Similarities Between Delhy And Delphy

Since our nation’s inception, Americans have pursued equality through protest, implementation of laws, or legal acts. However, no matter how many legal regulations are instituted, or protests are held, true equality has never, and will never be achieved until the public changes their ideology and mindset. Both Chris Chen and Christine Delphy who advocate for race and gender equality respectively, are two authors who believe that these radical changes must be made to create equality in society. They each give similar yet different ways to alter the mindset of modern society. In her essay “Rethinking Sex and Gender,” Delphy states that in order to truly gain equality between the sexes, we have to eliminate the idea of gender altogether. In a

Delphy gives a helpful analogy of her idea when she references sex as a container and gender as its contents in the current ideology of the country. She states, “we now see gender as the content with sex as the container. The content may vary, […], but the container is considered to be invariable because it is part of nature, […] What should have happened, however, is that recognizing the independence of the genders from the sexes” (Delphy, 3). When analyzing the ideas of both sex and gender in the quote above, Delphy follows the ideas of Ann Oakley, when she states, “‘sex’ is a word that refers to the biological differences between male and female […] ‘Gender’ however is a matter of culture: it refers to the social classification into ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’.’” (Oakley, qtd. in Delphy, 2). This idea that Delphy puts forth is a very powerful one, and relates heavily to her core claim. She is saying that gender, and not sex is the more important, and therefore proceeding variable. Then, later in her essay, she goes on to show that when this change is accepted, because gender is socially constructed, it can and needs to be abolished. This analogy is also very helpful when looking at some of the ideas put forward by

The first involves seeing race as a noun, and the second involves seeing race as what one group does to another, or as a verb. When referencing the two he defines race as a noun as, “ a property or attribute of identities or groups” (Chen, 1). By this statement he means race as an identity are the distinguishing features of a group. This includes both physical and cultural differences, and can therefore span things from skin color and hair texture, to things such as the music people sing and the clothes they wear. He goes on to define race as a verb as, “a set of ascriptive processes which impose fictive identities and subordinate racialised populations” (Chen, 1). By this he means the many the institutionalized processes and practices that disenfranchise people of color every day, such as unequal pay for equal work, and overall economic disadvantage, the escalation of the carceral state, the militarization of the Mexican border, and many more (Chen, 3). Chen adamantly believes that we need to stop thinking about race as a noun and start thinking of it as a verb, otherwise we will never be able to eliminate it and gain the equality that people have been striving for for so long. He believes people will always look differently, meaning they will always have different characteristics or different races. Therefore, if that is what we focus on