Blog 2

In the past, my definition of autobiography used to be a true and complete representation of the real life of the author, just like a realistic narrative film to represent the whole life experience of the author to the readers. But, Scott’s “Experience” has changed my notion of autography to be a polished or embellished work piece for experience is not equal to truth. Because what the authors wrote was what they felt, thought and saw, the real facts have been mixed and polished by their own opinion. And not every specific part of their life was presented in the autobiography. So the autobiography is not as true, complete, and unchanged as I used to think.

Now that the autobiography has been embellished by the author, this fact forms the one of the reasons why people read autobiography to some extent. People who read the autography are interested and care about the author, so they are curious about not only the story written in the autography, but also the information of the author hidden behind the autography. The very information, forms the very autography for the identity, gender, religion, race, experience and something like that have form the author’s philosophy, world view, sense of worth and ideology which the author used to us a different life representation of his/her own. That means a special identity has formed a special angle of view such as women, black man, and homosexual. In “A Tool Kit” written by Smith& Watson, we know that an autobiography has a strong relationship with  “authorship and historical moment” (Smith& Watson 165), “the history of reading publics” (Smith& Watson 167) and “identity” (Smith& Watson 168). So we could get conclusion that one of the reasons people read autobiography is that they wonder the effect on the autobiography of the authors’ gender, race, sex orientation and so on.

What’s more, the “cracks” formed by the special identity of the authors have also offered the opportunities for the feminist theorists. Through these “cracks”, the feminist theorist could discover the historical background, the special experience, and the contradictions of the author. The more they learn from the author, the more they deal with the feminism. That’s why the feminist theorist could find opportunity in the “cracks” of the autobiographical works.

blog 1

In my opinion, the original definition of feminism that is “a belief in equal rights, and taking a stand against discrimination based on gender and also race, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation” is not complete enough. According to my own comprehension of feminism, I think it should take some consideration about the relationship between the economic status and sexism. So, I define feminism as “a belief in equal rights, and women should have independent and equal economic status, and taking a stand against discrimination based on gender and also race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation”, which is based on the original one and my own understanding.

And some examples in the readings have informed my definition. First, women lost their freedom and rely on men for their economic situation is not independent. As illustrated in “Homophobia: A Weapon on Sexism”, “when battered women tell why they stayed with a batterer or why they returned to a batterer, over and over they say it was because they could not support themselves and their children financially, they had no skills for jobs, they could not get housing, transportation, medical care for their children” (Pharr 29), we could find that women did not leave their husbands even suffering from home violence because they do not have the economic status strong enough to support them and their children. And this is a significant reason of why women could not evade the home violence efficiently: they could not live on themselves.

Second, economics is the root cause of sexism. “Men profit not only from women’s unpaid work in the home but from our underpaid work within horizontal female segregation” (Pharr 30) tells us that women have been suffering unequal treatments in both housework and job work for their work and payment are not in balance. So, that is another significant part to support that the definition of feminist should contain the importance of economic independence of women.

Third, economics is also the underlying, driving force that keeps all the oppressions in place (Pharr 31). Described in the same paragraph (Pharr 31), sexism and racism are intersected as women and people in color both consist the bottom of the economic system in United States as unpaid or low-paid workers. So we could know that unfair economics is not only significant in oppressions of gender, but also significant in race.

In a nutshell, the equal and independent economic status should be considered in the definition of feminism for it stands for the freedom to get away from battering, the ability to live on self, the balance between work and payment, and the power against sexism and racism.