WRITING THE BODY
WGST 3090 / WRIT Monday 3030 D 6:30 - 9:15 Newton 1104
From Anne Fausto-Sterling Sexing the Body: Gener Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
"Dueling Dualisms"
The Body as Text and Reading as a Sociocultural Act
- Hormones, DNA, chromosomes (p2), Environmental factors and pollutants (p 54)
- These "alphabets" interactive, variable -- no single body/narrative from same "letter" -- recombinant
- Competition writes a body -- : athletics, exercise, training, diet and exercise write our musculature (3)
- "labeling someone a man or a woman is a social decision. We may use scientific knowledge t help us make the decision, but only our beliefs about gender -- not science -- can define our sex. Furthermore, our beliefs about gender affect what kinds of knowledge sicentists produce about sex in the first place" (3)
- Truth claims are political, social, and moreal struglles about culture and economy
- These struggles are embodied and incorporated in our physiological beings -- give examples
- Feedback loop (p. 5 -- read quote
- Acts of measuring can change social reality
- a scale/category is a narrative
- narratives frame what and how we can ask, what and how we can see; they order our understand and interpretation of self and world (pp 10 - 11)
- Disciplining - systematizing narratives (14)
- Individual and social bodies/ narrative: example p. 15/ emergence of homosexual social body in realtion to social, demographic, and economic changes
- Cultural influences: Bedrock of sexuality molded by culture and learning -- sex drive/impulse
- social constructionist positions: moderate and strong
- some physical acts = different social meanings in different cultures
- sexual desire constructed by culture and history form energy and capacities of body (18)
- Critique of incorrigible propositions (re: feminism -- that all societies organize social work through perspective of body as male/female -- Yoruba and age example p. 19)
- Our language shapes our physical body as well as our perception of the social world (give examples)
- Discursively and literally construct our bodies, incorporating experience into our very flesh (p. 21)
- erodes distinction between physical and social body -- how does language mediate between/converge pyysical and social body?
"That Sexe Which Prevaileth"
- Language is sexed (30)
- Nature has more than 2 sexes; state and legal system vested in maintaining 2 sex system
- Sexual continuum
- Legal status of male, female, intersex (31)
- Historical case studies
- What are the social practices for erasing the body's language of comple sexuality? (hair removal, makeup, exercise, diet, surgery, piercing, tatooing, style/fashion -- hair, clothes, walk, speech)