Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Gender Woes

For some reason, yesterday had a theme: women's inferiority to men:

  1. Lorca class: Discussion about Yerma, in which the title character wants nothing but to have a son and has failed in her three years of marriage to produce a child. Therefore, you know, her life is over. Commence class discussion in which my teacher champions the play's idea that the point of being born is to reproduce, and as only women can have children, the purpose of women is to have children. I could only respectfully argue against this for so long before I was reduced to glaring at the floor and sighing in exasperation.
  2. Spanish Culture class: Finishing up our unit on domestic violence, we got to spend half an hour about men beating up women. (On an unrelated but equally depressing note, we spent the first 40 minutes of class arguing with our teacher about how important grades are to get a job, which she firmly does not believe is true. It was an incredibly stressful discussion, which was an awesome lead-in to giving a presentation in Spanish without notes, which I had previously not been worried about at all.)
  3. Art History class: The article we had to read for class was about depiction of sexual violence and how that was a metaphor in the 17th century for leaders' military conquests, but it was better to depict men conquering women than men conquering other men. Then we looked at a lot of paintings with "rape" in the title. (And we're not talking about, for instance, The Rape of the Lock, about cutting someone's hair.)
  4. La Piel Que Habito: This is the new Pedro Almodóvar film, which I had very much been looking forward to seeing, and last night Brian and I went with a friend of mine, because there was a discount available to us so we could get in for 3.50 euros instead of 7 or something. It was a very well done movie, a strong and unusual drama that I actually followed and I was never bored, however, following the theme of the day it involved two rape scenes. Good times! Also the main woman tried to kill herself at one point?
Brian's off exploring this morning while I was doing some homework I got assigned yesterday. This afternoon we're doing lunch at Los Rotos again and then going to the Museo de la Biblioteca Nacional. Tonight we're seeing a play (at yet another theatre less than 15 minutes from my house), and then going to Cien Montaditos for one euro everything. (Brian has taken quite a liking to tinto de verano.)

¡Ciao!

2 comments:

  1. Sexism’s built into all those Romance languages—all those masculine and feminine nouns. No way around that, is there? You tell me. American English has been fairly-well neutered—or at least made sexually neutral—by professorial types who believe usage can be mandated. (“Mandated” is okay, because the “man” part is from the Latin “manus” meaning “hand.”) All the ungrammatical substitutions of “they” for “he” or “she,” randomly swapping “she” for “he” and all the actresses becoming “actors” and so forth has transformed our English. But what are they doing in Spain? Everything has gender.

    http://metathing.blogspot.com/

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  2. Not just that, even. Yesterday we also learned that esposo, as in spouse, also means handcuffs. And the root of the word conjugal as the word for yoke. Booo.

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