scholarly journals Gender and Sexual Identity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: A Cixousian Analysis of Hijra’s Resistance and Remaking of the Self

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 2335-2352
Author(s):  
Nur Ain Nasuha Anuar ◽  
Moussa Pourya Asl
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
The Self ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Feminine Writing ◽  
Stereotypical Image ◽  
Family And Marriage ◽  
And Gender

Hijra is a distinctive South Asia known for their gender and sexual difference and associated with their transgender and intersex identities. Otherwise known as transwomen, they are traditionally subjected to prejudices and embedded within narratives of exclusion, discrimination, and the subculture. As a result, Hijras are typically perceived as isolated, abject, and passive victims who remain social and economic peripheries. Concerning the stereotypical image of hijras, this study explores Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happinessecriture féminine, this study examines characters’ contestations and alterations of existing definitions of sex and gender. This framework allows for a manifestation of gender flexibility and feminine writing as a tool for self-emancipation. Both protagonists Anjum and Tilo, illustrate that hijras are not predetermined but are formulated in a complex process of a conscious rewriting of the self. While the former character resists heteropatriarchal normativity through her conscious alterations of the phallogocentric structure of her Urdu language, the latter defies societal conventions of family and marriage with unorthodox views and actions that are materialized in the writing of her story.

scholarly journals Protección, afirmación y sexualidad sin poder: un proyecto político y normativo para la construcción de los derechos sexuales / Protection, Affirmation and Sexuality without Power: A Political and Normative Project for the Construction of Sexual Rights

2004 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 687
Author(s):  
Tracy Citeroni ◽  
Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Sexual Rights ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Sexual Diversity ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One ◽  
Movimientos Sociales

El propósito central de este artículo es adelantar un proyecto político y normativo para el establecimiento internacional de los derechos sexuales como derechos humanos. Debido a la organización social del sexo y del género en nuestras sociedades contemporáneas, consideramos que son urgentes las demandas por diseñar y establecer normas para proteger la diferencia sexual y auspiciar la afirmación de la diversidad sexual. Por un lado, identificamos la necesidad de establecer algunos derechos sexuales negativos capaces de proteger la integridad sexual de ciertos individuos que históricamente han sido marginados y de algunos grupos que suelen ser blanco de la violencia heterosexista. Por el otro, consideramos necesario promover derechos sexuales positivos que afirmen la diversidad sexual y auspicien vidas sexuales llenas de placer.Sostenemos que para la justificación y aceptación de los derechos sexuales negativos sólo se requiere una política y una ética de la tolerancia. En cambio los derechos sexuales positivos exigen la adopción de un paradigma político y ético diferente, basado en el reconocimiento. El proyecto político de los derechos sexuales positivos busca, en última instancia, destruir la hegemonía masculina sobre la práctica y el discurso de la sexualidad, y pretende asimismo descentrar la heterosexualidad. Pese a los límites de los movimientos sociales basados en la identidad sexual, su impacto social y cultural ha sido profundo. Por ello opinamos que los derechos sexuales negativos son hoy un proyecto más que factible. Más aún, hemos desarrollado la idea de que la posibilidad de concretar el proyecto de los derechos sexuales positivos resulta de la combinación creativa de dos fuerzas. Primero, los potenciales emancipatorios de los movimientos sociales basados en la identidad sexual que han permitido mantener un cuestionamiento constante de la actual organización social de la sexualidad. Segundo, las transformaciones profundas en teoría social y filosofía que nos lleva a pensar y experimentar la sexualidad (y sus identidades) de manera no esencialista, descentrada, relacional, interactiva y fluida. Finalmente, esto abre la posibilidad de desestabilizar los efectos que las relaciones de poder tienen sobre el sexo, la sexualidad y la identidad sexual. AbstractThe main aim of this article is to promote a political and normative project for the international establishment of sexual rights as human rights.Due to the social organization of sex and gender in contemporary societies, we believe that there is an urgent demand to design and establish norms to protect sexual difference and encourage the affirmation of sexual diversity. On the one hand, we identify the need for negative sexual rights capable of protecting the sexual integrity of historically marginalized individuals and groups that have become the target of heterosexist violence. On the other hand, we explain the need to promote positive sexual rights that affirm sexual diversity and encourage pleasurable sex lives.We hold that the justification and acceptance of negative sexual rights merely requires a politics and ethics of tolerance. Conversely, positive sexual rights demand a different political and ethical paradigm, based on recognition. The political project of positive sexual rights ultimately seeks to destroy male hegemony over the practice and discourse of sexuality and to remove heterosexuality from the center. Despite the limits of social movements based on sexual identity, we believe that they have had a profound social and cultural impact, which is why we argue that negative sexual rights are now an extremely feasible project. Moreover, we develop the idea that the possibility of undertaking a project of positive sexual rights is based on the creative combination of two forces. The first is the emancipatory forces of social movements based on sexual identity that have permitted the continuous questioning of the current social organization of sexuality. The second is the profound transformations of social theory and philosophy that enable us to conceive of and experience sexuality (and its identities) in a nonexistentialist, decentered, relational, interactive and fluid manner. In the end, we believe that this opens up the possibility of destabilizing the effects that power relations have on sex, sexuality and sexual identity.

scholarly journals Men of Parts: Masculine Embodiment and the Male Leg in Eighteenth-Century England

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-821 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
The Body ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

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.

