feminism

My thoughts on sex and gender have been shifting throughout this course. When Paul Grobstein came to speak, I entered and left the classroom with the deep-set belief that there are two sexes, and two only. After thinking about it further, I’ve pondered about this idea, toying with the notion that perhaps there can be more than two sexes. Already I agree with the theory that gender is social and not always dependent on sex. Transgendered individuals struggle so much to switch genders that there must be some internal force pushing them to a gender different from their sex. No one would go through the ordeal of transitioning if there was no strong drive to do so, and therefore I must view sex and gender as occasionally independent.

In their article, “Toward a Theory of Gender,” Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna urge us to believe that gender is primarily “socially constructed” as opposed to a natural, biological fact. In their 20 questions-like game employed to figure out what constitutes gender, Kessler and McKenna find that “certain information (biological and physical) is seen as more important than other information (role behavior)” in the process of gender attribution. More specifically, knowledge of which genitals the person has always constitutes the gender of that person. Moreover, once that gender attribution is made, it is the umbrella through which to observe

All quotes are from Chapter 7 of Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse: Occupation/Collaboration except for the quote from Catharine MacKinnon

Reading—Not Writing—the Patriarchy: Limits of Language in Eugenides and Cixous

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Isaiah Berlin in his essay “The Sense of Reality” claims that novelists are better able than scientists to delve beneath the surface of human consciousness and private feelings. Because novelists seek understanding rather than knowledge, they are able to deal with particulars instead of searching for universals and larger systems. I think Grobstein’s lecture walked this line carefully, between avoiding generalizations and attempting to share facts with our class. Rather than stating a definition of sex and gender (as many former professors and high school teachers have done to us – “sex is the bits. Gender is

I am interested in the tension in Woolf’s letters between positions of insider and outsider status in society. On the one hand, Woolf points out that women (or, as she is very explicit to specify: “daughters of educated men”) are less able to create change because they do not hold the traditional positions of power in society. She writes, “All the weapons with which an educated man can enforce his opinion are either beyond our grasp or so nearly beyond it that even if we used them we could scarcely inflict one scratch” (18). Yet, on the other hand, Woolf also suggests that it is this very outsider status that allows these women to effect more meaningful change. “We believe that we can help you most effectively by