Hello all,
Listen, I’m taking a brief hiatus from the blogosphere. I am taking a really interesting course right now called Gender Empowerment and Development, and it is only two weeks long, so it’s very VERY intensive. I have a ton of reading to get done, and not a whole lot of extra time, and I’m still in French, and my final exam for that is coming up this week too! I’m under the gun!
Anyway, I apologize for not being able to put the time into research for Feminism Friday this week, but I will return to it next week, to Mister P’s question about powerlessness.
So, I’ll be around for comments and perhaps the occasional short post for the nextweek or so, but don’t expect to see too much of me!I’ll leave you with a question: what does empowerment mean to you?
Empowerment is when I make decisions with my head and not my emotions. Empowerment is when I feel I have value without having to be validated.
enpowerment cannot be done “to” you; it must be done “by” you. it is seizing control of your own fate and taking the responsibility for it.
a corollary: is empowerment always an individual endeavour? can we seek to empower entire groups of people?
Of course we can. It’s happened throughout the ages: with the American Revolution and the formercolonists, empowering themselves to have the government they wanted; with Eastern Indians freeing themselves from England with Ghandhi’s leadership; and the steps taken to empower racial minorities and women. Granted, they were not all fully sucessful, but in my opinion, it’s probably a matter of time.
That’s really funny! I just checked my stats & some perv. checked me out because I said, “cock-eyed” & they stayed around for almost 10 minutes. Ha Ha! didn’t find what they were looking for, I bet.
You can empower a group in that you can give them the option to exercise power but that doesn’t mean they will use it. Just as individuals have freedom of choice which is a power and don’t always use it.
well, based on my definition/perspective, it makes no sense to speak of “empowering” a group
having read that whole thing, the prevailing thought is… “ouch.”
That’s not cool…
Take a break though! It sounds like the class will be awesome.
empowerment (to me) is what happens to all people within a system of (to borrow from Malcolm X) complete freedom, justice and equality.
Which I’m not sure anyone has. There seems to be a limit on the kinds of freedom allowed in society. Anything that seems to go against the “law of society”, whether or not it’s encouraged by laws of government, is condemnded. Thinking Girl has shown many examples of this in her past blogs. Based on ignorance, bigotry, or fear, people are very judgmental. I hope that sometime that attitude will be wiped out, but it’ll probably take a lot of work for true “freedom, justice, and equality” to occur; since decades after groups begin to work to empower themselves, they aren’t completely free.
Good luck with the Course!
Hi
sounds like an interesting course! I wish you good luck too! hmmm? what does empowerment mean to me? it means taking charge of your life! no one else can do it but you!
Thought you might find this article interesting:
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4781
Thanks for the heads up on hillary.
Mocking politics is loads of fun!
Power, it’s such an ego thing, and it is an illusion. Who really has power? We all pretend to have power, some pretend better then others I guess. But in the end, we all die and all the things we thought we owned, go to others. The world moves on as if we were never here (every one thinks they are so indispencable) and life goes on.
Power is the love inside you, and it seems to be out of reach of most of the world. I guess because everyone is too busy hating.
thanks to everyone for continuing the discussion while I was on hiatus. Everyone had great comments about power and empowerment!
Thanks for all the well-wishes. The class was among the best I’ve taken – the topic was very interesting, the class was structured as to give us a lot of freedom and discussion, and the other students were great, really diverse and interesting and participatory. I enjoyed it immensely!
I’ve come to think a lot about empowerment over the course of the class. I’ll write a post about it, I think. I think that empowerment is a matter of both individual and collective work. Individually, it means doing work emotionally, psychologically, mentally, spiritually, and materially to gain a foothold that will allow for more personal power. I think individual empowerment is kind of like a set of skills to be learned and incorporated into one’s life. Collectively, it means helping out those who are stuck beneath barriers that impede their personal empowerment – like economic and political barriers, for example. If we as a society or as a collective can work to remove those barriers, those who are trapped by them can continue their personal empowerment work. Individual and collective empowerment must go hand in hand – if we focus too much on individual empowerment, then it won’t be long before we run up against social barriers that prevent us from going any farther. If we focus too much on collective empowerment, we may remove the barriers blocking empowerment but will still end up with people who don’t have the necessary motivation and/or skills to complete the journey.
I agree that empowerment can’t be done “to” a person – it must come from within, as Mike said. If we can go around handing out power, we can surely go around taking it back if we feel like it. But I disagree that it is always individual. Collective empowerment is possible, and necessary, for true individual empowerment (for some), like Jess and Nee points out.
Groove talking, I like your point about power being illusory and temporary. Good one!
Theo, thanks for the link. I disagree with that article completely!!!Perhaps I’ll have to post about it….
power most certainly is real.
Money, influence, possessions, they are not power, but they are symbols of power as determined by our society.
You can and do take power with you when you go, but you do not take the symbols with you. They stay here, to as you say, ‘pass on to others’.
The only ways to truely increase your power is to give it away, in one respect, or steal it from others if you are so inclined. The results of course are very different powers indeed.
Now you can of course hoard the symbols of power in this life, but that surely won’t help you when your gone.
But you can most certainly circulate the symbols of power in life to increase your own personal power, in a good sense.
You can also hoard the symbols of power in this life, and circulate them only in cases where others willingly give away their power in exchange, but this would be in the bad sense.
As for barriers there are many kinds, personal, societal and global.
Sure you can work together to remove the societal and global, but you can never remove someone elses personal barriers, because that person wanted them to be there in order to have some thing to get over.
what an interesting blog.
Thanks for your comment on my blog. I still have to go through your blog at a leisurely pace. Will do it one of these days.
Meanwhile I thought I might suggest some other post/blogs that you might find interesting:
http://whyiamabrownie.blogspot.com
http://whyiamabrownie.blogspot.com/2005/11/idiots-guide-to-feminism.html
I love it