Assigned Female at Death

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha G. Newman
Keyword(s):  
Male Voice ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Binary Gender

Sometime after 1188, Engelhard of Langheim composed a story about a Cistercian monk named Joseph. Engelhard insisted Joseph was a woman, but he also undercut normative assumptions to display gender fluidities for which he lacked a conceptual vocabulary. He preserved a binary gender system that controlled the dangers of a woman in a male monastery. Yet his willingness to ventriloquize Joseph’s male voice presents a Joseph who, with God’s help, successfully performed his male trans identity, while his depiction of Joseph’s death suggests Joseph’s soul miraculously became female after he died. Engelhard did not explicitly acknowledge either possibility, but in a world in which the miraculous could break naturalized categories, both transitions remain beneath the surface of his tale.

Reworking Testosterone as a Man's Hormone: Non-binary People using Testosterone within a Binary Gender System

Somatechnics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rillark M. Bolton
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Trans Men ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Social Logics ◽  
Male Hormone ◽  
External Body ◽  
Binary Gender ◽  
Transgender Men

Testosterone, deemed the ‘male hormone’, is a central method used by transgender men to enact gendered bodily changes. Testosterone is framed as a means for transgender men to align their external ‘female’ bodies with their internal male genders because it is positioned by medical and social logics as a kind of distilled masculinity. While recognising both the ways that trans men always already subvert and usurp these logics, the coherence of these logics is further undercut when assigned female at birth non-binary people, who do not feel themselves to be men, are, in increasing numbers, using exogenous testosterone. Using qualitative interviews with seven non-binary people, this article grapples with the desire of these participants to use testosterone, without being tied to masculinity, maleness or men. In this article, I first focus on how these participants re-formed testosterone as a substance that can unmake, rather than confirm gender. Secondly, I look at how their use of testosterone rejects the centrality of an alignment between an internal gender and an external body. And finally, in turning to the process of ‘coming out as a testosterone user’ I explore how one participant asserted themselves not as a concrete and clear identity, but rather as a self in action. All three negotiations point to new logics of what testosterone is and could be, how it arises and moves with gender, and how these selves may begin to exist in new and novel ways.

Gendering Occupations: An Introductory Exercise for Teaching Reproduction of the Binary Gender System

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 324-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela M. Adkins
Keyword(s):  
Community College ◽  
Sex Role ◽  
Personality Characteristics ◽  
Bem Sex Role Inventory ◽  
Diversity Course ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Labor Statistics ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Bureau Of Labor Statistics ◽  
Binary Gender

This paper presents a foundational classroom exercise used to help introduce the systemic and interactional aspects of the binary gender system, using 12 occupations selected from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and personality characteristics from the Bem Sex Role Inventory. This activity was conducted in an introductory Diversity course at a Midwestern community college over 13 semesters (n = 603). Collected results indicate a strong tendency for students to invisibly gender each occupation without any suggestive cues and a willingness in retrospect to examine their role in the implicit process of gendering. As such, this exercise may offer an additional strategy to help students understand that their individual agency can serve both to reproduce and challenge existing power relations.

scholarly journals Representation of the Intersex Phenomenon in Contemporary Culture: Cinematic Discourse

2021 ◽  
pp. 80-88
Author(s):  
Svetlana O. Izrina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
Social Acceptance ◽  
Sex Role ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Current Form ◽  
Child Relationship ◽  
New Type ◽  
Gender Paradigm ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Binary Gender

Today, significant changes are taking place in the approach to the study of many sociocultural phenomena. Duality and polarity of their perception and analysis are being mitigated, alternative facets of the familiar and the generally accepted are coming to light, a number of “marginal” ideas are becoming the “new norm”. The research paradigm of the 20th – 21st centuries pays special attention to non-binary gender. Modern researchers focus on such issues as self-identification and search for gender identity, mechanisms of gender construction, variability of sex-role and identification models, non-conventional forms of gender identity (transgender and agender, intersexuality, etc.), as well as their representation in contemporary culture. One of such nonconventional phenomena of culture today is intersexuality, the current form of the well-known philosophical idea of androgyny. Intersex as a phenomenon of contemporary culture is considered as an element of the emerging non-binary gender system. Nowadays, intersex is not only the denomination of a person with biological characteristics atypical of the binary gender paradigm, but also the name of a distinctive culture discussing the problems of this new kind of people, who have become a significant part of our society. This article studies the representation of the intersex phenomenon in contemporary culture through the lens of cinematography. The sociocultural status of intersexuality explains the increasing quantity and thematic diversity of cinematic material. Intersexuality is a subject of active artistic reflection of many contemporary directors (L. Puenzo, C. Lavagna, J. Solomonoff, R. Féret, S. Savory, etc.), the discussion of acute social, legal and ethical problems being their focus. Thus, the leading themes are as follows: self-identification of intersex people and their search for gender identity; the problem of medicalization of intersex people and the legality of “corrective”/ “normalizing” operations from both medical and ethical points of view; parent–intersex child relationship; socialization of intersex teenagers and social acceptance of this new type of person.

scholarly journals PERFORMATIVE SUBJECTHOODS: LESBIAN REPRESENTATIONS IN SPLIT BRITCHES’ BELLE REPRIEVE

2021 ◽  
pp. 51-74
Author(s):  
INMACULADA BENÍTEZ OLIVAR ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Lesbian Body ◽  
Binary Gender

Emerging postmodern theories of gender and sexuality frame the terms in which society has understood these concepts in an evolutionary way throughout history. The last century has witnessed the radical changes carried out mainly by feminist and LGTB movements. On the other hand, the theater, a subversive space where it is possible to experiment with different forms of subjecthood and communication, has been the laboratory in which it has been attempted to give a plastic form to these new currents of thought. In this sense, the work of Split Britches is remarkable for the innovative ways of bringing the abject to the political forefront. From the lesbian body to drag representation, Belle Reprieve (1991) is developed under the queer premise to dismantle heteropatriarchal hegemony and the binary gender system.

