ANTH_100_LECTURE_12_PART_1_SPRING_2023_

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ANTH 100 - LECTURE #12, PART 1 (SPRING, 2023).mp4 Speaker 1 [00:00:03] Okay. So what's on the agenda today? Well, we're going to be talking about some interesting things from an anthropological perspective. The textbook listed as gender, sex and sexuality. But I'm not really into. Rendering things into the singular. These days. I think we need to hear that light coming from, Oh, weird. We need to plurals things. So I retitle the genders, sexes and sexualities. Since we are living in a world of social, cultural, gender and sexual pluralism. And for those who don't like that. Well, that's how it is. And so embrace it, understand it first. And through understanding, I think judgments get worn or braided away and replaced by compassion. I would hope and we can be a bit more accepting in our roles. One thing I think we have to understand, too, is how much capitalism as our the socioeconomic system under which much of the world works today or is forced to anyways really configures in, some would say deforms many things in terms of the social when it comes to humans and renders things sort of seemingly natural. And I would replace it with the term hegemonic, which means dominance, the point of being on almost unquestioned. But what we'll understand through today's lecture, which again will be broken up into two parts and dispersed between today and Wednesday. Much of. Things, many things, rather, I should say in the social world that appeared to be just natural, appeared to be the product of the result of us being hard wired are really not. And they're just social constructions. And we're going to be talking a lot about gender performativity as well a little bit later in the lecture. That's why I think anthropology is interesting in many ways because it relative biases things. Looks at things from a cross-cultural perspective and then makes you really, really think about some of the most basic aspects of the social world, like gender, sexuality, etc.. So we'll get into that today. You know, we've got to issue. I guess, eh? Oh, gosh. These glasses, huh? I'm always doing this. And then I will clean them. I won't touch them. And then a smudge mark will just appear. A ghostly smudge mark. That'll suffice for now anyways. I'm. I'm white. I'm a white guy. And I'm. Heterosexual. Heteronormative. So what the hell am I doing talking about this stuff? Well, that's. That's the question, right? And, you know, perhaps I'm not the best person. And I and, you know, as I always say in my indigenous oriented courses, I'm not here to represent anything because I can't. I'm coming from a very particular social location. You know, I grew up in a an anti-racist family, a very accepting family. So, you know, and many of my friends who were the same skin color as me grew up that way as well. So but it is coming from, you know, a particular social location, rooted as it is in a very particular understanding afforded to me by my upbringing in its class oriented perspective as well. So maybe, you know, being who I am and coming from where I am. No, I think I'm just here to broach or to start the conversation and get everyone thinking, but definitely not representing any particular viewpoint. You know, I had mentioned last week that when I do my lecture on gender and gender and sexuality in Anthro two or two, I actually did one about creating that lecture in a collaborative sense with the gay and trans community at Waterloo, which was a really interesting experience, and I learned a lot. And so some of that will will come into this lecture here. Okay, So what's this afternoon's agenda? Well. Let's see. So we're going to be looking at the distinctions between genders, sections, sexes and sexualities. We'll look at the following. So how did feminism. And we'll just really briefly touch on an historic approach to this viewpoint of the world. But how did feminism shape? The study of sex, gender and sexuality in the plural lives that sex is gender and sexuality from an anthropological perspective. No academic discipline works in a vacuum. There's always going to be some influence from other perspectives. So we'll see how that works in the influence there. We'll also see how anthropologists, goodness, we look at this, but we've got a I don't mean to be pedantic here, but. To be consistent. The book is not consistent this way, but. Pete. Really? There. All right, everyone, let's get back on track. Yeah. So how do anthropologists study? And I really screw that. You know what a day here

is Monday, huh? Um, let's say. You know, screw this story. Oh, boy. They're okay. That's simple. So when I'm writing these lectures, I have to follow the textbook. And so I'm kind of going through each chapter and going through the key terms and headings just to make it consistent. I don't do this in any of my other classes because I don't use textbooks. So the lectures are all from my head. But this one, I don't want to be confusing and add completely different stuff from the textbook, you know? And because this class is all online and because all of the assessments are online, I want to really limit confusion and increase consistency. So how do anthropologists understand sex is gender and sexuality? To use the word to study brings up connotations of the scientific gaze, which automatically introduces a binary opposition between the one who studies and the studied or the ones being studied, which by default introduces a power differential. And I if we're really and I said this to you in the beginning, we're really going to take decolonization. Seriously, we really have to think about our use of words are use of language and even criticize the textbooks that we're reading and be like, Well, what in the textbook messed up again, you know, which no textbook is perfect. It's impossible. But I'm going to point that out