Week 1 Readings
Heterosexuality
- In 1901 à defined as “abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex”
- 1923 à “morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex”
- 1934 à “manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex, normal
sexuality”
o this is the definition we are familiar with today
“Man on the street”
- video in which people were asked if they thought homosexuals were born with their
sexual orientation
o different responses
o “nurture and nature”
- the interviewer then asked “when did you choose to become straight”
o this exposed some prejudices
o gay people were born gay just like straight people were born straight
o all sexualities are “just there”
“The rise of the homosexual”
- homosexual identity did come into existence at a certain point in human history
- however, it is the same with heterosexuality
- different reasons for this
o religious bias
o homophobia
o biggest one is that heterosexuality seems so normal and natural
§ however, it hasn’t always been normal and natural
When heterosexuality was abnormal
- appeal to reproduction
o different-genital intercourse has existed for as long as humans have existed
o this assumes that heterosexuality is the same thing as reproduction à NOT
TRUE
- “sex has no history” à grounded in the functioning of the body
o always been sexual instincts throughout the animal world
- sexuality is “cultural production”
Heterosexuals being known
- at the end of the 19th century, heterosexuals went from being there to being known
o the same way we find animal species
- 1860s, Karl Maria Kertbeny created four terms to describe sexual experiences:
heterosexual, homosexual, monosexual and heterogenit
o the last two are two terms to describe masturbation and bestiality
-
1889 à Krafft-Ebing created sexual disorders
o “contrary sexual instinct” instead of “heterosexual”
Krafft-Ebing
- normal sexual desire was in a larger context of procreative utility
o an idea that was interested in keeping with the dominant sexual theories of
the west
o different ruling binary before hetero/homo
§ procreative and non-procreative
- “in sexual love the real purpose of the instinct, the propagation of the species, does
not enter into consciousness”
o hard wired reproductive aim
The Shift
- from reproductive instinct to erotic desire
o without Krafft, this idea of heteronormativity might not have happened
o defining sexual instinct according to erotic desire was a fundamental
revolution in thinking about sex
o “morbid” to normal
Sex and the city
- heterosexuality was born out of a time when American life was becoming more
regular
- the invention of heterosexuality corresponds with the rise of the middle class
- late 19th century à Euro and NA populations started to explode and grew a lot
o people moved to urban centre and brought their sexual perversions
(prostitution, same sex, etc…)
o when populations were smaller, it was easier to control this kind of behaviour
o this sexual misconduct was blamed on lower class
o the growing middle class could no longer treat deviation from normal sexuality
as sin but as moral degeneracy
Degeneracy
- the reverse process of social Darwinism
- deviating from the procreative sex norm would be a threat to social fabric
- deviation could be reversed when it was caught early enough
Sexual Inverse
- occurred through several stages
- was curable in the first
- Krafft sent out a clarion call against degeneracy and perversion
- Freud gave the public scientific ways to think about sexuality
o Psychosexual theory of development
Freud
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Psychosexual theory of development
o Children develop their own sexualities througb their parents
Heterosexuals weren’t born this way but they were made this was
o Heterosexual for Freud was an achievement à if you attained it it means you
have successfully navigated through their childhood development without
being throw off the straight and narrow
o Lust of a boy and girl for the parent of the other sex
This endured for a long time as an explanation for normal sexuality
The future of heterosexuality
- “heteroseuxals and homosexuals are considered different because they can be
divided into two groups on the basis of the belief that they can be divided into two
groups”
o this is a recent grammar humans have invented
- if heterosexuality didn’t exist in the past, it doesn’t need to exist in the future
- no one will have to call themselves gay – James Baldwin
o it is a stupid term that answers a false argument and false accusation
- we now don’t have a need for the word heterosexual
Born this way
- a lot of people don’t agree with this
- no gay gene
- the author of the article says our sexual desires shift throughout our lives, and we
form new identities through this
- why are we uncomfortable thinking about how much power we have over our
sexualities?
- Why are we uncomfortable with challenging the belief that homosexuality, and
by extension heterosexually, are eternal truths of nature?
