Coleen Herbert Blog 5 Woman and Nation

Gender has been performed in a variety of different ways in the films that we have viewed thus far in class. In  Twilight, Anna Daveare Smith uses her body as a canvas to perform both genders. Gender is fluid in Twilight because the performance demands that it be. Gender is also a channel of oppression. The women in the performance take on different roles than the men as survivors of violence.Gender was also at times deliberately hard to distinguish in the performance. It was unclear until the name of the speaker appeared (because our language is based on a gender binary) as to what the gender of the speaker was. The performance shows that gender is itself a performance. Androgyny was at times the best way to convey the meaning of each monologue because it asserted power in the face of patriarchy by rejecting the gender binary.

  In Black Girl, Diouanna and her mistress present two modes of female oppression. The film depicts a strong example of what we discussed in class on Tuesday. The mistress acts as an oppressor although she is oppressed herself. Her husband is clearly controlling of her and enjoys demeaning her. The film makes it look like the two women in it are involved in a hierarchy of oppression. To quote Audere Lorde, however, "There is no hierarchy of oppression".  Diouanna and her mistress exist on an axis of oppression, a horizontal chain of difference. Diouanna's race and class cause her to have a different female experience than her mistress, a differnet type of oppression. Although the mistress learns oppression by being oppressed and enacts it upon Diouanna, she is not hierarchically in a better position than Diouanna is. She is, however, the person of privilege in the situation who refuses to acknowledge their privilege in order to enact change.

  Women make few appearances in Anderson's text.  As consumers of lexicographers, women helped establish national languages (Anderson 75). As the bourgeois became literate, women helped foster the masses. Nationalism was largely dependent on mothers. Children's first encounters with the nation would be in their homes, in their primary communities. Anderson uses the verb "to birth" often when he references nationalism. This genders the nation as a female vessel. Ultimately, I don't know why Anderson doesn't mention the role of women more often. The text seems somewhat male-centric so far.