Drawing from our qualitative, in-depth interviews of 35 professionals who write referral letters for “gender transition,” we explore how practitioners’ decisions to approve, delay or refuse access to ...body modifications speak to the centrality of normative concepts of sexuality and the social function of bodies in the cultural politics of gender identity. We argue that practitioners construct what we call an ethic of body modification that tends toward reducing the body to its symbolic function—as a representation of the subject’s true gender and a basis for sexual identity. We also discuss the views of a minority of practitioners who resist this tendency by creating an alternative path for body modification independent from identity claims. We conclude by discussing the cultural/political implications of pseudo-scientific discourses that assume gender identity is natural, stable and universal, whereas bodies are flexible and malleable social representations.
In the following ethnography of the California Coalition of Women Prisoners (CCWP), who exist at the forefront of feminist prison activism, I address canonical feminist debates focused on the ...relationship between subjectivity, experience, knowledge, and power by closely following an explicit attempt at political reform by and for women. I argue that feminist prison activists' attempts to reform the American prison system reveal why feminist theorists must remain committed to a specific, contextual, and localized analysis of the prospects for political empowerment.
Drawing from my ethnography of one prominent same-sex marriage rights organization, I consider how activists' appropriation of a risk-based political rationality blends utilitarian claims for equal ...access to self-governance with moral assertions that posit the conjugal couple as a superior context for governing problems endemic to populations. When constructed according to risk-based rationalities, marriage operates as a compulsory system that orients subjects to neoliberalism by promising to decrease danger for all of the "gay community," not just same-sex couples who marry. Articulating marriage according to a risk-based political rationality yields a sense of urgency that makes nonconjugal intimacies and alternatives to a neoliberal ethic of care appear untenable. I add to the literature on governmentality by utilizing qualitative methods that uniquely capture the diffusion of governance from experts to social activists who are unwillingly excluded from a form of neoliberal governance.
...she urges scientists to "break out of the sex hormone straightjacket" and to look at steroids as just one of a number of components that are important to the creation of sex and gender, including ...environment and experience.4 Scholars also point to an inextricable link between the chemical operation of hormones and the social process of constructing meaning, both at the level of social interaction and macrocultural constructions of sex categories and gender ideologies.5 While brain organization/activation theory attributes sex and gender differences to hormonal interactions within the developing brain, Fausto-Sterling questions the distinction between activation and organization by pointing out how "the brain can respond to hormonal stimuli with anatomical changes...hormonal systems, after all, respond exquisitely to experience, be it in the form of nutrition, stress, or sexual activity (to name but a few possibilities).
The following study is based on 35 in-depth, qualitative interviews with licensed marriage and family therapists, counselors, clinical social workers, and professional psychologists who advertise ...their services as 'trans-friendly', 'trans-supportive', or 'trans-positive'. We focus on cases in which practitioners denied clients access to body modifications for reasons related to gender identity in an effort to distill how practitioners' decisions are based on their working understandings of the appropriate relationship between gendered identities and sexed bodies. In the process of determining clients' access to body modifications, practitioners speak of the importance of the level of practice, as opposed to codified texts such as the DSM, in political and ideological constructions of gender and the materialization of sexed bodies. Instead of sharing one primary configuration of these ideological components, the practitioners we interviewed differed in terms of their assumption that gender identity is a product of biological, spiritual, or social processes. We conclude by considering the possibilities for the clinical encounter to subvert dominant gender ideology by authorizing more fluid gender identities and sexed bodies.
I analyze arguments for same-sex marriage in the United States in terms of how they articulate the purpose of marriage as a form of neo-liberal governance. Drawing from theories of governmentality, I ...argue that same-sex marriage activists reveal how marriage governs by offering a safety-net to manage population level "risks" associated with poverty, illness, and disability. I conclude that marriage embodies the state's interest to economize its own function by monogamizing the care of the population, while also providing its inhabitants a sense of security and safety from the negative effects of social stigma.
Discusses issues such as language, identity, gender, nationalism, and citizenship in plural societies; 10 articles. Based on a conference with the same title held on Mar. 7, 2002 at the University of ...California, Berkeley. Contents: The repositioning of citizenship: emergent subjects and spaces for politics, by Saskia Sassen; Step-mother tongue: language among Bulgarian Pomaks, by Robin S. Brooks; The discourse of language and nation in Catalonia, by Thomas Jeffrey Miley; The anti-quincentary campaign in Guerrero, Mexico: indigenous identity and the dismantling of the myth of revolution, by Rebecca Overmyer-Velázquez; Against the laws of civilization? race, gender, and nation in the international racist campaign against the "Black shame", by Iris Wigger; Forests for whom? ethnic politics of conservation in Northern Thailand, 199-2001, by Jodi York; Race, ethnicity, and citizenship: a roundtable discussion, by Michael Burawoy, Gillian Hart, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Aihwa Ong, and Saskia Sassen; Some questions for the true masters of the world, by Pierre Bourdieu; An inventive and iconoclastic scientist, by Loïc Wacquant; Taking Bourdieu into the field, by Loïc Wacquant.
Marrying for America Moon, Dawne; Whitehead, Jaye Cee
Fragile Families and the Marriage Agenda
Book Chapter
Contrasting two examples, we examine the ideology of marriage, seeing marriage itself as the product of social scripts and bribes, which foster the illusion of choice. We analyze the languages used ...in a reality television program called Married by America and the announcement of President Bush’s proposed welfare reform act, to show how internalizing the ideology of marriage induces individuals to take on responsibility not only for the failings of their own relationships, but for the failings of marriage as an institution and of American society as a whole. This ideology is critiqued from a historical perspective.
