Week 6 reflection

In Luft's piece, she discusses how disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and their victims must be analyzed from an intersectional perspective.  This intersectionality is important in terms of understanding the different cultural and institutional practices that play a role in how a victim is impacted by a disaster.  Victims are not monoliths and each victim is impacted in a completely different way based on their own identity (such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, socioeconomic status, etc) and the way in which our society discriminates against some identities more than others, especially in times of crisis.  Miller's piece about masculinity in the oil industry and the experience of women engineers paints a picture regarding how everyday interactions that have been scripted by problematic gender roles are reinforced and reproduced. It discusses a "silent language" that permeates our culture and certain job industries in particular.  This silent language is essentially unconscious and yet deeply embedded with male values that are forced onto everyone else.  

The readings this week made me think a lot about pre-disaster foundations.  I feel like people mostly mobilize after a crisis or disaster has already occurred, rather than implementing tactics to build a feminist intersectional approach ahead of time.  I feel like this is largely because building that kind of foundation requires people to be inclusive and reach out to groups that are typically marginalized and disregarded.  A lot of those marginalized groups are in crisis constantly, dealing with racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and other kinds of violence and discrimination daily.  These issues are heightened around times of crisis, and if they are ignored during other times, they cannot be properly addressed at the most crucial times.  I think many cishet middle/upper-class white people like to pretend as if these daily injustices don't exist so that they don't feel a responsibility to confront them. Then, when these marginalized groups are ignored in a crisis time like during a hurricane, people pretend to act shocked at the fact that these people have been disregarded in this way.   

Many of the important key terms this week centered around masculinity and the dangers it poses for the way we think and act in society and the way certain roles are produced.  Hegemonic masculinity represents the dominant ideology of masculinity that presents men essentially as monolithic beings.  The way in which political, institutional, organizational, and cultural entities and practices interact before, during, and after a disaster is known as disaster patriarchy.  Racialized disaster patriarchy describes the intersectional production of gendered experiences during and after a disaster.  The production of these experiences is rooted in pre-disaster patriarchal structures.  Disaster patriarchy shows the mutually constructive and symbiotic relationship between sexism and racism.