in terms of a use of a term by Michel Franco, a French philosopher and cultural historian. But we'll get to that toward the end of, I think today, maybe earlier on Monday or on Wednesday. Oh, look at me. I'm. Because it's Monday. I'm. Kind of tired. Oh, seriously. And we're paralyzed. This, too. It's so funny. Everyone should treat this as a lesson. Right. Thinking outside of binary oppositions, it's not hard. It's actually really easy. But you have to pay attention sometimes. And it's really, you know, it's easy to just skate by and be like, okay, whatever, whatever. Cool. Yeah, But if you want to take it seriously, just hold up a second. You know, because this is the. I've never taught Anthro 100 before. These are all brand new lectures, so I haven't had a chance to go through these yet. Our sexes and genders affected by other forms of identity or identities and how to do it. Our ethnographers study gender performativity, which is a really interesting and vital concept for all of us to understand. But then as usual, what we're going to do is we're going to turn our computers off. Let's hope anyways and get the heck out here. And you know, it looks like it's going to rain outside, so maybe we won't go for a walk. Do it. Okay, so let's do this brief foray into the history of feminism. You know, these are just staggered pictures here of various epochs or eras in the push for equality, which I think should have been taken care of a long time ago. But it's it's I'm not going to say interesting. It's unfortunate how residual and enduring the patriarchy has been. Even in very progressive countries like Iceland, which boast full gender equality, even though that's really more of an ideal than a reality for many, many women and many jobs, which still there is a pay gradient or scale or gap between males in the genders. So. What we have here. This is sort of early 20th century feminism, you know, representing, oh, gosh, there goes my eyes, a push for suffrage or the right to vote and paternalism and the patriarchy are just sort of interesting aspects of the social world because women were sort of treated almost as objects in the private sphere of the family or the home to be managed almost like children, which I think is bizarre because all of the smartest individuals I have ever met in my life have been women. You know, my wife, my grandmother, my mum. It's just it's interesting. But this violence, ideological violence and almost cognitive violence in terms of how people think. I always tend to think that all women are not really as smart as men. No, not quite there yet. And there's a lot of this thinking. Even at Waterloo, I think when you push out into these fields like computer science and engineering, there's a lot of this violence that still happens. And I think it's complete and utter bullshit. And so we all need to work together to crack the edifice upon which these ideas stand on and topple them right over. But it starts with acknowledgment of, you know, a way of thinking and a way of understanding the world, and that is feminism. So. The main push here, the main perspective from a feminist standpoint is that, you know, and here we go again. How about we do this? The here's this binary opposition thinking we can. There she is. People are equally human. And so

women. Yes. Um, and however you want to define that. Right? Are you 100% entitled to enjoy the same rights and privileges as everyone else? And it should really, by now. All the genders, whatever gender one feels comfortable with in terms of their expression, in terms of the residents of identity. Everyone should be respected, right? Regardless of of skin color, class, what have you. There should be a default automatic respect for people. But. We don't work this way. Sometimes the world, and especially capitalism. It's just really messed up. The first wave of of feminism going back to the 19th century or the 1800s. This was really a push for women to just obtain equal rights, and particularly women's suffrage or voting rights, so they could actually exercise their right to, you know, partake in Democratic convention to vote to just cast a ballot, to vote. But again, this is rooted this push was rooted in the great critique of 19th century paternalism in the patriarchy, where men were sort of seen as the unquestionable hegemonic head of house heads of households where this, you know, imagined ideal type male would have to manage children, would have to manage women and treat them all, you know, of apiece all cut from the same cloth, which is really even having that come out of my mouth kind of disgusts me. If this is, you know, for those of you who are taking courses in feminism, please forgive me. You know, we don't have time to really get into this second wave. Feminism was a product of social change in the 20th century that really wanted to question why there were these residues of inequality between people, but particularly in this time, you know, it was based on this binary opposition thinking and, you know, 1950s through the sixties and seventies between men and women, you know, others who didn't fit within that binary contrast weren't really recognized. There was a slow recognition, nowhere near what it is today, sadly. But a lot of this was based on pay inequality and, you know, inequality of being the result of sexual exploitation or men, you know, going after women in the workplace and being like, Hey, I'm your boss. Let me do something inappropriate to you. And well, you're not going to have any outlet for this. So you're kind of trapped and maybe I can get away with this stuff and you can just take it, right? Which is bullshit as well. So, you know, we're getting out now. You know, women obtained suffrage and were able to vote, but now it was just, well, why is there a huge pay gap? Why are we being taken advantage of and exploited in our workplaces, which are supposed to be safe