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