Researching masculinities, narrating sexual difference

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-63
Author(s):  
Jennifer Germon
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Development ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Popular Discourse ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Sex Development ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Female Sexual Development

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to engage with a foundational gendered imaginary in Western medical and popular discourse regarding fetal sexual development. It is an imaginary that consists of dual narratives that bolster an oppositional complementary model of sex-gender. By these accounts male sexual development results from complex and multi-faceted processes generated by the Y chromosome while female sexual development is straightforward, articulated through a discourse of “default sex” (Jost, 1953). Such apparent truths fit seamlessly with the timeworn notion of maleness and masculinity as always already active, and femaleness and femininity always and inevitably passive. In other words, he does and she is. Design/methodology/approach – Despite embryogenetic findings thoroughly debunking these ideas, contemporary medical and biological textbooks remain haunted by outdated androcentric models of sex development. This paper attends to biomedical and everyday understandings of sex and gender to demonstrate how fresh lines of inquiry produce conditions that enable new ways of understanding bodies and embodied experiences. Findings – This paper demonstrates how new ways of thinking can lead to a new understanding with regards to sex, gender, bodies, and experiences. Originality/value – This paper attends to biomedical and everyday understandings of sex and gender to demonstrate how fresh lines of inquiry produce conditions that enable new ways of understanding bodies and embodied experiences.

Remembering Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘ethics of ambiguity’ to challenge contemporary divides: feminism beyond both sex and gender

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-247
Author(s):  
Lucy Nicholas
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Alternative Mode ◽  
Foundational Ontology ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Cultural Origins ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Shared Commitment

This article returns to Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical oeuvre in order to offer a way of thinking beyond contemporary feminist divisions created by ‘gender critical’ or trans-exclusionary feminists. The ‘gender critical’ feminist position returns to sex essentialism to argue for ‘abolishing’ gender, while opponents often appeal to proliferated gender self-identities. I argue that neither goes far enough and that they both circumscribe utopian visions for a world beyond both sex and gender. I chart how Beauvoir’s ontological, ethical and political positions can be used to overcome the material/cultural, sex/gender bind that the contemporary divide perpetuates. I outline Beauvoir’s ‘ambiguous’ non-foundational ontology that attends to both the cultural origins, and material effects, of both sex and gender, and to the extent that humyns are fundamentally social. After outlining Beauvoir’s definition of freedom as purposive action, I then outline how the existence of the humyn-made and intersubjectively-upheld ‘situations’ of both sex and gender delimit this, urging feminists to return to the lost question of eradicating both. I use the utopian impulse in Beauvoir to argue that an ethics of reciprocity is an alternative mode of understanding the self and others. Beauvoir also calls for a political strategy that I call a ‘utopian realism’ that I apply to the contemporary divide. A way forward that is attentive to the concerns of both positions is the pragmatic use of identity politics that is nonetheless mindful of identity’s limits, alongside Beauvoir’s proto-intersectional vision of solidarity politics based not on identity but on a position of alterity and shared political strategy. Ultimately, I use this to argue that feminism would do better to unite around a shared commitment to challenging alterity, rather than further contributing to it.

scholarly journals The Production of the Sexual Difference in Physical Education: Problematizing Naturalizations

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Seger de Carmargo ◽  
Henrique Caetano Nardi
Keyword(s):  
Sex Differences ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
Human Motion ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Strength Performance ◽  
Anatomy And Physiology ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Physical Capacities

Abstract Researches that describe the anatomy and physiology of human movement have aimed to produce knowledge comparing women’s and men’s physical capacities, concerned with specifying and describing “sex differences.” One of the consequences of this kind of research is that it influences teaching processes in human motion disciplines for physical educators, producing gender-marked bodies. This article uses Foucauldian discourse analysis to question how the production of sex differences is present in scientific studies dedicated to studying athletic performance that propose comparisons between sexes in strength performance. Through this analysis, we aim to describe and analyse how the epistemologies of sex and gender involved in these productions reinforce naturalised ideas of what it means to be a man and a woman, as well as question the social intelligibility of body/gender/sexuality that regulates sex/gender in our culture and in science.

