Answer the questions according to reading - Essay Example

These four studies demonstrate the power of institutions in shaping gender identities through the dominant theme of power between the dominant racial male and the dominated female and other male racial groups, and in order to attain meaningful racial and gender equality changes, the causes of heteronormativity must be determined, followed by recommendations that impact individual mindset and institutional paradigm changes. Powerful institutions create specific gender and race identities and images of sexualities by designing and implementing oppressive gendered and sexualized beliefs, attitudes, policies, and practices.

Lindsey Feitz and Joane Nagel understand the connections among race, gender, and sexuality in “The Militarization of Gender and Sexuality in the Iraq War.” They assert that the American government, specifically through the U.S. Army, produces and reproduces sexual and racial repression through its wartime practices, specifically the sexualization of female soldiers and the promotion of “female masculinities” (Feitz and Nagel 201). These sexual relations and identities reinforce ideas of heteronormativity, despite the rising number of women soldiers in the U.S. military.

Furthermore, what is clear in the sexual industries is the gender and ethnic differences between the dominant racial man and the oppressed sexualized woman, thereby intersecting gender and race issues. Feitz and Nagel underscore gender and race in seeing minorities as sexual objects and as tools of the war. Private First Class Jessica Lynch has gender and race that opposed that of her kidnappers, where the media showed how “American men [saved] a pretty, young, white American woman from the possible sexual and personal assault by dark and dangerous Iraqis” (Feitz and Nagel 206).

The impact of the media coverage in Lynch’s staged rescue attempt is the formulation of racialization in war, apart from the gendering of military women in war. These examples show the role of the military in expressing and implementing oppressive gendered, racial, and sexualized beliefs in their practices. War rape becomes a method for suppressing other races through gender exploitation. The same intersection of ethnicity and gender is present in “‘Check Me Out’: Queer encounters in Sharif Waked’s Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints.

” In this article, Hochberg shows the impact of institutionalized racism on repressed gender and race identities. Sharif Waked’s Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints shows how checkpoints are a new arena of power play for political and gender subjugation because they seek to “produce the Palestinian body both as a symbol of imminent danger (“the terrorist”) and as the object of complete subjugation lacking any political agency (“the occupied”)” (Hochberg 578). These checkpoints demonstrate the sexualization of power even against men, where the othering of Palestinian men (and women) is performed through stripping them and removing them of their privacy, perhaps even dignity.

Their racial identities are then sexualized for political purposes that seek to marginalize them and make them feel powerless, physically, sexually and psychologically. These articles demonstrate that these practices and institutions promote oppressed gender and