Description
We established the key elements of social theory and reviewed foundational theoretical perspectives to the sociology of gender (social constructionism vs. gender essentialism) and contemporary theoretical works by both Peggy McIntosh and Partica Hill Collins. Additionally, you are to read the theoretical work of Tressie McMillan Cottom. Provide clear and well-documented (cite your sources) answers to the following questions. All posts should utilize all three assigned readings and use a minimum of three core concepts.
- First, watch the VMA video performance that McMillan Cottom references: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhZnnsTBYA4
- Utilizing the works of McIntosh and Collins and utilizing core concepts from the course thus far respond to the following passage by McMillan Cottom:
“Being desirable is a commodity. Capital and capitalism are gendered systems. The very form that money takes — paper and not goods — is rooted in a historical enterprise of controlling the development of an economic sphere where women might amass wealth. As wealth is a means of power in a capitalistic society, controlling this means of acceptable monies was a way of controlling the accumulation, distribution and ownership of capital.
- For black women, that form of money was embodied by the very nature of how we came to be in America.
- Our bodies were literally production units. As living cost centers we not only produced labor as in work but we produced actual labor through labor, i.e. we birthed more cost centers. The legendary “one drop” rule of determining blackness was legally codified not just out of ideological purity of white supremacy but to control the inheritance of property. The sexual predilections of our nation’s great men threatened to transfer the wealth of white male rapists to the children born of their crimes through black female bodies”
Sample Solution
