● “To end patriarchy we need to be clear that we are all participants in perpetuating sexism until we

change our minds and hearts, until we let of sexist thought and action and replace it with feminist
thought and actions”
● “Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike
or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interactions.
Imagine living in a world where we can all be who we are, a world of peace and possibility”

The Concepts: Power & Knowledge: Discourse

● Modern Knowledge: the binary of ‘Truth

● We fix the ‘Truth by following the rules of binary
○ We must have two categories (like boxes)
○ ONLY Two categories
○ Both categories are seen as mutually exclusive
○ Unequal distribution of power across both categories (dominant vs.
subordinate/inferior/Other)
○ Exclusion is the basis of Inclusion

The Binary: The STructure/Regulation of ‘T’ruth

Definitions/Concepts

● Social construction - ​Society creates us i.e. shapes/makes us into social entities

● Normalization ​is a process of social construction that fixes us with the category
‘normal’/’natural’

Gender:

● socially constructed through social institutions;

● dominant discourse focuses on masculinity and femininity
● multiple gender identities;
● we are socialized and regulated through societal understandings of gender to perform our
gendered selves.

Sex: ​dominant discourse presumes sex is biological (male and female) and that there are only two sexes.

Sex’Gender logic: ​dominant discourse claims that (biological) sex is fixed and the basis of producing
gender (i.e. Male=masculinity; Female=Femininity).

Patriarchy:
 ● System that has historically privileged the dominance of men based on the subordination of
women;
● Recognizing the invisibility of men’s privilege

Feminism:

● A critical perspective that makes visible the inequalities between men and women;
● Understanding that this unequal relationship is socially constructed and can be changed;
● Advocacy for women’s autonomy

- ​First wave​: 19th to early 20th Century (equality and right)

- ​Second wave: ​1960s (critique of patriarchy, broadening debates about structural inequality e.g. race,
sexuality, etc.)

- ​Third wave​: 1990s (critique pf patriarchy, multiple feminist standpoints, analyses and strategies -
critique of any singular meaning of ‘woman’) … Feminisms

History of the Term Feminism and the First Wave

● First coined in France in 1880s as ​feminism, femme​ meaning woman, and ​isme​ meaning a social
movement of political ideology
● Early feminists in Europe were part of the suffrage movement, the right to vote and shared
property rights, concerns of middle class women
● Then the term ​socialist feminist​ appeared in Europe in 1900, many socialists who supported
emancipation rejected the label feminist, they were concerned with the need ….cont.

Feminisms in the 20th Century: Second Wave Feminism

Historical Context

● 1950s - a conservative moment - functionalism, capitalism and patriarchy (Reinvention of the

Binary through state projects e.g. reconstitution of the nuclear family form).
● 1960s - a moment of critical moment to undo oppression and advocate social justice: multiple
stuggles - civil rights, women’s liberation, anti-colonial/political independence, gay and lesbian
liberation, class sturggles, etc. (Critique of the oppressive effects of the binary)
● Second Wave Feminism:
- Critique of patriarchal oppression (i.e. the site and system of masculine dominance)
- The personal is political: link between individual (micro) and structure (macro)
- Intersectionality (recognizing simultaneous oppression)
- Undoing the sex-gender binary (?): different critical engagements with the category
‘women’

Recent Trends in Gender & Women’s Studies

The Concept and Practice of Intersectionality:

● Intersectionality is a concept and an approach to understanding the lives and experiences of

individuals and groups of people in their diversity and complexity
● Not just a gender lens. Examining race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, etc.
● Understanding how multiple layered identities intersect, and how multiple systems of oppression
work together.

Queering Gender and Women’s Studies

….cont.

01/10/19

● “Intersectionality Feminist….cont.
● Intersectionality allows for a better understanding of how racism, sexism, ageism, and
discrimination based on language, sexuality, and/or disability upon migrant women
● Our knowledge ….cont.

The social construction approach

● Science is not neutral or objective but based on cultural ideas and sociopolitical contexts
● “Making sex” ….cont.

Dueling Dualism

● “A body’s sex is simply too complex. There is no either/or. Rather there are shades of
difference”(133)
● “Labelling someone as a man or woman is a social decision. We may use scientific knowledge to
help up make the decision but only our beliefs about gender - not secure - can define sex”(133)
● Early sexologists & feminist distinguished….cont.
● Foucault - Capitalism needed methods to control the “insertion of bodies into the machinery of
production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes”(136)
● Disciplines of sciences regulated the body, and the body….cont.
● Reason/Nature, Male/Female, Mind/BOdy, Master/Slave, Civilized/Primitive, Self/Other,
Sex/Gender….cont.
● Every time we try to return to the body as something that exists prior to socialization, prior to
discourse about male and female, Butler….cont.
● Unlike Butler, “Grosz believes that biological instinct or drive provide a kind of raw material
for….cont.

Beyond Dualism

● “Humans are biological and thus in some sense natural beings and social and in some sense
artificial - or, if you will, constructed entities” (139)
 ● Developmental systems theory (DST) - denies that there are fundamentally two different
processes - nature and nurture. Example: the goat born with no front legs, and developed an
S-shaped spine, suggesting neither its genes or its environment determined it’s anatomy, but only
the ensemble had such power.
● Another example: neuroscientist LaVay reported that the brain stucture of gay and heterosexual
men differed (result was fired stormed).

Science and Colonialism

● Colonialism: The conquest ….cont.

Making “Race”

● “Race” is not natural but socially & historically constructed with very real effects
● Ideas about “race” emerged during colonialism as a way of ….cont.

Ten things everyone should know about race

1. Race is a modern ideas

2. Race has no genetic basis
3. Human subspecies don’t exist
4. Skin colour really is only skin deep
5. Most variation is within, not between “races”
6. Slavery predates race
7. Race and freedom evolved together
8. Race justified social inequalities as natural
9. Race isn’t biological, but racism is still real
10. Colonialism will not end racism

The Social Construction Approach II: Understanding Socialization and

Culture

Freaks and Queers by Eli Clare

● “the freak show tells us the story of an elaborate and calculated social constructions that utilized
performance and fabrication as well as deeply held cultural beliefs. At the center of this
construction was the showman, who, using costuming, staging, elaborate fictional histories,
marketing, and choreography, turned people from four groups into freaks” (149):

● “nature did not make them freaks...an exaggerated divide between normal and Other” made them
freaks, rubes vs. freaks. (150)
● “The end of the freak show meant the end of a particular type of employment for people who had
worked as freaks...But for disabled people – both people of color and white people- the end of the
 freak show almost guaranteed unemployment, disability often being codified into law as the
inability to work.” (158)

X: A Fabulous Child’s Story by Lois Gould

The story of Baby X is about an experiment, about raising a child without a gender or sex, is it is a Baby
X. The day the Jones brought their baby home: “It’s an X”.
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