Samenvatting intersectionalities
Week 1
Anne Fausto-Sterling: the five sexes, revisited.
-the five sexes: article argued that the two-sex system embedded in our society is not adequate
to encompass the full spectrum of human sexuality.
5 sexes:
1) Herms: hermaphrodites, testis and ovary.
2) Merms: male pseudohermaphrodites, testes and some aspect of female genitialia.
3) Ferms: female pseudohermaphrodites, ovaries and some aspect of male genitalia.
4) Males
5) Females
Intersexuals have been materialized before our very eyes: it isn’t just a phenomenon or
biology book anymore, but becoming people who are part of society.
John money: psychologist who believed that gender identity is completely malleable for about
eighteen months after birth, thus treatment for an infant who has ambiguous genitialia, gender
assignment would be on the basis of surgical sense.
-identical twin boys with circumcision accident, one became ‘joan’, raised as a girl. The
experiment seemed successful. But Joan rejected the female assignment, sought masculinizing
medication and married a women.
emergence of intersex activism led to reexamination of the wisdom of genital surgery.
Treatment mantra should be therapy, not surgery with intersex babies.
-sex and gender are best conceptualized as points in a multidimensional space.
-focus should be away from genitals, but acknowledge that people come in an even wider
assortment of sexual identities and characteristics than mere genitals can distinguish.
Kate O’Riordan: The life of the Gay gene: from hypothetical genetic market to social reality.
Gay gene: correlation between the genetic marker Xq28 and gay male sexuality: results were
never replicated and the biological reality remains hypothetical. It has a kind of life and exists
as an idea, repititon, discursive pattern, emotional effect, label and hypothesis.
-Still very much alive in discourse.
Gay gene has an address: it speaks to people as a media object in the world with the power to
inform identities.
-many. Of the problems attached to gay gene stories were not generated by journalists, but by
scientific journals
-depoliticization of sexuality as it appears as a biological and medical category because of use
of the term. But biomedicalization generates a political question about how such changes in
knowledge production occur and by what authority.
-Gay gene structures reinforce its existence.
,-the layering of different references through different media forms helps embed the gay gene
as a reputable biomedical object at the same time that if ails to have biological materiality.
-life story of the gay gene attaches homosexuality to a biomedical database, which in turn
tries to offer resources for clinicians and newly diagnosed patients with the condition
homosexuality generated by OMIM’s cataloguing system. questions about the validity of
the research, categorization of sexuality and accountability for knowledge production become
erased.
The gay gene takes on forms of materiality by appearing as a reference in scientific journals,
news media and online databases. It has become part of queer culture, adopted as a logo and a
domain name signifying for example gay interests.
-middle class gay men have more positive attachments to the idea of the gay gene as a bio
history, women and working-class teenagers have been rather more suspicious.
-the reach of the gay gene is more a potentiality that creates affirmation or anger than a
biomedical tool for control.
-inaccuracy from the start, which is problematic.
College 1
Different sociological paradigms, founding figures/traditions
Marx: social conflict (class)
Durkheim: social facts
Weber: meaning-making
Dubois: social construction (race)
Paradigms (lenses, through which lens do you look at society) in this course:
1) Symbolic interactionist:
2) Marxist
3) Poststructuralist
4) Decolonial
5) STS
Sociological imagination: (Mills) enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations
between two within society. Personal story and history situate you in a longer history, how
does your story relate to the larger structures of history and society.
-Connections between: individual/society, personal troubles/public issues,
experiences/institutional arrangements, micro/macro.
-How: think yourself away from routines, willingness to view the world from other
perspectives, analyze and think with different dimensions.
Observing and analyzing power:
1) Invisibility of power: fish in the water cant analyze the water, social functions hide its
functions to function. Kimmel: wind as privilege/power, wind will make 2 bike rides
very different, we see the effects but not the wind itself. Difficulty to grasp power.
2) Neoliberal Political economy: idea of meritocracy based on: epistemological and
methodological individualism (social systems), essentialism (social construction).
Context, ways to look at social systems and naturalize them, looking at how it is
constructed. There is no such thing as society.
, Social construction, on two levels
1) Social reality is socially constructed. Social relations of power construct social
structures, bodies, common-sensical classifications.
2) The categories to capture social reality are also socially construct (and impact that
reality). Analytical categories are constructed (lenses) by us, categories through which
we see the world are not given.
Sociological construction in relation to biological variation
-three markers (race, gender sexuality) are/were assumed to be biological, haunted by the
notion of the biological.
Race: an idea that we ascribe to biology. Example: sickle cell disease trait gene mutation,
connected to regions with malaria. Ascribing it to black people.
-race as biological myth: Hall: ‘all attempts to ground the concept scientifically have been
untenable’ and M’Charek: ‘biological race exists because it is constantly produced.’
Sex: Anne Fausto-Sterling: the five sexes: Western culture deeply committed to idea of two
sexes Biological speaking: gradations.
1) Hermaphrodites (testes and ovaries)
2) Male Pseudo herms, merms (testes + some female genitalia but no ovaries)
3) Female pseudo herms, ferms (ovaries + some male genitalia but no testes)
4) Male (testes no ovaries)
5) Female (ovaries no testes)
-The five sexes revisited: absolute dimorphism disintegrates at the level of biology.
Sex/gender not as continuum, but points in multidimensional space. Gender variation=the
norm.
-Biological dimensions of sex: chromosomes, hormones, internal sex structure, gonads
(testes/ovaries- production of gametes), genitalia, secondary sex characteristics.
-Intersex: estimated 1,7% of all births (Fausto-Sterling), prevailing protocol in case of
apparent intersex condition at birth: medical intervention/surgery within 24 hours to make the
baby fit binary categories.
-Sexuality: gay gene (O’Riordan), no gay gene, there is variation. No individual prediction
possible.
We are left with:
1) great biological variation.
2) Crucial importance of epigenetics (interface genetics and social).
3) Great sociological variety of organizing biological variation.
4) Rapidly changing theories and social dynamics.
