scholarly journals “There are only two genders – male and female…” An Analysis of Online Responses to Tasmania Removing ‘Gender’ from Birth Certificates

Author(s):  
Louise Richardson-Self

<p><br />This article details and analyses some of the public online response to the Tasmanian Government’s decision to make the recording of gender on birth certificates an opt-in process. Tasmania is the first jurisdiction in Australia to make such a change, which aims to simplify the legal processes involved in affirming a person’s gender identity (including agender and non-binary status). The data set is comprised of comments posted on Facebook in response to The Australian newspaper’s coverage of this event; The Australian is Australia’s only truly national daily broadsheet. This article argues that the effect of this overwhelmingly negative ciscentric response, as revealed by the aesthetic of this digital social space, is the generation of an impression of Australians as trans- (and intersex-) averse. This risks undermining the basic good of assurance that transgender and intersex people ought to have: an assurance that they can inhabit public spaces and be treated with dignity and respect (cf. Waldron). To prevent this kind of hostile response in the future, we must find a way to communicate and make resonant to the general public what queer and feminist theorists have been arguing for quite some time: that sex and gender are not synonymous and that both gender and sex are social constructs.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Anna Constable

<p>This thesis aims to investigate, through design, spatial agency within the realm of New York City’s Privately Owned Public Spaces. The notion of agency in architecture is directly linked to social and political power. Starting in 1961, New York’s city planners introduced an incentive zoning scheme (POPS) which encouraged private builders to include public spaces in their developments. Many are in active public use, but others are hard to find, under surveillance, or essentially inaccessible. Within the existing POPS sites, tension is current between the ideals of public space - completely open, accessible - and the limitations imposed by those who create and control it. Designed to be singular, contained, and mono-functional, POPS do not yet allow for newer ideas of public space as multi-functional, not contained/bounded but extending and overlapping outward.  As public-private partnerships become the model for catalyzing urban (re)development in the late 20th century, bonus space is an increasingly common land use type in major cities across the world. The quality and nature of bonus spaces created in exchange for floor area bonuses varies greatly. In many cases, tensions in privately owned space produce a severely constricted definition of the public and public life. Incentive zoning programmes continue to serve as a model for numerous urban zoning regulations, so changing ideas of public space and its design need to be tested in such spaces.  These urban plazas offer a test case through which to examine agency, exploring how social space is also political space, charged with the dynamics of power/ empowerment, interaction/ isolation, control/ freedom. This thesis looks at one such site, the connecting plaza sites along Sixth Avenue between West 47th St and West 51st St. This is an extreme example of concentrated POPS sites in New York City. Here one’s perception and occupation of space is profoundly affected by the underlying design of that space which reflects its private ownership. Privately Owned Public Space can be designed that is capable of/ challenging the notion of the public in public space, and modifying the structure of the city and its social life.</p>


2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Dwyer

Using interview data on LGBT young people’s policing experiences, I argue policing and security works as a program of government (Dean 1999; Foucault 1991; Rose 1999) that constrains the visibilities of diverse sexuality and gender in public spaces. While young people narrated police actions as discriminatory, the interactions were complex and multi-faceted with police and security working to subtly constrain the public visibilities of ‘queerness’. Same sex affection, for instance, was visibly yet unverifiably (Mason 2002) regulated by police as a method of governing the boundaries of proper gender and sexuality in public. The paper concludes by noting how the visibility of police interactions with LGBT young people demonstrates to the public that public spaces are, and should remain, heterosexual spaces.


Author(s):  
Anoop Nayak

Gender and sexuality are slippery social constructs whose meanings vary across time and place. To capture some of the complexity of these relations, it is necessary to consider their mutable meanings in different parts of the world. This means understanding how gender and sexuality are regulated, produced, consumed, and embodied in young people’s lives transnationally. At a regulatory level, nation-states are found to disseminate different policies and approaches when it comes to young people’s gender and sexual learning. Alongside formal pedagogical approaches, young people’s peer groups and local friendship circles are critical to the production of sexual knowledge and gender practices. In what is a rapidly interconnected world, processes of cultural globalization evident in the spread of film, media, and music are providing new templates from which to transform more “traditional” gender and sexual relations. In consuming global images of gender and sexuality, young people are found to be active and discerning agents who experience and negotiate global processes at a local level, managing risk and carving out new opportunities as they see fit. Young people are seen to perform and embody gender and sexuality in a host of different ways. In doing so, they not only reveal the instability of sex and gender norms but also disclose the intense amount of “gender work” that goes into the performance of gender and sexuality.


2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Rutherford ◽  
Michael Pettit
Keyword(s):  

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-821 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Harvey

AbstractThis essay explores changes in eighteenth-century male clothing in the context of the history of sexual difference, gender roles, and masculinity. The essay contributes to a history of dress by reconstructing a range of meanings and social practices through which men's clothing was understood by its consumers. Furthermore, critically engaging with work on the “great male renunciation,” the essay argues that the public authority that accrued to men through their clothing was based not on a new image of a rational disembodied man but instead on an emphasis on the male anatomy and masculinity as intrinsically embodied. Drawing on findings from the material objects of eighteenth-century clothing, visual representations, and evidence from the archival records of male consumers, the essay adopts an interdisciplinary approach that allows historians to study sex and gender as embodied, rather than simply performed. In so doing, the essay not only treats “embodiment” as an historical category but also responds to recent shifts in the historical discipline and the wider academy towards a more corporealist approach to the body.