Nature
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Sex intercourse generally results in the propagation of species
Nature doesn’t reveal to use our moral obligations à we are responsible for
determining them
Why judge what is natural and ethical to a human being by his or her nature
o Ex: medicine is unnatural and we value it but disease is natural and we detest
it
Children can be born in different ways (IVF)
Conc
-
The line between heterosexuality and homosexuality is an invention, myth and
outdate
Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist
Theory
By Judith Butler
Phenomenological theory of ‘acts;
- Seeks to explain the mundane way in which social agents constitute social reality
through language, gesture and all manner of a symbolic social sign.
- Gender is no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed
- instead, it’s an identity tenuously constitution in time - stylized repetition of acts.
- Gender comes from a social temporary
- Constituting acts
- Both displaying a compelling illusion and an object of belief
Part 1 → Sex/Gender: Feminist and Phenomenological view
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Women - and by extension, any gender, is a historical situation rather than a natural fact.
- Not a stable identity and therefore part of a culture, not biology
To some scholars (Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty) the body comes to bear distinct cultural
meanings
To analysis the body we must understand that meaning is performed or enacts
- And like an actor in a show, every actor portrays a character differently
Mentioned scholars in the reading enforce how the acts of the body are reproducing a
historical situation
> the ‘i’ that is its body is, of necessity, a mode of embodying, and the ‘what’ that
embodies is possible.
The reproduction and dramatization of life can, therefore, be digressed into ‘a stylistics of
existence.”
The female is a word with no meaning but to be a woman is to become one. > like
conform to womanly things
Description of gender is similar to phenomenology because of its a commitment to
grounding theory in lived experience.
Butler suggests that the body becomes its gender through a series of acts that are
renewed, revised and consolidated through time.
Butler also notes though, from a feminist point of view, one might try to reconceive the
gendered body as the legacy of sedimented acts rather than a predetermined or
foreclosed structure, essence or fact, whether natural, cultural or linguistic
Part 2 → Binary Genders and the heterosexual contract
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The reproduction of human beings in certain gendered modes which, in effect,
guarantees the eventual reproduction of that kinship system.
I think this is where heteronormativity comes into play…
- Cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with ‘natural’ appearances and ‘natural’
heterosexual dispositions.
This heterosexual disposition is reproduced by a mode of dramatizing or enacting
possibilities
- How we understand Cultural convention as embodied and enacted.
Theatrical sense of an act
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We wear and do certain things that reproduce personal and cultural beliefs.
- And hence gender is an act that has to be rehearsed.
- But it’s not just something you can freely do - because people are
judgemental
- Gender performances in non-theatrical contexts are governed by more clearly
punitive and regulatory social convention
- It’s like someone dressed in drag at a drag show is different from someone
dressed in drag on the subway.
Social action requires a performance that is repeated.
Part 3 → Feminist Theory: Beyond an Expressive Model of gender
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Importantly, any theory of gender constitution has political presuppositions and
implications, and that is impossible to separate the theory of gender from a political
philosophy of feminism.
Butler thinks that feminist use the category of women as a political tool without attributing
ontological integrity to the term, and adds that, strictly speaking, women cannot be said
to exist
- Society is designed to limit women
Most importantly though, butler remains gender is an act both social and historically
constituted.
Week 2 Readings
Adrienne Shaw - Does anyone really identify with Lara Croft? 32 pages - MADDIE
→ overall Shaw rejects the idea that people play video games because they want and need to
identify with the on-screen characters
-
Research on representation and identification often assumes that identifying as a
member of a particular group means also identifying with a media character.
- Shaw says this is not true and cites Butler, “It seems that what we expect from the term
identity will be cultural specificity, and that on occasion we even expect identity and
specificity to work interchangeably
- > here, I think we could make a fire reference to Crenshaw's Intersectionality…
- Overall, Shaw is trying to figure out the ways in which individuals identify with video
games and media characters in ways that do not always correspond to identifying as
members of specific marginalized groups.
Identification and Representation
- This is the part with the only mention of Lara Croft > who is not totally relevant to the
readings
- Lara croft was a fictional characters in the video game Tomb Raider
- Tomb Raider was important because it highlighted a woman in a primarily male
dominated industry.
- “Complex connections between identities, identification, and representation in
video games.”
-
Prior to Croft's appearance women were almost entirely victors or decorations
meant to help the game itself stand out.
- Controversy came when people actually analyzed her looks and thing > like she
has huge boobs and wore short short
- She was mostly just “eye candy”
Identification and Identity
- Shaw begins by questioning what it means to identify with a character
- Is it because we want an outgroup to believe when they see minorities, inequality and
bigotry would end?
