fElizabeth has 35 post(s)

Due Monday, March 6th, by midnight. Word count: 300 words. Please make sure everything is in your own words. Absolutely no quotes should be used. If you paraphrase from the text (from Rubin’s work or anywhere else), you must be sure to include the proper citation (either MLA or APA).

In her essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” Gayle Rubin argues that several persistent features of thought about sex inhibit the development of a radical theory of sex. She notes that “[t]hese assumptions are so pervasive in Western culture that they are rarely questioned. Thus they tend to reappear in different political contexts, acquiring new rhetorical expressions but reproducing certain axioms” (9). In your own words, explain these assumptions and how they limit political discourse on sexuality in the United States.

In your responses to Kessler, many of you point to a moment she describes in her work: when doctors encountering intersexuality are managing all that this situation can mean and become. The relevance of this moment, when intersexuality is treated as a condition that must be resolved through the successful identification of the body’s characteristics defined either as male or female, is powerful one. Kessler returns our attention to the ideas expressed by Grewal and Kaplan, and their argument that we tend to treat science as “value neutral” (2005). We might also compare this moment to the one that Londa Schiebinger describes, when human skeletons began to be understood in terms of the messages anatomists were thought to be decoding, about the worlds the female body was built to inhabit (1986).

In the cases Kessler refers to, the supposed objectivity of scientific knowledge is clearly overridden by doctors who cannot see beyond a two-gendered system. Grewal and Kaplan explain that one of the hallmarks of western science is its division between the natural and cultural world. “Nature” is defined as that which is untouched and unchanging while “culture” refers to the interpretations and ways of life that human beings have adopted in the different times and spaces (2005:1). In line with the questions Grewal and Kaplan raise, about what counts as difference, we have in Kessler’s article instances where doctors cannot see past a difference based on male and female to consider the kinds of bodily differences presented to them.

Pivotal to Kessler work as well as for the article(s) from Ann Fausto-Sterling on “The Five Sexes,” are ideas about the connection of the sex of the body (presumed as natural) to gender (which Kessler describes as a performance). But there are some presumptions that both Kessler and Fausto-Sterling make about “identity” that are worth examining. Both seem to suggest that identity is something that most people desire to be aligned with once and for all. But is “identity” something that we aspire towards? In Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts (2015), she stresses that identity, and gendered selfconsciousness in particular, is not something people have an immediate awareness of. Moreover, she argues that a lack of selfconsciousness about identity (and gendered identity in particular) is, for many people, something that is desirable and refreshing. I want to underline this point as it bears an important affinity to the way subjectivity is often configured in relationship to difference, as a project of assimilation.

Due Monday, February 27th, by midnight. Word count: 300 words. Please make sure everything is in your own words. Absolutely no quotes should be used. If you paraphrase from the text (from Federici’s work or anywhere else), you must be sure to include the proper citation (either MLA or APA).

In The Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues that as a social-economic system, capitalism is committed to sexism and racism (2004:17). In your own words, describe the degradation of women that Federici describes in chapter one of her work. How is that degradation joined to accumulations of wealth in a capitalist political economy?

Due Monday, February 20th, by midnight. Word count: 300 words. Please make sure everything is in your own words. Absolutely no quotes should be used. If you paraphrase from the text (from Kessler’s work or anywhere else), you must be sure to include the proper citation (either MLA or APA).

In Suzanne Kessler’s essay, “The Medical Construction of Gender,” she claims that cases of intersexuality point to a lack of imagination on the part of physicians and Western society: a failure to understand how each of the “management decisions” described constitute a moment when “biological sex” is transformed into a “culturally constructed gender” (1990:26). Drawing on the examples in Kessler’s work, describe the factors that impact the way physicians, parents, and patients understand and / or manage the medical condition referred to as intersexuality.

I’ve just finished reading through your responses to chapter three from Davis’ work, Women, Race & Class (1983). Before commenting on the substance of your posts, I want to make a few comments about the more formal aspects of your writing.

Please make sure to proofread before you publish. If there are numerous spelling and / or grammatical errors, you will receive partial credit. As I mentioned in class, posts might appear in wingdings if you use a web-based platform (like google docs) to compose your post, and you accidentally copy html when transferring the content to WordPress. To prevent this from happening, you can write and edit in Microsoft Word. Alternatively, you can review your post in WordPress using the text editor (above) and remove any html coding that appears (HTML coding is everything that appears in brackets <> ). Make sure everything is written in your own words, and any paraphrased text includes a citation. Finally, the only category assigned to your post is the assignment for that week. For example, this week you should have tagged your post with the category on the right: “assignment 01.”

—————————————————

In your responses to Davis, many of you noted who was not asked to attend the Convention at Seneca Falls. These omissions, as some of you stressed, are all the more shocking because of the recent struggles faced by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott when attempting to contribute to the Anti-Slavery Society on equal terms with male abolitionists. In light of these experiences, we might expect Stanton and Mott to have been more sympathetic to “outsiders” to the women’s movement.

By way of introducing details about the life of Charlotte Woodward, Davis considers the different motives working women had for attending the convention at Seneca Falls. On the whole, the declarations that were the outcome of the convention addressed challenges that faced middle and upper class white women. Charlotte Woodward and some others were looking for guidance on how to improve the conditions of their lives as workers, but the conditions of working women seemed to be a marginal concern at the convention. This was too bad, because the activism of working women prior to the convention suggests what these women could have contributed to the movement had their problems been fully incorporated into the Seneca Fall Declarations and the tenets of the women’s movement during this period. In fact, by making the struggles of married women a primary concern, we could argue that Stanton and Mott reveal how much they didn’t understand about the conditions governing access to “rights.”

Some white women were quick to make comparisons between the lives of married women and that of slaves. From this analogy they did not mean middle and upper class women should dissolve their marriages in protest. I say this only partially in jest because to make this case would have required these women to see the way inequalities based on race, gender, and class were (and are) linked to accumulations of wealth in a capitalist economic system. As Davis underlines in this chapter and throughout her book, it was their mistake to think the subject of rights could be addressed separately from the economic concerns about labor (both slave or wage-based) that were also unfolding during this period.

Due Monday, February 13th, by midnight. Word count: 300 words. Please make sure everything is in your own words. Absolutely no quotes should be used. If you paraphrase from the text (from Schiebinger or anywhere else), you must be sure to include the proper citation (either MLA or APA).

In her essay, “Skeletons in the Closet,” Londa Schiebinger asks why comparing the anatomy of white women and men became such a critical project for the medical community in Europe during in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (1986:67). In your own words, explain Schiebinger’s response to this question.