O ETERNO SÉCULO DE HOBSBAWN

==> Sugiro a leitura acompanhada da trilha sonora do filme "Nós que aqui estamos, por vós esperamos", de Marcelo Masagão. Inclusive, acho que este filme, como um todo, é uma das expressões artísticas mais representativas da rebeldia moderna de Hobsbawm.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwl_CdjW3sw&feature=BFa&list=PL53DFB8F2EEA7BBC5>

O ETERNO SÉCULO DE HOBSBAWM

Morreu a primeira página de meu livro de história

velinha, já estragada,

mal se lia nela o passado...

entre seus traços esquecidos

brotavam

sozinhos,

qual ervas daninhas a consumirem o lar dos Buendia

sonhos de um velho

socialista

que agora lá está e,

por nós,

espera.

Um homem de seu tempo e

além dele,

um socialista

e além dele

um sonhador

e além dele

um realista

e além dele

nós.

de sonhos grandes

e sonhadores miudos

dos temas eternos

e dos maestros fugazes

das canções que confortam eras

e mudam mundos

e entoam lamentos

goela abaixo

dos poderosos

e dos violentos

e dos brutos

e dos homens

       -  dos vencedores

       -  dos senhores

Por ti os sinos dobram,

hoje e amanhã

e para sempre

sob o badalo dos que tem frio

e fome

e sede

de justiça

e um dia viraram as páginas da história

pelas Eras de Hobsbawm

e além

Choram por ti

as Pessoas Extraordinárias

num jazz silencioso

numa Marselhesa de Sans Cullotes

e sem direitos

e sem saida

e sem amores

e sem medalhas

e sem história

…

agora herdeiros de uma rebeldia,

que lá está e por nós

espera...

Estranho sentir-me assim tão afetado, pela perda de alguém que nunca conheci.

Pela perda de um mestre, do qual hoje discordo tanto: Razão pessimista, trajédia europeia, o absurdo do homem branco...

são críticas

severas

que hoje posso entoar

contra ele inclusive

porquê nas páginas doces daquele Breve Século XX

me perdi

pra nunca mais

me encontrar.

ABSTRACT ON WHITEHEAD'S “MATERIALIZING BODIES”

ABSTRACT ON WHITEHEAD'S “MATERIALIZING BODIES”