- Is it the assumption that identification with a character is the same as identification as a
specific member of a group.
- One issue with answering these questions is there is not way to clearly or consistently
define identification.
- Some says…
- The process by which a viewer/player/reader takes on the role and mindset of a
fictional character.
- Or maybe its - identification as taking the perspectives of a character.
- Shaw stirs up a definition of identification by looking theories of identity > at a few
different people
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Hall → identities and subjects are made in specific moments through connection,
requiring subject-position (the hail and the identification of the hail.
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- Defined by the individual
Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman argue that because identity itself is not
fixed there is no single identification with images.
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Althusser → subjects are made through interpellation
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Much like hall’s idea of call and response.
Further thought, institutional discourses shape how people think about
themselves as subjects.
And how subjects bearing gender and racial characteristics are
constituted in social processes that are amenable to historical explanation
and political struggle.
Judith Butler → identity is the performance of gender, this highlights the absence
of internal identities but also explains that structures themselves are empowered
via performance.
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Term by Butler > Precarity - refers to the ways one must perform
identities in an intelligible way, in a way that others can read, in order to
be recognized.
- Precarity allows us to argue for a politics of representation that values the
edges (ie the minority) rather than reimagining the center (the white man)
Importantly there needs to be a differentiation between including marginalized people
because it's important and because it's a point for consumer demand.
Unpacking Identification
- Identification is a much theorized and measured type of connection to text, and it is
rarely grounded in audiences’ understanding of the term and process
- There is both being identified as a member and representable as a subject.
- When applying identification to the media, the subjects of the study brought up a number
of important ideas. A common one was that people could identify with the characters first
because they shared similar physical characteristics but more importantly could relate to
the character on an emotion or intellectual level
- “They sympatized and perhaps even empathized with a character in a show, but they did
not feel that this meant they identified with them”
- Here, Shaw really highlighted the difference between feeling for someone and identifying
as them.
- Parasocial interaction vs superficial connection
- The latter, based on gender, race and sexuality led to only surface-level
connections.
- Overall, assumption that identifiers define or shape identification is then conflated with
an identity politics approach to media representation arguments
Identification and Disidentification
- Jose Esteban Munoz
- Disidentification = the version of identity politics that this book participates in
images a reconstructed narrative of identity formation that locates the enacting of
self at precisely the point where the discourses of essentialism and
constructivism short-circuit
- Like the point where who we are and how we are created to be intersect.
- Disidentification is neither a point which opts to assilate within a structure nor
strictly oppose it.
- Realizing for some reason how people are the same but at the exact moment
realizing how we are different.
- For many of the people that Shaw interviewed there was “a disjunction between what
they sought in the media in terms of identification and what they saw as representation
of themselves”.
Identification as or with Video Games characters.
- Research about video games assumes that because the games are interactive, the
player is automatically the character.
- Shaw found this wasn’t the case and instead they played video games to escape
themselves and therefore the character was not like them.
- Further, the characters in video games were often too abstract to relate to with
anyway
- In order to combat this, games are made in a narrative way in order to
rope people in.
- Still though, in the supernatural settings, players easily identified how the
game was ficitional, in a way a TV show doesn’t.
- Video games brought on different emotions then tv shows
-
For example, in a tv show you may be sad with the ending but in the end
of a video game you’re more likely to be upset or frustrated rather than
sad.
Is Identification important?
- Sometimes
- People can still enjoy media ‘if they do not see themselves’, but subjects in the article
stated it's cool when they do physically identify with characters.
- Like with videogames, identification is created through narratives. This allows for a
viewer to find non physical identification and rather character identification
- Overall though, Shaw found it interesting that identification with/as the characters did not
matter a lot to her interviewees.
- Further, even disidentification requires some feelings of recognition with the text, even
as audiences feel their difference from the characters.
Identification and Fantasy
- People do things on video games that they would never do in real life.
- But still fantasy and escapism defined their media consumption
- For example > while watching a crime show you want to be the FBI agent that
saves the day. There is similar gradification with video games because the player
is in charge.
- Either way - while identification as a member of a group does not define how audiences
identity with media characters, representation of different types of bodies remains
crucially important to shaping what types of worlds we can imagine.
