----- Original Message ----- From: Mistral mistral@centurytel.net
Sure; I said gender, not gender roles. Leaving out orientation, it's just male/female/other - pretty straightforward.
Actually, that's sex. Sex is the biological bit; gender is the social expression of those biological traits. Rereading your last with that little revision of technical terms: OK, it reads.
of gender roles, ISTM that one problem in this discussion has been one side appears to be trying to oversimplify or restrict the roles that a female character can play without being defined _solely_ by her gender. Factoring in of gender doesn't bother me; making it the only thing that counts does.
Only Wendy did that. Most of the other posters-- Neil, Iain, Sally, etc.-- have been bringing in areas of class, power, literature... it's fascinating!
Servalan, oo-er!) but to deny that there's a power aspect to *all* relations, including gender ones, is kind of hard.
I'm a little confused; I think we're at cross purposes here. I agree that there is a power aspect to all relations. Sally's got what I meant exactly right - just that gender isn't always the most significant factor in the mix. I'll grant that it usually is in the mix somewhere, but I won't go so far as to say that it _always_ is. For example, a father putting his small son and daughter to bed. That's not enough for me to say that gender is a factor at all; in absence of specifics, I won't agree that one's a sexist transaction and the other isn't, even though the father clearly has the power in both cases.
Now whoa there! I didn't say that a situation involving power relations and differing gender roles was inherently sexist! There is a difference, I think, between something involving power and something involving the abuse of power. E.g.: two people of different races interact. This is not necessarily racist. But to say that it is devoid of racial connotations of power is to deny that these exist in a culture.
But to take your example: I wouldn't say that a father putting his small daughter to bed is sexist, but I would say that gender and power are involved. Why? Because the relationship between a father and daughter, in this culture, does carry certain expectations of gender roles and power relations attatched to these gender roles, regardless of whether these are *directly* involved or not.
Similarly, the imbalance of power in Deliverance isn't to my mind _caused_ by gender;
Again, though, I think Wendy was the only one saying it was. Most other people in the discussion, inc. your humble servant, were more interested in what role gender played in the imbalance of power.
Oh, and re the Jenna point: most people (yes, including myself until I watched the episode back) seem to be forgetting that Meegat's instructions were to look for a man. If Jenna or Cally had turned up, they would have been ignored, cos they didn't fit the terms of the prophecy.
Fiona
The Posthumous Memoirs of Secretary Rontane Available for public perusal at http://nyder.r67.net
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