WGSS notes Aug 31


What are the goals of WGSS scholars?

  • Document systematic oppression of women, other genders, and sexualized minorities

  • Create new knowledge that centers the experiences of people who have been marginalized by dominant gender

  • To analyze the sex/gender/sexuality system as a socially constructed theory


Social constructionism as a way of resisting the idea that sex/gender/race/ sexuality etc are natural, or essential things. These ideas have a history and their meanings have changed over time and depend on specific cultural contexts (changed by time and place)


Gender- terms we use to talk about these concepts have changed over time and depending on location and cultural contexts; the words and the meanings attached to these words

  • “man”- what constitutes a masculine man? Phys. Strength? Financial power? Intelligence?

  • “Woman”- what makes a feminine woman? Submission? Emotionality? Phys weakness? Sensitivity? Gracefulness? Motherhood?


Social constructionism isn’t “nothing is real” but its about paying attention to the effects and real worlds impacts of these constructions

It also doesn’t deny that there are difference between bodies


Essentialists believe human behavior is natural, predetermined by genetic factors or biological forces therefore, these categorizations are not subject to change or impacted by social influences (uses “scientifically” backed ideas that people were inferior to others like men having bigger brains than women and then referring to intelligence being greater in men)


Biological determinism- a theory that identify insisting that “ a groups biological or genetic makeup shapes its social, political, and economic destiny

  • dominant ideas about sex and gender are assumed to be fixed and true ( every person is born either male or female)

  • WGSS challenge this by pointing to cultures who don’t think bout sex and gender in this binary way


Sex/gender/sexuality- system of social and cultural norms that lead people to make all sorts of assumptions about a person based on what their body looks like: who they are how they should act, who they should be attracted to, the kind of life they should live

Many of these assumptions happen at birth


Human sex is conventionally classified into one of two categories based on: genital morphology, chromosomal makeup, hormonal makeup, whether a body produces sperm or egg, secondary sex characteristics (breast, body hair, etc)


Western society often treat it as a natural truth, but the way we think about sex today is new

  • One sex model- medical texts from Ancient Greeks until the late 18th century described male and female bodies as fundamentally similar.

  • the female body