WGS200Y5 Spring Term - Sexuality: Theories in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies - Week 5

Objective: To become familiar with feminist theories of sexuality and their application to contemporary issues
Topics:
- Power & Knowledge
- (Hetero)sexuality
- Foucault – History of Sexuality
- Coloniality and sexuality
- Sex work and feminism

All Gender Washroom
How is Difference/Deviance Understood?
Politics: Discussion of Poilievre's stance on banning trans women from women's sports, change rooms, and bathrooms.

How are individuals who deviate from the “norm” in society categorized, controlled, and understood?
- Disciplinary knowledge
- Categorization
- Institutionalization
How does the concept of deviance relate to the concept of biopower?

"The emergence of the concept of sexual identity is intimately linked to the rise of the concept of the individual from the eighteenth century, which emerges out of liberal political philosophy deeply invested in imperial expansion"
SINNOTT, 2007, P. 132
- "Toms position themselves in contrast to “real” men, while they also position themselves as essentially different in nature from dees, who they often claim are not “born to be.”
The regulation of (Hetero)sexuality is a central aspect of how societies define what is (ab)normal

P. 163: "Capitalism constitutionally requires the perpetual production of unmet needs across the board, but especially intensively in those whose abjection from the social body renders them more vulnerable to exploitation "
P. 154: "Sexuality begins to serve not only as a vehicle for the empowerment of one kind of per-son—a most reasonable, bourgeois person—but also as a pretext for the disempowerment of an-other kind of person—a socially “ill” person "

"Women’s experiences of rejection, submission, pain, oppression, and sexual exploitation, all constitute the rubric of the ‘glorified Indian family.’ The film is a critique of this patriarchal institution."

P. 202: "Modern sexuality created an inextricable link between sexual desires and identities and facilitated them into a large- scale project of creating and naturalizing classifications for people as part of new forms of power that governed everyday life and death."
P. 203: "Sexuality must be explicitly situated in histories of slavery and colonial knowledge projects about enslaved and colonized bodies."
Saartjie Baartman (1770s - 1815)
- Khoekhoe woman (South Africa)
- Known for her stage name “Hottentot Venus” (1810-1815)
- Died in Paris in her mid-30s
- Her remains were rematriated to South Africa in 2002
P. 207: "Understanding the keyword sexuality through its colonial history helps one understand how modern societies define ideas of the individual and norms of sexual choice, pleasure, and identity in exclusionary terms while condemning most people as deviant, dangerous, backward, and incapable of appropriate forms of sexuality "

Questioned Over Decline in Asian Students
Steep decline in Black, Hispanic enrollment at Harvard Law after Supreme Court ruling
Legacy admissions: Harvard accused of favoring mostly white students
Google Ends Diversity Hiring Goals Here Are All The Companies Rolling Back DEI
Walmart pulls back on DEI efforts, removes some LGBTQ merchandise from website

Sexual ideologies function to justify structures of gendered and sexual violence
Quotes:
- "For prostitutes, against prostitution"
- Black Women for Wages for Housework.
- Prostitution is the welfare the State does not provide.
- Selma James spoke for many women when she said we were "for prostitutes and against prostitution".

"Many sex work thinkers do not think “work” is good, however. Under racial capitalism, they say, all work is exploitative, but workers also struggle against this exploitation.” (Berg, 2021, p. 209)