places who are right safe places. But, you know, RCMP, is that a safe place for women to work? Toxic new sounds like toxic masculinity rages in the institutions associated with our police forces and also the military. Go figure that right. Male dominated disciplines, of course, there's going to be raging toxic masculinity, which needs to be. Anyways, you probably get my perspective on this. So really fast forwarding through the ages here in the 1970s, and particularly I think it was in 1969 slash 1970 paper that really took aim at this so-called social construction of the public private divide. So what the problem was, was that we had. The spheres that were seen as distinctive social, and these were propped up by cultural ideals, wars, but also legislation and all that saw a split and a sharp one at that between private and domestic life of the family headed by a male, and then public life, which involved being political, making decisions, making money, being social side of the family. Public life was understood. And this is going to sound ridiculous in the domain of the man right in binary opposition here, whereas in private life, the life of the family taking care of children was the domain of the woman. And of course this worked all fine and dandy for the patriarchy and to leave that hegemonic construct unquestioned and intact because what it benefits, right? White males can have their say. They can do what they want. And the women. Well, how about you just shut up, put your apron on, take care of the children, cook dinner, clean everything, wash the clothes, do all this stuff. End of now in 2022, most of most of us can understand that this is complete and utter bullshit. And so to give an example with our own family here, you know, when well, how long blessed I mean, together 23 years. Had to spend five years apart in a long distance relationship. And then we got married after that. And then when we started talking about kids, we were like,

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Listen. We're doing this 5050. Right. And I wouldn't I didn't want it any other way. And so we came up with a plan. Right. We'll do everything together. Right. As it should be. Right. So it was really great because I ended up having the ability, an opportunity to take parental leave with both of our kids. And so I was with our kids every single day. Our daughter for. Oh, my gosh. One, did I take two parental leave in January and then January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September. So eight months. And then I think it was six for our son when he was born three years later. And it's interesting because I was fully in charge of changing diapers, cleaning up vomit, vomit in my mouth, you know, other things all over sometimes on my face, you know, And I it was great. I you know, I love being a dad. You know, it was a life changing experience. And I would love to, you know, keep doing what? I'm still doing it. But as your kids get older and they sort of sadly need you less, less. But, you know, I was sort of. Put in interesting situation sometimes where we would go for two or three walks a day. And this is downtown London, right? So sometimes you'd come across some interesting people and I was pushing our daughter down the street and this this dude was riding a bike who I'd seen before. Older guy, probably in his late fifties at the time, had longish hair in a backwards had. And he sort of comes up to me and slows down and he's staring at me as I'm pushing her daughter down the street and I'm like, okay, I can feel there's something going to happen here. And I don't think he wants something to happen. And that would be really awkward too, with my kid here. But he looks at me and then shakes his head, and then I go, I like I don't sometimes like when people do that. So I kind of put my hands like, what? And he goes, Men, pushy babies, give me a fucking break, and then rides away. And I'm like, Yeah, you keep riding, bro. And it just it got me so mad. But then it really dawned on me. All North Americans are weird about this. When you go to Norway, where Alexis and I have lived a few times over the past ten years, it is culturally accepted that wives and their husbands or partners, if they're with, they don't subscribe to that. You know, if it's to women or to men or trans whomever, parents, one parent. There you go. One parent will take parental leave for they get, I think, up to two years, if I'm not mistaken. But anyways, one year will take half the parental leave, the other parent will take the other half. So when you're walking around and we were walking around with both our kids in strollers, there are men everywhere. You know, we're we're dads. Let's use a more neutral term. And I'm thinking already in binaries anyways, not. You know what I'm trying to say? Pushing babies around and nobody questions it. But in North America, if someone sees a male because of these rigid binary oppositions that have been really propped up by capitalism, you think, well, you should what you should be a working in and not taking parental leave. This is ridiculous. So I used to get stared at. People would gawk at me, you know, and I just I want to give them the finger. But I didn't. But it's just like, big deal. Who cares? Get over yourself. So very odd that way. But anyways, so this. This push was to really question this this constructed divide. Right. So. What? The women wanted was some recognition and they wanted to take this binary opposition, this forward slash and erase it. And so it's unfortunate because as our second point here, you know, women who didn't want to fall prey to this public, private binary, you know, who want to push and go to medical school or law school or get an education, wanted to get a high paying job who didn't want a husband because they didn't like men that way, didn't have their own home. They were really under a lot of pressure from, I would say, hostile institutions and a hostile culture that just by default oppressed them and discriminated against them. And that's that's not fair. So these women from the 1970s that you see here are they were so brave at that point facing harassment around every corner. So you really have to hand it to them. Right. And they have a lot of they deserve a lot of respect, you know, And yeah, I mean, this all this stuff about. Oh, being, you know, predatory men at the workplace. My mum experienced it. You know, luckily things are a little bit better, I think sometimes. Maybe in academe. No, they're not, actually. Our department here is great, but in the States this stuff still happens and it's

