“On Psychological Oppression” by Sandra Bartky Presentation

Introduction

• Biographical information of Sandra Bartky:
  • She is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
  • In 1997, she received an honorary degree, Doctor of Humanities from New England College.
• Her article, “On Psychological Oppression”.

On psychological oppression

• Bartky quotes Fanon and says that colonialism had psychological effects on the colonized (mainly the blacks).
• Despite being white, Bartky complains of being psychologically alienated.
• The psychological effects of sexist oppression resemble those of racism and colonialism.
• Oppress is to weigh down or exercise harsh dominion over people economically, politically and psychologically.
• Psychological oppression is to have a harsh dominion exercised over your self-esteem and make the victims their own oppressors.
• It makes work of oppressors easy by breaking spirits of the dominated by rendering them incapable of understanding the nature of those agencies responsible for their subjugation.
• The economically and politically oppressed are themselves psychologically oppressive.
• The experiences of oppression falls into three categories:
  • Stereotyping;
  • Cultural domination;
  • Sexual objectification.
• Black men and women of all races have been victims of sexual stereotyping.
• White women have also been seen as incapable and incompetent.
• Female stereotypes threaten the autonomy of women both by their existence and by their content.
• Women are now learning to identify and struggle against the forces that have laid the psychic burdens upon them.
• Women had also become victims of cultural domination, under male manifested supremacy.
• The women of color face male dominance and racism.
• Women of all races and ethnicities are subject to stereotyping, cultural depreciation and sexual objectification.
• Many oppressed persons come to regard themselves as uniquely unable to satisfy normal criteria of psychological health or moral adequacy.
• Bartky argues that women ought not to look ‘pretty and attractive’ for the sake of mere men but for the sake of beauty.
• Much has been written about alienation, but Marx’s theory of alienation speaks most compellingly about feminist political theory.
• All modes of oppression serve to maintain a vast system of privileges including those of race, sex and class.
• Class oppression encourages those who are higher in hierarchies of race or gender to cling to a false sense of superiority.
• All forms oppression support each other and it’s difficult for any form of oppression to disappear entirely unless the system of oppression as a whole is overthrown.