Final Exam for Women and Work 153

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Final Exam for Women and Work 153

Summer Session B- 2018

Please choose three out of the following four questions to answer.  Your answers should be approximately the equivalent of 3- 4 pages each (double- spaced in Times New Roman or Cambria font) in Word— don’t use any spacing or formatting tricks.   Please attach it all as one document and label the file (last name, first name).  Please turn in your exam via Gauchospace by.  Late exam papers will be penalized a half grade per day late.

1. Do you think sex work is delegitimized in society? Consider how sex workers have advocated for unionization in the documentary Live Nude Girls Unite and how sex workers in Temporarily Yours express agency in negotiating clients, money, or working conditions in more informal ways.  Why might some people in society not deem sex work as legitimate work?  If it is not legitimate work, then what do people who take issue with it deem sex work?  What considerations, whether social and/or legal, do you think need to be further addressed if the United States were to legalize sex work?  How might legalized sex work result in benefits for both workers and society at large?

*Draw on Live Nude Girls Unite and Temporarily Yours for question #1.

2. What is the second shift? How do women in Domestica and the documentary Maid in L.A. go beyond a second shift?  What additional labor are they doing in addition to paid work and unpaid domestic work in their own home?  What obstacles and barriers do women working in garment factories or domestic work face?  How might joining a labor union or social movement pose danger for these women? How are middle-class white women complicit in keeping immigrant women of color in a cycle of poverty?  Instead of contesting the gendered norms that add to her “second shift, “ white women who are middle-class sometimes go the route of outsourcing domestic labor to more disenfranchised women, for example.  How might middle- class white women be better allies to poor women of color?

*Draw on Domestica and Maid in L.A for question #2.

3. When considering readings on the gender revolution, glass elevator, or the Wall Street Women book, how might the authors better account for the intersection of race and class with gender? What are your critiques of Wall Street Women?

*Incorporate Wall Street Women and one other source for question #3.

4. In Live Nude Girls Unite, there is a clip of a man who is a client who says that he will support the women workers but that he doesn’t know much about their union movement— that it’s a “women’s issue.” How are women’s working conditions and labor not just a “women’s issue?”  If the onus should not be solely on the women workers (across different settings) then who is responsible?  What can men do to further advance women’s working conditions and rights?

*In addition to Live Nude Girls Unite, incorporate one other class source for question #4.