Alan K. Frishman
In recent years, however, spurred on by politicians, there has been a move towards the myth of anti–mammy, a return to the alleged hypersexuality of the Victorian Hottentot, in which African–American motherhood is associated with illegitimacy and "loose wombs."
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Without a male presence, the woman while not defined away as she might have been a hundred years ago is yet rendered the enemy of decency and the American family. In Dan Quayle's famous attack on Murphy Brown's decision for single motherhood this connection was make explicitly and deliberately. Joined in a conspiracy against mainstream "family values," both white single mothers and African–American single mothers are accused of mocking the importance of fathers and undercutting the importance of true motherhood.
So what has really changed since Lombrosco denied the possibility of a woman being both a woman and an "offender"? An offender against whom, or what? Are men still voyeurs and women still vain? Or were they ever? After all, these assumptions of the past, and from the past, are true only if we believe they are. As Barbara Fields aptly points out, "An ideology must be constantly created and verified...; if it is not, it dies."
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that stereotypical thinking invariably leads to a "form of intellectual apartheid."
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As teachers, we need first to gauge the extent to which our own students continue the long, unfortunate tradition of sexual stereotyping of intellectual apartheid and then to show them there is another way.
Specifically, for purposes of this unit, we need to guide our students in their awareness of how films play a role in encouraging, if not outright creating, sexual stereotyping. And then we can, hopefully, accompany them down the path of clearer, deeper, more responsible thinking.