5 Outline

Hi professor.

Can I include the definition of the terms in my handwriting notes?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3094897/Readings_S17/Student_Work_12_16.pdf

Please Note: This writing assignment has been cancelled to give you extra time to study for the midterm exam this weekend.

Due Monday, March 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 Rich’s work or anywhere else), you must be sure to include the proper citation (either MLA or APA).

In her chapter titled “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich argues that heterosexuality is institutionalized. Drawing on the examples she introduces in her work, explain her characterization of this institutionality in relationship to the potential of feminist thought.

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.