1970 ◽  
pp. 8-21
Author(s):  
Awatef Ketiti

Over the course of Arab revolutions, many individual and collective phenomena and behaviours emerged, proving the importance of sex and gender in the concretization of the concepts of authority, and the methods of addressing them in both the public and the private spaces. Among such occurrences are the exacerbation of physical and symbolic violence against women, the frequency of violence, rape, trafficking, and child marriages, all of which have increased to the beat of religious fatwas and new laws that oppose women’s citizenship and humanity. The rise to power of Islamic movements has nurtured and further fuelled these phenomena, unveiling the extent to which these currents rely on gender and women as a cornerstone for their discourse.


Author(s):  
Joshua D. Kertzer

How does the public think about foreign affairs, and how do these public preferences shape foreign policymaking? Over the past several decades, scholarship on public opinion and foreign policy has proliferated, partially due to a growing interest in the “first image” and the ways in which individuals matter in international relations, partially due to an experimental revolution that gave political scientists new methods they could use to study public opinion, and partially due to a range of searing debates—on topics ranging from the Iraq War to globalization—whose fault lines political scientists attempted to map. Scholarship in this area is thus so vast that it is impossible to comprehensively capture in an annotated bibliography of this length. Instead, the discussion that follows focuses on a curated sampling of the field, focusing, in particular, on six sets of substantive questions, drawing on a mix of classic and contemporary scholarship. It begins by reviewing what we know about how foreign policy attitudes are structured, before focusing on public opinion about two different areas of foreign policy: the use of force, and foreign economic issues like trade and investment. It then turns to the effects of sex and gender, along with the role of cue givers in shaping foreign policy preferences—whether partisan elites, international organizations, or social peers. It concludes by reviewing the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy, whether in democracies (as in theories of democratic constraint and accountability), transnational public opinion (as in theories of soft power and anti-Americanism), or in nondemocratic regimes, a relatively new area of research.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole M Elias ◽  
Maria J D’Agostino

Sex and gender are evolving identity categories with emergent public policy and administration needs. To respond to the diverse landscape of sex and gender issues in the public sector, greater competency is needed. This research will contribute to the body of work on sex and gender in public administration by asking the following questions: (a) what do graduate students in Master of Public Administration (MPA) programs know about gender competency, (b) have graduate students learned gender competency in their MPA coursework, and (c) how can gender competency in MPA education be further developed and promoted? This study provides a critical analysis of one MPA program, at John Jay College, City University of New York, to begin this line of research. Our e-survey results of a non-random sample of John Jay MPA students demonstrate that many students do not learn about gender competency through their MPA education and that gender competency skills otherwise obtained are limited. To address this, we emphasize the need for incorporating gender competency into MPA education as the first step in equipping future practitioners with skills to promote gender competency in public policy, administrative decision making, and workplace culture. We provide practical means of achieving greater gender competency in MPA curricula and programming and articulate the importance of expanding this research to other MPA programs, MPA faculty and directors, and geographic regions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sari M. van Anders ◽  
Zach C. Schudson ◽  
Emma C. Abed ◽  
William J. Beischel ◽  
Emily R. Dibble ◽  
...  

Policy debates have focused on who can participate in or access single-sex activities or services. This article describes how science of the biology of sex is relevant to three major policy areas: parenting (including leaves), sports, and public spaces. We focus on what scientists know about sex and gender (and gender/sex, where gender and sex are intertwined), and the role of various biological factors, including hormones such as testosterone and estradiol as well as genetics, gonads, genitals, and more. The policies under debate often use “biological sex,” but this fails to account for scientific understandings of sex and gender, misrepresents sex as single-faceted and binary, and overlooks scientific consensus about the importance of gender and identity.


2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 214-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
María DeGuzmán

This essay theorizes the specific use of the term “Latinx” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill during 2016–2017, which emanated in the context of the Tar Heel State’s election year politics and the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump one. “Latinx” gained currency at the University of North Carolina in the wake of House Bill 2: The Public Facilities, Privacy, and Security Act, or as it came to be commonly referenced, “HB2.” The bill enforces an oppressive binary sex-and-gender system as well as the potential exploitation of and discrimination against employees. HB2, signed into law, takes aim at transgender and transsexual people and bars employees from filing in state courts against their employers and limits them to bringing their grievance cases to a federal court, a far more expensive and cumbersome process. Latinx was adopted at the University of North Carolina especially but not exclusively by students to be gender-inclusive in the wake of HB2 and, furthermore, to be coalitional. A general consensus exists that discrimination runs along multiple vectors at once, not just gender but also ethno-racial and class vectors where “class” is understood to encompass a variety of factors, including citizenship status.


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