Authors in “We Don’t Sleep around Like White Girl’s Do” are looking at the relationship between Filipino immigrant parents and their daughters. It shows how gender socialization occurs. The author in this research uses epigraphs, or statements, by a Filipina immigrant mother and her second-generation Filipina daughter, stating things like “we don’t date like white girls date” and “I don’t like them to grow up that way, like the American girls.” These suggest that the Filipina daughter is taught to believe that White women are sexually unethical. It shows that their required “morality” and the sexuality of women, are crucial to the shaping of social differences. Furthermore, it claims that gender is a key to immigrant identity, and a way for immigrants to claim cultural authority over the dominant Americans. …show more content…
Espiritu’s interviews with almost one hundred Filipino Americans searches how gender factors into minority understandings of whiteness and their own personal, cultural identity. Filipino immigrant families stress cultural superiority over white Americans by declaring that their daughters have higher moral standards. They believe they have greater values when it comes to family commitment and sexuality. Also, Filipinos felt their culture was superior to white American culture because their lives revolved around their close-knit families while white families were seen as detached or individualistic. The responsibility for maintaining family ties and cultural traditions was put on Filipino women, which usually falls on women of all cultures. Carrying out responsibility reinforces patriarchy among Filipinos. Nearly all cultures blend” proper” femininity with sexual
I also discuss my family’s adaptation to these values, norms and beliefs along with my own individual cultural sense of identity. Lastly, this paper reflects the impact of my role and ethical responsibilities as a social worker, especially in relation to working with the Hmong family in the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.
Gloria Anzaldúa was a Texas-born, lesbian, Latina, feminist, that wrote about many of her personal experiences and views of the diverse background she grew up in. Growing up a certain culture at home and being in a country with a different culture, brings along a lot of self-identifying issues. Gloria Anzaldúa uses various strategies and languages to write this powerful piece by code-switching, quoting others, diction, and rhetorical questions. Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” speaks about the social issues that Latinos face involving identity, language, and sexism.
She traces the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico using these debates and themes as her framework. The sexuality of women on the island became the object of worry beginning before the United States became the colonizer. This worry began with fears of the “tropical” or venereal diseases that prostitutes on the island could spread to soldiers stationed there. Briggs argues that North American missionaries, physicians, feminists, nationalists, and finally Puerto Rican feminists used the problematic sexuality of the women on the island as a rhetorical and political tool. The sexuality of women was seen as the root cause of the problems of poverty, disease, and nationhood in Puerto Rico. After the legislation about disease and its international context, Briggs delves into the history of birth control on the island. She argues that although pushed upon the women, birth control and eugenics could be appropriated by Puerto Rican feminists. Her chapters on sterilization focus on the idea that feminists in the United States could undercut Puerto Rican feminists when critiquing sterilization practices in Puerto Rico. The other forms of birth control that were widely available were available in quantity, not necessarily quality, and for Puerto Rican women, sterilization offered a solution,
Both of these essays reflect on facing prejudice with a particular audience in mind: Cofer’s intended demographic is white men, while Staples is addressing society as a whole, but particularly white women. Cofer wants men to know that Latina women are not the sexual deviants they are stereotyped as; they are not simply the “whore,
When considering the traditions of Pacific Islander Americans, the fourth story from “The Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety” featuring Min Ziqian relates the most to what Pacific Islanders would consider the ideal relationship between parents and children in terms of family structure. The story of Min Ziqian revolves around his relationship with his stepmother, who mistreated him for not being her natural born son. Ziqian’s father found out and threatened to banish her from the family, but Ziqian stuck up for her, saying that “But if she goes, then three son will have no one to care for them.” This shows that Ziquian not only cared about his stepmother, but also did not want to see his brothers suffer. In the study “Family Dynamics among
Asencio’s study tries to understand how Puerto Rican lesbians deal with their gender, sexuality, and ethnonationality, living in another country. The study focus on the experience of migrant Porto Rican lesbians regarding their multiple identities as women, lesbians, Porto Ricans, and migrants, the complexities of the issues and the strategies employed to survive, and the relationship among gender, sexuality. Ethnonationality, migration, and geographical location. The author reinforces that there is almost none study about lesbians Latinas, and she points out that the experience of those women could contribute to social science with the understanding of gender, race, culture, sexuality, and issues of multiple identities and oppressions.
Among the many struggles Asian Americans faced, troubles with finding their identities were perhaps the greatest. In an effort to conform to society, they completely abandoned their own culture, traditions and values. Instead, according to Uyematsu, they aimed “to transform themselves into white men,” which included “rejecting their
While Asian immigrants were first generation migrants, female Mexican-American teens in the early 1920s differed in that they were first generation Americans. Still, these teens faced similar pressures of formative gender identity set by both American culture and by the ancestral customs of the Mexican familial oligarchy. The familial oligarchy of Mexican culture refers to the system by which familial elders “attempted to dictate the activities of youth for the sake of family honor,” as the family’s communal standing depended on the “purity,” or virginity of their daughter with little mention of the son. Due to the sudden rise of the flapper culture, American temptations were a constant threat to traditional Mexican values. These temptations were controlled through the use of a gender medium, usually a mother or grandmother, known as a dueña or a
Ever since the early days of humankind, both men and women had specific roles that they were expected to do, the men would be the hunter while the women would be the gatherer and caretaker. Centuries later we can still see a resemblance of this philosophy in our society. As a result, many people feel like they’re forced to act and do certain things that they wouldn’t have done if they had a choice. In The House On Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros through the main character Esperanza shows that in the Mexican-American culture, women are forced through stereotypes to primarily be a housewife. Stereotypes in the Mexican-American culture only exist to limit a woman’s true capabilities.
