Sex-February 3

 While the readings for this week were very different, offering many layers to theory in various forms, I found that all emphasized sex.  Interestingly, exclusion and dominance based on the body, the physical manifestation of sex, strengthened the arguments of each writer.
In "Generations of Women," Mirikitani describes the deeply emotional histories of three Japanese women.  Words such as "weary" and "woman foetus" and "entering of men" echo through out this poem, contributing the overall understanding that these women suffered due to their inferiority to men.  Their physical bodies were subject to long days of labor, pregnancy, and racist mocking.  The grandmother and the mother are marked by the weakness of their sex and race during the period of Japanese internment in the United States.  At the end, the narrator (the third generation/daughter) defies the persistence of female inferiority.  She becomes proud of her mother and grandmother's experiences, and thus becomes proud of who she is--a Japanese American woman.
 Carole Pateman in "Introduction: The Theoretical Subversiveness of Feminism" argues that women have historically excluded from theory, and therefore, classic theoretical works should be reviewed with feminist lens.  The inclusion of women in theory would undermine, yet modernize the social and political patriarchal arguments made by classic theorists.  The previous, biased understanding of women as illogical deemed them unfit for the public sector, and thus unfit for making contributions to theory.  Universality, ineffectively, began to mask the obvious masculine bias of theory.  What "universality" and "individuality" fail to demonstrate is body of woman, which in itself is exclusive in that it has the ability to give birth.  The exclusion of women from social and political theory undermines the socialist themes that so many of the classic radicalists discuss.  If the point of socialism is to make everyone equal, then why do these theories not apply to women?  Shifting away from classic theory, in contemporary theory, we face a similar issue.  The issue is that theorists dismiss all women's theory as feminist, when it is impossible for all women to agree on the same theories.  This dilemma is part of the reason why I am taking this class, as I find many people do not want to listen to my ideas if I align myself with feminism, even if I do not agree with everything a modern feminist might.
Moreover, Barbara Christian demonstrates that race even further polarizes the already sexed biases of theory existing in literature.  She portrays the race for theory as an academic elitist phenomenon upon which literature is criticized using Western theory.  In order to break the shackles of Western thought, Christian turns to literature to express the philosphy she has accrued through experience.  So often, critics will classify or examine world and/or female literature with a Western, binary understanding.  This becomes an issue when in the attempt to create universal theory, critics fail to include the periphery.  I find this especially important as a history major.  I often find that what I learn is HIS-story, and excludes the experience of the smaller, yet still significant beings at play.  It is through literature that I can gain a better understand the world outside of white men's actions.