Posts Tagged: social constructivism

Trivial Pursuit: Sexuality and American Culture Edition For my creative project, I chose to create a board game – Trivial Pursuit: Sexuality and American Culture Edition. Initially, my intent was to create a game that would test the knowledge our class gained over the course of the semester in a fun, nontraditional way. However, I […]

“Can transvestites be cured?” asked Time in an article reporting on Christine Jorgensen (Peiss, 375). If the article were about Cal, perhaps the question asked would be: Can hermaphrodites be cured? Within these questions lies the assumption that these things – these genders – need to be cured. “In some cases of transvestitism, as in […]

One time, a professor told us about a series of ten confirmed genders that lie on a spectrum between “male” and “female.”  This is per the scarce liberal arms of the scientia sexualis establishment.  In the years since I acquired this information, I have hazily wondered why there are only restrooms designated for two genders.  […]

Middlesex has got to be the best book to end our semester. Not only was it actually written fairly recently (to my great surprise; the author’s style made me think the book was written in the ’80s), but the book touches on so many topics we discussed: The pros and cons of scientia sexualis; constructs […]

Or You Can Just Blame Your Mother… The Alfred Kinsey and US Senate reading this week seem the paramount example of scientia sexualis; numbers, facts, and (false) theories predominate in both pieces. But what interested me the most was the “blame game.” According to Kinsey, “disapproval of heterosexual coitus…before marriage is often an important factor […]

The speech was fun, informative — entertaining, too, because of all those film clips. It’s about time I become properly addicted to a TV show, and I think that show will be True Blood. I’m off to get a Netflix account. But before I lose myself in the joys of out-of-the-coffin vampires, a few of […]

Intellectual or Moral (But Never Both) William Alcott’s suggestions for young women to avoid ­­­­­nymphomania seemed to emphasize cooling – not surprising, since both sexual desire or passion and the Devil are associated with heat and fire. But he also quoted a writer who said “the reading of lascivious and impassioned works, viewing voluptuous painting, […]

Essentialism vs. Social Constructivism (This picture isn’t mine, credit and rights belong to Green Eyed Grin. Just stumbled upon this.)

Truth and Sexuality The central question of Weeks and Norton’s essays is: Is sexuality socially constructed? (This is similar to a topic we were discussing in class last week, the social construction of the “inner self”). “Essentialism” was used to describe the idea that Norton supported, that there is a “transhistorical core of desire” as […]

The two essays we read for this week from Kathy Peiss’s book, by Weeks and Norton respectively, seem to be a case of social constructivism versus essentialism. Weeks argues that sexuality – not the less ambiguous word “sex” – is not something natural, a biological function to be examined by scientists (as Foucault’s scientia sexualis, […]