The sociologist, Dorothy Smith, argues that we are all expert practitioners of our everyday world, knowledgeable in the most intimate ways of how it is put together and of its routine daily accomplishments. But our aim as scholars or analysts is to find the objective or generalisable correlates of what seem to be a private experience (of oppression).
In Tania’s experience this morning, encountering the father with the obnoxious t-shirt, we can find some “truths” of our gendered everyday world. That father, also a police officer, (and we know about police officers in New Zealand) was expressing his masculine gender identity. The T-shirt associates political expression and power (party-partisan, “Anti-Bush”) with female sexual subordination. And it’s relevant to our understanding of gender and politics.
This makes me wonder whether movements to replace Bush, i.e. the Democratic Party or the anti-Iraq war movement, will be any less masculinist in the way they wield power in the world than the Bush administration.
I like better the “My love” union of Bush and Blair. It puts both their “manliness” in question…Maybe you could get a T-shirt printed Tania??
– Jacqui
Hi all,
I have seen the t-shirt Tania mentioned in the past a few times and in each case the wearer was a man. If we see t-shirts as being one of the most popular forms of socially acceptable communication for men then wearers of the t-shirt in question clearly wanted to communicate at least two things: a dislike for President Bush and the need to publicly profess the objectivation of a part of the female anatomy. But I think it’s interesting WHO the t-shirt was designed to communicate to. Women were most probably not the intended audience. I’d argue that t-shirts of that type are designed to communicate these ideas to other men: to convince other males of the acceptability of this type of thinking and behaviour and also to reinforce it in males who already hold such views. So I guess such t-shirts are not only offensive but also pretty dangerous. But what can we do? No doubt such items are covered by conventions of free speech? I wonder what the members of this blog feel about the limits of free speech in relation to items that are clearly derogatory to women?
Cheers,
Charlie
Unfortunately, clothing is one of the key ways in which gender identities and power relations are created and reinforced. Just look at history; foot binding, corsets, crinolines, and today cosmetic surgery and high heels. (men mostly in remain in trousers.) I think clothing and fashion often reinforces women’s objectification, inferiority and kind of ‘fetishizes’ women’s vulnerability by physically restricting them.
It is so naturalised for me I barely notice it . Perhaps because I come from a family where gender roles were strictly enforced and women subordinate to male aggressive domination. I now see how this is injurious to everyone, actually disempowers the family unit.
As for t-shirts: the other day at work my boss wore a shirt with a realistic close up picture of a women licking a gun barrel. The gun was obviously a phallic symbol. Also at uni I saw a young girl wearing a supre shirt announcing across her chest ” weapons of mass distraction.”