Gender and Sexuality

Natural vs Normal

Natural = from biology
Normal = common or expected

Are bodies natural or cultural?

A mix of nature and culture that can't easily be separated

Gender ideology

A culture's model of gender that links man/woman to expectations about behaviour, appearance, roles and relationships

• Learned without explicit instruction so it feels like common sense

Is gender universal?

gender is experienced differently across cultures, showing gender isn't fixed before culture

Structural-functionalism

How is society organised and kept stable?

• tied to colonialism

• studied how stateless societies kept order

• gender studied via kinship, marriage, family and labour

Structuralism - Claude Lévi-Strauss

How do binaries organise meaning?

• universal human mind that thinks in pairs of opposites

• we understand each category through it’s opposite

• categories are assumed to exist and matter

Feminist anthropology - Ortner

Why does difference become inequality?

• women are symbolically linked with nature and men with culture

• culture ranks above nature - justifies women’s lower status

Post-structuralism - Judith Butler

How are the categories themselves produced, maintained and challenged?

• how gender categories are made, kept up and challenges

• from studying how gender roles organise society to questioning how the categories are constructed and used to exercise power

Gender or Behaviour

• we explain behaviour by gender

• but what if behaving in certain ways make gender recognisable

Gender Feedback Loop

You learn from others, act, and respond to others who learn from you; repetition makes gender look stable and obvious

• clothes gain gender through repeated social convention

Is gender as repeated practice free choice?

No. Gender norms exist before you and shape what is possible for you

Why can gender norms change?

Norms are never perfectly repeated, so they can shift and transform

The usual view of gender (that Butler challenges “Gender Trouble”)

You have an inner gender essence and behaviour expresses it outward (inside to outside)

Butler's view of gender

There is no inner gender essence; gender is produced by repeatedly doing gendered acts, creating the effect of a stable inner identity

Performativity

Doing creates the thing: gender is made real through repeated, socially regulated acts. It does not mean fake or fiction

How we recognise someone's gender

From a combination of body, clothes, movement and voice, never one thing alone

Sex

Bodily characteristics and how they're classified: genitals, reproductive anatomy, hormones, chromosomes. Usually assigned at birth based on external genitals

Gender

Identities, social meanings, roles and expectations; how you understand yourself and how others understand you

Sexuality

Desire, attraction and sexual practices, and increasingly identities (e.g. queer identity vs who you're attracted to)

Relationship between sex, gender and sexuality

Connected but not interchangeable

Gender and Sexuality

Adults joke a boy playing with a girl is his girlfriend, or a 6-month-old is 'flirting'. Shows assumed heterosexuality and that boy/girl relations must be romantic

• false scientific explanation (hormones that 4 year olds do not have)

Heteronormative chain of reasoning

Species needs heterosexual reproduction, so heterosexuality is natural and normal, so there must be two clear categories, men and women

Sex and Gender distinction

A huge feminist win: women's social roles aren't dictated by their bodies

but it imagines gender on top of sex + assumes sex is stable in the first place

Whose body defines the norm?

• less research on women’s bodies - can lead to misdiagnoses ie. heart attacks

• black women’s pain often isn’t recognised contributing to higher childbirth death rates

Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989)

Legal scholar who coined intersectionality to show how anti-discrimination law failed Black women

Crenshaw's hiring example (intersectionality)

A company hiring Black people (all men) and women (all white) could defeat a Black woman's discrimination claim, since race and sex were checked separately

Intersectionality

How gender, race, class and other relations interact to shape inequality; inequalities don't just add up, they change each other

Categories are not uniform inside

'Woman' or 'Black' differ internally; gender theory based on white women misses racism, race theory based on Black men misses Black women

Criticism of earlier waves of feminism

Not intersectional enough; built on white women's experiences

Karkazis and Jordan-Young (2018)

'The Powers of Testosterone’

• sport rules that women with naturally high testosterone have an unfair advantage

• ‘T-Talk’ science and folklore around testosterone - treating it as the male hormone and poison for women

• excludes women with PCOS

• femininity associated with whiteness - checklist for women on testosterone rooted in racial science

Ortner “Is Female To Male As Nature Is To Culture

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