really unfortunate. Okay, so. 20th century feminism sought to critique this gender binary, which really is, as I've explained, a culturally constructed, socially constructed opposition really between just two basic genders, which are two out of many right males and females and seeks to oppose them. But like we all have to understand what all binary opposition and oppositions do is one side is usually the stronger component, the other side is the weaker component. Right? So oftentimes it's the left side men versus women. And the right side is seen as the weaker side subject to oppression and control of the right side. And so it's usually how do we conceptually break that apart? You know, do we get rid of the binary, the forward slash and put one on top of the other? But then you still have an issue of one being higher than the other conceptually in terms of language or written on the page. I guess you could render things into a circle which would be much more in line with Indigenous thinking and get rid of the spaces between words. So you have a circle that could be rotated where there are no right angles or flat services where one could look into and overinterpret some kind of representational conceptual dominance. I might be maybe some of you were like, Dude, what are you talking about? These are the things I think about sometimes. Sherri Faulkner was and still is, a socio cultural anthropologist from New Jersey who I had to read many things, you know, of hers in my undergrad. Our textbook makes reference to a 74 paper of hers is female to male as nature is to culture, where she really sought to break apart this and come at it from an anthropological perspective, mind you know be at an earlier one in. So the key sort of the crux, I think of this paper, the takeaway was that male dominance should be understood and rooted in this universal form, seemingly anyways of binary thinking that subjects. Females and males to be opposed to each other. In what Ortner found was that males are associated with culture, oddly enough, and females are associated with nature, right? So males are working in the domain of making decisions subject to culture and, you know, Oh, we can. Oh. As for cultural values, beliefs and more, as you know, decisions have to be made. You know, there needs to be some sort of motive of subsistence and money to be earned. And males can do this, whereas females are so tightly tethered to nature and natural processes, i.e. childbirth, that they should just stick to the head and they're not in control of their bodies. You know, as for 19th and 18th century thinking, hysteria, wandering womb, etc., they should just kind of stick to having children, tending to children, breast feeding in things where the physiological can take control over the cultural and the social, which again, this is just B.S. And so, you know, to really flush this idea. Oh. You know, Ortner was found or Ortner found that while women might be able to mediate between culture and nature or the cultural realm in the natural realm, they were understood through this field work and from many male perspectives to be closer to nature. And what she meant by that was closer to nature being subject to women's physiology and bodily functions, natural processes of pregnancy, childbirth and lactation, which is just I mean, if you buy into that, you buy into that. But methinks women are a little more sophisticated than that. You know, or anyone who has a gender identity or resonates with this idea of the woman or woman ness or womanhood. Right. So. Many anthropologists oppose this view of water and think while she's critiquing this binary opposition, it still seems to be maintained, right? Its integrity hasn't been compromised in this paper. And so a few of them, Leacock, Rubin and Strother and over the years have argued that we need to take a marxist approach. And we we came across Marx not in depth, but a little bit in our last two lectures from last week. And so the idea from these anthropologists perspectives was, Hey, let's look at male domination. Trying Sussudio, trying to understand its contextual features and facets from a broader socioeconomic, political and cultural perspective. Right. So to really understand what male dominance is or male domination is and how it works, we need to situate it within the context of these wider social, economic and political structural factors, which to me makes a whole lot of sense, right? Because gender ideologies, the cultural construction of gender as gender perform activities, these are all subject to broader

