SOCI 365 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Queer Theory, Transsexual, Social Constructionism
5 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Lecture 20 – March 13th
Transgender Identity and Health
• Transgender
o Umbrella term: lots of range of possible identities, bodies, behaviors,
preferences
o Encompassing
▪ Transsexual
▪ Transvestite
▪ Transgender
▪ Gender queer
o Identification and expression as fluid, variable, shifting
• Transvestite, transsexual, intersexual
o Transvestite
▪ Early 20th century
▪ Eccentricity/preference/disorder? (fetishized)
• Gender presentation as non-binarized
o Transsexual
▪ Medicalized as gender identity disorder
▪ Disorder in DSM—and treatment?
▪ Transsexualism (ism often means its pathologized)
▪ Shift from birth sex assignment to transition from one sex to another
o Intersexual
▪ Disorder?
▪ Sex characteristics—inherited superficial sex characteristics, often
genitalia
▪ Natural variation?
• General term used for a variety of conditions in which a person
is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesnt
seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male
• Transgender Identity and Queer theory
o Social constructionism
▪ Radical politics of difference
o Post structural theory
▪ Identities as categories of knowledge
o Queer theory
▪ Study of those knowledges and social practices that organize
society as a whole by sexualizing- hetero-sexualizing or homo-
sexualizing- bodies, desires, acts, identities, social relations,
knowledge, culture, social institutions
o Central challenge of our queer theory
▪ Specific rejection of the ideas of a unified (homo)sexual subject
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