Blog Post 3: Chavez

     I wanted to talk about Chavez’s reading today since I have read her work before. I remember

taking my intercultural communications class when I was a PSEO student. Something

I thought was so interesting was the basics of what intercultural communication was.

And in general how it wasn’t just specifically race or ethnicity or culture like someone

being Scottish versus someone being Guatemalan, even though that was still

intercultural, but more things like sexuality, class, physical abilities, and how we make our own group

or culture for identity, or how we communicate within that culture of a group of people whether

it is apart of our identity or not. When I saw the term “interlocking oppressions” I was very intrigued, but not necessarily in a good way. I was upset that this term, as upsetting as it is, is true

in a way. Someone's identity has been oppressed in some way, shape, or form. I don't think this

is a term that should be ignored. Even though I hope for a world where everyone is accepted and we

can just all love each other, we still need to recognize the history of each culture and identity and the

oppressions people may have faced in order to become more accepting and help alleviate some

of that trauma.

 Why are people’s identities oppressed? In a book I found online, called

A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression, there is mention of alienation and

Marx, which essentially says that the way people are treated affects every aspect of life.

It is also put into words that when someone is alienated, they are only reduced to animalpleasures “eating, sleeping, drinking), which then puts that person into the category of animal, taking

away their human qualities. So decades of having someone's human qualities taken

away from them, and teaching this to others only instills beliefs that another person is not a

person. So, taking all of that turns into oppression.

Oliver, Kelly. “Alienation as Perverse Privilege of the Modern Subject.” The Colonization of Psychic

Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression, NED-New edition,

University of Minnesota Press, 2004,

pp. 3–26, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv70k.6.