The Language of Sex (Weeks chpt 1) Flashcards
Traditionally who could legitimately speak of sexuality and the body?
- churches and states
- priests and politicians
- the medical profession
- others – poets, novelists, preachers, reformers, activists seeking space where they could
Give examples of who nowadays speak of sexuality?
- globalized media: television, documentaries, ads
- cyber space: social networks, dating apps, blods, dark web
- intimacies of everyday life
Who has sexuality become the focus of fierece ethical and moral debate of?
- transitonal moralists vs progressive reformists
- high preists of sexual restraint vs advocated of sexual freedom
- defenders of male privelidge vs those who challenge it
- forces of moral regulation (traditional values) vs radical sexual opposition (and vs themselves)
what is the culture wars values of new conservative forces (New Right, the Moral Majority, the Christain Right)?
- fierce affirmation of the sancitity of family life
- hostility towards homosexualtiy, sexual diverstiy, and gender ambiguity
- strong reassertion of traditional demarcations between the sexes
where do fundamentalists focus their efforts on sexuality? what is it a response to?
want to point out the failures of the present and want to reconstruct neo-traditional societies: riigid distinctions between men and women, the harsh punishment of sexual transgressors, rejection of Western sexularism
response to uncertainty and ambuiguity of sex and sexualtiy – searches for meaning and clarity in a conflicted workd
what are some positives to take from the fact that there are fundamentalists who focus on reconstructing neo-traditionalism?
- compliment to the individuals across the globe who in their own ways have engaged in “everyday experiments” in living to help transofrm the ways in which sexuality is lived
- testimony of sucess of second-wave feminism, LGBTQ+ movements, and interational campaigns for sexual and reproductive rights challenging “traditional values”
What is ‘global sex?’
the ground rules of the debates over sezuality and gender are no longer a peculiar obsession of the West but of real concern in the Global South
What assumption about sexuality is deeply embedded in perhaps all cultures but strongly in the West?
that sexuality is the most spontaneously natural thing about us – the basis for some of our most passionate feelings and commitments, our identities, sense of self, as men and women, as heterosexual and homosexual, normal and abnormal, natural or unnatural, straight or queer
How has Foucault described what sex is to us?
“the truth of our being”
Traditioanlly what is “natural” sex and what would therby be “unnatural sex”?
what takes place with members of the “opposite sex” –> unnatural = between people of the “same sex”
What does the fact that “sex” can refer to an act and to a category of person, alert us to?
assume an intimate connection between the fact of being biologically male or femal and the correct form of erotic form and gender identitiy
what does “sexuality” mean? what did it change to (ish)?
personalized sexual feelings that distinguish one person from another (my sexuality) + mysterious essence that atttracts us to each other –> sexuality as a continent of knowledge, culture, beliefs, practices, identitities and social and political concern
what has caused the changes of who’s the authority on sex and what sex/sexuality mean?
- developments of psychology in 19th century – challenges essentialism, unsettles the solidity of our identities
- new forms of social and cultureal history – reopen the past and reinterperate
- individuals
- social movement
the social process through which the changes of meaning of “sex” and “sexuality” are complex, but what are three implications are clear?
- continuing assumption of a polarization between the sexes – battle of the sexes, site of conflict
- belief that “sex” is an overpowering natural force mysteriously located in the genitals that bridges the divide between the sexes
- sexual hierarchy pyramid stretching downwards from: nature-endowed correctness of heterosexulatiy to “the perverse”/deviant practices
what is sexology?
the science of desire – discover the true meaning of sex by exploring its various guises: infantile sexuality, relations between the sexes, influence of “germ plasm”, hormones and chromosomes and gene, the nature of “sexual instinct”, and the nature and causes of sexual perversions
