ANT215H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Genderqueer, Jordan Peterson, Gamete
WEEK 11: BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY
Ainsworth
• male and female comprise a basic opposition is not supported by modern science
• sex cannot be totally understood as a basic opposition
Simone de Beauvoir
• the way sex is manifested in humans is not universal
• we should not view them as oppositions.
• it is a linguistic construction and male vs. female rooted in language
• i.e. Michael and Michaela
• sex is not simply determined by chromosomes alone
• take into account anatomy, gonads, gamete, and genetics
• complications: Microchimaerism, CAIS, CAH
Reilly-Cooper
• sex (biological) vs. gender (social)
• 2 ways of looking at sex:
• radical feminist view:
• gender is something external and imposed by society at birth based on their gender.
sex has nothing to do with your moral role as a human being. depiction of
gender
• pervasive gender socialization through books and toys. conveys expectations about
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who that person is
• queer feminist view
• gender is entirely constructed, but also reject the radical feminist analysis that it is
inherently hierarchical with two positions
• what makes the operation of gender oppressive is not that it is socially constructed
and coercively imposed: rather, the problem is the prevalence of the belief that
there are only two genders
• society refuses to recognizes the actual gender of the person if it doesn't match
their biology/appearance
Gender identity: a person's innate, deeply felt psychological identification as a man, woman
or another gender, which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned to them at birth
Political implications
radical feminist: abolish gender discrimination and gender as a system of hierarchal values
that advantages men over women. disrupt gender and say it is not really relevant and get rid
of it altogether
queer feminist: recognize the diverse way that gender manifests. persons cannot be
categorized as just male or female
Reilly-Cooper seems to suggest that the queer feminist view:
1) Plays into or accepts widely held stereotypes of gender
2) Links gender to something internal, something innate (though this something frequently
does not align with sex assigned at birth).
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