Our Subconscious Nature to Categorize

The main idea that is strategically intertwined within each of the assigned readings is the idea that people contain a political nature to categorize their peers for personal comfort. Before engaging in a conversation, people have already mapped out your being (race, gender, stereotypes, etc.) They want to put individuals in a box. Why is this of any substantial importance to feminists? Well, I would think the answer to this question would be because subconsciously categorizing people affects all aspects of our life. In reality, no one can truly identify with a single group. Everyone is, at some point, caught in "los intersticios". We're shared among many, spread across all types of groups. This issue extends beyond just the realms of feminism. It affects the entire world and everyone in it. The readings did a great job in addressing the effects of assumptions, harassment, and exclusion. What happens when we don't fit in a box? When we don't fit into a category? The majority of people want to discomfort you because you no longer "only" identify with them or you have alternative views and lifestyles while still belonging to the same race. "My childhood desire, often desperate, was not so much to be a particular nationality to be a American or Arab, but to be wholly one thing or the other: to be something that I and the rest of the world could understand, categorize, label, predict." (Asultany, 293). People shouldn't have to want to be associated with "one" thing because of outside negative views.I can only wish that people could just be accepted for who they are because the world will never be on the same page. I may even participate in this cultural marginalization unknowingly/subconsciously and can not begin to fathom why these actions and responses are so automated.

These readings show how people fail to be empathetic and consider how others feel. "Brian begins to tell us how people react to him in France, how strangers continually think he's not only Spanish or Latin American, but also read him as female. 'Gracias, senorita,' they say to him. But sometimes the reaction is not so mild. Sometimes it results in harassment, staring, being followed and attacked." (Martin, 11). Reading this I began to see how not only do we overlook other people's feelings, but we react angrily out of discomfort felt because of other's differences. Why do strange/out of the norm things generate such negative responses? Now that I've been made aware of how such outcasting, harassing, sectioning, and the grouping of people together can have a detrimental affect to people's outlook on life, I am going to strive to not make flash judgments or cause an inconvenience by my "gawking, gaping, and staring? (Clare). I can not say I directly relate to the text and the situations present within the text, but I am very empathetic and relate in a way. I think most people can relate. Being this or that, people sometimes expect you to be able to do only the things associated with your race or gender which shouldn't be the case