The intersection of dominant ideologies of race, class, and gender are important in shaping my social location and experiences. By exercising my sociological imagination (Mills, 1959), I will argue how my social location as an Asian American woman with a working class background has worked separately and together to influence how I behave, how others treat and view me, and how I understand the world. The sociological imagination has allowed me to understand my own “biography”, or life experiences by understanding the “history”, or larger social structures in which I grew up in (Mills, 1959). First, I will describe my family’s demographic characteristics in relation to California and the United States to put my analysis into context. I
The essay was opened by a personal note of the author, describing himself as a middle-aged man parking outside his parents in San Francisco, California, who is about to step inside and explain to his parents that he is really gay. The idea of 'family values' is introduced by talking about its use in the Republican Party and its use and definition of the majority of immigrants living in the United States. The author goes on to outline that understanding the value of the world family has very different meanings based on the country of origin. He explained that the American idea of "family values" was in which children left home, lived alone, and learned to make a distinctive difference in their parents. America is a country rooted in ideas that question power and break away from the idea that you do not always represent where you are. The author goes on to explain that if the US is supposed to have sex, it would certainly be male; It is a country built on the ideas that power and independence are among the best ideas that one can master. Feminism and all its changes have
“People of Mexican heritage receive a great deal of social support from the family and, whereas Anglos derive most of their status from their job” (Ross, Mirowsky and Ulbrich 1983). Hispanic culture raises its females to care for the house and family. They do this by instilling in them cultural norms of most Mexican women. It is almost and expectation that life should be this way. The man is the supporter and provides financially and structurally for the family while the wife cares for the home and family. “Mexican-American women are also less likely to be employed then non-Hispanic white women” (Ross et al. 1983). Growing up in one culture with two different views can be confusing and liberating. My mother was born and raised in Mexico. In this part of the family, it was expected that women cook, clean and serve the men of the house. The women tended to the father and brothers. My grandfather worked to provide for the family, and my uncle worked to provide for himself, but my grandmother and aunts cooked, did the laundry and waited on my grandfather and uncle. This way of life was the norm for my mother’s family. The same culture somewhat different upbringing was my dad’s family. All of my father’s family was born and raised here. My grandmother was the family glue. She cared for all of the household chores and cooking. My grandfather worked and provided for the family. My aunt and uncles worked and assisted my grandmother, but not expected. My grandmother always stressed
Moreover, in our interview, she described what her article The Normal American Family was about, and stated that, while conducting her researches, she became interested in the internalized racial oppression within families. This internalized racial oppression within families later became based on the “white middle-class family”, to which I like to refer to as the “modern American family ideology”. The white-class family was the ideology that would be seen on television shows such as The Brady Bunch, as mentioned by Professor Pyke. She addressed the television show, The Brady Bunch, as one of the white-middle class families that many second generation Asian American immigrant students would compare to their families, and question why not being the same. Korean and Vietnamese second generation children seem to have built an ideal American family based on what they see on television or other American family, and that is why they have created certain ideals and characteristics that their families should meet. “Many of the image of normal family life that respondents brought to their description came in the form of references to television families or the families of non-Asian friends” (Pyke, 247). Professor Pyke mentioned that students would see these white middle-class families, and ask themselves why their families could not be the same. Or question why their parents could not be affectionate, just like their friend’s parents. The truth is that their parents could not be
Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarksian have shed new light on the subject of minority families and their differences to the traditional nuclear families in their essay, “The Color of Family Ties.” According to their work, those of White descent make up most of all nuclear families which can be described as a father, mother and children all living in one household. Gerstel and Sarkasian point out that it is not always the case that, “Black and Latino/a, especially Puerto Rican families are more disorganized than White families, and that their families ties are weaker,” as they are often thought of by those in politics or the media (62). In fact Gerstel and Sarkasian write, “Blacks and Latinos/as, are as likely as
Many people are proud of their cultural legacies and ties to their heritage. This can be pride in their country of origin or pride in their cultural history in America. In “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?” Alice Walker explains that the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s continues to impact African Americans because it gave them the confidence to stand up for their rights and claims, “If the civil rights movement is ‘dead’ and if it gave us nothing else, it gave us each other forever.” Every group seen as a minority has a detailed history in this country that impacts each member of the group personally. Along with a general cultural history, many people’s identities are affected by their own family’s history in America. Family traditions and heritage shape children and form each child into the person they will be. Families share the stories of ancestors, old or new, coming to America for a new life. For some, traditions are kept and passed from generation to generation, while others naturally assimilate like Asian American author Eric Liu explains in “Notes of a Native Speaker.” He plainly states, “I don’t mean that my parents told me to act like an American… they didn’t tell me to do anything except to be a good boy.” Whether or not a person chooses to assimilate to American culture, many experience a