• Few feminist approaches work revealing the materialization of the male body, but mostly pointing to the body as a field of social determinations.
  • Some pledge that objectification of males bodies has equaled with female's one
  • Adonis complex – crisis of masculinity makes man pursue through muscles the lost masculinity
    • He opposes the equality of the objectifications on bases of the different power equations informing one and other.
• His first purpose is to explore some of the ways in which men's sense of themselves as embodied agents serves to inform their physical presence in, and relationship to, the world and to others.
• A second purpose is to consider the notion that the material form of the male body is inevitably inscribed with masculinities
  • Male's sense of embodiment informs and shapes their multiple physical-discursive materializations and relationships – to their own bodies, to others' bodies (male and female), to the spatial field in which they find themselves.
    • None of this is received or experienced unproblematically. He is rejecting both:
      a) The essencialist notion of sexed bodies;
      • He follows the third wave of feminists on analysing the ways in which identity and materiality connect with the body, both to constitute it and to discoursively exercise power and resistance upon and through it
      b) The discourse of harmony leading certain sexed bodies to fit certain gender categories.
      • His point is that all male bodies are places upon which masculinities become inscribed, but not in any predictable or linear fashion
        • He reveals how the gaze is policing the problematic development of one such relation
          • For that he highlights how notions of the male body are historically differentiated, temporally and spatially located and highly specific to cultural sites
            • “The bifurcation of women and men as embodied beings took a particular turn during the period of the Western Enlightenment, when the belief in the Cartesian body-mind dualism served to reinforce the biological essentialism at the heart of male power, not least by depositing a 'universal voice of reason' on sex difference”
            • He points that understanding the body can no longer rely on sociobiological accounts only, but should also include pressures of postindustrial capitalism, commodification, gendered experiences, cultural significations, and psychoanalitical processes, to produce a body in flux, frequently rendered anxious, yet always subject to some level of external regulation.
    • He refers to Merleau-Ponty phenomenology (study of the formation of the consciousness) of the body as the original subject that constitutes space.
      • If this is the case, then there is no space within the public-private that is not already prefigured by (gendered) bodies, marking out territories for inclusionand exclusion of the female and male
        • Irigary understands that not on the basis of essentialist bodies prviously determining spatialities but, instead, as an evidence that the body itself is a contested terrain to the extent that its own formations will settle all the fenomenological consciousness, all the other spatialities.
          • According to this understanding the appearance of the male body as a 'whole and complete' steams a powerful semiotics of presence in the social world which turns its illusion into materiality
            • This process, however, does not succeed on being hegemonic as Foucault proposes that the body is not unified but is a site of struggle between opposing discursive power regimes:
              • “Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the processes of history's destruction of the body” (Foucault)
              • For Foucault the body is the ultimate surface upon which power and resistance operate
                • Foucault move us away from the Enlightenment split between body and mind
                  • Whitehead, however, problematizes which usage of Foucault suits better feminism as eventually the body is not seen as the starting point, as proposed by Merlau-Ponty, but rather the final point.
                  • He also problematizes using Foucault for his riginal concern was to understand the effects of capitalism and labour on their interconnections with the body.
                  • Thus he follows through the Foucauldian approach of Iris Marion Young and Judith Butler, who matches with Ponty's phenomenology to provide insights into the gendered body in ways that introduce the body as a contested plce, yet materialized in the social world through the dynamics of gender.
• Iris Marion Young
  • Young's argument is that most women experience their body as an object subjected to the gaze of another, as a fragile thing positioned in a gendered space, which serves to inform the degree and the extent ti which she may use it, exercise it, express it and receive it.
    • Her notion of space owes much to Merlau-Ponty to what ontology and subjectivity are located in the body, primarily through its orientation to the world
    • Young applies Beauvoir's existential feminism to Merlau-ponty's concept in order to produce an undertanding of feminine bodily existence – woman's motility and spatiality – as immanently positioned in a male dominated culture, where her very sense of being, self and subjectivity as Other arises from the fact of her bodily presence and entity being subject to restrictions and inhibitions
      • Basically the Beauvorian notion is that of 'women as man dennied to be', which is opposed to Butler's view of women as something unintelligible to the phallogocentric language.
        • Beauvoir posits woman and man as distinguished into one same linguistical system, while Butler claims that the very linguistic systems are distinct, and that woman are not intelligible to the masculinist language – they are abjected bodies.
      • Masculine ontology - dominant masculinities, and the sense of bodily presence and existence they suggest, do not position the male/masculine subject as timid, careful, restricted
        • Refers to the example of male kids playing through creating space for them (restricting space for others) while the women plays through intrsospection
      • She's not suggesting that behaviors are essentialists, but simply that gender constructions departs from a body contruction under the mark of lack, woman as the no-man. Thus she foresses the possibility of overcoming such differences as long as those body marks are not respected anymore.
        • Woman can escape one such typical situation of impediment in various degrees and respects.
      • She points that many man cannot sustain the display of their masculinities according to the ideal masculinist discourse upholding the masculinist spatialities they enjoy
        • The point, however, is less that certain man fail to have a constant symbiotic relationship between their bodies and dominnt discourses, but more about their permanent attempt to do so.
      • Young presents, in the overall, a clear link with gendered subjectivity, power, embodiment and materiality, but Whitehead prefers to shift her Beauvoirean understanding of woman towards a less essentialist and more discoursive approach which he considers capable of unfolding much more fragilities on the reproduction of masculinism. For that task he resorts to Butler.
• Judith Butler
  • Sex-gender distinction is an artifice
    • There's no pre-discursive sexed body
