Unconscious Dynamics of Gender Inequality,
Mingo Méndez –
Vocational School teacher at Institut Montserrat Roig de Terrassa
INTRODUCTION:
«The Chalice and the Blade» by Riane Eisler (1987) is intended to demonstrate that gender inequality was partly caused by the excessive demographic growth of neolithic settlements, their scarcity of resources and forced migrations to find new supplies. Her work has inspired most of this slides’ presentation and personal reflexion on the topic:
«...Women are recently asking for equality of rights; but in a historical perspective that could go back in time thousands of years, it looks more like men striving to prove the same abstract thinking skills with which women were first endowed with »accomplishments» like the Industrial Revolution, the arms race or the space program.
And however paradoxical it might seem, this could be the unconscious dynamics of sexual inequality in so many cultures and times: proving gender parity!»
A reflexion which was only intended to illustrate the historical protagonism of women in society and start a guided debate among my students.
OBJECTIVES:
Guided debates provide students with a variety of different opinions on a given topic with which they can agree or simply ignore but, in any case, ensuring diversity of stands, depth of statements and an active participation.
DESCRIPTION:
Students first watch and listen to the slides’ presentation, then, are divided into small groups for discussion. This model of guided debate organizes interventions into three periods of time: Positioning phase, Debating phase and then Conclusions. All along, participants are encouraged to mark down their opinions and summarize their mates’ points of views as well. The conclusions of each small group are finally shared and compared with those of the whole group.
CONCLUSIONS:
Guided debates can certainly provide not only foreign-language students but everybody with a definite set of specialized vocabulary, syntactic structures and connectors to further stimulate spoken output and interaction. This tool is meant to summarize the ideology of main currents on a given topic and therefore ensure diversity and depth of viewpoints in a dicussion. Moreover, it gives teachers an additional and objective tool to assess students’ effort, interest and active participation in a debate. A new publication in which vocabulary and grammar contents are arranged around a variety of updated issues for debate could prove to be particularly motivating and instrumental for reading/speaking skills, besides having a great marketing potential.
Gender parity is a cross-cultural issue in humanities and we, vocational and even college teachers, are in need of a workbook that adresses this controversial topic from a neutral perspective; that is, social awareness for the accomplishments of women in technology and science as well as their protagonism throughout history and pre-history.
As stated in the slides’ presentation: «We have completed a cycle that started thousands of years ago. Where are we going now?»
«I, Pet Goat II» by Heliofant Computer Animated Studios (2012) has won a number of film awards for their extremely thought-provoking imagery. The photogram above suggests that gender parity is crucial for social justice for both women and men alike and this has been a conclusion often reached at in these debates. You can download this handout and guided debate on gender parity as well as the original article at:
https://serveicomunitat.blogspot.com/2015/01/unconscious-dynamics-of-gender.html and http://ssrn.com/abstract=1663350
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