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Brief View Of Identity

The chapter we read of the book "Discrimination by Design", dealt with society and how it relates to men and women. The chapters dealt with language, parts of the body and structures.One of the interesting statements of what we read was the authors distinction between urban and suburban life. She says that the urban is associated with power, aggression, meaningful work, essentially male, while the suburbs conform to the conception of femininity as passive and intellectually void to name a few. The author dissected many parts of our society to show how our way of communication, how we interact with one another, our buildings, all are a way to reinforce the imbalance of power and often between men and women. This can be seen in how she deconstruction the body to show how women are in many ways describe as the left and lower side while the men are the right and upper portions.

The video that we watch describes the way in which women are taught the definition of beauty. The most interesting thing about the video is that it dealt solely with what it meant to be beautiful as a African American female. It was in some ways shocking to hear what these girls said as to what they are told is beautiful and how it affects them. When the one girl says that when she wore her hair "natural" and her mother was fine with it for a day or two but told her to change how she was wearing her hair because she was looking "African". This to me says something profound about our society. That in America there is a very narrow definition of what beauty is, for women at least, and it is not controlled by the women themselves but of those who have the power to dissiminate to the masses what their definition of beauty is and our society accepts it as truth.

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