Prepared by Dr. Noelle Leslie dela Cruz

Associate Professor, Philosophy Department

De La Salle University

Oppression

Discussion questions for “Oppression” by Marilyn Frye

Iris Marion Young’s Five Faces of OppressionTwelve common types of oppression

Key points

What is the difference between being miserable/being limited or hindered/being frustrated and being oppressed?

Think of a situation that is an example of being caught in the type of birdcage Frye describes. Can a person’s confinement in such a birdcage be seen only by viewing the larger situation, as Frye claims?

Discussion questions

Marilyn Frye

Frye says that the action of a man opening a door for a woman is part of an oppressive structure. Do you agree?

Frye believes that men’s inability to cry is not a form of oppression. Does she make too little of this constraint on men’s behavior?(Minas 2000: 10-16)

Discussion questions

Marilyn Frye

The five faces of oppression, as formulated by Iris Marion Young, refer to a comprehensive set of categories and distinctions that cover all oppressed groups and the ways in which they are oppressed

The five faces of oppression

Iris Marion Young

“A social group is a collection of persons differentiated from at least one other group by cultural forms, practices, or way of life.”

“Groups are an expression of social relations; a group exists only in relation to one other group.”

Definition of social group

Iris Marion Young

“Oppression” is traditionally understood as exerted by a tyrannical power over a subordinate group

The five faces of oppression

Hebrew slaves in ancient Egypt

However, “oppression” has since been redefined to include the disadvantage and injustice suffered by people due to the everyday practices of a liberal society

The five faces of oppression

The stays of Scarlett O’Hara’s corset are tightened, in the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind

The same person can be a member of an oppressed group and a privileged group, e.g. a white woman

In this structural or systemic notion of oppression, an oppressed group need not have a correlate oppressing group. Cf. Michel Focault’s idea of the modernization of power

The five faces of oppression

Michel Focault

In Jeremy Bentham’s idea of a model prison, there is only one watch tower in the center of a circular set of glass-enclosed cells. Inmates’ actions are regulated by their subjective sense of being seen.

The Panopticon

“Someone who does not see a pane of glass does not know that he does not see it. Someone who, being placed differently, does see it, does not know the other does not see it.”Cf. Marilyn Frye’s birdcage metaphor for structural or systemic oppression

Quote from Simone Weil

Exploitation - the process by which the results of the labor of one social group is transferred for the benefit of anotherE.g. The exploitation of black slave labor rationalized in part by “heathen” African religious practices

Faces of oppression #1

Marginalization - the process by which people whom the labor system cannot or will not use, are expelled from or denied useful or productive participation in economic and social life, often resulting in material deprivation and dependency E.g. The marginalization of denominations outside the Protestant mainstream (Amish, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists)

Faces of oppression #2

Powerlessness - inability to participate in making decisions that affect the conditions of one’s lives and actions; lacking in authority, status, and sense of self; limited concrete opportunities to develop and exercise one’s capacitiesE.g. The political and legal powerlessness of Japanese American Buddhists to resist or avoid forced internment during World War II

Faces of oppression #3

Cultural imperialism - the process by which the dominant symbols, activities, or meanings of a society reinforce the perspective of a dominant group while making invisible, stereotyped, or marked as “other” the perspectives of subordinate or targeted groups. Includes the presumed universality of the dominant group’s experience, culture and religionE.g. The cultural imperialism experienced by Native American Indians relocated onto reservations and forcibly “assimilated” by Christian denominational mission boarding schools

Faces of oppression #4

Violence - random, unprovoked attacks against members of (targeted or subordinated) social groups and their property, with the primary motivation to damage, humiliate or terrorize, and in a social context in which this violence is tolerated or even enabled by accepted institutional and social practicesE.g. The violence visited upon individual Arab and South Asian Americans in the rapid acceleration of harassment and hate crimes from the mid-1970s up to and following 9/11

Source: Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2010

Faces of oppression #5

Some common types of oppression• Sexism• Heterosexism• Cisgenderism• Classism• Racism• Colorism• Ableism

• Lookism• Sizeism• Ageism• Nativism• Colonialism• Speciesism

“Oppression” by Marilyn Frye, in Gender Basics (2000) ed. by Anne Minas

“The Five Faces of Oppression” by Iris Marion Young, http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/young.pdf

Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2010

References