there also has to be a way between phrasing it like you have control over someone and you don't care.
I'd like to take another look at this, after having read an interesting article about the relationships between Korean immigrant shop owners and African-American customers in Los Angeles, and had a think about what words mean and the difficulty of divorcing them from the cultural context in which they're uttered. I think that in the discussion I was having with xk above, I ran into some difficulty because everything to do with the host/guest relationship in Iran is very highly charged. As a culturally competent adult member of that community, I know the "right" way to be a host -- which is to say that I know what words and actions convey respect.
It seems to me (xk, I don't want to speak for you, please let me know if I'm off here) that what I was saying sounded as though I didn't see or wouldn't acknowledge that the meaning of an utterance is not located wholly in the intention of the speaker, but somewhere between that and the interpretation of the hearer.
I do understand that, and additionally, I'm bicultural, so I am to some extent able to see Iranian culture from the outside. So why was this issue so difficult? I felt a bit as though I was being told by an outsider how to do my own culture, or that my culture was 'wrong' -- yet from what I know of xk, that seems extremely unlike something she'd say or do. I think it goes back to the host/guest setting being so emotionally intense. I'm not saying that American or other cultures place no importance on it, but in Iran there is definitely a very elaborate dance that you do when a guest leaves (I remember being irritated, as a kid, at the way it took for-fucking-ever to leave a party, I could've gotten in a whole other hour of Pac-Man).
Over in Policy, there's a discussion right now about Barbelith's attitudes toward antisemitism. I think the general conclusion is that it's so potent an issue, that we're going to place greater weight on interpretation: if something sounds antisemitic, it goes, and we don't want this to be the place where people explain their noble intentions and why they manifest as holocaust denial.
Sexism is also a profoundly charged issue, so when faced with the problem of untangling what it is in behavior that might be stem from a difference in culture, I also have to look how sexism is embedded in that culture, and I'm not really sure how to do that. I'm not too worried about functioning in a multicultural environment, like Barbelith. It wouldn't ever occur to me to tell anybody here to take a cab and not to try to walk home while being a woman, as though I were telling somebody not to drive drunk.
It would be useful, however, to try to look at the way that concerns about sexism intersect with concerns about race, culture, and other aspects of identity, and how you learn to tell what comes from where. |