influences outside of the control of the individual, outside of the control, sometimes of the local immediate social context. Right. This is where psychology I often find falters in its explanatory and extrapolated power because it centers only on individuals and not the broader. I mean, social psychologist might say, well, we look at social context, but they have no expertise or training in those broader social forces and their influences on individuals. Right. So Leacock, back in 1983, I was just a little boy then shows how Western, how can I say the Western experience of colonization and colonialism, deformed and altered pre-colonial indigenous gender relations and transform them into something else. And while there was I think from what we know from historical records, which are always skewed from a Christian perspective, we know that there were gender divisions of laborers, But in terms of the ideologies that prop them up, we know that they're these societies, and I'm telling you about first nations societies and Inuit societies and then obviously later mated. But the cultural sort of I guess contours might have been a little bit different owing to that European influence there. But a lot of these societies were egalitarian in terms of their you know, in terms of socioeconomic relations. There was a lot of redistribution, but equality between the genders from what we know anyways. But what happened with colonialism and colonization, is it deformed this this equality, this respect between people and divided things up and parceled up experience such that women were forced into a certain kind of European patriarchal, paternalistic space where you do this and when you do that, it whether it's political conceptualizations, where many societies had indigenous had elders who weren't necessarily old but had wisdom based on experience, and these were sort of these individuals were sought out or were sought out for advice, you know, to help solve problems along with ashaiman. But then what happens with colonization is whether it's matriarchal or matriarchal society, indigenous, where you have females who sort of make decisions and in terms of handing down, you know, in terms of hereditary dynamics and what people are expected to get in terms of knowledge, etc., or even things, Europeans come along through these dynamics of colonialism and colonization and say, well, now what we're going to do is we're going to have elected officials, so we're going to foist foist Democratic convention onto you. You will be forced to have elections and pick a male leader where you'll have to vote for this leader, which is completely an alien political institution. And with that, again came an aggressive parceling out and fragmenting of gender relations. So. Here you have a conquistador is Latin America. And this is, you know, an instance of physical violence, taking the indigenous population, literally chaining them up in this instance, treating them as one sort of faceless, nameless. Godless in this context, social entity and almost seeing it as a tabula rasa blank canvas and now thinking, okay, now we can work our social understandings onto them and refashion them. And luckily it wasn't that easy. Many people lost their lives more so the indigenous than the conquistadors. And this is an early sort of colonial map or representation of North America where a once pan indigenous land, as you can see, much like social relations and gender relations, became parceled out and divided up, chopped up into different spaces and places which permanently altered and deformed. The experience socially of individuals, but the experience of the land itself, where many indigenous individuals who refused to assimilate and didn't want to leave their territories were sequestered onto reservations or parcels of land reserved for them only. And it really didn't do. Well, it has changed the social and geographic landscape for forever. And maybe one day with these land back pushes, we'll see something returns. Okay. So now we're going to kind of get into the study of. Sexes, genders and sexualities. And I'm just going to fix this because it's. Before to. So I'm going to push this over. Pardon me, everyone, for doing this, but. There are no know center right. So what are some some different approaches and the textbook kind of like old textbooks. It's like, okay, we're going to spend a little bit of time just to make sure we got this and then we're going to move on to something else. Well, some academic approaches to oh my gosh, and I'm so out of it

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today. I didn't even notice this by position here. It's a literal binary opposition, so let's remove that. Well, I can see here. That I ended up. So you don't know where they eat? Isn't this fun? Lectures with Mark. This guy works on his PowerPoints while doing the lecture. Well. Just. Let's hope there are no more. Okay. Now retrieve our title. Where to my table. There is table. Swap that back there. Okay, we're back on track. Now, just a few brief moments here. Okay. So feminist anthropology is a cross-cultural collaboration and also a lively debate about the sexes, genders and sexualities. Thank you. Textbook. My gosh. Which came out of the second wave. And, you know, I don't know if I find that useful. Um, feminist anthropology sees feminism. Here is a big term. You don't need to know this, but I'm just going to say this. Feminist anthropology sees feminism as an epistemology. So as a theory of knowledge, that has to do with the validity of the validity of knowledge, the source of knowledge, you know, its use, etc. It's, you know, placement on a higher hierarchy of knowledges. So I don't really like the word knowledge, I prefer understanding. But anyways, so it sees this as a way to understand the world from a feminist viewpoint. And this is something where a lot of people have debated this and you know, can men. Like Justin Trudeau say they're feminists with a straight face. And I will say, Well, no, you can't, because, you know. Experience is always from a location, a particular social location, which by default will always be gendered, which will always be class oriented in terms of socioeconomic status. There are so many facets and dynamics involved in how one sees the world. And so one of the pushes from feminism was it's an epistemology, it's a way of seeing the world and understanding it from the perspective of woman. However you want to define that, whether it's trans or what have you. It's a particular gendered