Conclusion
- Based on Shaw’s research, she found that we might define identification as a process by
which we come to feel an effective connection with a character on the basis of seeing
htat character as separate and yet a part of us in some way.
- Separating identification with and as from each other shows how people are able to
connect with character in a multitude of ways
Audre Lorde - age, race, class and sex - 9 pages - GRACE
Intro
- we see humans in opposition to each other
- good = profit and not human need
- this creates oppression
- it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes
o we call upon ppl who are oppressed to share their knowledge
o ex: the author has to teach her kids teachers about thee dismissal of their
culture in school
o ex: women are expected to educate men
- oppressors maintain their position by avoiding responsibility of their actions
Institutional Rejection of Difference
- an absolute necessity
- we need outsiders as surplus people
- we fear difference in and handle it in three ways
-
o 1. We ignite it
o 2. We copy it if we think it is dominant
o 3. We destroy it if we don’t think its dominant
we don’t relate humans differences as equals
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there are differences all over → age, race, sex
-
o these differences are not what is separating us it is our refusal to recognize
the differences
voluntary isolation
we don’t know how to use human differences to create change, we only know how to
avoid it
human deviance > human difference
creating a society where we can all flourish
The past
- we ignore the post à this encourages usn to reap our mistakes
- “generation gap” à an important social tool for a repressive society
- we have to view older members in a certain way to be able to not have historical
amnesia
- we tend to repeat and relearn the same lessons even in generations
o we don’t pass on what we have learned or listen to what other people have
learned
How we see differences
- example of white women reading black women’s work
o it is difficult for them to do so because they don’t see black women as women
and different from themselves
o have to see them as individuals, women, and human
- refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the different problems
and pitfalls facing us as women
- black women and white women are not the same
o they have different problems that come with both being a women but also
race
o black women and black men have shared oppression but in different ways
o white women have the problem of being seduced into joining the oppressor
and sharing the power à black women don’t have this option
- white women believe if they are perfect (good enough) they are able to co-exist in a
patriarchy
o black women dot feel the same
o some problems they share, some they don’t
- women of colour are the lowest paid wage earners in US
Homophobia
- exists for all women but particular resonnaces for black women
- black hetero women tend to ignore the existence of black lesbian women
-
black women used to say being lesbian was for white women à even though they are
oppressed they still oppress others??
Black lesbians get really bad rep
Conc
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A tool of social control à women only recognize one area of human difference as
legitimate
o The differences that exist between men and women
We all had to learn to coexist with men
We must recognize differences among women who are our equals
We should use our differences to enrich our visions and our joint struggles
o Develop and identity new definitions of power
Change means growth, growth can be painful
People identify as different but still share the same goals
Kimberle crenshew - why intersectionality can’t wait. (short, washington post article) -
Kimberle Censhaw
- Executive director of African American Policy Forum
- Professor of law at Columbia and UofCalifornia
History
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Lived reality before became a real term
Now it is used a lot
But
o Women and girls of colour continue to be left out, which means that
something vital to the understanding of intersectional has been lost
1976 à a few black women sued GM for discrimination
o they said that the company segregated its workforce by race and gender
§ blacks did one set of jobs, whites did another
§ black jobs were men jobs, and womens jobs were only for whites
· so where do black women fit in?
§ black women are neither white nor male so they don’t fit in
o the court dismissed their clams because theu believed that black women
shouldn’t be allowed to combine their race and gender into one claim
race and gender discrimination overlap in many aspects of life
intersectionality à an attempt to make femisnim, anti-racism and anti-discrimination
combined?
Intersectionality
- a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power
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this term brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that
claim them as members but fail to represent them (black women)
o same with people of colour to LGTBQ
groups that face intersections of racism, sexism, class oppression, transphobia
Intersectionality – flaws
- “identity politics”à people who practice intersectionality have been accused of this
- it isn’t just about the identities but the people who use the identity to exclude and
privilege
- too theoretical à all talk and no action
- can create atmosphere of bullying and privilege checking
- concrete action is required
Mikki Kendall - How to write about black women - 9 pages - GRACE & Maddie
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the same as the anth reading first semester
like make it clear you aren’t racist or sexist
it’s kinda like a mock reading
o ex: be stereotypical
● Black women = idea that their lives are public property
● "Write of how you studied them at a safe distance, while proclaiming that some of your closest
●
●
●
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friends are Black women"
Propriety - societal expection that centers on managing the behaviour of black people, laregly
black women, who have otehrwise been neglected in a society that only wants to offer
opportunity to those who have been approved by gatekeepers
Respectabilty politics - performing gender and sexuality in ways that don’t threaten traditional
ideas of masculinity
○ From an extreme outsider perspective, I think of powerful black women, for example
Michelle Obama - yes she is breaking down stereotypes but she is also maintaining them.