The older stages of the Romance languages

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Loporcaro
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Binary Gender

The chapter explores the earliest attested stages of the different Romance branches, elaborating on the picture which has emerged in Chapter 4 and showing that the traces of more-than-binary gender contrasts grow increasingly significant, and geographically widespread, as one proceeds backwards in time. Thus, even Northern Italo-Romance and Gallo-Romance, which have no traces of a functional neuter today, still featured in their medieval stage not only a non-lexical neuter adjective inflection for default/agreement with non-lexical controllers (Gallo-Romance), but neuter agreement on (overdifferentiated) lower numerals (Italo-Romance), and scattered remnants of neuter plural agreement on determiners. The latter gradually increase as one moves to Tuscan, Romansh, and, finally, Southern Italian, where the four-gender system is still observed today, with Old Neapolitan even showing a four-target/four-controller gender system, with the two genders in addition to masculine and feminine both going back to the Latin neuter.

Mainstreaming Dissidence: Confronting Binary Gender in Social Work's Grand Challenges

Social Work ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kel Kroehle ◽  
Jama Shelton ◽  
Emilie Clark ◽  
Kristie Seelman
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Grand Challenges ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Historical Function ◽  
Binary Gender

Abstract To genuinely embody its commitment to anti-oppression, social work must call on a critical gender framework in its response to the Grand Challenges for Social Work. Such an approach demands that social workers move beyond reactivity to thoroughly interrogate the binary gender system upholding the gendered injustices this special issue calls us to confront. This includes a consideration of the ways a binary gender system is ideologically linked to and acts together with constructs of whiteness, nationhood, citizenship, and ability. The present article seeks to complicate the lens such that gender is not a proxy for White cisgender womanhood but rather a call to unravel webs of normative thinking. Guided by transfeminist theory, the authors examine three grand challenges—climate change, technology, and advancing long and productive lives—in an effort to detail the current and historical function of the binary gender system as a tool for the subjugation of trans and nonbinary people and to explore social work’s role in building freer and more equitable futures.

From Culturazing Nature to Naturalizing Culture: The Differing Function of Animal Imagery in Defining Bodies from Homer’s Odysseus to Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Begüm Tuğlu
Keyword(s):  
Primary Sources ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Male Voice ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Animal Imagery ◽  
Literary Heritage ◽  
Man And Nature ◽  
History Of

Feminist authors have long been trying to alter the patriarchal structure of the Western society through different aspects. One of these aspects, if not the strongest, is the struggle to overcome centuries long dominance of male authors who have created a masculine history, culture and literature. As recent works of women authors reveal, the strongest possibility of actually achieving an equalitarian society lies beneath the chance of rewriting the history of Western literature. Since the history of Western literature relies on dichotomies that are reminiscences of modernity, the solution to overcome the inequality between the two sexes seems to be to rewrite the primary sources that have influenced the cultural heritage of literature itself. The most dominant dichotomies that shape this literary heritage are represented through the bonds between the concepts of women/man and nature/culture. As one of the most influential epics that depict these dichotomies, Homer's Odysseus reveals how poetry strengthens the authority of the male voice. In order to define the ideal "man", Homer uses a wide scope of animal imagery while forming the identities of male characters. Margaret Atwood, on the other hand, is not contended with Homer's poem in that it never narrates the story from the side of women. As a revisionist mythmaker, Atwood takes the famous story of Odysseus, yet this time presents it from the perspective of Penelope, simultaneously playing on the animal imagery. Within this frame, I intend to explore in this paper how the animal imagery in Homer's most renowned Odysseus functions as a reinforcing tool in the creation of masculine identities and how Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad defies this formation of identities with the aim of narrating the story from the unheard side, that of the women who are eminently present yet never heard.

Nonbinary Gender Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hegarty ◽  
Y. Gavriel Ansara ◽  
Meg-John Barker
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Health Culture ◽  
Gender Binary ◽  
Nonbinary Gender ◽  
Language And Cognition ◽  
Binary Options ◽  
Gender Categories ◽  
Binary Gender

This chapter concerns nonbinary genders; identities and roles between or beyond gender categories such as the binary options ‘women and men,’ for example. We review the emerging literature on people who do not identify with such binary gender schemes, unpack the often-implicit logic of thinking about others through the lens of gender binary schemes, and briefly describe some other less-researched, but longstanding cultural gender systems which recognize nonbinary genders. This chapter makes the case that consideration of nonbinary genders is germane to several core topics in psychology including identity, mental health, culture, social norms, language, and cognition.

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