Thursday, April 12, 2012

Role models, dependents and motherhood

Since we spent a whole week on Beyonce, when I saw that Beyonce has very recently wrote an open letter to Michelle Obama on feministing, I decided to make a post out of it.

http://feministing.com/2012/04/12/beyonce-writes-open-letter-to-michelle-obama/

In the handwritten letter Beyonce talks about how Michelle is a good role model for young black women, and how Beyonce feels proud that her daughter will grow up in a world where she has Michelle as a role model.  This sparked alot of things for me.  Even though I'm not a fan of Beyonce, I definetly agree that Michelle is one of few role models for young black women that are visible in popular culture.  In pop American culture, we rarely see successful people of color, and often the most black women are relegated to black sit-coms (which are are comedies and have historically always been comedies), black hair commercials, hip-hop videos, and black cinema.  This isn't to say all of these roles are bad, there are plenty of transgressive and transformative black female figures in the media, but to me, they have always been overshadowed by the negative ones which appear to be more popular and more plentiful.

The conversation about role models got me to thinking about our recent discussions about dependency, and about how women are often in charge of taking care of the children.  (Beyonce also calls Michelle a role model for being a good mother).  But in the readings we read for this week, women are either dependent on men, or burdened by dependents (children).  In case I missed it, the readings didn't touch on what it's like for young women who are dependents.  I think what was missing from the anaylses were the unique dynamics of mother-daughter relationships.  How is it that daughters learn what it is to be a mother, what it is to be a wife, about the institution of marriage, from these relationships.  Even the earlier theory we read, which borrowed from the inept psychologist Freud, only seems to talk about young girls in relation to penises.  What about young girls in relation to their mothers?  How does the activity of being a dependent in a mother-daughter relationship reify our current sex/gender system?  Also what if we consider young women watching television for role models as dependents on these pop-culture role models?  Do they become dependent, so to speak, on the reflections they see of themselves (women of their race, class, nationality, religion, sexuality) in the national spotlight?  How does that complicate the themes we discussed in class this week?

1 comment:

  1. This Blog post is great! I think about this issue a lot at least once a week honestly. Women have so much pressure to be dependent and independent at the same time in society. That being said, it is seen as feminine to be dependent on men as a woman, thus, falling in the traditional role of women by 'needing' a man. At the same time women are competing for equality and to do that there has to be complete independence which abstractly is great for role modeling for young girls. That being said, I feel like women should have a unique relationship with their daughters where they exemplify 'interdependency' so they show young girls that having healthy relationships with men or women might have some emotional dependency by being vulnerable but they should be independent enough to be centered and dependent on themselves at the same time. This level of vulnerability should be presented as gender neutral so both mom and dad or mom and mom both trust each other and depend on each other as partners but in a way that if they weren't there the woman wouldn't breakdown. Empowerment of women is one of the key ways to make the interdependency happen. SO the woman is empowered enough to have a stable successful career while having a relationship that's not making her really dependent on the partner. I hope this makes sense...I'm talking mainly about healthy dependency not abusive disempowering dependency that women should exemplify to their daughters.

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