The Sexuality/Gender Intersection
Central European University
Department of Gender Studies
Academic year of 2004–2005
Fall semester
2 course credits
Instructor: Erzsébet Barát
Description:
The course is designed to advance a dialogue about the implications of the various theorizations of the
categories of sex, gender, and sexuality in the past three decades, assuming as its basic premise that
these categories come to mean different things in different disciplines. Based on the critical readings of
both classic and recent texts, we shall explore the insights and subversive potential we can gain by
understanding the overlap and mutual debts as well as the political and theoretical differences between
‘gender’, the key concept of Feminism/s (as of the 1970s) and that of ‘sexuality’ developed by (the
1990s generation of) Queer Theory. In addition to an engagement with the argumentation of the weekly
set readings, the participants will also share responsibility for choosing material from their own socialcultural and/or auto/biographical context in order to probe the validity and explanatory power of the
readings. Our ultimate aim is to destabilize the non-productive dichotomy between feminist vs. queer
theorizations of women’s everyday life. Instead, the course is hoped to seek a more integrative account
of the complex hegemonic relations between gender and sexuality, destabilizing the (theoretically)
assumed reductive continuities between anatomical sex, social gender, gender identity, sexual practice,
sexual desire, and sexual identity. In other words, queer theorists’ knowledge production will be a
helpful criticism of most feminist theories’ separation of biological/anatomical sex and social gender
but without valorizing a queer non-foundationalist celebrations of sexualities as playful, de-centered
performative acts, postulating women as dematerialized and disembodied signification of fun only.
Topics to be covered on a weekly basis:
1. Introduction: Sex in question. From the arbitrary sex/gender relation to a systematic
dissymmetry obtaining between male/female and feminine/masculine.
2. Orthodox accounts of the gender/sex differentiation. Ann Oakley and the politics of sexual
equality.
3. Socialization theories and the unproblematic status of sex: Why should sex give rise to any
sort of social classification? Why can it be extended successfully to all domains of activity
beyond that of procreation?
4. The co-optability of a political project arguing for re-education vs. the historically and
culturally shared specific imaginary body.
5. Transexualism as the critical potential to expose and understand the valorization of the
‘masculine male’ instead of subscribing to a masculinization of ‘woman’.
6. Mid-term discussion of envisaged projects.
7. Gendered forms of sexualities: Diversity of sexual preferences and practices.
8. The problematization of heterosexuality: Against a disillusionment with the explanatory force
of the concept of ideology in the analysis of women’s oppression.
9. Merely cultural? The limits of reducing queer politics to the question of un-equal recognition
in liberal jurisdiction.
10. Practices of “Othering” in feminist thinking. ‘Political correctness’ in the academy and the
production of ‘cultivated citizens’
11. The neo/liberal and neo-conservative backlash that fosters ‘womanism’ over ‘feminism’ vs.
the emancipatory potential of a sexualized/gendered political subject .
12. Consolidation: Major perspectives and their potentials.
Assessment:
Participants’ performance will be based on the following grounds:
1. Participation in classroom discussions of weekly readings (based on prepared critical
questions addressed to the text). 50%
2. Seminar paper (3000-4000 words) that developes a particular issue in the light of some of the
various approaches relevant for the student’s project. 50%
Readinglist
Week 1:
Moira Gatens: “A critique of the sex/gender distinction”, 1983, pp. 3-20.
Week 2:
Ann Oakly: “Sexuality” in Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott (eds.) Feminism and
Sexuality: A Reader, Edinburgh University Press, 1996, pp.35-49.
Simon de Beauvoir:” “Introduction” to The Second Sex” in Linda Nicholson (ed.)
The Second Wave of Feminism: A Reader in Feminist Theory. Routledge, 1997, pp. 27-62.
Gayle Rubin: “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex” in
Linda Nicholson (ed.) The Second Wave of Feminism: A Reader in Feminist
Theory. Routledge, 1997, pp. 27-62.
“Sexual Traffic: Interview with Judith Butler” in Elizabeth Weed and Naomi
Schor (eds.) feminism meets queer theory, Indiana University Press, 1997,
pp.68-108.
