Scavenger Hunt
This is my favorite part. This part allows me to see a lot of perspectives on feminism, and there are many aspects that I haven’t thought of. I find it very interesting, and I enjoy this part of the sharing. Although the events that everyone concerned about are different, our ultimate goal is to have equal status and get back what should belong to women.
Statement of project
One of the biggest reasons I chose this class is because I want to understand more of what people living in a patriarchal society are missing. Patriarchal society treats oppressed women and other marginalized people unfairly. Patriarchal society teaches people to compromise, warn this is how things have always been, they tell you don’t struggle with the rule.
I chose this topic because I have heard more than once that Asian women face various abuses and violence from their relatives and society. I often feel anxious whenever I think of many women in the world experiencing mental and physical violence from their families. When the family becomes a place where they want to escape, the criminal justice system and social assistance become their only life-saving straw. The new divorce cooling-off period has put more women in need of safety and hope into a predicament. I wanted to do something, so I drew the image with pencil to tell more women that they are not alone. The black straw tube net-like on the background of the drawing represents everyone who wants to squeeze something from women. It may be a husband full of toxic masculinity, it may be a boss who wants to ask you to do the most work with the least salary, it may be a father who never has any expectations on you and only hope that your marriage will bring him money. The unfairness towards women must stop.
In 2020, China introduced a new 30-day cooling-off period for divorce. I think it is a decision beneficial only by men in a patriarchal society in order to more easily oppress women. Soon after the launch of the new policy, I keep seeing the same news on Weibo (a similar social software similar to Twitter) that women could not bear the constraints of the delayed divorce and decided to jump off the building, or take their young children with them to commit suicide. Every month, desperate women occur in different regions of China, who end their lives because they cannot escape their marriage in time. And this, as the government hopes, dead women can no longer increase the country’s divorce rate. The reduction of the divorce rate naturally reassures the general public that marriage is still an ideal life state or the illusion of the ultimate pursuit of life.
Tracing back to the beginning, why do people rush into marriage? In China, many women marry strangers because of arranged marriages. People want to get married because marriage is the best way to humanity’s strongest desire for connection and belonging. Arranged marriages enable people to entrust their lives to each other without much understanding or communication with their future partners. I think this is one of the reasons for the increase in the divorce rate in China.
Does marriage mean to a woman proof of happiness or a guarantee for the rest of her life? I think for women born in poor areas, marriage is a market transaction, a transaction with a clear price tag. As a woman grows up, women often face more challenges. Society expects women of every age to have a specific look and figure, it often brings out the anxiety. When females are getting educated, some families would prevent them rather than supporting them because a girl is marrying sooner or later. At work, many women would reach the unequal salary ceiling. Now, the right to divorce has become difficult to enforce. With the cultivation of toxic masculinity, men have become more compliant with the gifts that society has prepared for them before they born, while females have to work many times harder to get the same treatment.
I chose this topic because I have heard more than once that Asian women face various abuses and violence from their relatives and society. I often feel anxious whenever I think of many women in the world experiencing mental and physical violence from their families. When the family becomes a place where they want to escape, the criminal justice system and social assistance become their only life-saving straw. The new divorce cooling-off period has put more women in need of safety and hope into a predicament. I wanted to do something, so I drew the image in my mind to tell more women that they are not alone.
At first, my project was mainly about the establishment of a new divorce policy of 30 days cooling-off period in China in 2020. I was curious about the beneficiaries of this new policy and whether there are such policies around the world. eventually, I found that there is a different cooling period of divorce in the United States and 30-45 days in New York State.
Not only China, but all countries in the world are facing a decline in population growth rate. More women decide to postpone or not give birth in the future. Therefore, preventing people from getting out of marriage will help population growth and reduce divorce rates.
In China from 2016 to 2017, 70% of divorce petitions were filed by women, and most women who filed divorce petitions were subjected to domestic violence of varying degrees, and eagerly leaving a marriage is more like a petition for their safety.
If marriage hurts, why decide to enter a marriage at a young age. Marriage is the life of a stranger. This is my new knowledge derived from this project.
