Darlene McCoy
Karen Barad
FMST 80K
6 April 2011
Week 1 Readings
The “Five Sexes” and the “Five Sexes Revisited” gave insight to a kind of people not commonly spoken of. I, for one, have not ever given serious thought to intersexual people or hermaphrodites until I read those articles. I honestly just did not think of sex in terms of anything but male and female - and then suddenly there were five different sexes floating about in my head! It’s not that the information that intersexual people existed startled me it’s just more the fact that I’d never given a thought to how they live, or even how a person could be defined as intersexual. I appreciated the fact that Anne-Fausto Sterling did a follow up on her article, because I feel that no work or issue is completely resolved, and her revisions to her original ideas made me feel that she legitimately cares for her work, which made me care more.
The “XY Corral” piece more or less blew my mind. I was just so shocked at how the team of scientists in the article attempted so furiously to keep gender roles intact. The “special segment” that makes a person male is only active on the Y chromosome! This article just made it incredibly clear that science is not without its biases and whatnot.
The movie shown in class yesterday made consequences of social constructivism taking a role in scientific study and practice quite clear. It was quite the downer to learn what people had gone through because doctors thought that having an undefined sex would harm a person socially to the point where surgery should be employed to correct “deformities.” It was almost like learning about the consequences of racism for the first time. People did what I would consider unnecessary things to others due to how they were born. I understood that the doctor’s intentions were good and genuine, but I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just wait a while for the person in question to make a decision about their body and life. Either way – Anne-Fausto Sterling and the movie we watched gave me some fantastic food for thought and made me more excited for the upcoming weeks!
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