Precarious, Performative, Playful, Potential...Perspectives!

I was a patient escort for Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania (Westchester) the summer after my freshman year of college, and therefore related on a very personal level to one of the videos we watched for class this week. I'm from Massachusetts, where buffer zones are the law, so protestors cannot be within 35 feet of a family planning clinic. The situation at PPSP therefore shocked me. In the attached image, there is a white line in the lower-left hand corner. This was the line that protestors could not cross. It was literally a foot from the back of where the cars would pull in. As a result, when we walked in patients (most of whom were visiting Planned Parenthood for birth control, STD testing, or other preventive services), we would end up standing several feet from protestors screaming at us and the patients. Planned Parenthood has a non-engagement policy, so we were not to look at the protestors in the eye, nor respond to them, nor provoke them in any ways. I witnessed first-hand the racist tactics the protestors used to try to reach out to the patients: if someone looked remotely Hispanic, they would shout in broken Spanish ("el aborto mata!") African-Americans who entered the clinic were told that Planned Parenthood was conducting a Holocaust against black babies, specifically targeting black mothers.

Alison DiLaurentis

(ABC Family)

Dear boys, girls, and those of you who just aren’t quite sure yet (because that is totally cool too),

            For many of you, this is a confusing time. Things are growing in places where you aren’t sure if they are supposed to be growing, new places might develop novel smells, and you might start to feel differently. If any of these things apply to you, or if none of these things apply to you, you are still normal. Every body goes through different changes at different speeds and in completely different orders. So if your best friend is growing armpit hair, but you haven’t reached that point yet, don’t worry – we all catch up in the end! I am writing to you, middle-schoolers, because this time can be a bit scary; there are a lot of changes that you can expect in the next couple of years, and a lot of information out there, both true and false, so a quick guide to the next few years seems like a pretty good resource for you right about now. Read on to learn about what makes boys and girls different biologically, some of the changes that you can expect to your body during puberty, how babies are made, and a quick peek at the different categorizations of gender!

Let’s start from the very beginning. How did we get here and what exactly makes girls different from boys?

Yes, I do realize that Kaye had mentioned in class that we were going to look at sex and gender in different regions but as I read this column (published in The Standard Hong Kong), I realized just how important it is for us, as students of gender and sexuality studies, to really look further into the intersections between race and gender.

http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?we_cat=5&art_id=115956&sid=33969693&con_type=1&d_str=20111012&fc=1

When we make assumptions about genders in general, we tend to forget that not all societies comply with what our notions of what 'feminine' or 'masculine' are. In this article, Nury Vittachi, attempts to create a more complex way of classifying men. While I don't really agree with some of the things that he is saying (the column is supposed to be tongue in cheek afterall), I sort of see the point about the limitations of western concepts of masculinity and femininity. Thus, I think it is important to look more at gender constructs in different societies rather than to apply our "own" (or the American points of reference) to other societies. 

I was glad to see that Anne had posted the Pseudoscience of Same-Sex Schooling study published in Science magazine. (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6050/1706) Though I am not a Bryn Mawr student, I did go to an all girl's middle school, and while reading "The He Hormone" I found myself reflecting on the experience. I think that there is a value in same-sex education that Pseudoscience overlooks. The study begins its argument by pointing out that the test scores of girls in a SS environment were much less impressive when one took into account their elevated performance prior to entering the school. While this may seem like a mildly interesting statistic, I felt that it missed the point of Same Sex education. I think that a lot of what SS institutions strive to address is less tangible (and perhaps less statistically testable) than test scores. Though I do remember middle school as feeling academically challenging, I think the real value of the experience came from being in an academic environment during those awkward and tumultuous middle-school years that allowed me to behave as a student without being concerned with the gender dynamics at play. I think McAuliffe alludes to this when she quotes the Bryn Mawr grad who said that "I could concentrate on learning instead of being the representative of a gender. Gender became irrelevant instead of being something that defined me." I have no way of knowing how I would be different as a student or a person had I not gone to an all girls middle school.