○ De facto rules of marginalized people in order to be respected in mainstream culture
○ Way to avoid engaging with history and current events
Misogynoir
○ Term by queer black feminist professor Moya Bailey - describes the specific misogyny
directed toward black women in American visual and popular culture because of their
race and gender
Idea by me - "any systwm that ties our rights to getting the entire black community to assimilate
isn't interested in equality, much less equity.
○ US constitution.
○ Assimilate to the greater society but also to the black community as a whole > few
famous black women define how a whole group is viewed
● Conclusion
○ We have to change how we talk about blackness, poverty, the women who inhabit those
spaces and where access and opportunity rarely intersect
○ The position of some black women paved way, both possitively and negatively, for a
whole group.
Connection between Kendall and Crenshaw
● Kendall as - "and in feminist spaces, the expectation of who will be heard, of who will have the
agency, the autonomy, and the respect is heavily informed by the lens of respectability"
● Crenshaw shares this idea with intersectionality
Plus 1 documentary - 1 hour and 23 minutes and short youtube video.
Week 3 Readings
Susan Stryker - (De)subjugated Knowledges: an introduction to transgender studies - 17
pages GRACE
INTRO
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Transsexual identity
At a conference, thought to herself “why are there no transgender speakers on the
panel”
o Gender diversity was summed into sexual desire
o Made it seem like the only way to express gender was through sexual activity
and attraction
People say transgender people believe in oppressive gender stereotypes
Jim Fourratt à a veteran of thw 1969 gay rights riot at the Stonewall Inn
o Founding member of the gay liberation front
o New York progressive politics
o Complained that a new transgender hegemony was marginalizing and erasing
the experiences of people like himself
§ Revisionist history of sexual liberation and civil rights movement was
rewriting the past in a Orwellian fashion
Histories have been rewritten and relationships have changed
The word transgender
- In the 1990s, the word transgender was what people thought was the best fit for
describing what they were trying to talk about
- Had to do with the way we define gender
Transgender Studies
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“the academic field that claims as its purview transsexuality and cross-dressing,
some aspects of intersexuality and homosexuality, cross-cultural and historical
investigations of human gender diversity, myriad specific subcultural expressions of
‘gender atypicality’, theories of sexed embodiment and subjective gender identity
development, law and public policy related to the regulation of gender expression,
and many other similar issues”
draws upon a bunch of different fields
investigates embodied differences and analyzes how these differences are formed to
be social hierarchies
“A Little Background”
- the word transgender was coined in the 1980s
- took on its current meaning in 1992 à featured in a small pamphlet
- the first use of the word was attributed to the Virginia Prince
- used to be all about gentials and the changing of them but now its more about the
changing of the way we express our gender
- Feinberg à a new use
o “an adjective rather than a noun”
o political alliance
o “pangender” à an umbrella term for all transsexuals, drag queens, crossdressers, masculine women, etc…
- Sandy Stone 1991 “posttransexual manifesto”
o Second wave of feminism
o Janice Raymond à considered transsexuality to be a form of false
consciousness
o Failed to analyze gender oppression
o Some feminists said that transgender people alienate themselves from their
own lived history
UK
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Compared to the US, Europe had little transgender activism
1992 à the political activist group Press for Change was founded
o in response to the defeat of an application at the European Court of Human
Rights
situation in Europe and US improved drammitcally within a few short years
the term transgender by 1995 was being used a lot
Broader Context
-
paralleled the rise of queer studies
at first, queer studies and feminist studies kind of excluded transgender studies
queer politics and queer studies
queer studies can fail to acknowledge the same sex object choice is not the only way
to differ from heterosexist cultural norms
queer studies sometimes perpetuates homonormativity
homonormativity: privileging of homosexual ways of differing from heterosocial
norms, antipathy toward other modes of queer difference
TRANSGENDER STUDIES CAN BE OVERLOOKED??
