• Questions about Response Papers?
• Form groups – first assignment to be completed between 2.1 and 2.7 (when journals due)
• Get 5 more names and phone numbers
• Mini-lecture – from Teresa Brennan Transmission of Affect on in-utero communication/ blastocyst and mother's blood (hormone, DNA, RNA as text, first moment in bodies constructed by sociality) -- link to Symbolic order and bridge Fausto-Sterling and Salecl

From Anne Fausto-Sterling Sexing the Body: Gener Politics and the Construction of Sexuality

Framing thought: from "Introduction: Dermographies" by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey: "The substance of the skin is itself dependent on regimes of writing that mark the skin in different ways or that produce the skin as marked. . . The skin is a writerly effect" (15 ) -- skin, like language, is a border between inside and outside/ "self" and "other"/world; Inter -embodiment; skin as personal biography; technologies of the skin/ discourses - medical, scientific, aesthetic - produce intelligible skin

"Gender and Genitals: The Use and Abuse of the Modern Intersexual "

"Our conceptions of nature the nature of gender difference shape, even as they reflect, the ways we structure our social system and polity; they also shape and reflect our undersanding of our physical bodies. Nowehere is this clearer than in the debates over the sturcutre (and restructuring) of bodies that exhibit sexual ambiguity" (45).

• Biotechnology p. 54
• Psychological goals of early genital surgery p. 58 (relate to clitoridectomy from Salecl)
• Phall-o-metrics
• Reading Nature is a sociocultural act
• "bodies . . . only live within the productive constraints of certain highly gendered regulatory schemas" (75)
• culturally intelligible bodies (76)
• dialectic of medical argument (76)
• ". . . human males and females all begin life with the same structures; complete maleness and complete femaleness represent the extreme ends of a spectrum of possible body types" (76)

From Renata Salecl "Cut in the Body: From clitoridectomy to Body Art"

• Body cuts confront us with over-riding question of post-modern time: What is the palce of the subject in contemporary society?
• How does the subject identify with the symbolic order in pre-modern, modern, and post-modern societies:
  • Definitions: symbolic order, pre-modern, post-modern
• Testimonial function of skin
• How is clitoridectomy a response to a perception of identities endangered?
  • East/West clash -- how do each perceive clitoridectomy and how are each threatened?
  • Blind spots: circumcision remains unchallenged in the West and a normative practice
• "The belief in the bit Other is the belief in words, even when the contradict one's own eyes. What we have now is therefore precisely a mistruct in mere words (that is, in the symbolic fiction). People want to see what is behind the fiction. But the encounter with what is behind the fiction can be most traumatic for the suject . . . If we stop using the polite words, we don not achieve a simple liberation from the fictional character of politesness, but instead encounter violence, which radically disrupts the social bonds" (28).
• "The symbolic structure today appears increasingly replaced by imaginary simulacra with which the subjects identify. Life seems lie a computer game in which the subject can play with his or her identity, can randomly follow fashion rituals and can have no strong national or religious beliefs. But the fact that life appears as a screen on which everything is changeable has resulted in a desperate search for the real behind the fiction. The cuts in the body thus appear as an escape from the imaginary simulacra that dominate our society" (31).