not great

[ailiathena]

i started out my day with a couple of hours of meetings for my ra job and then went to the coffeeshop where i finished coding yesterday's transcript. Not much new on that front, but i was reminded in listening to my informant's description of a good and bad mother how much those things get overdetermined

Comments

[ailiathena]

Yeah ... it's Emily Martin's The Woman In the Body, which I generally like very much. But she has this part that talks about the common experience of women in our society. She starts off okay, saying all are defined as "women," which she adds is usually a permanent category. So, okay, sure. I appreciate the reminder that being a woman is not ALWAYS a permanent category. Then she says all have a subordinate position to men in one way or another, which I'll go with at the very minimum at some structural level, right? But then she says, "all have female bodies and experience common bodily processes such as menstruation and childbirth" which ... no, actually. 1) it is now obvious that she is excluding trans women from her definition of women which I don't like, but could have been handled much better in the telling, 2) not all women who were assigned that gender at birth actually DO menstruate, etc, although most do, and 3) certainly not all women share the experience of childbirth. I understand what she's trying to say, but I think that she's wrong. The whole point is that not everyone DOES share the same physiological/biological experience of womanhood.

I still think there's going to be a lot in here that I will really really like, but as a start to the book it really rubbed me the wrong way. If I were reading public health I would expect it, but anthropology? Come on, Martin!