      • In feminist postructuralist terms, this binary operates in the service of a field of power relations through which is concealed the cultural invention of such truths and knowledges
    • She criticizes Beauvoir on what her – Beauvoir – suggestion that one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one implies a degree of agency, wherein choice of gendered embodiedness is avaiable
      • Irigary, who argues that the phallogocentric logic of a masculinist signifying economy, emcompassing both ontological and espistemological structures, signals that woman is 'marked off' from the domain of the signifiable; her very existence is mediated through men whereby she emerges as 'masculine woman'.
        • Butler moves beyond and criticizes even Irigary on what she proposes a non-definable “feminine feminine” representation, which offers women the opportunity to stablish a discursive space outside the dominant phallic epistemology
          • Butler questions any claim to a universal womanist epistemology
          • Butler sees the body in Foucauldian terms – materialized through power.
            • He stresses that Foucault and Bulter are not strictly constructivists on what, for them “there is no power that acts, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability (…) a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter”
            • Materiality designates a certain effect of power or rather, is power in its formative and constituting effects
              • In poststructuralist terms the 'I' that speaks has no presence and is not knowing beyond its discursivity. However, the 'I' that speaks does occupy a political position, for in speaking it makes claim to forms of knowledges that are themselves associated with particular political categories
                • These categories are discursive and, thus, enabling and not simply regulatory. And they are categories which, in extreme situations (for example, full gender reassignment), bodies can move across.
                • But for the most part they are categories, or power regimes, into which discourses materialize an embodied entity, not a unity of identities and not a stable, constant sovereign subject, but a politicized physical presence nonetheless.
                  • From this standpoint Whitehead moves to debate how, despite its existential status as Subject, the male body has other potential inscriptions, many of which render ir precarious and serve to position as Other (in such cases the male body shifts from the observer on the panopticon to the individual being observed)
• In gender terms we can see the gaze applied to both women's and men's bodies, whereby the discursive subject comes to discipline and manage her/his body as self-surveillance
  • The gaze itself is not neutral but invested with powers, in so much as it comes with a set of moral, social and cultural codes or assumptions; an economy of looks that places values on the body
    • While accepting that for many feminists the authoritative gaze is male, it is also important to recognize that male bodies are not outside of he gaze, but, indeed, also subject to multiple gazes, including that of the female
    • He proceeds revealing some examples:
      • Race man
        • For black men, stylizing their bodies can be understood as the exercise of power and the practice of resistance. However, the notion of a singular black masculinity is problematic, not least because it can be used to naturalize differences between black and white men
          • The black subject is idealised as the embodiment of its aesthetic ideal
            • He point to the gendered processes by which modes of thought surrounding African American men acquire dominance
            • 'Race man', Carby argues, becomes a black signifier of American society, but it is a signifier constructed from male-centered assumptions leaving women, sexuality and gender as a 'decorative function'
              • This signification of the black through the Race man keeps the phallogocentric discourse reifying woman's Otherness unaltered.
              • This signification also keeps the black man located as the Other through the institutional and authoritative gaze of the white male
                • Despite the multiplication of ideals of white man on current times, and the creation of a black male, the white male far from being displaced from the centre of discourse by a myriad of postmodern voices continues to predominate in the control of the image.
                  • The power of the gaze lies on its multiplicity, for it is through these multiple authoritative gazes that the paradoxes of embodied masculinity become apparent, as much for those who gaze as for those who are gazed upon.
      • A gay body of men
        • He points that the gaze of the gay body of men exemplifies how subversive potentials can underlie the regulatory mechanisms themselves
          • It's subversive potential lies on what it can makes strange and blurs stereotyped views.
            • Photographer Robert Mapplethorp is known for his evocative portrayals of black gay nude males
              • The imagery is almost impossible to categorize, for it depends on the gazer's subjectivity as to whether one sees the photographs as erotic, pornographic, aesthetic, emotive or simply beautiful.
              • Similarly the black male models can be understood to be both objectified and dignified by the process of being gazed upon
              • His pictures are a site of struggle, the arena being dominant notions of representation and truth, the contestants being both the gazed upon and the gazing
              • Mapplethorpe's photographs do not provide an unequivocal yes/no answer to the question of whether they reinforce or undermine commonplace racist stereotypes – rather, he trows the binary structure of the question back at the spectator, where it is torn apart in the disruptive shock effect
                • I find this reactionary on what he neglects the horizons of gender directing the shocking effects to homofobic reactions.
          • Gay men can occupy numerous meterialities, some of which may, apparently, conform to dominant understandings of how gay man might position himself as an embodied presence in the world.
      • Men's aging bodies
        • Whatever men's responses to growing older, it can be stated with some confidence that if men's bodies and the masculinities inscribed upon them are made precarious by multiple gazes, then they are, like women's bodies, rendered particularly insecure through aging. For if masculinity is about occupation, vigour, activity, mastery and overcoming space, then aging is the inevitable process that puts under question such dominant representations of maleness
          • Masculinity is not static and unchanging over a male's life; it changes just as the body moves in time and space
          • Some man are privileged with means for aging but still keeping virility, strenght and, in such cases, having the additional benefit of free time
            • This however is the privilege of a minority
          • Apart from economics and health, a further and related key variable in the ability of older men to manage later life transformations appears to lie in their sense of masculinity and its inability to acknowledge dependency on the help of others
• Thus the gze is not simply about reifying bodies; the gaze politicizes bodies, rendering them into numerous political fields of truth and knowledge, of which race, sexuality and age are but three.

