Gender - Carol Rambo



Gender and Race

Typical contrast when considering this topic

Sex- Biological status, occurs at conception.

Gender- status one is socialized into.

I am tempted to even debate this! That sex is not biological, but socially constructed as well. What about the baby that is born with ambiguous genetalia? The underformed penis which is wacked off and boom! It’s a Girl! It is so important to be one gender or the other, we are willing to put our child through hormones and the knife so that they will conform?

Like Foucault shared with us, can we say that Gender is a Discourse? Is there a “technology” surrounding Gender? Medical, psychological. Gender, it can be argued, is a way that culture reaches up inside us and subordinates us.

Gender identity- collection of characteristics that identifies a person as a specific gender. Varies from culture to culture.

Gender roles- activities and attitudes generally associated with one gender or the other.

If you do not conform to your gender role, what do we say about you?

Seems gay!

But what does Gender identity have to do with sexual orientation. Does it predict sexual preference? No.

Quick note—homophobia serves as a tool, a discourse, which serves to keep people in conformity with their gender role proscriptions. How is this done?

Make choices about what we will and won’t do based on our ideas of “would that seem gay or not?” Limits our possibilities as people.

Black Board exercise.

Do for race too?

So can we say there is also such a thing as:

Racial identity—collection of characteristics that identifies a person as one race or another. Varies from culture to culture.

Deseree Robertson—Grad student here doing some research on multi-racial identity. Race becomes problematic in this culture if you don’t identify as one or the other.

McRoy- racial identity refers to “one’s self-perception and sense of belonging to a particular group…including not only how one describes and defines oneself, but also how one distinguishes oneself from members of other ethnic groups”

Is there a biological component to race?

Hypodescent, which emerged in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, usually refers to the one-drop rule (if you are 1/16th of that race, other than white, you are that race.) It issues mixed race individuals an “enforced choice of an African American Identity” and was reinforced by the desire to maintain not only white privilege, but also white racial and cultural purity (Debose and Winters, 2002). Between the years of 1905 and 1925, mass projections of the patholization of mixed-race created devastating consequences on biracial people:

“Mixed-race families themselves developed “an artificially exaggerated animus against interracial union,” as Corline Bond Day found, especially between white men and light-skinned Negro women. A growing number of Americans of mixed race began to abandon their claims to a “third space,” and to identify themselves as Negroes…During the early twentieth century, Afro-Americans themselves internalized the “One Drop” rule” (Pabst, 2003).

A paradox resides within the one-drop rule, within the notion that black/white combination equals black and if one admits to or publicizes having racially distinct parentage, one is both mixed and black. Biracial people’s social location is often between both spheres of mixedness and blackness. Robert J. C. Young validates this paradox with his comments on racial difference in the nineteenth century, which “was constructed not only according to a fundamental binary division between black and white, but also through evolutionary social anthropology’s historicized version of the Chain of Being. Thus racialism operated both according to the same-other model and through the “computation of normalites” and “degrees of deviance” from the white norm…But none of these was so demonized as those of mixed race”

Like Foucault shared with us, can we say that Race is a Discourse? Is there a “technology” surrounding Race? Race, it can be argued, is a way that culture reaches up inside us and subordinates us.

Both ideas, gender and race, can be seen as meta-narratives which have outlived their usefulness.

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