In Judith Butler’s essay Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy she discusses sexuality and what actually makes a world livable. Judith is a gay rights activist and doesn’t believe that your gender is not who you are skin deep, but it is who you define yourself as.…
It has always been said that both nature and nurture are the main ingredients in shaping a person’s behavior for the rest of their lives, like the meats and the cheeses to your favorite sub sandwich. Deborah Blum seems to think that not only do these things greatly effect human behavior but also gender identities. She gives the reader a new perspective on nature and nurture, arguing that it is way more than just nurture that paves the path of gender roles. Blum’s essay “The Gender Blur: Where Does Biology End and Society Take Over?” does a great job convincing the reader with it’s incredible use ethos, slight use of pathos, and so-so use of logos allowing it to be determined as a successful essay.…
Ronna Pearson Sociology 3337-70 July 12, 2012 As Nature Made Him The boy who was raised as a girl John Colapinto In 1967, after a baby boy -- one of a set of identical twins -- suffered a botched circumcision, a radical treatment option was agreed to by his desperate and grieving family. Encouraged by renowned medical psychologist Dr. John Money, an expert in the field of gender identity and sexual reassignment, the anonymous child was surgically altered to live life as a girl. The case would prove to be precedent-setting, becoming "proof" for the feminist movement that gender gap was purely a result of cultural conditioning. But all was not as it seemed. Initially proclaimed a resounding success, the devastating psychological cost of the procedure has only recently become known. Now living as an adult male, married and with a family of his own, this patient has granted John Colapinto unprecedented access to his story. As Nature Made Him is at once a fascinating exploration of the elusive nature of sexual identity and an examination of the ever-intensifying struggle between what medical science can do and what doctors should do. It is also a story of courage and survival that sheds light on the murkiest areas human sexuality. (Amazon.com)…
Allowing space in the representation of the body for an exploration of its boundaries and personal desires in a way that is not dictated too closely by complex theories like feminism develops the contradictory aspects of their work. Nicola Tyson’s reference to Judith Butler’s ‘Gender Trouble’ gathers together and reuses contrasting theories creating new meanings and new readings of texts in relation to new texts, continuously diversify the category of ‘women’ and ‘feminism’. The androgynous figures in Nicola Tyson’s breakdown tradition binary gender categories in the light of ‘Queer Theory’ and theorist such as Butler to a more open state of possibilities in which the body can exist and be re-invented without any limitations from having to represent ‘feminist theory’ of existing gender, its possibilities are…
Later in her argument, Fausto-Sterling also touches upon the representation of one of the argued new sexes within the community, this being the intersex community. With this the call for distinction and gender comes into play by the discussion of sexuality, gender, and anatomy as separate and different things. Though as a society we have recently been exposed to this new sex through the media, many people still fail to believe or recognize the idea that a man or woman could be born into the wrong body. This can occur through bodies being surgically altered through surgery at birth. Fausto-Sterling makes her opinion clear on this, strongly advocating against it.…
By the information we find in the geneticist’s study, there seems to be no need for “fixing” these people’s physical deviation’s from the regular male or female type. Burke paraphrases “… except in terms of life‐threatening conditions, surgical intervention after birth [is] simply preventing the natural, and real, human physical diversity to become visible” (221). Fausto‐Sterling is, then, asking to normalize the real identity of this people in society, instead of making them the difference that needs to adapt. She is implying that there is nothing wrong with them; they are just as normal as any other sex. Being a minority is not enough of a reason to hide or exclude people from their need for consideration. If we are even challenging the natural assumptions of a two‐sex world, how are we going to create an ideal binary system of gender that could possibly work? Nevertheless, we still take endless measures to try to make it work. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) decided to add a new diagnosis called Gender Identity Disorder (GID). Since the last reform in 1994, this diagnosis includes people who (1) repeatedly stated desire to be… the other sex; (2) In boys, preference for cross‐dressing or simulating female attire; in…
Important for us to think about the idea/notion that sex/gender and sexuality are historical and politically constructed (not rooted in biological or natural orders); enduring impersonal dimension which makes it feel as though they contain a natural biological truth, this kind of structural/objective experience that produces this feeling of the biological…
One may postulate that there may be a continuum of human sexual nature from male toward female and everything in between, offering us a broad and complex spectrum for defining gender and roles within…
Gender and the Heterosexual Norm In the 1960s, feminist theories assumed a possible distinction between (biological) “sex” and (socio-cultural) “gender”. This distinction and its epistemological value underwent critical review (e.g. Gildemeister/Wetterer, Butler Gender Trouble). Since the 1990s, the biological bi-morphism of humans, formerly considered as a “natural” binarism that produces distinctive “masculine” and “feminin” ways of behaviour, thought, talent, language, is now seen as the effect of a socio-cultural practice to label us as “male” or “female” at (or even before) birth. There is no knowledge to gain about “sex” before “gender”. The categorizing/labeling socio-cultural “norm” and the…
Butler (1990) argued that society’s perceived need to assign a sex to intersex infants is due to cultural fears, believes about gender binaries, and fear of difference. In the 1950s and 1960s the sexologist John Money carried out research on intersex infants. He tried to prove that gender is learned and therefore if someone is born intersex but a sex is assigned to them at birth and they are raised as either a boy or girl then they will learn the behaviours associated with the gender and therefore he believed sex did not have to be biologically determined. Money received an intersex patient, a young boy named David Reimer, who had severed his penis during a botched medical procedure, he recommended the best action to take would be to carry about male to female sex reassignment surgery (Preves, S., (2002)). However despite the fact his theory proved to be unsuccessful and the child eventually committed suicide due to the effect the gender reassignment surgery had on him. Therefore Money’s experiment had in fact failed to prove the desired…
2-Website: no author name (1996) “Transsexualism: A Primer”. Retrieved on January 26, 2007, from http://www.looking-glass.greenend.org.uk/primer.htm…
References: Rathus, S. A., Nevid, J.S., and Fichner-Rathus, L. (2005). Human sexuality in a world of diversity. (6th ed.) Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.…
Fausto-Sterling describes the ideal make-up of a man and a woman. “Males have an X and a Y chromosome, testes, a penis and all of the appropriate internal plumbing for delivering urine and semen to the outside world. They also have well-known secondary sexual characteristics, including a muscular build and facial hair. Women have two X chromosomes, ovaries, all of the internal plumbing to transport urine and ova to the outside world, a system to support pregnancy and fetal development...”. (“The Five Sexes, Revisited” 2). In the idealized world, Fausto-Sterling points out how human beings are a “dimorphic species”, that is, two kinds. Science takes into account the biological DNA sequence of chromosomes to determine male or female. The genitalia of a person, his/her biological parts, are…
QUEEN, G. & SCHIME, L. (Eds) (1997). PoMoSexuals: challenging assumptions about gender and sexuality (San Francisco: Cleis).…
References: Fausto-Sterling, A. (2009). Dueling Dualisms. Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: The New Basics, an Anthology (pp. 6-21). Oxford University Press.…