Contemporary “Othering”
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document in english
social sciences
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published 03/05/2007
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SummaryA few weeks ago, I joined a protest on the quad against the “Conservative Coming Out Day”, which was organized by the Orange and Blue Observer and a conservative student group on campus. The conservative group held a “coming out day” because the members say they feel oppressed on such a liberal campus; they said professors and textbooks all have a liberal bias, and therefore, their views are underrepresented. By using the phrase “coming out” this group trivialized the incredibly personal and painful experience a homosexual faces when saying aloud, “I’m gay”. What really upset me was the fact that this group looks down on homosexuals; the members believe that homosexuality is wrong. Thus by co-opting the symbol of the closet, the conservatives made the closet a joke, something to be mocked. Furthermore, this group wanted to auction off derringers, and they encouraged females and homosexuals to enter the raffle because they wanted these supposedly defenseless groups to have equal access to guns. The fliers they handed out said, “anything that carries a purse can win”. Anything? Are women and homosexuals no longer human? The rhetoric of the speaker appalled me, not only was he dehumanizing women and homosexuals, but he implied (not so subtly) that women need to realize that they need men to protect them. His entire speech was blatantly sexist and homophobic, and it made me feel angry because I wanted to believe that most people had moved past the traditional image of women and marriage.
Table of Contents
- To follow up this rally, the Orange and Blue observer held another protest against the university
- After this rally, I began to notice parallels between the way this group talked about the 'other', and the readings for class
- The view of women as the 'second sex' represents a very strongly gendered discourse that exists in American society
- While the theme of pollution was not overtly discussed in reference to women at the rally, de Beauvoir does discuss the idea that women were seen as dirty
- While homophobia and discrimination against homosexuals were not touched on in our reading
- At the second rally, Buchignani spoke about the breakdown of Black and Latino families as reasons for their problems in American society
- Furthermore, at the rally the speaker only mentioned the disintegration of minority families
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