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Thursday, February 04, 2010
Sex, Identity, and Haiti
I too am a long-time Prawfs reader and a virgin guest blogger. Thanks to Dan and the Prawfs team for extending the invite to me this month – I’ll be blogging mostly about international, comparative and corporate contexts with a focus on gender and sexuality. First topic: food coupons for women in Haiti. Now the food coupons in Haiti must be denominated for “women” because the men who received the limited rations were not sharing them with women and children.Sex differences persist between men and women, and the Haitian authorities’ response reminds me of the creation of women-only train cars in India and Japan. Men are constructed as a sex that ignores rules, whether legal or societal. Both the prompting behavior and the resulting policies in such contexts both amaze and disturb me.
One’s observations of another culture reflect first and foremost one’s own, as comparative theory tells us (think Roland Barthes and Lama Abu-Odeh). When we see something elsewhere, we must look home first to find the meaning. So the United States cannot fall so far from these examples - we may behave similarly in such a shattering crisis. A study by Esther Duflo of MIT in two Indian regions exposed the divergence between male and female leaders’ policy decisions, and how they reflected sexed opinion differentials - in her example, women preferred access to water, while men preferred roads. These examples remind us that strict adherence to identity-neutrality, such as that embodied in recent Supreme Court jurisprudence, can lead us to mistaken policy outcomes.
Posted by Darren Rosenblum on February 4, 2010 at 01:06 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink
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Comments
How often do you ride the subways in Tokyo, Darren? (I ride them daily.) Do you know how crowded they are in the rush hours? Or that "chikan", molestors, often organize in gangs? Or that some women will erroneously or even maliciously accuse some guy of being a chikan? Actually, there are benefits to both women and men from the women-only cars, which are limited to certain train lines and certain times of day. No one I know believes that all men are chikan, or potentially so. But the molestation problem is real; to say this is "men being constructed as a sex that ignores rules" is rubbish.
Posted by: A.J. Sutter | Feb 5, 2010 10:35:29 AM
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