Class notes and readings summaries for course Intersectionalities: Race, Gender, and Sexuality
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Course
7332F004BY (7332F004BY)
Institution
Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
I GOT 8.3 ON THE EXAM. Notes from every lecture and summary of all the readings from course Intersectionalities: Race, Gender, and Sexualities. Notes from September and October 2023. Perfect for exam preparation.
Reading list:
The Negro And The Warsaw Ghetto (Du Bois)
Race, the Floating Signif...
Intersectionalities: Race, Gender, and Sexuality
Week 1
Paradigms / Lenses through we look at the topics:
1. Symbolic interactionism: meanings attached to human interaction, both verbal and
non-verbal, and to symbols
2. Marxist: class struggle, historical materialism
3. Poststructuralism: challenging the discourse, what comes to be accepted as 'truth'
and 'knowledge'.
4. Decolonial: disrupting colonial logic and the seeming "naturalness" of racial
capitalism
RACE:
● genetically speaking, there’s as much diversity between people in the same ‘racial’
groups as in people from di erent ‘races’
○ variations in us come from di erent changing populations which parts are in
us
● what may influence perceived di erent abilities between ‘races’: geography,
mutations in regions of the world, history of our ancestors, training, NOT biological
di erence
● naturalization: biology becomes an excuse for social di erences, and domination of
one group on another
● skin colors: absorption of melanin, populations di er by distance
● conception, idea, notion of race has history, connection to 19th century, it has it
inventors VS physical di erences between bodies, biological variation
GENDER / SEX:
● the boundaries separating masculine and feminine are impossible to define
● the various forms of intersexuality should be defined as normal
● diversity is a norm, and we should not try to create categories
● authors: sex and gender are best conceptualized as points in a multidimensional
space: genetic hormonal, cellular, and anatomical level
○ and: how we feel it, how we experience it, how describe ourselves
● Intersexuals have materialized before our very eyes
○ discourse about intersex opens space in reality for more intersex people
, 2
● Fausto-Sterling’s thinking: critique of binary distintion → proposing five sexes →
critique (her own) need for classification
● intersex is an umbrella terms, it’s a concept, it describes a great variety of bodies
○ it’s not visible, some bodies may seem to fit the binary
● intersex is a category, but not everyone identifies with it, there’s di erence between
gender identity and intersex body
SEXUALITY:
● gay gene does not exist, Hamer’s findings had not been replicated, though they have
been contested
● despite the fact that there’s no biological gay gene, it became a reality, when being
reported in scientific press and lay people press → gay gene ‘materalized’ itself in
reality
● after 1993 many people got excited about gay gene, including LGBT+ community
(“born this way”), gay gene got its own social life
, 3
Week 2
The Negro And The Warsaw Ghetto (Du Bois)
● Du Bois: “It had never occurred to me until then that any exhibition of race
prejudice could be anything but color prejudice.” = using symbolic category of race
could be justified by more means that di erent skin color, sometimes di erent race
(and di erent treatment) is ascribed to people who at the first sight don’t di er at
all
● about racism:
○ not solely a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics
○ not merely a matter of religion
○ cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status and was a matter
of cultural patterns, perverted teaching and human hate and prejudice,
which reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men
● “There I realized another problem of race or religion, I did not know which, which
had to do with the treatment and segregation of large numbers of human beings”
○ religious symbols were/are signifiers of race, signifiers and the signified
changes and gets new meanings, new signifiers emerge
○ everything (religion, culture, etc.) can be ground for race-making
Race, the Floating Signifier: What More Is There to Say about "Race? (Hall)
● race is a discourse, a floating signifier, and works like a language
● arbitrary relation between signifier and meaning
● floating signifier: an “empty” signifier, a signifier that absorbs rather than emits
meaning, has ability to di erent meanings in di erent contexts
● race is one of those major concepts which organize the great classificatory systems
of di erence
● The survival of biological thinking:
○ the genetic, biological, and physiological definitions of race are alive and
well in the common-sense discourse of us all;
○ in scientists’ common wisdom and their tries to prove a correlation between
racially defined genetic characteristics and cultural performance
○ explaining social, political or cultural phenomenon by the racial character of
the person involved
● The Badge of Race
, 4
○ common racial ancestry "they have a common history, have su ered a com-
mon disaster, and have one long memory of disaster”
○ skin color "as a badge for the social heritage of slavery, the dissemination
and the insult of that experience”
○ race is a signifier, and that racialized behavior and di erence needs to be
understood as a discursive, not necessarily as a genetic or biological fact.
● Race as a Language, a "Floating Signifier"
○ race is more like a language, than biological construction
○ signifiers: systems and concepts of the classification of a culture, making
meaning, constant process of redefinition and appropriation, meaning is
relational and can never be finally fixed, constantly resignified
○ however, race is a reality: you can see its e ects, you can see it in the faces of
the people around you, you can see the racial discrimination in institutions
● Two Positions:
○ realist: races are “out there”, we just reflect them in language, di erences of
a physiological kind provide the basis for classifying human races into
families
○ textual / linguistic: it can only be tested within the play of the di erences we
construct in our own language
● Third Position: The Discursive
○ there are probably di erences of all sorts in the world, there's no reason to
deny this reality or this diversity
○ but only when these di erences are organized within language, discourse,
and systems of meaning, they acquire meaning and become a factor in
human culture and regulate conduct
● Religion: A First Go at Racial Classification
○ for centuries it was not science, but religion standing as the signifier of
knowledge and truth
● Sleeping Easier: The Cultural Function of Knowledge
○ science was used for “proving” that non-whites are worse, they’re not fully
human or have worse genetics, so all bad things that happen to them would
not worry whites, and it would legitimate exploitation (?)
● Fixing Di erence: The Cultural Function of Science
○ sciented looked how, why, one bit of the species is di erent- more
barbarous, more backwards, more civilized, looking for di erence inside the
system
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