intersectionality

Chrissy Y., Stacey S., and a former student of mine, Kenjus Watson, have all suggested that we post about the controversy over Olympic athlete Caster Semenya’s sex.

A lot of people are talking about whether or not it’s appropriate to be asking about her sex and why we would be so obsessed with knowing the answer. Those are fine questions (and I address them secondarily).  But first I would like to suggest that, even if we were to decide that it is appropriate to want to determine her sex (that we are obsessed with it for a good reason), it would be impossible to actually determine her sex definitively. Let me explain:

If you were to try to decide what qualifies a person as male or female, what quality would you choose?

I can think of eight candidates:

1. Identity (whatever the person says they are, they are)
2. Sexual orientation (boys dig girls, vice versa)
3. Secondary sex characteristics (e.g., boobs/no boobs, pubic hair patterns, distribution of fat on the body)
4. External genitalia (e.g., clitoris, labia, vaginal opening/penis and scrotum)
5. Internal genitalia (e.g., vagina, uterus, and fallopian tubes/epididymis, vas deferens, seminal vesicles, prostate, etc)
6. Hormones (preponderance of estrogens/androgens)
7. Gonads (ovaries/testes)
8. Chromosomes (XX/XY, the SRY gene)

Most of us assume that these criteria all line up. That is, that people with XY chromosomes have testes that make androgens which creates a penis, epididymis, vas deferens etc… all the way up to a male-identified person who wants to have sex with women.  We also assume that these things are binary (e.g., boobs/no boobs), when in reality most of them are on a spectrum (e.g., hormones, also boobs, likely sexual orientation).

But these criteria don’t always line up and sex-linked charactertics aren’t binary.  Examples of “syndromes” that disrupt these trajectories abound (e.g., Klinefelter’s syndrome).  And all kinds of practices, including surgeries, are sometimes used to force a binary when there isn’t one (e.g., intersex surgery to fix the “micropenis” and “obtrustive” clitoris and breast reduction surgery for men).

If these criteria don’t always line up, then we have to pick one as THE determinant of sex.  But any choice would ultimately be arbitrary.  The truth is that none of these criteria could ever actually definitively qualify a person as male or female.

The alternative would be to require that a person qualify as male or female according to ALL of the criteria.  And you might be surprised, then, how many people are neither male or female.

I think the debate over whether we should test Semenya’s sex is getting ahead of itself, given that there is no such test.

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Yet, while we won’t be learning anything definitive about Semenya’s sex, the controversy does teach us something about our obsession with sex difference.  On MSNBC, Dave Zirin explains what the controversy over is really about:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK-w6lDOZ5Q[/youtube]

To me, one of the most interesting things that Zirin says is that sex isn’t actually a good indicator of athletic ability.  He may be a guy, he says, but having a penis doesn’t translate into outrunning anyone.

He is implying that sex segregation in athletics, as a rule, is more about an obsession with sex categories and their affirmation than it is about sports. Remember, Semenya’s sex is being questioned not just because she appears masculine to some (she always has), but because she kicked major ass on the track.

Kenjus, my former student, writes:

…why didn’t they test Usain Bolt?  He did amazingly well… Yet, his otherworldly accomplishments are considered the result of his never-before-seen body structure… Usain, however, is a big, strong, fast Black man. The fact that his times are just as mind-boggling as Caster’s gets lost in the widely accepted narrative that big, strong, fast Black men accomplish amazing athletic feats. It’s what they’re built for.

But this woman has apparently baffled the athletic and scientific experts because her body is not doing what a woman’s body is supposed to do. More specifically, her shape is too muscular, her voice is too deep, and her time is too fast. Essentially, “Semenya-the-woman” CANNOT exist in an exclusively two-gendered (i.e. men and women) society in which men are innately bigger, stronger, more deeply-voiced, and particularly FASTER than women…

Semenya is getting far more media attention than the recent cheating scandals of higher profile athletes. This is precisely because there’s something that separates Caster from an A-Rod, a Marion, a Sosa… The world is captivated by Caster because something that should be certain; unquestionable; medical; pre-ordained, is in flux.  It is regrettable that some athletes take illegal drugs to gain an edge over the competition. It’s entirely unethical, unnatural, and ungodly for an athlete to not fit into our narrow specifications of what constitutes gender or sex.

Indeed.  Our obsession with Semenya’s sex, in addition to being hurtful and invasive, says a great deal more about us, than it does about her.  And perhaps the reason we are so obsessed with proving Semenya’s sex, to bring this post back to its beginnings, is because binary sex doesn’t actually exist.  Me thinks we protest too much.

(Thanks to Mimi Schippers, via the Sociologists for Women in Society listserve, for alerting me to the video. Images found here and here.)