experience in terms of that resonant expression, the identities or identity that comes along with it. So there's a lot of debate about this. But what's interesting about feminist anthropology is that it does view this from a cross-cultural perspective, which you don't often see. Women's Studies. This is a definition from our textbook, seeks to tackle questions about class and racial issues into gender relations and analysis or gender relations analysis. Or you should pluralist that analysis. That's not particularly helpful, but it seeks to understand everything. The range from, you know, feminist epistemology to, you know, the role of women in the workforce, the role of women in history, in all of the oppression, the struggles that have come out of that, but also the positive things as well. Inventions, you know, new ways of thinking, gender studies as well. This combines the study of women, men, sex, gender and sexuality is an inclusive field that's not really helpful either. And I don't know why the textbook includes that. I guess it's just the point is to show that there are many different academic fields from which to understand not only women, but. The rules that have been attributed to women critiquing gender ideologies. I guess there are men's or male studies. But that's you know, I took that out because whatever. But wait, so. What about other aspects? Now we're jumping here, as the textbook does. So these are ways to study gender and gender relations, the oppressions, the violences. I'd like a pluralist, all of these things that come with them. But I do at time check here. But what about other aspects of social experience that might not be gendered, but that come into play in terms of how we see the world or how people see the world? According to some critiques, the second wave of feminism that came more in the mid 20th century doesn't take into consideration other forms of identity, let's say race, socioeconomic status or class. To interpret and understand women's position in society. Right. So the critique is it's like, okay, well, that's great that you're only looking at sex in, let's say, gender, but what about other aspects that come in to deform, marginalize or exclude or even transform experience? We have to look at all of these, right? We can't just see gender and sex in a vacuum. And these broader aspects, you know, race, class, socioeconomic status. These are structural features that really affect experience in both the public and private domain. And so you've got all kinds of gender divisions, whether it be ideological, whether it be socioeconomic slash, ideological, religious, etc., that affected

divide. And we really have to take all of these into consideration to see like, okay, well, how did these things work? Right. So one way to do this is to not get dizzy looking at the PowerPoint is look at the ways the patriarchy work. Look at the ways colonialism and colonization work. So colonialism is the ideological face of this kind of oppression. Colonization is the physical act of coming from one place to another, taking it over, displacing and marginalizing individuals, and really just taking over the land. Discrimination. Extractivism, misogyny, exclusion. Racism. Capitalism, neoliberalism. You know, I can't even expropriation pollution. These are all aspects, you know, using women's labor without any acknowledgment. You know, and all of the exploitations that come with this, and they're not even looking at rights. So what about these structural features? How do we understand them? What do we even call them? We can understand these the way all of these oppressions, micro and macro and even men's, the in-between, how they work from the perspective of intersectionality. And I know many of you have probably heard this, maybe even in high school. So how do we define intersectionality? I use the term a lot in my upper year classes, but I like this definition, and I think this is one of the things I like about the textbook. It's the idea that institutionalized forms of oppression organized at the structural level and organized systematically, sometimes too, in terms of race, class and gender are all interconnected and race, class and gender interconnect and work against some people to really shape opportunities or take them away and constrain the ability and possibility of individual individuals to live their lives. And so what I like, the way I like to sort of see this is through the term agency. So what does agency mean? Agency is the capacity to decide to make decisions, to act, sometimes even conceive the possible. And if your ability to make a decision to act to do things in society is constrained, it means your agency is being constrained in intersectionality by default limits and constrains women's agency such that possibilities like maybe sometimes even going to university, the possibility is blocked off and not even a thought for many, many women because of the way poverty works, because of the way gender relations work. While you're kind, don't go to university, right? So we have to understand this more. And I want you all to understand that this term has an origin. And it came from a very, very wise and intelligent woman named Kimberly Crenshaw, who's actually a legal scholar and analyst in the United States. And she wrote two major papers, one in 89 and the other in 91, where she really. Puts these social relationships in racism, sexism, class and gender under her microscope and came up with this fantastic term. And it's you know, she acknowledged being humble. It's not a brand new term. The term is new, but the idea is not. So this was the very first paper where she mentioned this all the way back in 1989 de marginalizing the intersection of race and sex, a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and anti-racist politics. Then this really should be a required reading for everybody, even in this class. And if I