Five of the many new things that have struck me

I haven't done a lot of academic reading on queer theory - more anecdotal, political, etc.  The philosophical points are where I have learned the most.

Foucault’s linking the confessional with the later psychiatric and medicalization model of confession was absolutely stunning to me.  It makes sense, and its timing with the hygienic movement causing the splitting of discourse between the act of reproduction and the confessional nature required of all other sexual acts/thoughts/feelings is quite interesting.

Further, Foucalt’s concept of repression and acts against repression being a cycle that feeds itself is not one to which I had previously introduced.  I like it – whenever we “do” we are either part of the normative structure or acting against it.  Both positions have energy.

‘Sex in 69’ was primarily the usual hippie free love/ feminist radical/ Hugh Hefner stuff we’ve come to know and love about the year, but I enjoyed the part about the utopian guilt-free polyamorous community.  I knew utopian communities were happening at the time, but that one had a really interesting agenda, and I think that such an experiment opened a lot of doors that are still a little unwelcome in the normative world, but practiced more freely now. 

(As an aside, I was talking with my future in-laws today about repression in the context of x-rated films in theaters in the 1970’s vs the brown paper package of the 1980’s and 1990’s, and now, the download.  We hide pornography, rather than going to public places to watch it, and while now pornography is everywhere and easily accessible, it is, at the same time, not publically consumed.)

Judith Butler.  Wow.  “If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”  It’s not everyone who would go so far as to suggest that sex is culturally constructed, like gender, and that what we think of as sex is the same as gender.

But Anne Fausto-Sterling does, and from a biologist’s perspective, at that.  Her mandate that intersex children should not be altered (or any children for any reason other than death/ true quality of life), is the sort of scientifically derived philosophy that will help many an intersex child to remain unharmed.  She sees with clarity what gender issues have stirred: “More generally, the debate over our cultural conceptions of gender has escalated, and the boundaries separating masculine and feminine seem harder than ever to define. Some find the changes under way deeply disturbing; others find them liberating.”