ABSTRACT ON SHAW AND DARLING'S 'STRATEGIES OF BEING FEMALE'

ABSTRACT ON SHAW AND DARLING'S 'STRATEGIES OF BEING FEMALE'

• She points how the biological arguments for gender distinction in analogy to nature animals behavior is fallacious as the so called male active role on mating, as opposed to female passivity, is the outcome of how researchers just look at males behavior and even interfere in the female species to turn it into a blank sheet where the male can draw its agencies (e.g. female cats being ripped out of their ovaries and submitted to sex-inducing drugs at the convenience of the studies interested on the male behavior)
  • A paradigmatical case shifting this stereotyped trend came in 1970 as the Shiner Perch, a little fish revealed that females are strongly active on mating, and more, that they do so even without the 'hormonal imperative' of reproducing, as they don't reduce their sexual intercourses even after getting pregnant
    • And the females even perform sexual migrations after being already pregnant
    • The females of this species are promiscuous as they mate a variety of males
      • This species also reveal activity on what the females choose and regulate their pregnancies by keeping the sperm without fecundation so that her conception of babies could be in the time of abundance of food
    • The sexist persistence to this case was the concept of “sex role reversal”, referring to females which reverse a 'natural supposed to be' by the [heterosexual] scientific culture.
      • It's an arbitrary concept as natural becomes a cultural presumption and the nature it self is said to be reversing it. The very source of naturality is abjected by the heterosexual panopticon
      • This is a way to carry on examining nation from the males viewpoint
      • They resort to gametes to forge some natural distinction between the sexes claiming that male gametes, sperms, are active, while the women gametes, ovules, are passive receptacles
        • Besides the arbitrary of presuming the whole biological construct from the original gametes, and to carry on forging cultural differences on this base, recently there was a discovery on Nature Magazine which revealed how female gamets vary like the sperm and that the adaptations of females sexual organs are definitive to induce the sperm activity.

