PSY BEH 104S Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Manifest Destiny, Binary Opposition, Biopower
14 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
No meaning is ever fixed, they are always dependent on cultural and linguistical context. Gender: a system for assigning masculine and feminine characteristics to bodies, objects, identities, attitudes, activities, varies over time and locations, often presumed to be tied to biological elements. Sex: system for categorizing living things into male and female, the biological characteristics and properties. Sexuality: related to desire, orientation, and identity, sexual mode: how you want to have sex, sexual object: who or what you want to have sex with. These terms are related to one another because they are all classification systems that create distinctions in power. They are all used to target people, place them into groups, and focus on how to use power relations to treat them. They are distinct from one another because gender is more social, sex is more biological, and sexuality is more behavioral. Tied into biological determinism, where biology determines destiny and your inferior/superior status in society.
