• figure hetero/homosexual relations
• Heterosexism
• systematized set of social standards
• customs, and expected practices
• that regulate and restrict relationships

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1. Introduction Power, Sex and Love

• engages heterosexism as a cultural construction
• paradox - heterosexism
• assumed and invisible
• enforced and visible
• radical feminisms position
• heterosexual practice a co-option are
• need to make conscious choice

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1. Introduction Power, Sex and Love

• Trangender
• concept of identity between
• identity-based feminisms
• postmodern feminist theorizing
• Neither takes seriously transgenders
• experience

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1. Introduction Power, Sex and Love

• critique of identity
• liminality re transgender
• subject locations re transgender
• 1. androgyne, 2. epicene, 3. two-spirited 4.
  Intersex, and 5. Third sex

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2.Prostitution and Ancient Ritual

• Sumer (ancient Near East)
• myth of Gilgamesh and Enkidu
• 2500 B.C.E.
• Uruk
• deities Enlil, Enki, Inanna
• the harlot as civilizing sexual force
• temple sex workers

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Inanna(2700-2300) Sumer cylinder seal, cultic
statue
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3. Prostitution, Patriarchy and Gender Ideology

• Gerda Lerner Creation of Patriarchy
• veiling
• two kinds of women in patriarchy
• respectable non-respectable
• in relation to male
• legislated middle Assyrian period c.1200 B.C.E.
• distinction between cultic sexual services

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3. Prostitution, Patriarchy and Gender Ideology

• and commercial prostitution
• military campaigns -- enslavement of women and
  men
• sexual abuse of these captives
• prestige based on number of slaves
• sexually available women (harem)
• women commodified as slaves/virginity - financial
  asset

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4. good women and bad women in Classical
Athens (Wife, Concubine and Hetaera)

• Demosthenes (4th BCE century Athenian statesman
  and orator)
• three women
• wife (damar or gyne)
• concubine (pallake)
• hetaera (hedones henek)
• women defined by relation to men

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4. good women and bad women in Classical
Athens (Wife, Concubine and Hetaera)

• hetaera
• educated
• schools for hetaerae
• paid professional companion
• non-exclusive
• sexual

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4. good women and bad women in Classical
Athens (Wife, Concubine and Hetaera)

• prostitutes of the servile status
• pornia
• not forbidden by law
• Athenian law
• set a ceiling on price
• collect tax
• temple prostitutes (hierodoulai)

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5. The Sex-trade and the Moral Majority

• in patriarchy sexual classes of women
• create divisions between women
• feminisms a disservice to sex-workers
• moral judgement
• media distortion
• STDs, drug use, criminality

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Child Sex worker - SeattlePhotographer -Mary
Ellen Mark
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5. The Sex-trade and the Moral Majority

• attitude puts sex workers at risk
• isolation, scapegoating, silencing
• whore-stigma
• moral demarcation between
• good/bad girls

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5. The Sex-trade and the Moral Majority

• victimization by society and the law
• vulnerable to rape and murder
• (Priscilla Alexander) countries most restrictive
  re
• sex trade - most problems
• re violence against prostitutes

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5. The Sex-trade and the Moral Majority

• e.g. Peter Sutcliffe case (1975-1981)
• systematically killed 13 streetwalkers
• maimed 7 and killed several other women
• he considered suspect
• Sir Michael Havers / Jim Hobson
• comments show link between
• kinds of misogyny shared between
• reps. of the law and Sutcliffe

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5. The Sex-trade and the Moral Majority

• Visual markers
• dress (the veil), mannerisms (sexual), posture ,
  location - all visual markers to establish kinds
  of women
• good/bad virgin/whore unpaid/paid
• classes of women related to 1. Sexuality 2.
  Affiliation with male
• misogyny

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Vancouver Murders

• Robert Pickton
• 63 missing women
• Charged 15 counts 1st Degree murder
• Missing women
• Marked in press as prostitutes and drug addicts

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BC Murders

• Mothers, sisters, daughters, cousins, friends by
  those who since 1991 pushed the police to
  investigate the missing women
• Mona Wilson, Diane Rock, Angela Josebury, Heather
  Chinnock and so on