Postmodernity
- Sex is considered more stable and the signs of gender reflect it
- The relationship between sex and gender role is simply mechanically
- Gender is representation
- “sex” is supposed to serve as a foundation
- transgendrr studies needs to articulate new epistemological frameworks
o saving transgender lives
Performativity
- JB
- Butler has been critizicized by some transgender groups as she says gender is mere
perfprmance and somehow not real
- She is criticized because she implies gender can be changed by putting on a costume
for pleasure
- Transgender studies and people have a problem with this because it is not a form of
play for them but a specific mode of being
- “Rather, they see their gendered sense of self as ontologically inescapable and
inalienable—and to suggest otherwise to them is to risk a profound misrecognition
of their personhood, of their specific mode of being.” (pg. 10)
- speech is social not a performance
- “To say that gender is a performative act is to say that it does not need a material
referent to be meaningful, is directed at others in an attempt to communicate, is not
subject to falsification or verification, and is accomplished by “doing” something
rather than “being” something”
- raises question about social and political struggles
Language Games
- own rules for everyone one
-
model of the game is like the model of the performative speech act
has specific players or posts
the speaker is authorized by extra linguistic circumstances to sau those
I do not get this at all
(DE)Subjugated Knowledges
- “the study of transgender phenomena” and “transgender studies” à two different
things
o phenomena is a on going project
o studies is a new critical project that has taken shape in the last decade
- “This critical attention to questions of embodiment and positionality aligns
transgender studies with a growing body of interdisciplinary academic research in
the humanities and social sciences. Transgender studies helps demonstrate the
extent to which soma, the body as a culturally intelligible construct, and techne, the
techniques in and through which bodies are transformed and positioned, are in fact
inextricably interpenetrated” (12)
- transgender studies pulls on historical contexts
Renarration
- transgender studies renarrates the intellectual heritage
o calls attention to transgender effects
o the field began to tell new stories
o transgender phenomena has taunted social order
Conc
“In conclusion, we simply note that transgender phenomena haunt the entire project of
European culture. They are simultaneously everywhere and elsewhere. T eir multiple and
contradictory statuses of visibility and erasure, of presence and absence, are intimately related
to the operations of social power that create norms, impart consequence to dif erence, and
construct the space of a dominant culture. A transgender studies more attuned to dif erences
of race, location and class, as well as to dif erences within gender, would provide a better view
into the making of this world we all inhabit, and enable a powerful critical rereading of
contemporary (post)modernity in all its complexity.”
Finn A Enke - The education of Little Cis: Cisgender and the Discipline of opposing Bodies - 17
pages. MADDIE
What is ‘cisgender’
- Cis - a latin prefix meaning stay put or do not change property
- Dana Leland Defosse
- First person to put cisgender into public in 1994
- Cis - in science
- Things from the same molecule
- Trans- means things act from different molecules
- Defosse, along with others saw how CIS could be alined with gender
- Cisgender implies staying within centain gender parameters
- We are borns girls and identify as girls.
- Cisgender is now widely recognized but it gives us an idea about the power of language
to transform gender politics
- Cisgenders encourages investments in a gender stability that undermines
feminist, trans*, queer and related movements
- Bloggers have said that it is cisgender who take offence - which is ironic and this
because transgender people date to name and to other them.
- But now it is the trans people who are more critical of cisgender
- Differences between campus and classroom context.
- Cisgender as a performative ally-idenitty, explicitly reserving the term “trans” for others.
- LEADING question - Trans Ally-ship
- People who are trans-allies would identify themselves as a ciswoman >
like as way to show that people are not just men or women.
- Importantly those, as much as we defined ourselves as cisgender, its still a theoretical
framework of power.
What kind of Category is Cisgender
- What signifiers of gender can be “crossed” or not
- Cis is usually equate with gender normativity > cis privielge
- Basically cisgender is affirming that not only is it possible for one to stay “a women” but
also that one is “born a woman” after all.’
The Genealogy of Cis
- Cisgender as a term of gender begins with trangender activism in the early 1990s.
- At this time “transgender” was used to talk about all gender non-normative
pracitices, communities, and identities.
- But in reality - transgender was meant to explain those who’s social gender was different
from biological sex.
- Within trans activist circles, non-normative gender variability is normalized, but in the
world it is not.
