"Doing Gender With a Feminist Gaze"-Shirley Hune
Purpose: "To provide a reinterpretation of aspects of Asian American history by foregrounding Asian American women, incorporating scholarship that uncovers hidden aspects of their history, and reassessing women's gendered lives"(135). In other words, the purpose is to focus on Asian American women and evaluate how they changed the idea of gender roles in society.
Key Question: How did Asian American women change the gender roles between men and women?
Important Information: Asian American women helped to support their households economically by working outside the home. This is seen as "acts of resistance against a racial patriarchal order"(144), which resulted in them being less dependent on men and increased their decision-making power in the domestic sphere. They sought not only to better the lives of their family but also to better their own lives as well by balancing work and family.
Inferences/Conclusion: Women were falsely perceived as being weak and submissive when in fact they were strong and they challenged traditional authority. The conceptions of women were that they were "absent and their participation was filial, passive, and reactive"(137). However, they played a crucial role in the development and survival of communities and family welfare.
Key Idea: By working outside of the home, Asian American women defied and challenged the role of genders and advanced their place in society by expanding themselves. "Employment as a domestic worker, for example, [challenged] notions of a public/private dichotomy"(142) while at the same time, it also challenged the husband's authority. Women also balanced their private and public lives and established communities that served to help both women and men from discrimination.
Assumption: Women "actively negotiated and contested traditional hierarchical gender relations" and "changed their ideology of what constitutes womanhood"(148) by advancing their personal and professional developments. They focused not only on improving their domestic, but also their personal, lives. Women also reshaped their community by changing the ideas of gender roles between women and men by joining the workforce and working to provide for the family.
If we take this reasoning seriously: then we realize that women did in fact participate greatly in revolutionizing the role of being a woman and they were an important part of reconstructing the gender roles in society.
If we don't take this reasoning seriously: then we assume that women were insignificant and played an irrelevant role in history. We also assume that they weren't seen or recognized in advancing the history and role of Asian Americans in society.
Point of view: the author, Shirley Hune, with a feminist point of view towards the crucial role of Asian American women in history
