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SEX, "Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from…

- - - - "Decolonization is not an individual choice. We must collectively oppose a system of compulsory settler sexuality and family that continues building a nation upon Indigenous genocide and that marks Indigenous and other marginalized relations as deviant."
        
        Settler colonialism imposed monogamous nuclear families on Indigenous peoples, displacing traditional kinship
        
        Making Kin Not Population---TallBear
      - "It was not always so that the monogamous couple ideal reigned... The standard of lifelong monogamous marriage took hold in the US in the 19th century. It was propped up by Christian moral arguments coupled with state structural enforcements."
    - - "Residential schools punished Indigenous children for practicing traditional adoption rituals; Indigenous two-spirit identities were criminalized as 'deviant'."
  - - - “‘Womb renting’ is a growing enterprise in India estimated now to be half a billion dollar a year business and counting. Alongside the more recognizable outsourcing of Information Technology (IT) in the form of ‘call centres’ and ‘cyber coolies’, India is also the centre of a ghoulish market for replacement body parts, primarily kidneys… To this ignominious list, one can now add labour of biological reproduction.”
        
        Foreign Babies, Indian Make---Modhumita Roy
    - - "Wombs are the latest, and perhaps most troubling in a series of resources... in what kind of social and economic desperation are women's choices reduced to [surrogacy]?"
      - Critique of Demand: "It begs the question: why not train the yearnings of the childless not to desire a baby? or at least, not to associate the joys of parenthood with genetic transference?"
  - - - Exchange of Women
        
        “The exchange of women does not necessarily imply that women are objectified... but it does imply a distinction between gift and giver. If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners.”
        
        Incest Taboo
        
        “The prohibition of incest is less a rule prohibiting marriage with the mother, sister, or daughter, than a rule obliging the mother, sister, or daughter to be given to others. It is the supreme rule of the gift.”
        
        By banning sex within the group, societies ensure that women are traded to other groups, creating kinship networks.
        
        Compulsory Heterosexuality
        
        "If women are exchanged, and if the sexual prohibition is a corollary of the rules of exchange, then homosexuality cannot be tolerated."
        
        The Traffic in Women---Gayle Rubine
        
        Hemosexuality is a structual threat, because is based on the exchange of women between men. Therefore, the system enforces Compulsory Heterosexuality as a means of maintaining its own political and economic integrity.
    - - "We can distinguish sex from gender and oppression from both... To say that women are oppressed is an observation; to say that they are a sex-class is an explanation; to say they are an economic class is a theory."
      - Arguing that feminism must use the structural language of the Sex/Gender System (a social, political construct) to explain oppression, rather than relying on biological facts of Sex.
  - - - “The overthrow of mother right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex. The man seized the reins in the house also, the woman was degraded, enthralled, the slave of the man’s lust, a mere instrument for breeding children.”
        
        This created patriarchy: men controlled property, women, and reproduction.
    - - Monogmay
        
        “Monogamy arose out of the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of one person—and that a man—and out of the desire to bequeath this wealth to this man’s children and to no one else’s.”
        
        The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State---Engels
  - - - "What of wives? Because women who are wives are provided for by men, they offer their flesh as a playground, as if between a man and a woman there is nothing but a contract of indentured servitude: I sell you my body in exchange for your consideration and support. "
        
        Economic Revolution and Women’s Revolution---He-Yin Zhen
      - “Marriage in recent times is nothing but a woman selling her body to a man in order to escape a lifetime of difficulty and to provide for herself a livelihood. A man calculates his economic situation and buys a woman to marry. This is called marriage for purchase.
      - Poverty forces women to treat their bodies as “economic assets,” whether in marriage or prostitution.
      - A woman who sells her body to a man because of her lust for money – no matter whether she actually works in a brothel or not – is still a prostitute by another name.
        