• The authors follow an investigation line presuming that animals have no culture, therefore whatever they behave is not according to any immanent cultural universe to which sexists resort on pointing the males are more active than females. Thus, she points that animal variety reveals completelly different behaviors of females which our cultural background could classificate as patriachalist or feminist, but in fact they are non for animals don't have culture, and just do whatever is necessary to stay alive and assure the species survival.
  • I disagree of this approach on what it keeps the biology-culture duality still alive, but simply deconstruct claims that heterosexual sexism has biological roots. I'm more favorable of destroying the very duality itself, which suits more Irigary and Butler critique on the phallogocentrism and the economy of the phallus. I think that neither animals not human beings should be hailed in terms of rather they have culture or not, and to what extent does it relate to biology.

• The authors carry on giving more examples of how animals biology, which are assumed to have no cultural links, can manifest in ways opposed to the essentialist nature construct of heterosexual sexism.
  • Species of which only sexual distinction are the gamets: Clams, oysters, starfish, sea urchins, snails, and fishes.
    • They also just abandon their eggs on the sea, without anything resembling 'maternal care'
  • Species of which females actively mate and perform mating ceremonies: Seabirds, rats
    • The Pelican also shares domestic 'bliss' on an equal time basis
    • Female rats is more active than the male on satisfying sexual apetite
    • Female Phalaropes and 'Jesus Birds' are colored to mate, pursue an active sexual position and patrol their own large land-holdings where she allows (patronizes) males to stay in exchange for sexual mating at her convenience.
      • They made the males take care of the eggs by smuggling it while males are not aware.
  • Species og which females are bigger than males: Many insects and certain mammals:
    • Spiders (some kill and eat the males)
    • Rabbits, hamsters, baleen whales, bats
    • Deep-sea angler fish which captures the males bad of testis to reach self-dependency
    • Female hyena even has a fake penis and scrotum (which is bigger than males one)

CHAPTER 8 (THE MYTH OF MATERNALISM)

• She deconstructs the myth according to which females are better nurturing than males because of the biological fact that they lactate
  • She notes that the stereotype is not so strong on species which doesn't have to care of its eggs, simply abandoning it. Therefore she focus on revealing nurturing behaviors of nonlactating animals and, at the same time, reveals not-caring behavior of mammals, or male nurturing on mammals
  • Nurturing behaviors of nonlactating animals: 90% of bird species – among songbirds (Passerines) – have alike caring provided by both female and male
    • Swifts, swallows, magpie geese, pied kingfisher, king penguins, bushits, nuthatches, wrens, grosbeaks, tanagers, jays, woodpeckers, terns, murres, and cuckoos all form cooperatives for the feeding of the young
    • Certain woodpeckers and pygmy nuthatches show that excess males which are not mating exercise nurturing roles in nests of others.
    • Anis cuckoo has communal nests
    • European cuckoo deposits its eggs in other species nests and when the offspring emerge it pushes the other eggs out of the nest to keep alll the care and attention to itself.
    • Jesus Bird females allows males to live under her territory to assure its sexual appetite and so that they can nest the eggs as she simply deposits it around.
  • Non-nurturing behavior of female mammals:
  • Nurturing behavior of male mammals
    • The male beaver watches the bith of the baby and shares everything but nurturing, including baby-sitting when the famale leaves the nest
    • Typically, one-third of carnivores, all of which are social species (e.g., dogs, hyenas, foxes, martens, mangooses), the males socialize, feed, guard, groom, huddle, and baby-sit for the young
      • Wild-dog males even regurgitate food for the pups and the female is more expendable than the male on the nurturing of them after the lactation period – in some cases of females death males managed to grow pups even without lactation.
    • In 40% of primates, males care for the young.
      • Among marmoset and tamarin monkeys, its hard to say who is the primary caretaker. Males even help on the birth of females, and they keep the nurturing behavior way after the females give up.
      • Male nurturing is most common among monkeys of the New World
      • Old World monkeys don't much seek contact and they are also kept distant from the youngs by the females, though they do come on rescue of the pups in moments of distress.
        • Baboons have a strong female authority as they have the last word on most aspects, and the male appearently doesn't involve much with pups because the females deny such access. But when given opportunity the male baboons seem to be good cares as well.
        • Female chimpanzees exclude males from family circles.
        • Female langurs keep passing the baby from female to female, but not allowing the male to approach pups. But after pups get independence from their mothers control males usually develop caring relations.
        • A widespread reason for non-nurturing males is that certain females species mate and leave the male company
    • The author suggests that man, in fact, have as much potential to be 'mothers' as females, and that developing that is pretty much about having contact with the babies and being given the opportunity to develop that.
      • She recalls the curious fact that most societies follow this woman role of motherhood maybe because men are kept distant from the moment of birth itself, what she suggests to have long term effects. Thus she proposes that men should be part of the birth moment (and of the early days as well).
      • Offspring creates caretakers too!
  • Communal nurturing behavior among mammals
    • Among Old and New World monkeys, newborn langurs are communaly taen care, spending around 50% of its time sucking different grown ups regardless of whether they lactate or not
    • Young lions are notorious for demanding extra-milk around their pride
    • Coatis have some mother-baby reclusion of 5 weeks, but afterwards they rejoin the groups and the baby starts being collectively nurtured.
    • Wild pigs not only share nursering but sometimes have communal nests
    • In all-female herds of Elephants those who need demand nursing from any member
    • Rodent rats doesn't even seem to be able to distinguish between their particular youngs, and nurture all communally
      • males also share everything else but lactating
    • Ann Oakley points to the occurrence of communal breast-feeding among preliterate peoples like the Samoans, Dakotas (sisters lactate collectively), Bororo and Arrenta
  • Equal nurturing behavior among male mammals in certain circunstances
    • In laboratory experiences, male rats and non-mother female rats develop nurturing behavior if in contact with the pups, even though in the presence of a nurturing female male rats are rather aggressive towards the pups.
      • They also noticed that if pups are always changed for young ones as they grow the nurturing behavior will not cease.
    • In laboratory experiences, rhesus monkeys, of which males are otherwise indifferent to pups, develops nurturing behavior once they get close to the pups – what usually doesn't happen as the females don't allow their presence close to the pups.

