Stuff I Write for School

  When legal dynamo Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away from pancreatic cancer in September of 2020, her death was met with international mourning. In her later years, serving as a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Ginsburg, or “RBG” as she is colloquially known, enjoyed status as a folk hero that reached far beyond her relevance to the legal community. The 2018 biographical documentary RBG serves to offer the viewer insight into not only Ginsburg’s personality, relationships, experiences navigating a patriarchal society, and even workout routine; but the legal cases that led to her lasting impact upon gender discrimination laws.             To fully understand the influence that Ginsburg had upon United States law, one must turn to the laws that were in place at the time that she began her career in 1960. As the documentary describes, at the time it was legal for employers to fire a woman for being pregnant, for banks to require a husband’s co-signature for women to o

  As an avid gamer, an avowed feminist, and one who has previously been employed within the game development industry, I consider myself well versed with the systemic subordination of women within games and game development. As explored in class, and extensively by Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian, this subordination was evident in the nascence of games, with player characters predominantly presented as male, and women serving a perfunctory decorative purpose. As men are dominant members of Eurocentric society and those with primary access to resources, hegemonic masculine interests are those primarily considered under capitalism. To maximize gains, early game developers relied heavily on emphasized masculinity in the form of violence and sexual domination to attract and retain players. As technology has expanded, so have the myriad opportunities to objectify women in games. The game experience has evolved to allow for moving, talking actors within a digital environment, in some

Historically speaking, concepts of gender, sex, and sexuality have been interrelated and defined in strictly binary terms. One would be characterized as either male or female, as strictly defined by one’s reproductive organs. The male or female individual would be sexually interested in either the opposite or same gender and would thus be afforded a label of heterosexual or homosexual. They would be expected to conform to social concepts of “masculinity,” “femininity,” “straightness,” or “queerness.” While cultural variations exist in how these concepts are defined, it remains that they are generally rigidly upheld as dichotomous and opposite in Western Eurocentric societies. The rigidity of such gender role concepts was explored in class through the discussion of gendered toys and tacit implication that one’s enjoyment of a toy is inherently connected to one’s gender. While boys are expected to enjoy toys that reflect traditionally masculine concepts of toughness, stoicism, and cour