Bodies and Sexuality

2024

In this unit of study we will examine the ways in which feminist and queer theories have used bodies and sexualities in order to theorise difference and identity. The body and sexuality have been shown to be a major site for the operation of power in our society. We will look at how bodies and sexualities have given rise to critical understandings of identity. The unit of study will be devoted to working through some of the major theories of sexuality and embodiment and the analysis of cultural practices.

It is not easy to define and contain the concepts like that of 'Sexuality' in definition like statements, neither these statements can really encapsulate the ever evolving, changing and sensitive aspect of human being's life. Sexuality as a concept, phenomenon and theory is important not because it is incomprehensible but rather because it is neglected most of the time even after the basic understanding of the fact that that it governs and most of the times dictates our form and existence.

Lacan and Foucault are often said to be opposed to each other, but this essay explores a connection around ethics, transgression, and sexuality, based on Freud's early work on the body and the hysterical symptom, and the elaboration of that work by Lacan and Foucault. Published in Angelaki.

Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Ed., 2020

Anthropologists are fond of pointing out that much of what we take for granted as "natural" in our lives is actually cultural-it is not grounded in the natural world or in biology but invented by humans. 2 Because culture is invented, it takes different forms in different places and changes over time in those places. Living in the twenty-first century, we have witnessed how rapidly and dramatically culture can change, from ways of communicating to the emergence of same-sex marriage. Similarly, many of us live in culturally diverse settings and experience how varied human cultural inventions can be.

Radical Philosophy Review, 2011

T he ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface." 1 Freud's famous claim has sparked a host of responses within psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and queer theory. Gayle Salamon's excellent new book addresses the ways in which these fields speak of the body. In order to highlight the scope and limits of embodiment and sexual difference, she examines how bodies that are not normatively sexed and gendered raise questions about relationships between the psychological and the material and how these relationships may be embodied and lived. Noting that a) the philosophical canon has only rarely addressed the challenge to traditional accounts of embodiment that gender variation poses, and also that b) the nascent field of trans studies does not yet utilize the theories of embodiment that phenomenology and psychoanalytic theory offer, Salamon aims in Assuming a Body to "bring psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and transgendered bodies proximate enough so that their similarities might become more visible and their differences might be brought into productive tension with one another" (10). This is not a book about why one thinker's theories can beat up another thinker's theories. There are not so much winners and losers as there are pieces of a puzzle that fit together 1. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, Inc., 1960), 26.

APA Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology, 2013

Our bodies are the permeable boundary between our individual sense of self and the society in which we live. From the most banal bodily acts of life - how we dress, the magazines we read, with whom we sleep - to the big questions of social organization regarding marriage, family, sexual morality, and sexual health, the body is always involved in some way. The body is at once our own, something we share with others, and also something that is important to and shaped by the social world. Almost everything about sex is also about the body; sexuality is an intrinsic part of an embodied self. Although there is certainly much research that focuses on particular biological functions of sexual bodily parts and physiological processes associated with, and in some cases considered to comprise, sexuality, this line of research is predicated on the body as fundamentally and exclusively organic and, for the most part, hardwired. We begin the introduction to this chapter by articulating social concepts of "the body" and their relationship to understandings of and research about sexuality.

Smith/A Companion to Greek Art, 2012

After studying this chapter you should be able to: define some key concepts in the psychology of gender differentiate between a variety of different sexual orientations identify the ways in which psychology has approached gender/sex differences construct accounts of gender development in childhood by discussing the basic views of each theory explain the differences between an essentialist and a social constructionist approach to gender explain how gender inequality is often expressed in violence against women describe the rise of feminism and the corresponding emergence of a new understanding of masculinity. CASE STUDY Nosipho saw herself as a feminist because she believed in the fair and equal treatment of women and girls. She had grown up in quite a traditional household where, even though her father had treated her mother with respect, if ever there was any difference of opinion, her father's decision was final. Fortunately, her father was a kind and gentle man so this had not been the problem it might have been. But Nosipho had seen many families where the father bullied his wife, and the children too. Everyone in her community knew of homes where the wife was being beaten by her husband-even if they didn't say it openly. When Nosipho and her mother discussed these kinds of things, they both felt angry on behalf of the women, but they also felt helpless to do anything about it. It seemed to Nosipho that many of the things that went wrong in families had to do with the way that men and women related to each other. Nosipho had often tried to make sense of the problems she saw between men and women. Why did men seem so aggressive and why did women so often land up being treated badly? Nosipho had found herself sometimes wondering about how different men and women seemed from one another and what had made them that way. Were they just born different or did their society and culture force them into these gender roles? She also wondered if these problems could ever change; perhaps some of them already had? Sometimes, for example, it seemed to Nosipho that the men in her generation were less afraid of showing their softer feelings and that the women were often more assertive than their mothers had been. Had others observed these improvements? And what other changes needed to be made?

Researching Sex and Sexualities: methodological reflections, ed. Edited by Charlotte Morris, Paul Boyce, Andrea Cornwall, Hannah Frith, Laura Harvey and Yingying Huang, Afterword by Ken Plummer, Zed Books, 2018

The Insinuating Body investigates how pornography, sex work, and aberrant sexualities in the United States constitute an uncanny epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic condition of the in-between—an oscillation between the private and the public. My theoretical-visual work emerges from the intimacy of the “I” as profoundly collaborative. Sexual justice actively seeks connections that may be saturated with irreducible differences. My choice to unapologetically implicate the “I” is not a reaction to reductive vernacular, but a vital commitment to embodied thinking—an explicit integration of the private into the public. Protean sexualities, ranging from sex activism to female ejaculation, deconstruct patriarchal inscriptions on our bodies. In cultural production as in its reception, vulnerability becomes a vital intervention in public-private discourse. Since the private is construed as vulnerable and ambiguous, it “requires” unquestioned taxonomies of regulation and normalization. The sanctity of normalcy constitutes a hegemony of representation that colonizes our relationships with our own bodies. In contrast, an uncanny erotic politics reorients our cultural notions of pleasure and vulnerability, and ultimately who has power, imagination, and sovereignty over our bodies. Merging the private with the public—the ob-scene (off-stage) with the explicit—we can generate ethical individual and collective sexual justice.