Readings 9/17/08

Dissident Women, Chapter 3: Gender and Stereotypes in the Social Movements of Chiapas y Sonia Toledo Tello and Anna Maria Garza Caligaris

This chapter is about the difference in media coverage, and public view of, women in social movements in Chiapas throughout the years. The authors talk about how stereotypes are both used by the movement itself (taking advantage of the perceived helplessness of women when faced with police action by using women as a sort of barrier) or in the media coverage of the movements (showing the women to be helpless victims of violence, garnering support for the movement while encouraging sterotypes). It is an interesting dynamic, both in how drastically things have changed in 30 years within the movement and how little things have changed in terms of public perceptions of women and their roles in the movements. Women may play more of a leadership role in the movement now than they did before, having leadership roles within the Zapatista movement and representing indigenous women in their position in the movement, but one would not know that through the media coverage of these movements. Men are still seen as the leaders of the movement, with women either along for the ride or a nominal factor not worth exploring. Remember, I am talking about mainstream media, which tends to get quite a few things wrong, and not socially conscious media outlets.While not letting those forms of media entirely off the hook, it is the mainstream media largely responsible for propogating these stereotypes as reality.

Don't Le the Sun Step Over You - Introduction, Chapers 1 and 2
by Eva Tulene Watt

A collection of stories from Eva Tulene Watt about her childhood, and her family's history, this book is a lot of fun to read. In the Introduction she talks about what a shame it is that all the books written about the Western Apache people don't actually talk about what life was like for them - it is an abstract view of life, without getting into details or specifics (and when they do go into those details, they mainly got them wrong). I'm glad this book was written, as a way for people to find out what life was actually like from a person who was there. Not to discount the worth of anthropologists and historians, but those professions can be very insufficient in telling an accurate story of a peoples history.

In one way these stories are depressing, just because learning about other peoples hardships makes me wish things had been different in so many ways. But that is something that we cannot change, and it is better that we lok at the real history of the people, not a Disney version that sugarcoats reality or ignores it entirely. That is why this book is so important, and why I'm glad we are reading it for this class.