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Week 1 10/02/2021Gender as a concept
Sex and Gender: Intellectual / scholarly concept
- Why is sex (the bodily designation of male or female) a fundamental part of identity?
- Why do we need to know what someone’s gender is when we meet them?
- What role does the sexed body play in determining personality traits, capacities, inclinations,
limitations? (this was known as the sex / gender distinction)
- The question of biological determinism, idea of chromosomes and hormones.
- Sex-gender distinction.
- What explanatory power can we assign to sex or gender when attempting to understand
human behaviour at the individual, collective or social level?
- How important is it to be taking the maleness and femaleness into account for
consumers when for example looking at economics.
Before Bodies That Matter
- Sex: the physical characteristics of the body: genitals, secondary sexual characteristics (hair,
mammary glands, etc.)
- Gender: the traits, abilities, and behaviours that were associated (in a given socio-historical
period) with that body
- Sex-gender distinction, how do we understand that distinction and how do we understand
that distinction and how does that distinction become a tool of power e.g. the patriarchy
uses the idea of the sexed body to limit women’s access to certain elements of society.
The sex / gender distinction
- Sex (male, female) : Nature
- Gender (masculine, feminine): Culture
- Culture produces meaning around sex.
- Separate sex and gender as nature and culture.
Bodies that Matter
- Intervened in this conceptualisation of sex as given / natural and gender as cultural /
constructed by arguing that the very need to identify the body as male or female was cultural
- The very need to identify wether a body is male or female is cultural, when we are
determining the sex of a body, we are imposing cultural ideas onto the body.
Intersex people
- There are a wide variety of bodily manifestations of “sex”: at all levels of the body (genitals,
secondary characteristics, chromosomes)
- Intersex people—people whose bodies do not “ t” the established norms of bodily sex
adhered to by medicine—evidence this
- We shouldn’t treat people that don’t t the norm as exceptions to the rule. Include them
when thinking about gender
- But also, the existence of a wide range of sexual preferences, styles of embodiment, kinds of
pleasure and interest evidence that the relationship between sex and gender is not stable
(just because I have a female body, does not mean I will be feminine)
- Draw on a large pool of human experience
- What if we looked around us with a female body that don’t line up with the standards of
femininity. Rather than thinking of those as exceptions, why don’t we include them and
use them as evidence about what sex and gender is, rather than as problems for what
sex and gender can account for.
Queerness as evidence, not deviance
- Intellectually: rather than excluding intersex, gender queer and homosexual people from
thinking about sex and gender as categories, Butler takes these people as evidence that
what we think is natural is cultural (ie: that ‘nature’ is actually very diverse in terms of sex
and gender, but that the culture ignores this diversity because simple classi cations make life
easier and serves the distribution of power in society)
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, - Nature is really diverse in the terms of that there are so many di erent types of bodies,
intersex people exist and they always have, they must be included, not forgotten.
- It is much easier to decide who is in control and who isn’t based on categories in
society.
Bodies that Matter
- Examines and theorises why it is that being able to identify someone as either male or female
is central to our ability to recognise them as person.
- Why does gender have such a fundamental role in identity?
- Unconsciously what we do when meeting someone is guring out their gender, why is
this so important?
- Why is gendercon dence such an important part of our relationship with ourselves?
Butler’s in uence
- Bodies That Matter has contributed to changes in how gender is thought and applied in
society, politics and medicine
- The recognition that gender is contextually determined rather than naturally given by sex
- The recognition, and reassessment, of the centrality of sex or gender in determining
identity
- Wether or not certain kinds of organisations really need to know if we are male or female,
why is this an essential thing to know when lling out forms.
Butler Key Terms: Identity
Butler: gender is performative: key terms
- Identity
- Subjectivity
- Repetition
- Citation
- Performative
Identity
- ddOED: “the fact of being who or what a person or thing is”
- Identity refers to the facts that make us who we are: it is made up of the central, most
important things that make us recognisable to others, and ourselves, as ourselves
- The fact, the truth that makes us who we are. We talk about the things that make us
most recognisable towards others.
Identity is read, as much as it is lived
- While it is important that we know ourselves, Butler argues that identity really matters
because being identi able as ourselves is fundamental to our ability to participate in the
world
- Other people need to know who we are, and we need them to know who we are, if we
are going to participate in the world
- Identity really matters, being identi able allows us to participate in society.
Identity is a regulatory apparatus
- Because it is read, identity is a regulatory apparatus: we need to have one to be, and
move, in the world
- Identity is governed through identi cation (BSN, passport, solis ID)
- Identity is fundamental to social and intimate life: our friends and family come to rely on
the “facts” of our identity: who we are (name, age, sex, personality remains consistent)
- Identity is regulated (subject to assessment by others) in both formal and informal ways
- Identity is an apparatus (a system) that is the means by which we are subject to
assessment by others: ie: who are you?
- Many people that arrive in the netherlands are stuck having to get a BSN, but they can’t get it
yet they are blocked from things if they do not have a BSN.
- Friends and family come to rely on a certain identity, e.g. if they call your name they’ll expect
you to respond.
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