Intersectionalities: Class, Race, Gender and Sexualities
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Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
Summary of all the readings of week 4 from the second year sociology course 'Intersectionalities: Class, Race, Gender and Sexualities. Subject: gender.
Intersectionalities: Class, Race, Gender and Sexualities
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Summary readings week 4 intersectionalities
Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000).The five sexes, revisited.
In ‘The Five Sexes’, Fausto-Sterling argues that the two-sex system embedded in our society is not
adequate to encompass the full spectrum of human sexuality. In its place, she suggests a five-sex
system, consisting of:
1. Males
2. Females
3. ‘Herms’ named after true hermaphrodites, people born with both a testis and an ovary
4. ‘Merms’ male pseudohermaphrodites, who are born with testes and some aspect of
female genitalia
5. ‘Ferms’ female psudohermaphrodites, who have ovaries combined with some aspect of
male genitalia
This article clearly struck a nerve when it was written in 1993.
Those born outside of the platonic dimorphic mold (male/female) are called intersexuals. In ‘The Five
Sexes’, Fausto-Sterling sets out to conduct the first systematic assessment of the available data on
intersexual birthrates (1,7%).
Money believed that gender identity is completely malleable for about eighteen months after birth.
Thus, he argued, when a treatment team is presented with an infant who has ambiguous genitalia,
the team could make a gender assignment solely on the basis of what made the best surgical sense.
Treatment teams were never to use words like ‘intersex’ or ‘hermaphrodite’. They just decided
whether the baby would be a boy or a girl. This theory didn’t work, because a lot of people rejected
their early assignments. The aftermath of the surgery can be problematic: genital surgery often
leaves scars that reduce sexual sensitivity. In the process of assigning gender, physicians should
minimize irrevisible assignments (surgical removal or modification of genitalia that the patient may
one day want to have reversed). The treatment should be therapy, and not surgery.
According to Fausto-Sterling, treatment should combine some basic medical and ethical principles
with a practical but less drastic approach to the birth of a mixed-sex child.
- Surgery should only be performed to save the child’s life or to improve the child’s physical
well-being
- Physicians may assign a sex to an intersex infant on the basis of the probability that the
child’s particular condition will lead to the formation of a particular gender identity.
- As the child grows, he or she may reject the assignment and parents should listen to what
the child has to say.
- Parents should have access to the full range of information and options available to them.
Transsexuals are people who have an emotional gender at odds with their physical sex. They can feel
like they are men trapped inside a woman’s body, or vice versa. If they perform surgery, they
become transgendered.
Since 1993: moving beyond five sexes to a recognition that gender variation is normal and an arena
for playful exploration.
, Critique on Five Sexes according to Kessler: it only focuses on genitals and signifies status and it
ignores the fact that in the everyday world gender attributions are made without access to genital
inspection. What has primacy in everyday life is the gender that is performed, regardless of the
flesh’s configuration under the clothes.
Fausto-Sterling agrees with Kessler on this: better to turn the focus away from genitals.
Ways towards a more gender-diverse world:
- Eliminate the category of ‘gender’ from official documents
- Right to define your own gender
- Right to change one’s physical gender if one so chooses
- Right to marry whomever one wishes
Salih, S. (2007). On Judith Butler and performativity.
Gender is constructed. All bodies are gendered from the beginning of their social existence. Gender
is a doing, rather than a being.
Butler is not suggesting that the subject is free to choose which gender she or he is going to enact.
Gender proves to be performance, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense,
gender is always a doing. Butler is not claiming that gender is a performance, and she distinguishes
between performance and performativity.
Performance = taking a role, acting. Subjects do gender, take on a role and perform gender roles.
Example: I am a girl, so I’ll wear make up.
Performativity = producing affects. Walk, speak, talk in ways that make you a man or woman. The
stylized repetition of acts (the doing of the act) is how subjects make themselves in a gendered self.
Cultureel bepaalde gedragingen eigen maken. Example: I’ll wear make up because I’m a girl.
All bodies are gendered from the beginning of their social existence, which means that there is no
‘natural body’ that pre-exists its cultural inscription. This means that we are born in a system of
meanings and we are immediately ascribed to a gender.
Gender is an act that brings into being what it names: a ‘masculine’ man or a ‘feminine’ woman.
Language and discourse ‘do’ gender.
Gender is incorporated: because there is no interior to gender ‘the law’ cannot be internalized, but is
written on the body of what Butler calls ‘the corporeal stylization of gender, the fantasied and
fantastic figuration of the body. Gender acts are not performed by the subject, but they
performatively constitute a subject that is the effect of discourse rather than the cause of it.
Butler: there is no doer behind the deed, no volitional agent that knowlingly ‘does’ its gender, since
the gendered body is inseparable from the acts that constitute it.
Gender is a fantasy inscribed on the surface of the bodies in the discourse. All gender is a form of
parody, but some performances are more parodic than others. Performances such as drag effectively
reveal the imitative nature of all gender identities. If gender is ‘a regulated process of repetition’,
taking place in language, then it will be possible to repeat one’s gender differently, as drag artists do.
All gender is parodic, but Butler warns that not all parody is subversive. How to differentiate parodic
gender from subversive parodic gender?
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