Discussion question

Description

So this week’s discussion is an invitation for each of you to reflect a bit, not only on what you have learned, but also on how it might be possible to make sense of the various claims that people with different experiences of gender, sex, and sexuality are making – indeed, to reflect on the way that differently positioned people might see gender, or sex, or sexuality as oppressive constructs to be resisted or as ways of being to be celebrated (or perhaps liberated). Do we want to overcome gender (as some feminists we have read would like)? Do we want overcome sexuality (as someone like Foucault has provocatively argued, preferring simply ‘bodies and pleasures’)? Or might something important and valuable be lost along with these categories?  And what about the claims of intersectional thinkers, who remind us that none of these categories – or their effects or their value going forward – may be thinkable in isolation from other sorts of categories and social hierarchies? Indeed, who are ‘we’—who are ‘sexed’ and ‘gendered’ beings, who are the subjects of ‘sexuality’? And how do you think we can and should negotiate these categories going forward?

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