OPPRESSION AND POWER
Focus on critical reading skills and discussion
Objectives:
- to reflect on critical gender and neurodiversity theories
- to read academic texts critically and synthesise information
- to discuss issues related to gender and neuroptype discrimination
Introduction and background reading
We strongly recommend reading chapter 9 on Oppression from the source below before engaging with this lesson.
Jason, Leonard A.; Glantsman, Olya; O’Brien, Jack F.; and Ramian, Kaitlyn N., “Introduction to Community Psychology: Becoming an Agent of Change” (2019). College of Science and Health Full Text Publications. 1. https://via.library.depaul.edu/cshtextbooks/1
Read “Oppression and Power” on Rebus Press
Activity 1
Read and discuss the following citations:
1. Psychology of oppression reveals that oppression is not always perceptible and repellant. It can be disguised and beguiling. People do not always know they are oppressed. Sometimes they have to be educated about their oppression. The reason is that oppression stunts people’s critical, rational, analytical, and probing capabilities. Normative oppression also becomes taken for granted and mundane and therefore imperceptible (Ratner, 2014).
2. People cannot reject the system of domination without rejecting [part of] themselves, their own repressive instinctual needs and values (Marcuse, 1969, p. 17).
- Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency Lorde 2 become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of difference strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters (Lorde, 1984).
Activity 2
Now read the short essay written by Audre Lorde in 1984. What does she mean when she says that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house?
You can listen to the essay here:
How do you understand these words? What do you think about them?
Activity 3
Now read Nick Walker’s essay titled “Throw away the master’s tools: Liberating ourselves from the pathology paradigm.” What is he advocating for? What alternative to the pathology paradigm does he propose? Can you explain the difference and summarise his arguments?
https://neuroqueer.com/throw-away-the-masters-tools/
What do these texts have in common? What do Critical gender Theory, Critical Race Theory and Critical Neurodiversity Theory have in common?
Ratner, C. (2014). Psychology of Oppression. In: Teo, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_571