ANT276 Midterm 2 Flashcards
michael warner
Things are queered when the norm is resisted
Krafft-Ebing
- Sexual identity is generally assumed to be based on your biology
- Who and what you are attracted to made you a certain type of person
Sigmund Freud
- The purpose of sexual behavior is pleasure and not procreation (major shift)
- Sexuality is a consequence of development → sexual behavior is then fixed into adulthood
Masters and Johnson 1950s-60s
- Performed “scientific” studies to understand the physiology of sex
- Focused on heterosexual activity and on intercourse as the norm for achieving orgasm
- Deviations from this model led to ideas of sexual dysfunction and pathologies
Existentialists
- A person who claims a fundamental identity is in bad faith, for they deny their choice and freedom to be that particular way
- Denies biological determinism and social essentialism
- Deny that people are born with a certain identity or that they develop one from childhood
Jean-Paul Sartre
A waiter is not a waiter but is simply BEING a waiter
Simone de Beauvoir
- Freedoms can be limited and are experienced differently by people
- Woman deny their freedom to focus on being “for others” (being dainty)
- Men are encouraged to embrace their freedom
Alfred Kinsey
- Viewed sex as a benign behavior, something people should be open about
- Published research showing high frequency of “abnormal” sexual behavior and attraction
- People had at least some overt same-fender experience to orgasm and many more experienced some degree of same-gender attraction
- The kinsey scale → a spectrum between heterosexuality and homosexuality rather than there being a binary
- Failed to include genders other than female and male
Sandra Bern
- Androgynous Theory: rigid gender roles were psychologically unhealthy
- Gender roles are internalized by children
- Gender is not a useful way of categorizing people and we should move away from it
Audre Lorde
- Women = white
- Black women = other
Bell Hooks
Marginality is a place of resistance while holding on to our humanity and compassion
Adrienne Rich
All forms of sexuality should be examined, including the normative ones
Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence
Heterosexuality is easily threatened
The lesbian continuum should capture bonds between all types of women (not just sexual)
Suggests that all man-woman relationships are coercive (in a patriarchal society, men force women to be straight)
Oppresses gay men & other marginalized sexualities
If heterosexuality was so natural, it wouldnt feel so threatened by alternatives
Monique Wittig
“The straight mind” captures how heterosexuality is woven into the way we think/are
So only non-heterosexuals ask themselves why they are the way they are
Relationships between men and women are obligatory
Lesbians are not women (women only make sense in a heterosexual world)
Suggests there are only to political responses to the straight mind: total conformity or radical revolution
Kimberle Crenshaw
- Demarginilizing the intersection of race and sex
- Race, gender, sexuality, class, etc cannot be regarded separately from all others
Work together always
Gayle Rubin
Sex wars (sex positive & sex negative feminists)
Book called “thinking sex”
Argued against the oppression of sex workers, sadomasochists, trans, gay, and lesbians
Six ideologies operate together to constrain us: sexual essentialism, sex negativity, importance of sexual behavior, sex hierarchy, domino theory of sexual peril, and the lack of understanding that sexual variation can be benign
Inner limits = good
Outer limits = bad
Assimilationist movement → attempts to move into the charmed area of the sex hierarchy
These movements still leave the marginalized to be oppressed → instead, the hierarchy should be undone