ABSTRACT ON RUTH VANITA'S 'THINKING BEYOND GENDER IN INDIA'

ABSTRACT ON RUTH VANITA'S 'THINKING BEYOND GENDER IN INDIA'

• The man-woman relatinship is premised upon a normative heterosexuality, geared towards reproduction of a dominant group (men) and a subordinate group (women)
• She criticizes certain Western feminist approaches towards India as they kind of focus on issues like sati to foster syndromes of Eastern patriarchy posed as worst than the Western one.
  • This leads ordinary woman not to complain about 'softer' violences under the sub-optimal logics of 'it could be worst' – what just legitimize rather than undermine the structures of male-female relationship.
    • She exposes that this subliminary logics of Western feminism is pushing feminists organizations in India into mere marriage counsellors.
      • This keeps heterosexual structures intact as they are permanently repaired by feminist groups (which she claims to be serving as 'unpaid relief workers')
        • In the overall there's the understanding that heterosexual monogamy is the least worst, which disables them from shaking the patriarchalists aspects of this institution itself.
          • She quotes the disregards of feminists organizations towards other sexual structures as two girls decided to marry taking advantage of the loophole of the Hindu Marriage Law – which doesn't specifies the sex of the partners involved – but ended up being pressured not to carry on by the authorities.
          • She also recalls that “different communities in India have practiced polygamy and polyandry, practices now outlawed. The undesirability of the economic and other inequalities built into these practices tends to be confused with the practices themselves; a residual puritanism makes these inequalities more visible than those that are built into heterosexual monogamy”
          • She also mentions how the desire to abolish verbal talaq (divorce declared by Muslim men to their wifes, with immediate effects) overshadowed that one such practice can be used with emancipatory horizons as one should not be forced to live with somebody else against one's will.
            • She claims that what feminists should be focusing was the only masculine usage of this device, but not necessarily the practice in itself.
              • She remembers that Islamic law has a provision for women getting immediately divorced as well, the khula – in which case she has to pay the mehr, just like the men is supposed to do in case of talaq
                • I made some research on my own to see the practical usages of that and appearently only Egypt enables, but in such cases the womas is automatically renouncing any financial share of the wealth of the couple. I also found that it has been proposed in Pakistan by some Muslim Council, but it didn't got operational (I couldn't get rather it wasn't yet been voted or if it was voted against).
                  • Speculating about the possibilities, however, she points that, introducing the khula with economic safeguards, what matches the contractualist nature of Muslim marriages, could transform Muslim marriage law into the most progressive law in the country – India.
                  • She reminds that in India, if separation is not consensual the one willing to leave has to prove that the other is an undesirable person rather than alleging simply incompatibility.
        • “Because the near-universal assumption that heterosexual monogamy is the best practice makes it easier for people to accept the idea of imprisioning men within monogamous marriage in the same way as women already are, but difficult to accept the idea of providing women and men with easy escape routes from marriage”
      • She points that any women's movement at some point has to repair the structures of heterosexual marriage but also combine this with the task of rethinking gender and sexuality to liberate both women and men into developing different kinds of family or collective living
        • Women's movement in India have just centered on the first task as people are just taken as victims instead of agents, and questionment smade on bases of equity rather than liberation
          • She points that liberation is about not being a man nor a woman in the sense that woman is just a complement for the man.
            • She points alternative sexualities such as Hijras (eunuchs), bhakta ans sant poets, besides European Saints
            • Radhaswami Satsang is an inheritor of bhakta traditions

ABSTRACT ON KESSLER'S 'THE MEDICAL CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER'

ABSTRACT ON KESSLER'S 'THE MEDICAL CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER'

• Her article analyses interviews with several physicians involved on the 'treatment' of intersexes to reveal how they intervene on the attribution (annountiation) of a particular heterosexual sex on bases which are rather cultural than the supposedly uncontested biology
  • She reveals how the biological criteria show up so blurred that the 'ideal' references become useless and the decision is usually cultural

