Posts Tagged: essentialism

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 […]

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 […]

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

The beauty of a liberal arts degree is seen when two seemingly unrelated subjects provide an understanding of each other.  For example, a simple fact about crystal growth may provide clarity on the topic of sexuality within culture. Given proper conditions of temperature, pressure and space a crystal will continue to grow with virtually no […]

Multiple Discourses, Similar Objectives In closing his essay Essentialism and Queer History, Rictor Norton has this powerful reminder for his readers:  “It is naive to think that one theory or the other will inevitably affect the predominantly negative attitudes of modern Western society,” and suggests that, in place of abiding by one monolithic theory of […]

Manga, Media, Social Construction v. Essentialism? For me, our visit to the Museum of Sex drove home some of the ideas that Weeks’ touched upon in his discussion of the social construction of sexuality.  Weeks states that sexuality is shaped and given meaning by society and that it in turn shapes each of us.  Each […]

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, […]

Museum of Sex, Norton, Weeks I was struck by the condom exhibit at the Museum of Sex for two reasons.  One, despite Talmudic law that prohibits the “waste” of semen, the two most largely used types of condoms – animal skin and latex – were invented by Jews (one American, one German.)  This is as […]