Gender, Sexuality
and Feminism
Tyrone Connell and Mikaela Brusasco
Gender in debating
• What is gender?
• Is gender a good or a bad thing?
• Is it opted into by individuals or imposed by society?
• Should society attempt to regulate expressions of gender?
• Banning things (e.g. sexist films)
• Regulating things (e.g. equal gender ratio of tv content)
• How effective is society at doing this?
• E.g. TWS ban all advertising of products on the basis of gender,
except where there is a specific and proven need to do so
Sexuality in debating
• Is sexuality individually or socially constructed?
• Should society regulate people’s sexuality?
• Banning and regulating
• Subsidising things (e.g. paying for prostitution services for the
severely handicapped)
• How effective is society at doing this?
• E.g. TWS ban all pornography
• Since sexuality is an important domain for the expression of
gender, debates about sexuality often engage questions of
gender
Feminism(s?)
• There is debate about what constitutes feminism:
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Radical feminism
Liberal feminism
Libertarian feminism
Women of Colour feminism/womanism
Marxist feminism
• Some argue that each of these is a valid expression of
feminism of equal value. Others disagree.
• Can a social movement function with disparate/conflicting
elements?
• E.g. That feminists should reject Slutwalk
• Appropriation/parody or conformity?
Where did feminism come
from?
• Western feminism:
• 1st wave (turn of the 20th century) – women’s civil and political
rights; the suffragette movement
• 2nd wave (1960s-1980s) – social and sexual inequalities;
reproductive rights; workplace rights
• Divisions: the ‘Sex Wars’
• 3rd wave (1990s-present) – reclamation, individualism, WoC,
corporate board representation, legal inequalities,
intersectionality
• Many liberal feminists have rejected elements of the 2nd wave which
opposed liberal sexual expression
• Feminism in non-western countries, womanism, minority
feminism
• E.g. Aboriginal feminism in Australia
Has feminism succeeded?
• 1) Feminism is largely failing
• Radical feminists: since the Second Wave, liberal feminism has
seen the reemergence of some harmful gendered practices
• Pay parity has hardly shifted in recent decades, lack of corporate
board representation
• ‘on the wrong track’
• 2) Feminism is on a positive trajectory
• While there is still much to do, there are many marks of progress:
• Paid parental leave schemes, ERA in the US, increasing
representation in the workplace/politics
• 3) Feminism is over/complete (‘post-feminism’)
• Quite difficult to argue in debating/objectively wrong
Movements based around
sexuality/gender diversity
• LGBTIQ…
• Lesbian rights – dealing with erasure of lesbian experiences from
the social discourse, within the ‘gay’ discourse
• Gay rights – ‘marriage equality’, historical repeal of sodomy laws,
political representation, reform of religious doctrine
• Bisexual rights – again, issues of erasure; conflation with stages of
homosexuality, etc.
• Transgender – access to state-funded surgery/debates within
transsexual community about the gender binary, recognition of
‘third gender’ or ‘non-gender conforming’ identities
• Do these groups all belong in the same movement?
• What are their similarities?
• What are their differences?
Debates about sexuality
• E.g. That we should criminalise the demand but not the
supply of prostitution
• E.g. That the BDSM movement is bad for feminism
• What’s good about the BDSM movement?
• What’s bad about the BDSM movement?
• How do these things relate to feminism?
Consent
• A common justification for gender/sexuality practices that
might (because of social norms, for example) seem harmful
• Consent theory generally requires the proof of:
• 1) access to information
• 2) rationality
• E.g. That we should regret the rise of the ‘hook up’ culture
• Who’s consenting?
• Questions of intersectional disadvantage
• Power imbalances
• Intersects feminist debate – libertarian vs. radical feminism
Gender in ‘non-gender’ debates
• TWS regret the federal government’s intervention in the
Northern Territory
• TWS not give development aid to countries without
population control