• Fewer than 5% of intersexes are 'true intersexes' (have both ovary and testicles)
• The current attitude towards intersexes are primarily influenced by three factors:
  1) The possibility of surgically constructing a sex
  2) As feminists in the USA have called into question the valuation of women according to strictly reproductive functions, the presence or absence of functional gonads is no longer the only or the definitive criteria for gender assignment
  3) Psychological theories of 'gender identity', instead of 'gender role', claim for eraly assignments of sex so that one can develop such identity successfully.
• Management of intersexed cases is baded upon the theory of gender proposed first by John Money, J. G. Hampson, and J. L. Hampson in 1955 and developed in 1972 by Money and Anke A. Erhardt
  • She criticizes the Erhardt's references for being restricted to few cases, and she suggests that the widespread acceptance of their work is because it fits the contemporary ideas about gender, etc...
    • Many of her respondents claimed to use Erhardt's references just for those are the only medical publications on the issue, and in cases the doctors even questioned the effectiveness of the technique.
  • Doctors argue that gender is changeable until approximately eighteen months of age
    • Ideally the parents must be left no doubt of rather their child is male or female for the success of the assimilation, thus none of the respondents was positive about the idea of waiting the eighteen months, prefering to do it as quick as possible
    • Doctors claim that time is crucial to avoid confusing development of the body which could pose doubts on the way parents refer to the sexuality of the children
      • Endocrinologists pointed that this pushes to premeditate diagnosis which miss hormonal evidences which demand time to be produced
      • Doctors usually inform parents about intersexuality as being a malfunctioning of either heterosexual sex, but not as a condition in itself which they want to alter to conform bodies to cultural patterns.
        • Doctors pointed to her that keeping the first sex claim is important, even in cases when the doctor is convinced of having claimed the 'wrong' sex it's better not to retroactive for the sake of the confidence they must transmit
          • For this reason they condemn precoce anounciations of sex at the moment of birth for they may demand changes and inspire doubts
            • When, after 'being confused' parents come to the 'specialists on gender' those physicians usually try to deny the confusion even by criticizing previous doctors if necessary
        • On the urge of assimilating a sex early for avoiding doubts the respondents main concern was with avoiding a 'wrong' castration rather than avoiding a wrong 'devaginization' (construct of a penis), what reveals how masculinity is perceived in a cultural folder of substance while feminity is merely seen as the absence.
          • When chromossome tests reveals any possibility of Y there's an effort through hormones to assimilate masculinity, a preference which is rather cultural as chromossome tests revealing no Y keep the doubt opened to other variables instead of pointing to hormonal femininization.
            • In such cases, though, physicians usually retroced on masculinity assimilations whenever the penis doesn't develop as culturaly expected (which means that femininity is attributed even in cases where all the other masculine functions are avaiable but still the penis is considered aestheticaly small)
              • A penis must be good enough (not be a micropenis), otherwise a vagina is assimilated as there's no such thing as a good enough vagina
            • Another evidence of how physicians relate masculinity to substance and femininity with asbence is the reference to small penis instead of overdeveloped clitoris before assimilating a definitive sexuality
              • One respondent, endocrinologist, deliberated loud about the useless effort of performing so many tests as the appearance of the genital is usually the last word on the decision
              • Also, when teams of physicians disagree on the sex assimilation the practice usually points to assimilating as female
                • Urologists usually point to the possibility of making 'men' if the girl ever decides so due to hormonal or other developments, while the reverse way is always foreclosed under the spectre of castration traumas.
    • In cases where assimilation has to wait, usually when the assimilation depends on hormonal treatment which requires time, physicians also play a role shaping the parents reaction as they foster some sort of secrecy and denial (sidestep) of the intersex condition by delaying to give name or to give neuter names (e.g Claude or Jean)
      • Physicians normalize intersexed conditions in those cases through 4 steps:
        1) They teach parents about fetal development and explain that all fetuses have the potential to be male or female, thus implying that what is happening is a delayed definition rather than a condition 'as natural as the hetrosexual ones'
        2) Physicians stress the normalcy of the infant in other aspects and instead of refering to the abjected sexual identity they portray it as particular malfunctionings of an otherwise intelligible overall condition
        3) They reduce even more the intersex identity through saying that its just a genital malfunctioning.
        • In essence, the physicians teach the parents Money and Erhardt's theory of gender development
  • She emphacizes that physicians don't even refer to themselves as constructing genitals or sexes in general, but as fixers or repairers.
    • Certain physicians admited that they are the ones who decide the sex rather than simply announcing a naturaly given thing, but even than, they claim that they assign on biological bases of what sexual identity can be developed and kept stable, rather than on cultural preferences per se
      • Kessler criticizes this denial of culture on their part on what the mere fact that they are looking for sexual stable identities and the bases through which they frame what is or not sable are culturaly defined, and the objectivation with which they approach it is just an outcome of their very deep immersion into one such system
        • This is made evident as a medical success in those cases is usually judged on what their pacients have 'common' sexual genitals and develop capable of engaging on genital [heterosexual] sex.
        • Many doctors talk about hapiness as a criteria steaming from this sexual normality
  • In post-inphancy Kessler notes that physicians stimulate social convincements of the assigned sex by exhibition of the successfully created genital and spreading of medical reports which they recognize to have an authotity legitimacy within society
    • On dealing with the patients own questionments, physicians also reproduce the same kind of practice given to the parents, fostering some sort of essential naturality on the atributed sex and reducing the hiden intersexuality to malfunctions which they had to fix.
    • Even though access to biological knowledge and the horizons of litigious claims may prevent doctors from stating truths (lies), they still pretty much induce so by not mentioning certain aspects (e.g: the chromossome XY of assigned 'girls') or introducing partial explanations.
• She concludes that the peculiar balance of discovery and determination throughout treatment permits physicians to handle very problematic cases of gender in the mst unproblematic of ways.
  • This balance relies on a particular conception of the natural as waht it ough to have been
  • Naturality is made culturaly indisputable in a process of which main base is the actualy construct of a distinction between culture and nature
• In order for intersexuality to be managed differently than it currently is, physicians would have to take seriously Money's assertion that it is a misrepresentation of epistemology to consider any cell in the body authentically male or female.
• Neither the psychology nor the technology is doubted, since both shield physicians from responsibility on the reproduction of [hetero]sexual schemes of body.

