Hermaphrodite Movie Analysis
The feature presentation we viewed in class was a movie I thought I would never see in my life time. Learning about the term “Hermaphrodite” and the actual story about why people use that particular term to describe a human being always struck my mind, and after seeing the film in conjunction with the reading the book Testo Junkie I am coming to grips with the term. That word is also used to describe the main character in the story Phoebe, a women who has mens chromosomes.
The first part of the movie starts out with Phoebe telling her story on how she was raised, and told to be a girl. But as she aged, she slowly began seeing that she was different from all of her other girlfriends she would hang out with. I loved how quickly Phoebe turned
her condition into something that could liberate her to want to reach out to others, so their could be a community.
Phoebe was forced to be raised a certain gender, but gender in reality is a biotech industrial artifact. As Beatriz Preciado would say the words male and female are terms without any empirical content beyond the modern technologies that may produce them. Gender depends on your true optical ontology, meaning the actual real is what you see. So in the end how can we based someones gender on the way they are actually. Many scientist have like Margaret Mead and Judith Butler have called gender a social and cultural construction of sexual differences. Judith Butler believes It is repetitious acts that construct somebodies full gender, not a biotechnological form.
Every scene in the movie connected with the book Testo Junkie in many ways, but I think what hit home the most was the conception of gender, and how that plays a pivotal role in Phoebe’s life. What if we lived in a world without the conception of sexuality, and gender? Would we just assume we are a gender because we were biologically born that specific person? Or would we just continue to develop our true sexuality through our everyday actions, and what others tell us who we are? These are questions that I continue to question as I explore the depths of gender in a global perspective, but I could say that I am coming closer to the true explanation of the role of gender in a global frame.
The first part of the movie starts out with Phoebe telling her story on how she was raised, and told to be a girl. But as she aged, she slowly began seeing that she was different from all of her other girlfriends she would hang out with. I loved how quickly Phoebe turned
her condition into something that could liberate her to want to reach out to others, so their could be a community.
Phoebe was forced to be raised a certain gender, but gender in reality is a biotech industrial artifact. As Beatriz Preciado would say the words male and female are terms without any empirical content beyond the modern technologies that may produce them. Gender depends on your true optical ontology, meaning the actual real is what you see. So in the end how can we based someones gender on the way they are actually. Many scientist have like Margaret Mead and Judith Butler have called gender a social and cultural construction of sexual differences. Judith Butler believes It is repetitious acts that construct somebodies full gender, not a biotechnological form.
Every scene in the movie connected with the book Testo Junkie in many ways, but I think what hit home the most was the conception of gender, and how that plays a pivotal role in Phoebe’s life. What if we lived in a world without the conception of sexuality, and gender? Would we just assume we are a gender because we were biologically born that specific person? Or would we just continue to develop our true sexuality through our everyday actions, and what others tell us who we are? These are questions that I continue to question as I explore the depths of gender in a global perspective, but I could say that I am coming closer to the true explanation of the role of gender in a global frame.