        Sex in Marriage ? or Work in Marriage?
    - - “Poverty is the root cause of prostitution, just as wealth is the root cause of lustful indulgence. The more money a man has, the more numerous are the women he violates.”
  - - - "We are envisioned both as removing corruption from society (a nineteenth-century French physician spoke of the 'seminal drain') and as a source of contamination, disease, and death in our own right."
      - Criminalisation
        
        “Criminalisation can make [sex work] more dangerous, but there is little the state can do to physically curtail a person’s capacity to sell or trade sex. Thus, prostitution is an abiding strategy for survival for those who have nothing.”
        
        Revolting Prostitues---Mac & Smith
    - - “Most porn workers do not want to be only workers. In escaping worker status, they find themselves in shifting positions as entrepreneurs, independent contractors, employees, and producers.”
  - - - Black Women
        
        Double-discrimination: "Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white women’s experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men."
        
        Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics---Kimberlé Crenshaw
    - - Power
        
        "Because women are thus constituted as a coherent group, sexual difference becomes coterminous with female subordination, and power is automatically defined in binary terms: people who have it (read: men) and people who do not (read: women). Men exploit, women are exploited. "
        
        Under Western Eyes---Mohanty
      - Interlocking
        
        “The major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.”
        
        Combahee River Collective Satement
      - Universalization
        
        Western feminists’ tendency to universalize their experiences (e.g., white, middle-class) as “women’s oppression,” while reducing non-Western women to monolithic “victims” (e.g., “veiled women,” “oppressed by tradition”). It erases cultural, class, and historical specificities, using feminism to reinforce Western hegemony.
- - - - “A determination made through the application of socially agreed upon biological criteria for classifying persons as females or males.”
        
        This clarifies that even "biological" sex is not purely objective. Societies decide which criteria (genitalia at birth, chromosomes) count, and these criteria can conflict (e.g., intersex individuals).
    - - "The activity of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one’s sex category.”
        
        Gender is not a trait, but something people do in daily life. Eg, a woman adjusting her behavior to avoid being labeled "unladylike," or a man refraining from "weak" displays of emotion.
      - "Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds."
    - - Sexuality, I shall argue, is a ‘fictional unity,’ that once did not exist, and at some time in the future may not exist again. It is an invention of the human mind”
        
        The Social Construction of Sexuality---Jeffery Weeks
    - - "Achieved through application of the sex criteria, but in everyday life, categorization is established and sustained by the socially required identificatory displays. . . In this sense, one’s sex category presumes one’s sex and stands as a proxy for it in many situations, but sex and sex category can vary independently; that is, it is possible to claim membership in a sex category even when the sex criteria are lacking."
        
        Doing Gender---West and Zimmerman
      - "Managed properties of conduct that are contrived with respect to the fact that others will judge and respond to us in particular ways.
      - play a massive role in defining what is 'normal' and 'abnormal' sexuality, thus constructing the categories we use.
      - Binary Incoherent
  - - - "To “do” gender is not always to live up to normative conceptions of femininity or masculinity; it is to engage in behavior at the risk of gender assessment.”
      - Gender is a performance learned over time
    - - The category of 'woman' is an achievement, a Social Construct, not a biological inevitability.
        
        Feminisms
        
        "Feminist theory has sought to understand the way in which systemic or pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced through individual acts and practices, and how the analysis of ostensibly personal situations is clarified through situating the issues in a broader and shared cultural context."
      - Essentialism
        
        "The theory of the eternal feminine still has its followers; they whisper, ‘Even in Russia, women are still very much women"
        
        The Second Sex---Simone de Beauvior
        
        Identity is defined by social and political relations, not by the body alone.
      - "Against the certainties of this tradition [essentialism] I... offer an alternative way of understanding sexuality. This involves seeing it not as a primordially ‘natural’ phenomenon but rather as a product of social and historical forces"
    - - "One of the critical shifts of the last hundred years has been the move away from moral regulation by the churches to a more secular mode of organization through medicine, education, psychology, social work, and welfare practices."
        
