Gender

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Conventional Approaches:

Gender - socially constructed

Social and cultural features that are associated with sexual categories:

- Identities: self-consumption & society

- Values: eg aggression

- Norms: social expectations in employment, education, child care, etc.

Sex - Biological, Secondary identities - natural

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Sex & Gender - (More Complicated than this)

Sex is understood through cultural lenses

Gender performance is inseparable from the body

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Olympics - woman or man

- identified woman

- but have Y chromosome (gender determination test)

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Performing Sex and Gender

- Gender: a type of performance

- Performativity: Performances of gendered behavior reproduce gender categories

- Sex & Gender: Being constituted through particular acts of performances

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“Third Gender”?- complicated, cannot generalize

- eg Born as a man, but social role as a woman, etc.

- Alternatives to two-gender system, which is not culturally universal

- Native American “two spirit”?- may have unique social roles (eg ceremony)

- South Asian “hijra:”?eunuchs, intersex people, and transgender people

(India: legally recognized Hijra.)

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Sexuality - change through time

Not restricted to male-female sex

Same-sax intercourse exist in all societies

Categories for understanding human sexual practices are socially constructed

Homosexual - Lesbian, Gay, etc.

Medical science description of sexuality can shape people’s understand of it:

Eg The Kinsey scale, also called the Heterosexual–Homosexual Rating Scale, is used in research to describe a person's sexual orientation based on one's experience or response at a given time. The scale typically ranges from 0, meaning exclusively heterosexual, to a 6, meaning exclusively homosexual.

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Medicalization

The process of defining of a condition as a disease, or in need of medical surveillance - defining a part of social reality as belonging to medical systems - defining human behaviors / experiences as medical issues.

Examples include diagnosis (of illness - disease), the creation of new diagnostic categories, or the medical management (of experiences) of death.

Positive aspects: Make available for medical intervention - naming it as medical issues to be able to intervene upon;

Negative aspects: Medicalization Critique - reinforce social norms (defining what is healthy / normal), social power; Depoliticizing - disease, narrows social factors, Medicalization - a narrow, curative approach

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Experience for intersex people:

Relatively recently that medicine has gained the authority to assign gender

In early modern period, courts had the power to define gender identity

Modern biology redefined “hermaphrodites”?as “intersexuals.”?Result from Medicalization, greater authority of medical sciences.