scholarly journals Discrepancies in sex-specific COVID-19 outcomes in South Asia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nusrat Khan ◽  
Shammi Luhar ◽  
Dinesh Prasad Koirala ◽  
Tshokey Tshokey ◽  
Rajiv Chowdhury
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asians ◽  
Healthcare Access ◽  
Case Fatality ◽  
Health Conditions ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Male Predominance ◽  
Case Fatality Ratio ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Suboptimal Health

Abstract Divergent sex and gender norms in South Asia are key determinants of health conditions and healthcare access. However, sex-discrepancies among South Asians in important COVID-19 outcomes are unknown. We report and examine sex-specific patterning of infection, hospitalisation, deaths, case-fatality and recovery in South Asia, and conclude that contrary to trends in many high-income countries, there is a male predominance in the number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalisations, and a comparatively very low men to women case-fatality-ratio. Our findings emphasise the demand for detailed research into reasons for these sex-discrepancies to develop combative strategies in settings with suboptimal health systems infrastructure.

Femme Fatale or Lesbian Femme

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Straayer
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Same Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Creative Capacity ◽  
Double Cross

This chapter analyzes the neo-noir Bound (1996). It shows how the splitting of sex from gender liberates generic conventions in the service of protagonists who, enacting a lesbian romance in film noir, avail themselves of generic formulas to double-cross the villains. Analyzing the creative capacity of noir gender “to turn cartwheels on both male and female characters within a system of sexual difference,” the chapter shows how Bound—self-consciously playing on the debated identities of butch, femme, and feminine—generates different-sex erotics through same-gender protagonists. Through such playful manipulations, the film opens up flexible reimaginings of sex and gender across the spectrum of gay and straight as alternatives to rigidifying heterosexual and homosexual binaries.

Locating Savitribai Phule’s Feminism in the Trajectory of Global Feminist Thought

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-105
Author(s):  
Renu Pandey
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Liberal Feminism ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
Feminist Ideology ◽  
Salient Points ◽  
Approaches To Study ◽  
And Gender

Initially, the feminist thought was based on Humanist approach, that is, the sameness or essentialist approach of feminism. But recently, gender and feminism have evolved as complicated terms and gender identification as a complicated phenomenon. This is due to the identification of multiple intersectionalities around gender, gender relations and power hierarchies. There are intersections based on age, caste, class, abilities, ethnicity, race, sexuality and other societal divisions. Apart from these societal intersections, intersection can also be sought in the theory of feminism like historical materialist feminisms, postcolonial and anti-racist feminisms, liberal feminism, radical feminisms, sexual difference feminisms, postmodern feminisms, queer feminisms, cyber feminisms, post-human feminisms and most recent choice feminisms and so on. Furthermore, In India, there have been assertions for Dalit/Dalit bahujan/ abrahmini/ Phule-Ambedkarite feminisms. Gender theorists have evolved different approaches to study gender. In addition to the distinction between a biosocial and a strong social constructionist approach, distinctions have been made between essentialist and constructionist approaches. The above theories and approaches present differential understandings of intersections between discourse, embodiment and materiality, and sex and gender. The present article will endeavour to bring out the salient points in the feminist ideology of Savitribai Phule as a crusader for gender justice and will try to locate her feminist ideology in the overall trajectory of global feminist thought. The article suggests that Savitibai’s feminism shows characteristics of all the three waves of feminism.

Self-Compassion and Quality of Life in Adults Who Stutter

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 2097-2108
Author(s):  
Robyn L. Croft ◽  
Courtney T. Byrd
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Social Connectedness ◽  
The Self ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Self Compassion ◽  
Adults Who Stutter ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Impact

Purpose The purpose of this study was to identify levels of self-compassion in adults who do and do not stutter and to determine whether self-compassion predicts the impact of stuttering on quality of life in adults who stutter. Method Participants included 140 adults who do and do not stutter matched for age and gender. All participants completed the Self-Compassion Scale. Adults who stutter also completed the Overall Assessment of the Speaker's Experience of Stuttering. Data were analyzed for self-compassion differences between and within adults who do and do not stutter and to predict self-compassion on quality of life in adults who stutter. Results Adults who do and do not stutter exhibited no significant differences in total self-compassion, regardless of participant gender. A simple linear regression of the total self-compassion score and total Overall Assessment of the Speaker's Experience of Stuttering score showed a significant, negative linear relationship of self-compassion predicting the impact of stuttering on quality of life. Conclusions Data suggest that higher levels of self-kindness, mindfulness, and social connectedness (i.e., self-compassion) are related to reduced negative reactions to stuttering, an increased participation in daily communication situations, and an improved overall quality of life. Future research should replicate current findings and identify moderators of the self-compassion–quality of life relationship.

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