ABSTRACT ON CHOPRA'S “FROM VIOLENCE TO SUPPORTIVE PRACTICE: FAMILY, GENDER AND MASCULINITIES”

ABSTRACT ON CHOPRA'S “FROM VIOLENCE TO SUPPORTIVE PRACTICE: FAMILY, GENDER AND MASCULINITIES”

• The research has tried to bring into focus the way that men's support can be outlined and reflected upon in the context of gender equality and domestic democracy
• While feminist writing and research has established the fact that women are not passive subjects doesn't mean agency and subjectivity are not fixed or absolute
• Neither is women's agency wholly recognised as an absolute goal of all feminists
• Some feminist theories have insisted that agency cannot only be understood as an exercise of volition in the abstract
  • Martha Nussbaum shows how agency to her is fixed on the horizon of human rights
  • Agency as an issue has to address the horizons within which it is articulated and realised as a political and substantive position
  • It is precisely this frame of women's agentic positions located within material conditions of existence – that has also produced the view that understanding women's lives is incomplete without looking at their everyday locations within families that must, of necessity, include relations with men.
    • The household is an arena of political division along fractured lines of deprivation
      • The experience of being male needs to be placed within these questions and masculinity as an identity has to be understood as a complex negotiation between gender, class and power
        • Outlining deprivation has produced another dynamic: the need to redress unequal distribution
          • E.G: Microcredit is a way of entering households to redress unequal distribution and at the same time promote gender intervention and gender sensitisation
            • Microcredit provides women with the means to secure livelihoods for themselves and their families
              • This stimulates men to be more suportive, involving them on reproductive healthcare
          • This outline reworks men's subject positions within the home by expanding and elaborating the role of men beyond the sexual, into the intimacies and the work of care
          • Violence is also framed and formed by cultures of power and deprivation
            • Adding to this, however, there's the role of social and cultural contexts shaping men's role in violence – what demands a closer investigation.
              • More critically, no analysis that seeks to understand men can confine itself to understanding men only in relation to violence
        • The deprivation approach, or entrance, however, focus only at men in the household, particularly in the category of husbands, and women only in the category of wifes in the reproductive phase of their lives
          • An analysis of men's everyday speech will allow us to tease out another dimension of gender relations that has remained muted, the support that men extend towards their families
            • The concept of supportive partners is a relational question because support can really only be understood in its relationalcontext
            • If support is relational its also context specific
              • E.g: In South Asia usually sons need to extend support to older parents, particularly widowed mothers, an aspect that the man-as-supportive partners programmes overlook
            • Those who seek to enter the household through intervention need to ask whether supportive practices already exist at the level of the everyday
            • Supportive practices need to be located in relational contexts between men and women, as well as between men and men
              • we need to address a dimension of relationships that patriarchal structure often hides or mutes and look more closely at the everyday practices of men.
                • There's a need to explore men's perceptions of supportive practices.
• A research on men's supportive practices and their subsequent perceptions was realized by UNFEM India and Delhi University
  • Methodological choices:
    1) Not intended to change the way people think
    • Rather it was to track the way people think differently with the horizons and limits of their cultural and social positions
    • It's an anthropological rather than intervention research
      • Anthopological researches are defined as projects to be discovered during the investigation
      • Intervention researches have a choice already made intended to be informed and inflicted on the subjects of investigation
        • In essence, intervention echos the same problems that lie in words like penetration. Feminist writings have alerted us to the power of penetration which blanks out agency and subjectivities of those who are positioned as penetrated
          • She says that: “This is not to claim that transformation is not a valid agenda. But I think it is important to recognize that people confront and engage with change and transformatioon continuously in their everyday lives. Daily lifes are altered through movements of migrants, through doing effeminate work, by expanding the role of fathers towards other adult men”
    2) The choice of the family as the single most definite institution within which to explore the lives and everyday relational practices of men
    3) The choice to demarcate 4 contexts of men to men supportive practices:
    a) Family businesses
    • It enabled a view of the father-son relationship within the domestic domains as well as the expansion of the family ideology beyond the immediate boundaries of the home
    • It highlighted the material substance of supportive practices and the affirmation of the ideology and ethos of the family when extended towards the economic institution of the shop or business
      • The three generational business enabled us to track the variety of supportive practices across time and through various male-male relationships
    • The involvement of uncles, nephews and other non-direct parents reveals the expansion of the authority of the father as both re-enforced and simultaneously dissolving as it expands beyond the single person of the geniter
      • She points that, in fact the dispersal of fathering over many men demonstrated the need to think about supportive partners in a more elaborate and far more nuanced way
    b) Lives and histories of male domestic workers
    • By choosing to look at unconventional work performed by men we were able to analyse both existing paradigms of divisions of labour and how these are contravened in everyday choices that very ordinary men make
      • Unconventional in the way it lies outside the accepted division of labour.
        • E.G: When men worked as domestic lobourers, work which they talked of as effeminate or not male within the division of labour, they said that they did domestic work despite this feminine orientation for the sake of the family
    • Domestic workers revealed to be a bridge between their own family and their 'expanded family'.
      • The subjective position of the man is splited between two contradictory contexts – as a fully entitled male member in one family context, and as a partial member in the other
      • It reveals that the family needs to be viewed as an arena within which not just women, but particular categories of men occupy positions of deprivation as subalterns
    c) Male beauty parlour workers
    • A situation that was unusual and normally associated with women
    • The deliberate choice of a non-family field enabled an exploration of the ideology of the family as an institution of care and learning and the way that care is articulated in non-family contexts
    • They provided an insight into the value of friendship as social and cultural capital
      • Supportive practices here are elaboreted by men, for the sake of other men and the families of these other men. Thus men's supportive practices may not only orient themselves towards their own families, but to other families as well
    • It yelded important insights and allowed us to explore both the subversions of masculinities and the re-assertions of the male self through the performance of work
      • Beauty work entails a physical exchange between the bodies of men who care for the appearance of the male self
        • New formations of masculinity and the male self are produced through cultures of body care
    d) Boys club in Kolcata
    • It provided an opportunity to explore formations of masculinity in the public, or non-domestic, domain
      • E.G: The process of passing on maleness from adult men to adolescent boys
        • The passing on vital knowledge between elder club members and new or potential members imitated, in some part, the idea of passing down inherited knowledge that was more overt in the family businesses.
    • The choice for analysing this category followed the more prolific investigations of Western gangs and pubs
      • It's important to notice that those spaces are not hidden or marginalised
    • Our attention was drwn to the hidden social value of hanging out
      • The clubs are collective bodies that initiate and introduce boys into worlds outside the family – non-formal sites of socialization of boys into the world of power and support
  • Conclusions:
    • The question of hierarchies between men is one critical issue. At the same time, this hierarchy is counterpoised with the spirit of egalitarianism that also seems to be crucial in forming relations between men
      • What place does friendship have in the lives of men?
    • The two field sites 'outside' the family provided a constrast for the research within the family. In addition, these two sites simultaneously enabled the possibility of understanding how work and non-work were key issues in the formations of masculine identities and in the lives of men
    • The research highlighted the way that the concept of effeminacy needs to be expanded to be able to address sexual identity through work and labour.
      • Labouring bodies confront the issue of male identity and effeminacy in extremely complex ways that complicate the relationship between sexual identity and effeminate bodies
    • One of the critical arenas of support between men was through friendship
      a) Enabled entry into working lives and the reproduction of necessary skills.
      b) Friendship networks were the context for men to re-articulate autonomy, a sense of male self 'lost through the performance of women's work'
    • One of the issues raised by this research, most importantly in the field of family business, but also in the other field sites, is the ways in which practices that constitute fathering might also be placed within the context of supportive relations and support practices
      • Fathering is a role centred on more than one single man because it is an ideology more than a biological fact.
        • Most clearly on the family businesses, where continuation is not necessarily in a direct lineal or agnatic line, but along affinal or collateral lines
          • Just as there might be a proliferation of businesses that make up the family business, there is the equal possibility of a proliferation of fathers who play a critical role in the lives of younger men, not necessarily their sons
    • The social networks of support are those that are drwn upon during times of need and times when a family affirms and celebrates itself
      • It reveals certain institutionalised support networks
        • E.G: Deepchand, a Dalit who was supported by upper caste friends on settling his own business and currently has overcome hierarchies on stablishing a level of intimate friendship with them.
    • Support has a material and non-material aspect
    • Support practices are diverse in terms of the cultural contexts within which they are articulated
    • Supportive practices are distinguished between those that already exist and those that come into existance or are created when people find themselves in situations of deprivation and a perceived loss of autonomy
      • Supported among men is not taken for granted. It is cultivated with care and time (a thing of value) is freely spent in the cultivation of support networks
    • Conflict between the father and son standing in a direct lineal relation may be diverted by overemphasising the support from other fathers (maternal uncles, for example). The future reproduction of the family is assured by the strategic displacement of support and the consequent deflection of conflict
      • Apart from uncles in business families, hierarchically placed upper caste men do assist low-caste men to get work and support their families, indirectly entering as supportive partners of lower caste men
    • Drawing from these instances it may be possible to argue that husbands are not more supportive than parents in certain cases
    • In talking about themselves and their lives, men did not have a very articulate vocabulary to speak about themselves, except when they were narrating the support they received or had given
    • Supportive practices are an idiom which explicate agentic subjectivities and provide a language of engagement with the lives and cultural locations of men.