Thursday, May 27, 2010

unedited intro!

Gender and sexualities are fluid, ambiguous and constantly change through time. In this regard, gender and sexual stereotypes are fast becoming obsolete.


It is difficult to give only one definition of gender and sexuality. The varied discourses arise because of different social, cultural and political contexts. Its ambiguous nature is due to fluidity of time and the communication between cultures and sub-cultures in many spaces.



The biological model is the default model for many western societies, but is becoming increasingly outdated. The biological model determines that their are two sexes, male and female, which informs two genders of man and woman and their characteristics of respective masculinity and femininity.


Freud’s model centres around the oedipal stage, where a girl sees a mother and herself without phallic power and finds this power through male relationships. The boy sees the mother and father and feels a threat of castration, believing the mother can destroy his phallic power so represses his love for her and the desire is transferred to other women. Freud explains female homosexuality as a refusal to accept castration and male castration as identifying with the mother instead of the father.


The socialisation theory, including feminist theory, explains how genders and sexualities are socially constructed and informed by culture. The punishment/reward conditioning system helps to shape genders, and desires are learnt.


Finally, the queer theory. Queer theorists believe that gender and sexualities are undefinable and there are multiple. They wish to prevent totalising labels and focus more on subjectivity.


Emma will speak first about marriage and family, the gender roles they produce and sexualities they exclude.

Dorothy will speak about something

April will speak about the third gender or something

And finally, Steff will speak about the relationship between religion and sexuality or something

No comments:

Post a Comment