Making Sexism Visible: Birdcages, Martians, and Pregnant Men

Document Type

Review

Publication Date

1-1-2006

Description

This paper offers six strategies for dealing with students’ resistance to learning about the oppression of women: making the familiar strange, substituting race for sex, distinguishing between intentions and consequences, imagining men in women's bodies, exposing students’ claims of equal gender oppression as false parallels, and analyzing some of women's desires as instances of false power. These teaching strategies, along with Marilyn Frye's (1983) metaphor of oppression as a birdcage consisting of systematically related wires, provide a framework for pre-empting or responding to students’ resistance.

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