Villamizar 1

Maria Villamizar
Professor Steven Hall
ENGL 1010 (Issue Exploration Essay)
30 April 2015

Feminism in 21st Century

Women, by nature, are the ones who have the power to choose one in a million to create
life but why our society still referring to women as something inferior to men? If biology, as a
science does not lie, why we have to make a stereotypes when we talk about women? To make a
general analysis of how is the feminism in the 21rt century we have to look the most important
parts that makes this movement what is today, and these principal ones are how is the women
role in represented and attacked in the society and which are the tools this movement is using to
fight back .
Thought decades the term society have been seen as the list of rules that everybody has to
follow to have some kind of harmony , and we think that those who have the power in our
society are the ones who are always right. But, does that makes any sense, if the name society
means all why we let ourselves rules by few, or better to say the half ?. We are in the 21srt
century and I think it is time to see as a real society that women deserve an equal respect and
right to be heard as men.
Oscars of 2015, Patricia Arquette wins in the category of Best Supporting Actress for her
role in the movie Boyhood, in her greeting speech, she says: Its our time to have wage
equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America, when she

Villamizar 2
finished, I asked my cousin, Jose, What is she referring to, arent women already free? He
looked at me as a stranger, and with a disgust gesture in his face he explained to me that our
society stills look womens work as less than mens. In that moment I felt as a complete ignorant,
kind of cave-women after a long winter. This was more than a reason to start to investigate how
our society is really dealing with gender equality and those rights.
Talking about rights in this world is talking about politics, who are the ones in charge in
our government, is one of the principal issues that we, as a society, have to face. Is it possible a
real democracy if just one voice is heard? , because according to the UN Women website, the
amount of women in parliamentarian positions across the United States is getting better with
only twenty-two percent. In the book Feminism Without Borders , by the professor Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, this number is represented by the female gender with color, and for her it
seems to be just a perfect excuse used by the masculinization to create different institutions,
with a profitable mask to easily organize and capitalize politics. Basically, using only this small
amount of women presence to still have a politic and economic power.
Even when this representational number has been increased with the time, is not enough
to raise a voice equally respected and supported as the male in these days, and reaching that
equality is taking too long. But, this issue brings up a very inviting solution for Chandra, and she
called it transnational feminism, this concept is to bring up a community of feminist, looking
origins, colors or social class not as differences, instead of that, looking it as an opportunity to
learn and share knowledge. As my personal interpretation of this theory, we have to stop looking
to form different groups minorities to build up a society of equal opportunities and rights
,because is not only womens rights, for me is the whole concept of society that have to change.

Villamizar 3
But, unfortunately, we have to fight for equality in each aspect separately and for everybody to
have the same freedom, for me this is the real goal we have to look forward.
And this issue is not only in political manner it is also dealing with one of the most
powerful communication tool nowadays, the media. As we can read in chapter IV of the book
Catching a Wave by Rory Cooke and Alison Piepmeier, there are so many examples of how
women have been dealing thought years, but one that is recently popular is in the media. The
material we see on television, like advertimesnts, the news and also in the dialogs in programs,
refers to women, in the majority of the cases, as a sexual object and not as a person who can have
an option about what is male topic. This is one of the points that bothers me the most , because
television is reflecting what we are thinking as a society and t make it worse the future
generations are learning and making their own ideologies and interpretations with the
information shared in this medium.
We are all human, no matter race, social class or gender, and only for that reason is time
to learn to tolerate and to stop thinking about power, we are not in an animal kingdom to reach to
the top of any alimentary group, so we have to start tolerating each other and learn to learn for
each person, and the only way to doing that is to listen to others without any prejudice.
Fortunately, technology has been changed, and social media have been created, and right
now there is tons of information sharing every day. And for a feminism approach we now have
more freedom to speak in this type of platform. According to Gina Messina and Rosemary
Radford in the book Feminism and Religion in the 21srt century: Technology , Dialogue and
Expanding Borders , this type of communication is effective, because writing in an electronic
wall that does not sees what makes you in certain way different give us the freedom of speech.
Using social media and internet as a tool to share information and important topics can be the

Villamizar 4
best creation when some groups of people are being shout in other place. So, now that we have
the tools to share our different points of views it is time as a society to use them, and to make
ourselves rich in knowledge.
I could realize with this research, as a women I have to lose the fear to ask for my rights
and fight if those are violated. The biggest thing that I enjoy learned is that we really have to
change our perspective about the concept of society rules are there to change and we have to try
that those rules, no matter in which context either in religion or in social, are good and fair to
everybody to reach that goal of equality . And the most important part is how we as human
beings follow and adapt those changing rules, because the object is to be a better being each day.