        Societies regulate gender through formal (laws, medicine) and informal (shaming, peer pressure)
      - Authority of Medical & Doctor
    - - If gender attributes, however, are not expressive but performative, then these attributes effectively constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal.
  - - - "The family is the arena in which most of us in Western culture gain some sense of our individual sexual needs and identities... it is the arena where our desires are organized from a very early stage indeed"
    - - "Marriage, by making the woman the dependent of the man, makes her the property of the species."
  - - - "The medical profession has quietly maintained a two-sex system by fiat, often with the aid of surgery... [doctors] usually advise the parents to choose a single sex, male or female, and let the doctors 'manage' the infant's gender development."
        
        The medical establishment acts as an agent of social control, using surgical and hormonal intervention to enforce the two-sex binary on intersex infants.
        
        The FIve Sexes---Fausto Sterling
      - The medical decision places the infant into a compulsory, defined Sex Category from birth, creating the initial foundation for the subsequent social expectation and performance of Gender.
      - "S/he: “even language refuses other possibilities; thus to write about Levi Suydam I have had to invent conventions--s/he and his/her--to denote someone who is clearly neither male nor female or who is perhaps both sexes at once."
    - - History of Sex Research---Velocci
    - - "Transsexuals must seek and obtain medical treatment in order to be recognized as transsexuals. Their subject position depends upon a necessary relation to the medical establishment and its discourses."
        
        Medical institutions as gatekeepers: Trans people must perform a normative "transsexual" narrative to access care
        
        Mutilating Gender-Spade
    - - “sexual and gender self-determination and the expression of variant gender identities without punishment (and with celebration) should be the goals of any medical, legal, or political examination of or intervention into the gender expression of individuals and groups.”
  - - - "Scientific videos consistently describe sperm as active, brave, competitive, and strong while eggs are described as passive, wasteful, demure, and dependent... [This] is a cultural lens that genders the biological processes of reproduction."
        
        Brave Sperm and Demure Eggs: Fallopian Gender Politics on Youtube---Pamela Hill Nettleton
  - - - Marginalized groups challenge norms through collective action.
- - - - “Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body.”
        
        The History of Sxuality---Foucault
      - Biopower refers to modern states’ shift from “right of death” (sovereign power to kill) to administering life, which through regulating populations through health, sexuality, labor, and reproduction
      - Anatomo-politics: Disciplining individual bodies (e.g., prisons, schools, factories) to be efficient, docile, and productive.
      - Bio-politics of population: Managing collective life (e.g., birth rates, public health, sexuality) to optimize societal “strength.”
      - "Between the state and the individual, sex became an issue, and a public issue no less; a whole web of discourses, special knowledges, analyses, and injunctions settled upon it.:
  - - - Sexual Necropolitics---Jackson
      - the pretext of protecting The Body from a specific form of sexual violence is used to expand the power and reach of the state's Authority and carceral system, which ultimately governs life and death.
  - - - The Failure of Dobbs---Roberts
    - - Their reproductive freedom, for example, is limited not only by the denial of access to safe abortions, but also by the lack of resources necessary for a healthy pregnancy and parenting relationship. Their choices are limited not only by direct government interference in their decisions, but also by government’s failure to facilitate them.
    - - Reproductive freedom includes both bodily and family autonomy. The human right not to have a child, to have a child, and to raise children in safe and supportive communities are all essential.”
    - - Undrowned
        
        Trans-Species Solidarity as Resistance: “I call on [marine mammals] as teachers, mentors, guides… Breathing in unbreathable circumstances is what we do every day in the chokehold of racial gendered ableist capitalism. We are still undrowning.”
        
        Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals---Gumbs
        
        “Undrowning” reframes survival under oppression as an active, collective practice—not passive endurance.
        
        “Those who survived in the underbellies of boats… are the undrowned, and their breathing is not separate from the drowning of their kin… Breathing in unbreathable circumstances is what we do every day.”
- - - - Rejects biological determinism: "Woman" is not a natural category but a political class created by heterosexuality as a system of oppression