Week 3:
Lyz Stanley: “Should ‘sex’ really be ‘gender’ – or ‘gender’ really be ‘sex’?” in Stevi
Jackson and Sue Scott (eds.) Gender: A Sociological Reader. Routledge, 2002,
pp. 31-41.
Lyz Stanley and Sue Wise: “What’s wrong with socialization?” in Stevi Jackson and
Sue Scott (eds.) Gender: A Sociological Reader. Routledge, 2002, pp.273-279.
Christine Delphy: “Rethinking sex and gender” in Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott (eds.)
Gender: A Sociological Reader. Routledge, 2002, pp. 51-59.
Monique Wittig: “The Category of Sex”, “One is Not Born a Woman”, “The Straight
Mind”, in The Straight Mind and Other Essays, Beacon Press, 1992, pp. 1-32.
Week 4:
Stevi Jackson: “Heterosexuality, Power, and Pleasure” in Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott
(eds.) Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader, Edinburgh University Press, 1996, pp. 175-179.
Denise Riley: “Bodies, identities, feminism” in Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick
(eds.) Feminist Theory and the Body, Sage 1999 pp.220-226
Week 5:
Harold Garfinkel: “Passing and the managed achievement of sex satus in an
intersexed person” in Studies in Ethnomethodology, Cambridge, 1994, pp.
116-185. 285-288.
Julia Epstein: “Either/Or – Neither/Both: Sexual Ambiguity and the Ideology of
Gender” in Genders, Vol. 7. 1990, pp. 99-142.
Week 6:
Mid-term orientation: Discussion of individual projects
Week 7:
Tamsin Wilton: “The nature of the beast: What is a lesbian?” in Lesbian Studies:
Setting an Agenda, Routledge, 1995, pp. 29-49.
Majorie Garber: “Spare Parts: The Surgical Construction of Gender” in Vested
Interests: Cross-deressing and Cultural Anxiety, Penguin, 1992, pp. 93-117.
Susan Sontag: “Notes on “Camp”” in Fabio Cleto (ed.) Camp:Queer Aesthetics and
the Performing Subject: A Reader, Edinburgh, 1999, pp. 53-65.
Week 8:
Steven Epstein: “A Queer Encounter: Sociology and the Study of Sexuality” in Steven
Steidman (ed.) Queer Theory/Sociology, Blackwell, pp. 145-167.
Celia Kitzinger and Sue Wilkinson: “Deconstructing hetero-sexuality: A feminist
social-constructionist perspective” in Nickie Charles and Felicia HughesFreeland (eds.) Practicing Feminism: Identity, Difference, Power, Routledge,
1996. pp. 135-154.
Judith Butler: “Imitation and Gender Subordination” in Henry Abelove et al (eds) The
Gay and Lesbian Studies Reader, Routledge, 1993, pp. 307-320.
Judith Butler: “Critically Queer” in Bodies That Matter: On the discursive limits of
“sex”, Routledge, 1993, pp. 223-242.
Week 9:
Judith Butler: “Merely Cultural?” in New Left Review, No. 227, January-February,
1998, pp. 33-44.
Nancy Fraser: “From Redistribution to Recognition?” In Justice Interruptus: Critical
Reflections on the Postsocialist Condition, Routledge, 1997, pp. 11-39.
Nancy Fraser: Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response to Judith
Butler, In New Left Review. No. 228, March-April, pp.140-149.
Week 10:
Elizabeth Grosz: “Refiguring Lesbian Desire” in Naomi Zack et al (eds.) Race, Class,
Gender and Sexuality: The Big Questions, Blackwell, 1998, pp. 268-280.
Teresa de Lauretis: “The Technology of Gender” in Technologies of Gender, 1987,
pp.1-30.
Rosemary Hennessy: “Materialist Feminism in the Postmodern Acadmey” in
Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse, Routledge, 1993 pp.1-36.
Week 11:
Lauren Berlant (with Elizabeth Freeman): “Queer Nationality” in The Queen of
America Goes to Washington City, Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 145-174.
Rosemary Hennessy: “Setting the Terms” in Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in
Late Capitalism. Routledge, 2000, pp.1-36.
Week 12:
Consolidation.