- The way one presents themselves defines how they fit the social arena.
- Normative privilege (cis gender) created teh transphobic institiions and every day
practices.
- But it also was challenge to the naturalization of woman and man in social
hierarchies.
- Trans activists turned the naming tables transgender> cisgender,
transsexual > cissexual.
- This decentralized the dominant group and exposed it as just one position
- Eventually, activists groups were saying everyone is either cisgender or transgender
- Julia Srano’s Whipping Girl
- Helped to authorize cis identification
- Serano defines cissesual as - people who are not transsexual and who have no
only ever experiences their physical and subkconsious sexes as being aligned whereas cisgender is just people who are not transgender.
- Cissesual does not equal cigneder
- Trans people and gender queers may not feel this wya
- Cissexual privileges is in about about the activity of reading and assigning male or
female sex/gender to others.
- Cissexuality is nice for those people because the reading is accurate of their real,
true or natural gender.
- Cissexual privilege is authorized through
- Assuming everyone is cissexual
- Demanding that trans men and women must be defined then as that - like not
just man or woman but transman …
- “Requiring that transsexual men and women “pass” or “be believeablt ot other as”
the sex/gender they “claim to be” to make their trans-sex more palatable to poepl
who feel birth-assigned sex/gender is the only true one.
- Camp trans
- Weeklong protest the includes workshops, speeches, reports, and performances
- Begins with insistence on self-identifications
- Iconic because it generated some of the earliest articulations of classism and
racism in the use of surgical status.
- Inclusions/Exclusion policy
- Inclusion policy says that camp is not set up to play to the privilege cis
people experience.
- Exclusion policy - cis people shouldnt come if they just want to learn
about trans and gender queer people > specifically noting how cis people
shouldn’t come if they do not recognize the idea of gender privilege and
oppression
> Ally-identity in college classrooms creates inclusion of trans people, because they offer ‘
cultural capital’ of cis people who address trans issue, gender privilege and oppression.
Enter the Unmarked Cis-Ally
- Allyship educations touches on the desire of some members of majority communities to
solves rather than participate in the oppression, stigmatization and marginalization of
minority communities
- Important = acknowledgement of relative privilege
- Ally is a paradoxical identity
- But claiming simultaneous proximity to and distance from those of whom one
becomes an ally
- Reminds me a bit of the disidentification thing from last week.
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Enke notes how when we call ourselves Trans allies or LGBT allies, we are still othering
trans people and it asserts our own position (that being straight) which resecures or
point of normativity.
“In just the way that “LGBT ally” effectively marks one as straight, “trans ally” is a
discursive practice that resecures some portion of normativity.” page 11
Cisgender privilege is important because its a critique of structural hierarchies build
around binary sex/gender > and opposes the ‘trans 101’ learning model.
Will the Real Cis please stand up?
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At what point is do we determine distance between cis and trans?
- DSM - Diagnostic and Sratistical Mental Disorders.
Is it when we look at what must stay the same what what must change between cis and
trans.
- Is it dependent on place and privilege?
- The author, Finn Enke is a trans woman and she discusses how she fits
in in certain places because of her privilege > able-bodiedness, perceived
age and ability
At what point do trans-ness and cis-ness depart from each other
- And at what point do they become the same
Enke talked to one trans women who said “she became a woman and now is a woman”
- I think this connects to JB’s idea of one is not born a woman but comes one
- Also this woman does not define herself as a transwoman, just a woman.
Bumping into Walls
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Disability and ability, along with identity and subjectivity are situational, temporal and
spatial, and cultural constructed; barriers are in the same measure social, physical and
psychological - always political
Identity politics
- The idea of people getting in like a pass in society - the absence of queer/trans/
disability - then we can perform or make visible our own non-normativity by
coming out
Focus on specularity and visible difference → culture of surveillance and policing
- Michel foucault - the panopticon
- “the Panopticon’s power is to ‘induce in the inmate a state of
conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic
functioning of power,’
- More about panopticon on page 76
Despite their binary opposition, cis and trans are no functionally equivalent or
parallel
- Cis never needs to prove itself - its just assumed
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Surya Monro - Non-binary and genderqueer: An overview of the field - 5 pages
The other readings/things are like a few pages each so maybe we just read them ourselves?
Week 4 Readings
Week 5 (?) Readings