Essay on Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions

The only way this novel should be used in curriculum is to teach about privilege and how it can have a positive impact on very few individuals, but an extremely negative impact on far more. Kerouac uses characterization, a specific style and tone, and structure to show how Sal lives his life as a privileged white male in the late 1940s. Each of these topics help to prove how his privilege becomes ignorance, and how he glorifies the unfair lives of the less fortunate and those of color. The story is very unique and helps to provide insight on these topics, but often does so in an unsuitable way. Overall, this novel portrays privilege in a way that exposes how it can cause the romanticization of the unfair and impoverished life of those who are oppressed or a

Writer Gregory Mantsios in his article “Class in America”, talks about these things, and how wide the gap is between the rich and the poor and also discusses how the rich continue to get richer, while the poor continue to get poorer. Mantsios gives his readers the profiles and backgrounds of three hard-working Americans, two of them are white males, whose family background as well as education played a role in their success, while the other person is a black woman who is just above the poverty line despite her work as a nurse’s aide. Through these profiles, Mantsios article shows exactly how sex, race and shows how your parental and educational background of a person can play a role in the things that you achieve. Mantsios also talks about one’s performance in school and the level of school completed can suggest whether or not class that person may belong in.

In this course we learned about many different types of oppression, from the time America was first “discovered” and the discoverers began oppressing the Indians, to slavery, to the oppression of the mentally handicapped, all the way to more “modern” times in schools were students are being oppressed.

Beginning with Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron-Mills, readers can find within the text a clear oppression of lower class peoples that is also an indirect oppression of women as lower-class individuals. Davis tells this story with a man named Hugh Wolfe as her main

False judgment leads to crazy notions. It creates false ideas and opinions. Judgment stretches or condemns the truth to be less that it is. In Barbara Kingsolver's novel, The Poisonwood Bible, many characters judge others based upon preconceived stereotypes. 'Judgment is always influenced by stereotypes and causes false feelings'.

From the start the novel is laden with the pressures that the main characters are exposed to due to their social inequality, unlikeness in their heredity, dissimilarity in their most distinctive character traits, differences in their aspirations and inequality in their endowments, let alone the increasingly fierce opposition that the characters are facing from modern post-war bourgeois society.

Both Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies and Pretty Modern acknowledge the term class, and the established social hierarchy and physical sufferings that comes from it, in many cultures. According to Schultz and Lavenda, class is defined as “a ranked group within a hierarchically stratified society whose membership is defined primarily in terms of wealth, occupation, or other economic criteria” (312). Ultimately, my goal is to demonstrate that while both ethnographies explore class, they do it in equally important, but different ways. Seth Holmes’ Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies is an account of the Triqui people and other Mexican migrant’s sufferings in U.S. farm labor camps. Alexander Edmonds’ Pretty Modern is an account of the booming plastic surgery market in Brazil, and the risks women take in order to modify themselves. Class is a rather fixed concept; it’s not easy to move between classes in most societies. While both ethnographies tell the tale of people trying to attain more wealth and a better occupation, the former does it in a way where class is perceived to be immovable, while the latter seems to heavily rely on the notion that you can climb the social ladder.

In her essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, Audre Lorde details multiple groups of people and their actions and attitudes. She focuses on and criticizes different demographics’ actions and how they impede the achievement of equality for people like herself. She portrays the disenfranchisement and underappreciation she receives multilaterally because of her race, social class, sexual orientation, age, gender. Lorde’s prevailing goal of the essay is to demonstrate that the marginalized should not nullify, ignore, suppress, or attack the expression of differences between themselves. Rather, she asserts that they should recognize and celebrate those differences to unite across demographic boundaries so they may together

In any case, individuals within society become oppressed as higher-ranked groups control their lower class counterparts. The five characteristics that pertain to human oppression become defined in Plumwood’s essay as: radical exclusion, homogenization, denial, incorporation, and instrumentalism. Radical exclusion refers to the separating of men as the “One” and women as the “Other.” Furthermore, this term means that the qualities of women become

They have their ups and downs, struggling to define who they are, in an often cruel society (Davis, 2009). The two main themes found within the documentary focus on strife in their current lives, and the potential for a better future, both of which relate to our class

Dedicated to what is called "the oppressed" and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysisin his exploration of the relationship between what he calls "the colonizer" and "the colonized".

“Five Faces of Oppression” by Iris M. Young tries to create an idea that we can critique the reality and stages of oppression of different groups. She argues that oppression is structural in the sense that injustices arise from systematic everyday activities, and not from policies or how people act. Since oppression is systematically reproduced and thus ingrained into culture, politics and economics, therefore it cannot be simply removed from our society. She separates the condition of oppression into five different forms: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Young states that exploitation is where oppression occurs in the transfer of one social group’s products of labor to benefit the wealthier class. She also argues that women are also exploited to through this from of

The organs of our body are controlled by many systems in order to function correctly and efficiently in order to survive within the environment we live in. These include the heart, stomach and intestines and other vital organs and body systems. All of the systems in our body are regulated by a part of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS is part of the peripheral nervous system and it controls many organs and muscles within the body. Rather bizarrely we are unable to determine or feel its presence in our bodies as it is working involuntary, as a reflexive manner. A common example of this involuntary action is best understood when

One major link includes the fight between an oppressed group and their persecutors. Whether it’s the proletariat and the bourgeois in “The Communist Manifesto,” or the inequality of genders in “The Second Sex,” or the flight of the African Americans in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. In all of these texts we are shown how easy it is for one group to abuse their power and create unfair rules and regulations only imposed on the more inferior members of society. Each group of oppressor thrives off of alienating, and subjugating their inferiors.

As poststructuralism would have it, human consciousness is constructed discursively. Our subjectivity is constructed by the shifting discourses of power which endlessly speak through us, situating us here and there in particular positions and relations. In these terms we are not the authors of ourselves. We do not construct our identities, we have it written for us; the subject cannot be sovereign over the construction of selfhood. Instead the subject is decentered, in that its consciousness is always being constructed from positions outside of itself. It follows then that the individual is not a transparent representation of the self but an effect of discourse. Spivak argues that surprisingly for these figures, when Foucault and Deleuze talks about oppressed groups such as the working classes they fall back into precisely these uncritical notions of ‘sovereign subjects’ by restoring to them a fully centred consciousness. In addition they also assume that the writing of intellectuals such as themselves can serve as a transparent medium through which the voices of the oppressed can be represented. The intellectual is cast as a reliable mediator for the voices of the oppressed, a mothpiece through which the oppressed can clearly speak.