S. Gallardo lecture notes

Gender & Sexuality

I. Sexuality as a concept

II. Women's sexuality as threatening

III. Kinsey & Heterosexuality

IV. Homosexuality

 

 

The meaning of “Sexuality”

  • Voluntary motherhood (early reproductive rights)
  • Rural to Urban shift, family economy, family size
    • Social interaction - Marriage, dating norms
    • Consumerism
  • Women’s sexuality
    • Whose controlled?
    • Whose uncontrolled?

 

With emergence of “romantic” and “dating” culture, sex detaches from reproductive function

  • Early talk of birth control
  • Sanger first bc clinics, shut down by Comstock Laws, 1916
  • Control of fertility emerges as acceptable in context of eugenics, control of “undesirable” populations
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.Margaret Sanger interview with Mike Wallace, 9/21/57

"My feeling is that love and attraction between men and women, in many cases the very finest relationship has nothing to do with bearing a child. It's secondary. ...you can talk to people who have very happy marriages and they're not having babies every year. Yes, I think that's a celibate attitude...

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Early birth control options

BC4
Stem pessaries are intra-uterine devices (IUDs) consisting of a rubber, metal, or glass stem attached to a cup or button to hold the stem upright and prevent it from becoming lost in the uterus.

1960s  Loretta Lynn, "The Pill"

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Missing discourse of desire

  • Recognizing women’s sexuality
  • Koedt, Myth of Vaginal Orgasm
  • Medical self-knowledge, professionalization of women’s health
  • Personal is political (Millet, Sexual Politics)
  • Autonomous or promiscuous?
  • Still?

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Kinsey scale

Alfred Kinsey

On Sexuality Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)

Review of his findings here at the Kinsey Research Institute at the University of Indiana

 

  1. Dynamic nature of human sexuality

    2. “While emphasizing the continuity of the gradations between exclusively heterosexual and exclusively homosexual histories, it has seemed desirable to develop some sort of classification which could be based on the relative amounts of heterosexual and homosexual experience or response in each history... An individual may be assigned a position on this scale, for each period in his life.... A seven-point scale comes nearer to showing the many gradations that actually exist.” (pp. 639, 656).

  2. Fluid nature of human sexuality

“Males do not represent two discrete populations, Kinsey scaleheterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats…The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects."

 

3. Rejection of pathology; experimentation is normal.

 

 

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Homosexuality – recognizing lesbianism & lesbians

  • Stonewall. Acceptance – rejection of pathology

  • Coming out - Moving a culture above ground

  • Civil rights issues - nondiscrimination, employment, adoption and most recently, marriage

  • Questioning heterosexuality

  • Challenging feminists - Feminism is the theory…?