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Anne Fausto-Sterling Sexing the Body - Coggle Diagram
Anne Fausto-Sterling
Sexing the Body
What are we getting wrong about "sex"?
Sex is assigned at birth; we have 3 categories, intersex, male, female; but actually we get locke dinto a binary (who has I on their birth certificate)
CHROMOSOMES! Male:XY Female: XX -- this is only part of the picture
but science and culture are not separate conditions/states/mindsets
See Fausto-Sterling on Harraway's "God trick" (6): Science is the all knower, we can't go against it since its based on scientific evidence;
"The knowledge developed by the medical disciplines empowers doctors to maintain a mythology of the normal by changing the intersexual body to fit, as nearly as possible, into one or the other cubbyhole" (8).
Sex is about reproductive organs--but wait, it's not true
Where does Fausto-Sterling make her knowledge from? What's her evidence/archive?
doctors look at external organs;
1988 Olympics, Spanish athlete Maria Patino --
we continue to see trans/intersex athletes being super visible and
Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics (from which women were originally banned), argued that ‘‘women’s sports are all against the law of nature.’’6 If women were by nature not athletic competitors, then what was one to make of the sportswomen who pushed their way onto the Olympic scene?
on knowledge production: "What they think about how the world works shapes the knowledge that scholars produce about the world. That knowledge, in turn, affects the world at work" (20).
also akes me think about how a lot of research in the medical field is done on men, so how health issues appear in woman isn’t well known and many women go misdiagnosed or without proper medication
Current debates about gender variance, gender affirmation, and sport:
Assumption: male bodies have a
genetic
advantage compared to female bodies
and our hormones? I think testosterone brings more strength right? (But Patino's body produced testosterones, but with an androgen insensitivity, her cells couldn't detect this" (pg2)
Patino's story helps us see that its not all about the organs a person has that determines sexual characteristics
Assumption: people are afraid that transgender athletes have unfair advantages when it comes to their
biological
stregth
musculature; skeletal structure;
what's the difference between "natural" and "normal"?
natural means...having no outside interference; it's a thing the body just does cause body; how we came out
normal means...being folded into social expectations (gendered binary)