Audre Lorde’s essay “ The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” talks about the heterosexual biases that revolve around feminist academia. “As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”(2) I found this quote shares the enlightening view of how patriarchy rules and isolates and fades women in the way we don’t see. In a world dominated by men ruled with racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, etc., the voice of women will not be taken seriously. The article proposes to find two black women to join as part of a panel at the New York University Institute for the Humanities conference. In the last hour to express the tolerance and diversity of the conference. I think this hypocritical tolerance is very common in life. Lorde observes that she belongs to a marginalized group.
I picked “When I Was Growing Up” by Nellie Wong from This Bridge Called My Back. I think this entry is very important because it illustrates how a child sees the world at the first sight. In today’s social atmosphere, we encourage every girl to be a true self, but to a certain extent, this is not entirely true. Society invisibly gives girls a lot of frames, how to behave like a girl, how to be an elegant girl, how to have smooth thighs and armpits.This poem is about the narrator’s own assimilation into the dominant white culture, and a need to become something she in fact isn’t. It shows how society can influence your identity because the narrator wishes to be white as it is the dominant culture and has ‘privileges’ with it.
Elsie Chen and Sui-Lee Wee” China Tried to Slow Divorces by Making Couples Wait. Instead, They Rushed.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/business/china-slowing-divorces.html This newspaper articles was written by the author of the New York Times which is a reliable and credible newspaper sources.
In this article, we can see several women who want to protect their lives through divorce. Their situation are surprisingly similar, all hoping to get a divorce but face many obstacles. This article helps me collect the impact of the new divorce policy on women. Setting up a “cooling-off period” is not conducive to protecting the victim of domestic violence. This is very helpful for my project when I want to show that this kind of situation may happen to many other females.
Mandy Len Catron “What You Lose When You Gain a Spouse” https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/07/case-against-marriage/591973/
This is a story post under the Atlantic website, by MANDY LEN CATRON, a writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She is the author of How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays. Therefore, which I think is a reliable source.
“This notion—that marriage is the best answer to the deep human desire for connection and belonging—is incredibly seductive. “ Oftentimes I question myself, why marriage? I consider myself a semi-independent woman who has just got into adulthood, a full-time student, and a part-time allowance earner. Oftentimes I question myself, why marriage? I think this article helped me grow a deeper understanding of how marriage works in society to this day and why the government tries to pull back couples from getting a divorce even if in an unhealthy marriage.
Dawn Liu and Adela Suliman“Frustration among women in China as new divorce law stalls process” https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/frustration-among-women-china-new-divorce-law-stalls-process-n1262065
This newspaper articles is written by the researcher for NBC News based in Beijing, so this source is credible.This source is written by By Dawn Liu and Adela Suliman. Dawn Liu is a researcher for NBC News based in Beijing, and Adela Suliman is a London-based reporter for NBC News Digital.
“According to a report from the Supreme People’s Court of China, in 2016 and 2017, about 74% of the first hearings in divorce cases were brought by women. “ Using this source will help me focus on the impacts that directly affect women in divorce and how the new divorce policy limits their right to freely seek spouse separation.
-Dommaraju, Premchand, and Gavin Jones. “Divorce Trends in Asia.” Asian Journal of Social Science, vol. 39, no. 6, 2011, pp. 725–750. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43498086. Accessed 3 May 2021.
This journal was written by Dommaraju, Premchand, and Gavin Jones, they come from Nanyang Technological University and the National University of Singapore. This journal was published from the jstor, so this is a credible source. This paper presents and discusses recent trends in divorce for countries in Asia, highlighting both wide variations in divorce patterns and recent changes in divorce trends for countries in the region. They found out that East Asian pattern characterised by increasing divorce rates.
-Sui-Lee Wee “Her Husband Abused Her. But Getting a Divorce Was an Ordeal.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/world/asia/china-domestic-abuse.html?_ga=2.52609768.1703904778.1620713053-1042994979.1618529178 Sui-Lee Wee is a China correspondent for The New York Times, so this source is reliable and credible.
