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GENDER AND SEXUALITY, SOCIAL PERCEPTION, SOCIALIZATION AND GENDER ROLES,…
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SOCIAL PERCEPTION
THE SOCIETY
OPPRESSION
How We Get Free, Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, Barbara Fransby
- a path to true freedom for Black people requires power through grassroots, democratic organizing, following the leadership of minorities within the Black community like women and queer people, the redistribution of resources to meet human needs, and connecting the struggle against racism to similar struggles against capitalism, the patriarchy, and more, to integrate the liberation of all
Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, Chandra Mohanty
- Mohanty critiques the monolithic and victimized idea of the “third world woman” in feminist writings as constructing an ‘othered’ group to contrast the liberated and modern ‘western woman’ against under the guise of solidarity. it assumes an ahistorical, universal unity between women based on a generalized notion of their subordination rather than acknowledging the details of the socio-economic and political groups they exist within
- To categorize all non-western women under the title of “third world women” erases their immense diversity and denies them agency and voice, instead just symbolic objects to be saved rather than people involved in their own struggle for recognition and equality
Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscriminatino Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics, Kimberle Crenshaw
- “Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white women’s experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men. Yet often they experience double-discrimination–the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as Black women–not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as Black women” (149)
- The idea of intersectionality as a place where someone can exist, not as a sum of their parts but something wholly unique to their person, is an important one, because it can explain why addressing the discrimination against one category or another is not enough, because one can exist as an amalgamation of multiple
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The Meaning of Liberty, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, Dorothy Roberts
- To make this freedom complimentary rather than making sure that all parties have access to such care means that situations such as specific reproductive qualifications for state welfare in America can occur, where women, disproportionately women of color, must subject themselves to an inserted contraceptive before allowed state resources, forcing control over their bodies and denying them access to public resources that were touted as free
- It should be the affirmative duty of the government to protect individuals’ personhood from degradation and to facilitate the processes of choice and self-determination, rather than simply passive nonintervention
- “Liberals frame the issue of access to abortion or reproductive technologies, for example, as freedom from government interference with private decisions to use them, rather than a claim to public resources to make these options truly available”
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THE SELF
BODIES AND ORGANS
The Five Sexes, Anne Fausto-Sterling
- Intersexuality, its history, its treatment by the medical field, and how it clashes with the expected two-sex binary of modern western society
- Fausto-sterling desires for society to accept all the sexes that exist or may exist in the future. Imagine if we used our desire to treat ‘hermaphrodites’ instead in a direction of helping people present how they would wish?
The History of Sex Research: Is 'Sex' a Useful Category?, Beans Velocci
- Velocci seeks the treatment of sex by scientists the same as its been treated by data, acknowledging that it is not a binary thing, even in nature
Why Mammals are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History, Londa Schiebinger
- The choice to describe mammals as mammals from mammalia reflects the patriarchal, gendered nature of the science of the period that attempted to ground its gender bias into the natural order of the animal kingdom, which assumed that all mothers were tender and nurturing as seen through their sexual characteristics
Brave Sperm and Demure Eggs: Fallopian Gender Politics, Pamela Hill Nettleton
- Science exists within a self-fulfilling prophecy of gender wherein the methods in which information is conveyed, along with their biases, are influenced by the cultural values of their times, which will then go on to reinforce those values as their implicit prejudice is taught to the next generation of students
- By attributing emotional and gender values to objective items of biology and the human body, it reaffirms traditional gender roles with what is supposed to be neutral language, making social inequality seem ultimately unchangeable and rooted into the very way the world functions
Mutilating Gender, Dean Spade
- The legal and mediate gatekeeping of gender affirming care is gender mutilation, which forces transgender people to jump through hoops of
- Invasive questioning and tests before they can obtain care
- The medical system of gender affirming care forces people to conform to a medically approved narrative of dysphoria and binary gender which often punishes those who cannot or do not prove their ability to fulfill these requirements
- Advocates to dismantle this current system, shifting from the ‘disease model’ to a ‘harm reduction and informed consent model’ which treats transitioning genders as medically necessary for one’s wellbeing and not treating some sort of disease
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PERFORMING GENDER
Introduction to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, trans. Borde and Malovany Chevalier
- “one is not born but rather becomes a woman”
- defines women as subjects perpetually in relation to men
- women lack coherent group identity, and also, thus, the ability to organize
Doing Gender, Gender and Society, Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman
- Zimmerman splits “sex” into sex (biological happenings), sex category (how one attempts to convey their personal biological traits), and gender (a self-affirming performance for the reactions and understanding of others)
- However gender isn’t an identity but rather something that people engage in during moments of interaction
- Since we can’t exactly observe someone’s sexual characteristics unless they choose to display them, we must rely on people being active portrayers of their own choice of gender
- “Doing gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine natures” (126)
The Social Construction of Sexuality, Jeffrey Weeks
- “The social processes through which [the definition of ‘sex’ have] taken place are complex. But the implications are clear, for they are the ones we still live with” (3)
- “What we so confidently know as ‘sexuality' is, then, a product of many influences and social interventions. It does not exist outside of history but is a historical product. This is what we mean by the ‘social construction’ of sexuality” (9)
- “We might find a framework which allows us to come to terms with diveristy–and to re-find, in sexuality, new opportunities for creative relationships, agency, and choice” (9)
Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory, Judith Butler
- Gender is an improvised public act of performance that exists within a rigid framework of societal expectations but is neither purely an individual self choice or wholly and utterly imposed upon the subject
- “Just as a script may be enacted in various ways, and just as the play requires both text and interpretation, so the gendered boy acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives” (526)
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SEXUALITY
If Not, Winter, Fragments of Sappho, Sappho, trans. Anne Carson
An important historical representation of queerness in history, especially in a time where if there was any queerness, it was still dominated by men
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A Litany for Survival, Audre Lorde
- “So it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive”
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Preface, Introduction, One: Listen, Three: Remember, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Alexis Pauline Gumbs
- There are many lessons to be learned from the animals around us, if humans were to let go of any notions of superiority and hierarchy and immerse ourselves back into nature, to accept that we are simply animals, equal
- To accept the longstanding tradition of western science to elevate humans beyond the natural order as somehow different by dint of some godly proclamation is to leave open the opportunity for a new, artificial, classist hierarchy to be made. To disregard it, is to step outside the system into freedom
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REGULATION
Sexual Necropolitics and Prison Rape Elimination, Jessi Lee Jackson
- Necropolitics, as a derivative of biopolitics, is in a unique place to be seen in the American prison system, where intervention into situations like rape and sexual assault assume the passive existance of such as a fact of prison life and not as a consequence of the dehumanizing conditions that the prisoners are kept within
- Necropolitics, as a derivative of biopolitics, is in a unique place to be seen in the American prison system, where intervention into situations like rape and sexual assault assume the passive existance of such as a fact of prison life and not as a consequence of the dehumanizing conditions that the prisoners are kept within
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GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
The Incitement to Discourse and the Right of Death and Power over Life, The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault
- The emergence of population as an economic and political problem, the emergence of sex as something to be controlled by the state, was a key transition point in the concept of biopower
- The idea of sex, then, made it possible to conceptualize power as power, something solely derived from law and taboo. a necessary evil that emerged from the usefulness of the ability to control the body through those two axes, and with it, its abilities as a working machine
- “One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (138)
The Failure of Dobbs: The Entanglement of Abortion Bans, Criminalized Pregnancies, and Forced Family Separation, Dorothy Roberts
- “The family policing system revolves around an ideology that confuses poverty with child neglect and attributes the suffering caused by structural racism, poverty, and other inequalities to parental pathologies” (186)
- American CPS is more focused with separating children from parents and putting them into foster care than it is with providing families with much needed resources, targeting their inability to provide and accusing them of a refusal to care, instead
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THE GIG ECONOMY
THE WORKER
SEX AS WORK
A Scene is Just a Marketing Tool: Hustling in the Gig Economy, Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, Heather Berg
- “Porn workers’ reliance on multiple income sources should be understood in the context of the creative ways of getting by that those on the economic margins have long deployed…the hustle” (97)
- “The disappearance of direct managerial control can signal less retreat from capital than its obfuscation behind the veil of tech development” (120)
- Sex work should be understood, in the modern day, as another aspect of a long running gig economy, which combines both greater autonomy for workers but also their splintering into individuals without much bargaining power against a perpetually oppressive, capitalist system
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UNPAID LABOR
Economic Revolution and Women's Revolution, The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transmational Theory, He-Yin Zhen
- “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…the marriage system in China today is not founded on love; it harbors within it the fundamental character of ‘a woman selling her body to a man’” (97)
- “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…the marriage system in China today is not founded on love; it harbors within it the fundamental character of ‘a woman selling her body to a man’” (97)
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Sex and Work, Revoluting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Worker's Rights, Juno Mac and Jolly Smith
- “As with other jobs that women do, sexist devaluation of ‘women’s work’ erases the emotional labor and hustle that constitutes the bulk of sex workers’ actual efforts, reducing our job to simply being available for penetration at all times” (43)
- Arguments surrounding prostitution often fall into the false premise of the common existence of good work and if sex work can be such or not, if it can be fulfilling, non-exploitative, and enjoyable, while ignoring that the vast majority of non-sex work does not fall into the category of good work either, and yet do not face nearly as much of the disgust and disdain that sex workers face
Sex work is work, objective neutral, and activism should focus on the safety and wellbeing of the worker and not the moral nature of her job, ignoring the agency within her own actions. Instead, why not focus on the exploitative nature of all work under a capitalist economy?
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SURROGACY
Foreign Babies, Indian Make: Outsourcing Reproduction in the Age of Globalization, Modhumita Roy
- “Commercial surrogacy does not occur in some race and class neutral environment” (66)
- “...Motherhood (or fatherhood) is a relationship that is created through and exists in variable social, political, and historical contexts and is not/should not be reducible to a biological imperative or basic instinct [for children]” (67)
- Roy questions why one couple’s desire for biological children has the right to be fulfilled through the exploitation of the bodies of those less privileged than them, while another’s right to self autonomy is not nearly as respected. Why not teach the couple to not desire biological children, rather than teach surrogates their ‘duty’ to create a healthy infant?
- Highlights the deep inequalities that exist within the global market for surrogate babies, which questions the ethics of classifying a woman’s reproductive abilities as a location of potential monetary profit, specifically women without much ability to refuse
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