Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Honors 212 C
6/3/15
I once had a gender studies professor claim she could guess 90% of
the time who would sit next to whom on the bus. That was the basis of this
project, and our research question was this: How does gender, race, and
assertion that the choice of whom to sit next to on the bus is always
gendered.
bus route that we believed would make for diverse and interesting
observations. We each rode our buses for approximately one hour, writing
down all of the interactions we witnessed. I rode Metro Route 2, going from
Madrona Park to West Queen Anne, and passing through the Central District
These categories are social constructs, which vary across our locations in
time and space, and are therefore subjective in nature. We are often
identify as a boy, a girl, a nonbinary person, or something else; but for most
of their life, everyone around them will refer to them as a boy, because of a
decision that was made for them. Nevertheless, we are all raised in a society
that treats race, class, and gender as essential categories, distinct and
taught what it means to belong to those categories, and how those people
unavoidable product of our society, and our only method to counteract it was
group was made up of four people with different backgrounds and biases.
middle class. As such, I have my own personal set of experiences that led me
person, Im primed not to notice how white people make up the majority of
people I interact with in my daily life. Therefore, its possible that I could
have viewed the racial makeup of the bus as normal when primarily white,
and abnormal when more racially diverse. But as a woman, Im very aware
of sexism I experience on the bus, and therefore could be more in tune to
sexist occurrences I witnessed. For example, when I see a man sitting next to
our observations.
ride. Three of us rode at rush hour on a weekday, and only one rode on the
expand upon our observations, its probable we would have chosen to ride
the same bus at several different times of day, to observe the changes that
occur. We also would have ridden the bus in both directions, instead of just
one. So, due to the limitations of our own schedules, our observations were a
study class, but found myself unable to guess class categorizations, and
ended up leaving class out of my observations almost entirely. The one
notable exception is this: I factored class into the population of bus riders as
and middle class people, since it is assumed that the upper class and upper-
middle class have cars and can afford the expense of parking downtown.
observations, men took up more space than women did. Women frequently
crossed their legs while sitting, whereas men never did. In fact, when men
chose to sit next to a woman, they tended to take up some of her allotted
down by the lines dividing one seat from another by the bus makers.) A New
spaces (and frequently public transportation) in which men spread their legs
wide enough to take up more than their fair share of space (Fitzsimmons). I
observations of men who spread their legs over their entire seat and
approximately 1/3 of the way into the seat next to them. Women, on the
depending on how much space their male seatmate was taking up. Outside
their legs (7.14). One possible explanation for this gendered gap in leg room
is the social ideal that women keep their legs closed in order to be modest
and ladylike by not revealing their crotch. However, this doesnt fully
explain the gendered dynamics of space, like the example of men spreading
their arms across multiple seats, and women rarely doing the same. Another
explanation is that women are expected to take up less space, and men are
and female subordination. When I observe women on the bus taking up less
space: an intricate dance in which women forfeit their allotted space to men.
This gendered space gap may be one reason why I frequently observed
seating choices I observed were explicitly gendered, but only when women
were making the choice. When given the choice, women usually sat next to
other women, where as men sat next to men and women, seemingly
considered the default in our society. To give an example, stick figures are
Everyone crosses the street when they see the male-bodied walk signal,
but that same design is also used to designate male-only spaces, like mens
bathrooms.
Therefore, men are given the luxury of not considering gender as a factor
that applies to them, and subsequently, they may not explicitly consider
gender (and of themselves as gendered) more often than men, the male
explanation for why women chose other women for seatmates (because
when considering their safety, women were the safest option), while men are
phenomenon in which people who take up greater space are also more likely
a man unaware of his privilege in choosing. While the focus of this paper was
Bibliography
Eunson, Baden. Communicating in the 21st Century. 2nd edition. John Wiley
and Sons Australia, Ltd, 2008. Ch. 7. Web. 3 June 2015.
<http://www.johnwiley.com.au/highered/eunson2e/content018/web_chapters/
eunson2e_web7.pdf>
Yap, Andy J., et al. The Ergonomics of Dishonesty: The Effect of Incidental
Posture on Stealing, Cheating, and Traffic Violations. Psychological Science.
Sage Publications, 2013. P. 19. Web. 3 June 2015.
<https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/cbs-directory/sites/cbs-
directory/files/publications/Yap%20et%20al%202013%20The%20Ergonomics
%20of%20Dishonesty.pdf>