This article analyzes the difficulties faced by a woman who has suffered domestic violence from men when she decides to divorce. The article also mentioned that Chinese laws are almost formulated and enforced by men, which provides a broader perspective for my project. If a country’s laws and enforcers are determined by a single gender, the ultimate benefits and protection Only men. This woman submitted her divorce petition to the court, but the court rejected her petition for divorce on the grounds that she should seek mediation, until the video of her decision to jump off the building because she could not bear domestic violence received hundreds of millions of attention on the Internet. Eventually, she was granted the divorce.
Engel, John W. “Marriage in the People’s Republic of China: Analysis of a New Law.” Journal of Marriage and Family, vol. 46, no. 4, 1984, pp. 955–961. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/352547. Accessed 13 May 2021.
This journal was published from JSTOR collection, which I think is a reliable resource.
This paper analyzes those articles on China’s marriage law that deal with marriage contracts. Articles relevant to arranged marriage, “marriage by purchase” and dowry customs, concubinage or polygamy, marriage restrictions, rituals, and residence customs are analyzed in terms of their contexts in traditional and modern China; and implications for continuity and change are discussed.
The poem “Who Said It Was Simple” by Audre Lorde illustrates those who define themselves as feminists but continue to accept and benefit from the oppression of other groups. I think Audre Lorde and Kimberlé Crenshaw they both use their own voice to speak up about the injustices of racism, sexism, etc. At the beginning of the TED speech “The urgency of intersectionality”, Kimberle Crenshaw, names groups of colored women names who have experienced different forms of police brutality. The audience at the scene shows that they did not know them or their stories.
Kimberlé Crenshaw pointed out that improving the status of black women is one urgent matter, and on the other hand, it leads to a Cross-cognition not only for black women. She uses the term “intersectionality” to deal with the fact that many of our social justice problems like racism and sexism are often overlapping, creating multiple levels of social injustice. When you are in the intersections, you may suffer more. She mentioned that the intersection of “transgender fear”, “xenophobia”, “physical discrimination” and so on appeared in people’s everyday lives, and called on us to face this matter squarely and speak up for those who suffer from prejudice.
Mainstream feminism often concentrates on those who have met most of their needs. In many cases, this has nothing to do with survival, but with increasing privileges. For women at intersections, such as black feminism mentioned in recourse, It emphasis empowering black women and living on the edge of women with a new and critical way of thinking that centered on how racism and sexism worked together to create black women social issues and inequalities.
In the past months, I have been seeing that high identical news happening on Chinese social media, news about if a woman is in an insecure, relationship, domestic violence issues, she wants to get a divorce, but the government’s new divorce policy makes divorce more difficult to achieve. I want to know more about the divorce rate and the country’s policy on divorce. maybe comparing with other countries. I found that when women decide to divorce, what they have to do is far more than signing a name and persuading each other to sign a divorce agreement. In China, a new policy forced couples to wait for 30 days so-called the divorce cooling-off period. After a series of evaluations from the Civil Affairs Bureau, they will determine whether the couple has a relationship problem that cannot be fixed before officially approving the divorce. After the 30 days have passed, couples can go to their local civil affairs bureau to apply a second time for their official divorce documents. I personally think that this move is a stupid failure. This policy makes it more difficult for many women who desire to get out of their marriages to achieve a divorce.
Cardi B, is an American rapper, songwriter, and television personality. Born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, New York City, she became an Internet celebrity by achieving popularity on Vine and Instagram. I knew about her from social media, and then I noticed more of her music. I admire her outspoken personality and caring for the sexual health of other women, as well as her sharp speech on politics. The sexual element is a recurring element in her music works and that is one thing I like about her the most. I think we need more women like her, to spread more opinions of sex from a woman’s perspective, and most importantly how to protect ourselves in sex. I know that many girls in poor areas do not have much understanding of sex education. For religious reasons, family reasons, and social reasons, people always want to “protect” girls by preventing them, prevent girls from studying, prevent girls from knowing themselves, and prevent girls from moving toward a broader life. As a result, they became unprepared pregnant and sacrificed their time and future for the sake of their children. I think only treating sex as a normal thing and letting more women aware of their inherent female power, lead them to better realize their self-worth.