could add it without overburdening the reading load, I definitely would. And here in this paper back in 1989, she focuses exclusively on race and sex. And it was the paper afterwards where she really started to take class and socioeconomic status into consideration. And so I'll just read you this very quickly. This is from her second paper where she mentions she says, I used the concept of intersectionality to note or define the various ways in which race and gender interact, to shape the multiple dimensions of black women's employment experiences. And on in both, she sort of focused on this in women's navigation of the sort of legal apparatus. My objective, my objective there in this paper here, the first one was to illustrate that many of the experiences black women face are not subsumed within the traditional boundaries of race and gender or race or gender discrimination as these boundaries are currently understood, and that the intersection of racism and sexism factors into black women's lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the women, race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately. So you can't look at black women's experience. Let's look at black women and look at it from a gendered experience, or let's just look at it from race. You have to look at them together

and see how they both interact. I build on those observations here by exploring the various ways in which race and gender intersect in shaping structural and political aspects of violence against women of color. So very important paper, and it's a very important and very keen insight all the way back in 89 to see how these dynamics of exclusions work together and even, oh my gosh, up until the 2000s, you had white epidemiologists, white social scientists looking at all of these aspects of the women's experience, black women's experience in vacuums. Oh, let's just look at the way race affects women. Let's separately look at the way sex and gender and then class separately. But you can't sequester these and look at them as if they affect women. What am I trying to say sequentially or in an additive sense, you have to see how they work synergistically or come together. Right. That's the important thing here. And I see my innovation didn't really work there, but. Okay. Contemporary anthropologists, what they do is we analyze gender identity by incorporating from what Leacock had mentioned and wanted to do from a marxist perspective. So looking at social, cultural, economic and political structural factors, we look at individuals as active social agents. I think rather than cultural automatons, you know, just kind of blindly conforming to cultural expectations. So there's a degree where people have some interpretive control. They're not just cultural dopes where it's like, okay, I'm from this place, I just follow these cultural rules. People question them. You know, people work them into ways that that resonate with their understandings of life, etc.. And so from this perspective, then I've got to keep an eye on the time here. I've got a meeting with my graduate student in 5 minutes, so I will make sure this doesn't go over an hour and I'll do the same thing for Wednesday. From this perspective, then anthropologists see that individuals or people interpret social life and through those interpretations, learn skills in terms of how to perform acts. Right. And this could be through mimicry or a fancy term mimesis, bodily movement, etcetera, through social interaction and just by being around other people. And each of these performances can be incorporated into their identity. And so in terms of our genders, these things aren't just sometimes defaulted in. We're just, okay, I'm a man and I this is just how I am, naturally. No, you learn how to do this in by learning how to do this. A lot of anthropologists and other philosophers in social sciences say, Well, this is about performance. You're performing your gender because you've you've been around. For me, I was around males like my dad. My grandmother lived with us. So I was around two very strong women growing up. We became very sensitive to such things, you know. So in a way, I had a very particular understanding of what it meant to be male, and I based my ideas on this. You watch TV shows, right? We didn't have the Internet in the eighties, in the early nineties, so I had no idea what that was, but watched a ton of TB as a kid and, you know, saw how men acted and that what that affected me. So I was like, oh, and you know, you pick and choose how you want to be, who you want to be like and then that, that and because you know, I guess. What was that term, you know, cis gendered, you know, there's resonance between my gender expression in my biological attributes, right? Look downstairs and it's like, okay, I've got that, you know, this is how I am. I'm not going to question it. I don't need to for me. So this is, I guess what I'm going to base my my gendered experience on. But it's a performance nonetheless because we're learning it all the time, right? So you've got the same individual here dressed as. I guess you know what would be a sort of maybe a more male expression? This might be a little bit more in between. And this is female, but these are all sort of learned. And it's interesting, You know, there were a lot of things growing up that I questioned about, I guess the male gender in the male perspective that I didn't really like. And so my mom, you know, it's always kind of weird, right, when you're talking about this stuff. But my mom to other not to me because it's my mom but to other men was considered an object of desire. Right. Really pretty. And she always had people kind of calling after her and making comments. And as a little boy, I. I didn't know what it meant. I knew I didn't like it. And I remember seeing my lacrosse coach look at my mom in a certain way. And I was a five year old kid.