I work at the Women’s Center on Haverford’s campus, and we deal with a host of issues relating to sexuality. While I was at work this week, a male friend of mine came into the center, and somehow our conversation turned to the subject of how the issue of sexual assault is presented to freshmen during Customs week. While I admitted that I didn’t really remember the specifics of the talk that was given during my own freshman orientation, he told me he had been shocked by the emphasis he felt the campus put on the idea that when the issue of consent is in question, men are always to blame, and that and it is entirely the male partner’s responsibility to halt the encounter, particularly if alcohol is involved. He stressed to me how scared and helpless he felt at the implication that simply by being male and pursuing a sexual encounter he could unintentionally assault someone.

"Most striking is McFadden's admission that his primary theory relies on evidence that is largely circumstantial" (2008, 309). Bonnie Spanier and Jessica Horowitz

     This reminded me a lot of the discussion we had in class about the Biology textbook chapters and the validity of the text based on the author's status at a University and the fact that Kaye had picked the text. Although we seem to have full-diclosure here I am left feeling unamused that such serious research would be conducted from a loose evidentiary base.

"After acknowledging the possibility that there may, in fact, be no common underlying cause for all the different observations, McFadden reminds the reader that until the answer is found "science dictates that one tries to find the simplest possible explanation for as many facts as possible, and the prenatal-androgen-exposure explanation appears to do the job' (2008, 318). Bonnie Spanier and Jessica Horowitz

Again, this is extremely unsettling to me, as an individual I prefer the rational and logic. However, this sounds like more of a wild goose chase to me. Is it really prudent to conduct research simply searchng for the simplest possible explanation? As we have learned, when is it ever simle when it comes to something as complex, individualized and intimate as someone's sexuality and gender?

"Colorblind" - Counting Crows

One of the things I most enjoy about our class is the variance in perspective that comes from engaging with individuals who study in alternating areas. I, for example, am an English and Creative Writing student; other in our class may be studying Biology, History of Art, Psychology, or another area different than my own.  In Rebecca Jordan-Young’s selection Brain Storm, she describes the term network and how it is used to “describe groups of connected people, and in science studies especially to describe how personal and professional connections among scientists shape the scientific knowledge they produce” (Jordan-Young 8).  We may all be pursuing different areas of academia, but this class is our common link. By meeting each week to discuss Perspectives on Gender, we become a part of a network.

I was particularly intrigued by Jordan-Young’s perception of sex, gender, and sexuality as a three-ply yarn. They are all distinct strands and alone are functional; however, they may be wound together in the formation of a new entity that may be slightly “fuzzy around the edges.” This ties back into the idea of network, of individual people or thoughts that are connected through a commonality. But what do we call this newly formed three-strand yarn that is sex, gender, and sexuality? Do we even need to give it a name?

Starting out reading the preface for “Brain Storm” I expected to find out what some common differences are between brain structuring is between people who identify as different genders. As we saw from our readings last week, some women have equal levels of testosterone as men or sometimes even higher levels, so if hormone levels currently present in the brain doesn’t account for gender differences, it makes sense to me that it would be some structural wiring in the brain. Instead I found myself reading about case after case, generalization after generalization, being torn apart. Good points were brought up in both “Brain Storm” (how we gather information, quasi experiments, professional and academic differences/similarities, socialization vs. biology, sex vs. gender) and the critique “Looking for Difference?” (group differences vs. individual differences, assuming universal behavior, heterosexism as the norm, decreased masculinity of gay men, the rigidity of some scientists, inability to reconsider a better explanation for results). However I found myself disappointed at the end of the readings because I just didn’t come away with what I expected to.

Something that particularly resounded with me was on page 271 of “Brain Storm” with the summary:

“The three key concepts are the inseparability of experience and heredity, the importance of random events, and the fact that development is a lifelong process. Outcomes in the cognitive domain, in particular, are always contingent, rather than ultimate.”