Arbitrary Marks

I am working on a paper having to do with (in part) Haslanger’s social constructionist analysis of gender, but I am also reading Wittgenstein for class. It was a toss-up between the two authors for today’s post, although I think there are clear affinities between their projects. Here’s a chunk from Haslanger’s paper, “What Good [...]

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tries to isolate innate characteristics of the brains of homosexual men and women. Earlier studies have focused on parts of the brain which are more or less plastic–that is, they have to do with perception or reproduction, behaviors that may reinforce structural [...]

After I published (then re-published) my earlier post on gender and reduction, I had a few thoughts. So, here they are, in no particular order:

Zucker’s reduction of gender to biology also requires another step, which is that certain behaviors are appropriate to biological givens–i.e. GI Joes to boys and Barbie Dolls to girls. That, or [...]

If you haven’t listened to the NPR story about two boys who feel like girls and whose parents are responding in divergent ways, go do it now. Forget Thomas Beatie and the hype over a pregnant man and instead consider the choices families must make when their child ask to play with ther opposite-sex sibling’s [...]

How do you distinguish the gender of these two individuals on the cover of April’s J Crew catalog? What visual cues differentiate “masculine” and “feminine”, despite the similar dress style (tie, khakis, blue shirt, etc)?
In 1978, Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna wrote a book, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach that attempted to answer this [...]

For anyone who hasn’t heard the news, a transman named Thomas Beatie is pregnant. I read about the news first in The Advocate, but it seems the story has spread to mainstream media, including Oprah. I’ve watched some clips from MSNBC and other news sources where anchors have made fun of the situation, remarking [...]

This looks to be an interesting book: Sexual Fluidity. “Lisa Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.” A key phrase is “some women”, and the question is [...]

Suppose it were shown that pharmaceuticals in our drinking water were responsible for increasing numbers of individuals with body dysphoria, or transgenderism. What would that, if anything, say about how we ought to value the phenomenon? Should it change how transgender individuals should perceive themselves? How we should treat them?
(For fuller context and the reason [...]

So I’ve been reading Pat Califa’s Sex Changes and came across a section that deals with the history of transgender people in native tribes. Califa is leery of generalizations about the purportedly “liberated” values among Native American society, as one example. He’s* also concerned about the assumption (that Leslie Feinberg makes) that matriarchal property transmission and food production meant a time of women’s rights.

Here are a few points worth considering when looking at the berdaches and other “third-gender” persons and women’s status in indigenous societies:

Among the many books I pick up during my bus commutes, I’ve been slowly working on Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge and just recently finished Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors. One of the questions that has concerned me, personally and philosophically, is how to understand the role of history and cultural assumptions in how we [...]