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Essay On Gender Inequality

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As Gender Studies started to gain more academic respectability in the contemporary society and as many female scholars take actual participation in contributing women’s perspective to the field, the problem of “gender inequality” has risen to the surface. In this paper, I would like to specifically talk about how beauty ideals that have been set up for women play its role in creating an unequal power relation between men and women. For the sake of clarity, the beauty ideals I focus on this paper are not limited to the appearances but general expectations that society make of an “ideal women”.

To begin with a simple example from today’s society, women are judged by their appearances more than their abilities, and to makes things worse, their appearances are compared with …show more content…
Looking at this scenario, men are like the evaluator and women are the individuals that are being evaluated, in which women are naturally placed in a lower position. But who is responsible for deciding which gender takes up certain role? Before answering this question, I would like to study the ideas of Foucault Michael, a key postmodernist philosopher, which provided significant insights to the gender issue I am writing on. In his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michael Foucault introduces the idea of “docile” bodies. Docile bodies, in Foucault’s definition, refers to “subjected and practiced bodies” which holds the belief that human bodies are controlled and constructed in a certain way how the society wants them to be (Foucault 138). To add my interpretation of his example on how society can make people to function in a way that can benefit the country economically and politically (138), bodies (referring to people in this content) are valued only when they can be productive, such as working hard, which benefits the economy of the country; but the same bodies are less valued when they question the system. Instead,

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