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And, you know, I remember thinking like, I don't like that guy. I want to I want to do something to him because I knew what that look meant, but I didn't understand exactly what it meant. And my mom told me the story. I don't really have much of a recollection of it. I was about four and we went to the school ground by our apartment. You know, my mom was just pushing me on the swings. And these two guys, this would have been 1980, 79 or 80. So I was really, really small. And two guys there had been drinking and they were catcalling. My mom, Hey, baby, come over here. I'll show you a good time. And apparently it made me furious. And so I went after them just by blind rage. And I tried to get them and I was punching them and kicking them. And my mom said, you know, it was such a weird sight because like a cartoon, I guess one of them had just grabbed my head before my mom came and grabbed me and then ran home. But one of them had my head and was pushing me while I was swinging and kicking, and he was just laughing as I'm trying to throttle him. Obviously, like a four year old can't do that. But that sort of sensitivity I think has stuck with me my whole life. And when I see men saying inappropriate things to women, I always make sure to stop and be like, What the fuck are you doing? You know, do you have a problem? Because you might not like, you know, want to be some tough guy or anything like that? That's ridiculous. But I just. I can't stand for that. Any kind of, you know, objectification or exploitation that way. And we had a little incident at the grocery store. Someone was after a Lexus and then, you know, kind of ramped up from, you know, like, oh, I'm going to chat to you every time you come in, one of the other employees there, and then really ramped up to some inappropriate comments. And when Alexis told me this, I went to jump on the country, countries like don't go anywhere. And I was like, not going to have a word with this guy. I think we're gonna have to go back and maybe chat about this. And she was like, Don't do it. You're going to get yourself into trouble. It's not worth it, you know, I'm just not going to go back there. And I felt this rage inside of like, Oh, my God. Oh, crap. I'm in a lecture right now talking to you guys about gender performance. Where did that come from, anyways? What is gender Performativity? You know what? I think I'm going to do? Everyone. We're at an hour and 2 minutes here. Yeah. I've got about 10 minutes to prepare. Prepare for this meeting. I'll just say this really quickly. What is gender performativity? Well, here's a definition from Google. You know, and this is a pretty good one, actually, because when you look at Performativity, it's usually in terms of linguistic performativity. But we want gendered Performativity is the theory that gender and gender roles are elaborate social performances that you learn and that you put into effect sometimes not questioningly into effect every day, and the hegemonic versions of which underlay popular conceptions of man, masculine or woman and feminine. And people play these up accordingly. Remember, hegemonic means dominant, but unquestionably dominant, where people just sort of take it as natural. But they're not natural. They're learned and they're cultural specific. Right. Last thing I'll do on this slide. Performativity could include gender identity in sexuality and other forms of social identity, such as race and ethnicity and how all of these come together in very particular ways. Right. So we've got someone in drag here and this is sort of exaggerating gender performativity. And I think it's interesting. It's great. And we will talk a little bit more about this on the next slide, but I'll stop here and we'll continue with some interesting stories and some interesting ideas. Okay, everyone, I don't mean to bring this to a close abruptly, but I do have a thesis that one I need to get to you in 10 minutes here. So thank you for the patience. I hope you found this interesting so far. And I will see you in two days. Okay, So take it easy room and have a great afternoon. And I'll see you in a little, little bit. Why is it so dark in here? No.