introduction to sexuality

mid term defintions and concepts

Sexual Dimorphism: Secondary Sex Characteristics

• Biological sex affects how you physically appear

Gender:

codes, behaviour, and ways of performing in the world that mark us as masculine or feminine

Michel Foucault

• French guy who analysed power hierarchies in the state/government 

• Understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality differs from person to person due to culture

Durba Mitra

Sexuality can be individual expression of sexual desire or as sexual preference/orientation

• Can’t understand sexuality without engaging with colonisation, slavery, gendering of bodies, racism, and power 

17th Century:

• Sexuality was freely discussed

Victorian

•  Industrial revolution makes sex only appropriate between heterosexual married couple for procreation 

• Connected to shame (deviant and indulgent; applied to homosexuality)

Post-ww2, 1960s, 1970s

• Sexual liberation and “free love”

• Invention of the pill (racist histories to stop people from procreating!)

DISCOURSE

Written and spoken communication; codified language 

IDEOLOGY

Body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, or culture

The Regulation of First Nations’ Sexuality (Queerly Canadian) (cannon)

Early missionaries wanted to indoctrinate a christian morality and a patriarchal family structure

Heterosexuality: It’s just not natural (Ingrahm)

Learn how to act feminine and masculine (socialisation)

NORMATIVITY

Social expectations alongside what is considered to be the norm

Parent-Duchatelet on prostitutes in Paris

• Focus on abnormal and deviant sex

• Pathologising, not a socioeconomic issue

• first exploration of sexology

PATHOLOGISING

Considering something as wrong or bad (medically or scientifically) and needing to be fixed 

Ars Erotica:

eastern concept of sex for pleasure

Scientia sexualis:

western concept of sex is for control and population

Magnus Hirschfield

• Campaigned against harsh punishment of same sex behaviour and for trans rights

• nazis burned his stuff

Richard Krafft-Ebbing and Havelock Ellis

• 1886, first full scale analysis of sexual deviancy Pyschopathia Seuxalis

• 1896, Sexual Inversion

SEXUAL INVERSION

• Inverse of expected gender traits that becomes an identity

• Conflates trans and homosexual identities (you’re attracted to the same sex because you want to be the opposite sex)

HETERONORMATIVITY

heterosexuality as the norm

CISNORMATIVITY

: everyone identifies with their birth sex and should fall into 2 gender categories

Heterosexual Imaginary

Belief system developed through heteronormative institutions relies on romantic and sacred nouns in order to create and maintain the illusion of wellbeing

Jane Austen + Regency/Georgian Period (19th century)

• Rules of social decorum (women engage in leisure activities and social sphere), marriage (exclusive goal for middle class women), heterosexuality

  • Women don’t have sexual desire (pure and chaste)

    • Only activated by male desire

Romantic friendships:

close bonds between women that were “non sexual” that were deeply loving

Homosociality

• expectation that people of the same gender socialize together 

  • was dependent on rejection of homosexuality

  • Lesbian desire were impossible (gasp)

  • But male homosexuality was criminalised and punishable

The Binds of Femininity (MCcann)

People equate femininity with binding (forced)

Women are criticisesd for embracing femininity

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t (madonna whore complex)

femininity as a masquerade

Reclaiming Femininity Serano

femininity is innate and expressed differently

Compulsive heterosexuality:

The comments and acts that normalise and eroticise male dominance and female submission

Stone Butch:

butch masculine lesbian who is more interested in giving than receiving. 

→ when we allow for masculinity to look this way, we make masculinity more about giving than receiving (more complex and nuanced than the typical “i own your body” way)

→ makes female masculinity possible