SOC633 FINAL Flashcards
Gleeson: Individual agency and trans people
taking control of the way you are perceived. “Trans people struggle with mastering the way they, in particular, will be perceived, and mastery over this moment of encounter (the aleatory exchange) through exercises, affectations, and physical changes is the focus of transitioning.” (Gleeson)
Gleeson: passing and trans people
Orientation to cis majority. “Those undergoing transition must prepare themselves for encounters with strangers, through whatever changes are required to get them ‘read’ correctly.” (Gleeson)
Social Reproduction
the unpaid labour of staying alive
Dispossession
no access to means of life
Wage labour
sell capacity to work. unpaid and poorly paid labour process – sustain life.
Divisions of labour
gendered and racialized. Unpaid reproductive labour = women
Poorly paid reproductive labour = racialized women
Obstacles for trans people – paid labour
getting and sustaining employment. Exclusion from households of origin causes them to need to find employment to survive.
Due to discrimination they disproportionately end up unhoused and turn to sex trade work to survive.
Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR)
Revolutionary moment – Black Power, Gay Liberation, feminism, anti-war, student, labour activism, anti-poverty organizing
Revolution – thorough-going transformation, eliminating key systems of rule (e.g. capitalism)
VS.
Reform – making improvement within the limits of the current system
Crenshaw and politicization
In turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women.
For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class.
Consent and contract
Things turned into property – exchanged on market
Exchange as transactional – governed by contract
contract – voluntary, between formally equal partners
based on the formal equality of parties as buyers and sellers, despite substantive inequalities based on age, gender, racialization, colonial or migration status, categorization as disabled, class and/or sexuality
labour contract
Sell our capacity to work
In exchange for a wage
Formal equality/substantive inequality – compelled to sell capacity to work to earn survival.
Exploitation built into labour contract – employer profits
Sexuality and “survival projects”
Organize our lives to meet our wants and needs in the context of dominant social relations.
Desexualized aging
Senior sexuality as unproductive, once they age out of productivity, they are isolated and outcasted which causes lonliness
Social reproduction and responsibilities
Adulthood as time of caregiving and paid labour - peak responsibilities
Sexuality aligned with productivity (production/reproduction) normalized, that does not align is stigmatized, regulated
Organize sexuality around survival projects (FERGUSON + MCNALLY)
Ferguson and McNally describe as, “the inner connections of household, neighbourhood and community activities with the monetized social activities (predominantly wage-labour) necessary to market-dependent reproduction, wherein food, housing, transportation, clothing and so on must be purchased as commodities.”
Separation of work from sexuality (FREUD)
Freud argued that sexual repression was necessary to orient life energy productively, as paid work was powered by life-energy redirected from the sexual sphere: “civilization is obeying the laws of economic necessity, since a large part of the psychical energy which it uses for its own purposes has to be withdrawn from sexuality.”
Basically, sexuality needs to be repressed in order to be productive in work.
confinement of sexuality (MARCUSE)
Marcuse – repression of sexuality is “enforced by the need for sustaining a large quantum of energy and time for non-gratifying labour, perpetuating the body’s desexualization to make the organism into a subject-object of socially useful performances.”
Marine Cooks and Stewards Union
The union, after long internal struggles which vitalized the rank and file and transformed practices, took up the fight for justice for queer and racialized crew members on passenger liners, which meant among other factors overcoming a history of racist exclusion.
The organization of work and life for crew on these passenger liners created possibilities for particular expressions of queer life, including political articulation in ways that were relatively rare in that time period.
Queer work (BERUBE)
divisions of labour, stewards jobs tended to be associated with particular kinds of workers. Bérubé noted most steward work was “stereotyped as the “women’s work” or “colored work” — the personal service and the housekeeping.” Particular areas of this work were associated with queer workers, “Some stewards’ jobs are also stereotyped as “queer work” — activities that gay men are supposed to be especially good at… pastry chefs, waiters, bedroom stewards, pursers, wine stewards, florists, hairdressers, and telephone operators.”
Legality and worker protection
Criminalization doesn’t help sex workers – makes them vulnerable. Worker rights and safer sex – increasing agency. Safer sex, not just knowledge but the ability to implement (vs client preference)
Impossibility of consent in sex work (FARELY)
The silence of most of those in prostitution is a result of intimidation, terror, sexual violence, and shame. Their silence, like the silence of battered women, should not be misinterpreted, ever, as their consent to prostitution.
Pros of porn (BERG)
make more money in less time and feel authentically good.
Cons of porn
great deal of work to keep body marketable (unpaid labour). Pleasureless