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Clayton W. alerted us to this September’s issue of Harper’s Bazaar. Paul Goude decided to photograph Naomi Campbell as if she were in Africa with animals.  Clayton writes that it “…very nearly turns her into some sort of animal.”  Below are some images from the photo shoot, courtesy of Womanist Musings (via Feministing):

On this cover of Vibe, Lil’ Kim is posed animalistically and, it is asserted, she is “ready to roar”:

NEW! Naomi Campbell, is also put in leopard print in this photo in the December 2008 issue of Russian Vogue (found here):

ALSO NEW! Iman with a cheetah, and with a cheetah print scarf on her head, as photographed by Peter Beard, 1985 (found here):

ALSO ALSO NEW! These two pictures of Grace Jones (from here) involve animalization (explicitly in the second case). These images may not be safe for work, so I’ve put them after the jump, along with another example:

more...

I schedule my posts for mid-morning, but I write most of them between midnight and 5am.  It’s 3:24am right now.

The New York Times developed an interactive graphic, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that allows users to see what proportion of Americans are doing what at any given time of the day.

At about 3:24am, 95% of Americans are sleeping:

The interactive graphic allows you to look at the data by race, gender, parental status, education-level, employment, and age. Below are screen shots of the data for each age group.

People aged 15-24:

People aged 25-64:

People 65 and older:

Click overto play with the data. It’s oddly fascinating.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Tracy R. sent in the trailer for the movie “Good Hair,” a documentary by Chris Rock:

This movie looks awesome. It humorously addresses the social construction of “good” hair, which means, of course, straight hair. As we see in the trailer, African American women often feel pressured to wear their hair straight in order to be seen as attractive; this is similar to how lighter skin is often defined as more attractive than darker skin, even by other African Americans (and Latinos). It’s also interesting that the pursuit of “good” hair has created a global market for human hair.

On the topic of African American women and weaves, Sexual Buzz sent in this KGB “Natural Weave” commercial (KGB is a service where you can get answers to questions via text) that plays on the “angry sassy Black woman” image.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Mary M., of Cooking with the Junior League (go read it now! It’s awesome!) sent in photos she took of several pages from House Dressing, a cookbook published by the Windsor Square-Hancock Park Historical Society in 1978 (Hancock Park is a wealthy section of L.A.). The cookbook contains a section called “Kitchen Spanish,” which, as Mary says, “pretty much amounts to phrases you can use to boss around your help.” They are quite thorough, providing terms not just for cooking but for many other household tasks, and specific terms for wool vs. silk clothing. Here are images of a couple of the pages:

And here we have my favorites, “This is still dirty” and “Do it very thoroughly this time”:

And to think, when I first read the phrase “Kitchen Spanish” I assumed it was a geographically confused title for the Tex-Mex recipe section. Also, given that the pronunciation guides don’t include instructions on which syllable to emphasize, I can only imagine what kind of directions the employees actually received.

It made me think of the book Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence, by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. She discusses the tensions and conflicts that often arise between immigrant (largely Latina) housekeepers/nannies and their (mostly White and female) wealthy employers over how tasks should be done. Domestic workers generally expressed a wish to be told what to do, but not how to do it (and not watched while they worked), while employers felt they had to provide a lot of micromanagement if they wanted tasks done to their standards. Many instances where employees quit or employers fired them resulted from the conflict over this issue.

My guess would also be that many of the individuals contributing to and buying this cookbook would not be cooking anything from it themselves. The cookbook probably served as a form of symbolic domesticity for wealthy women to share recipes, while the women doing much of the actual cooking and cleaning in their households were present only implicitly as the recipients of the instructions on these pages. As Mary pointed out, something similar was probably true of all the “signature recipes” of First Ladies are often shown serving in photo ops–it seems likely that many of them had nothing to do with the preparation and may not have even supplied the recipe. Didn’t John McCain’s wife (I know, not a First Lady, but she was a hopeful) post a recipe on the campaign website that turned out to be taken from another cooking website?

NEW! (July ’10): Jason K. sent in another example, this one published in 1976:

Lisa recently asked, “What warrants a slide show on a newspaper’s website?” Denise L. sent in an article from the Life section of the Globe and Mail website called “Obsession with Aging Female Parts Has Created a New Body Lexicon” that brings up similar questions about what topics are given attention. The article states,

Ladies of a certain age, the best that can be said is, welcome. Congratulations are not necessarily in order…

Such is women’s obsession with the tyranny of their aging bodies – some might even call it a body dysmorphic disorder – that they develop names for the various age-signifying bits that can seem as offensive as teenage behaviour, prompting a need for strict control (in this case intervention in the form of diet, exercise, cream, injection or scalpel).

The names suggest annoyance, never love or fondness of the type men have for some of their parts.

Which is unfortunate. Don’t you love your teenager, despite his long, greasy hair? The cure, ladies, is to laugh. To wit, a list of the best names for the worst afflictions.

We then have images to illustrate aging and the names giving to aging body parts. Here are a few. Vampire Dinner Lips:

Quilting Pattern:

Suitcase Knees (because they’re “padded and bulky”):

Crepey Cleavage (presumably looks like a crepe?)

Crow’s Feet:

Huh. I wonder why women don’t see to express “love or fondness” for their aging bodies the way the article claims many men do (something I find doubtful).

The article presents itself as an antidote to women’s obsession with their bodies and aging, a way to help women laugh and accept their bodies. But the images that accompany it, clearly meant to make the figures into objects of ridicule, make it hard to imagine how they would achieve such an objective. Reading it just made me aware of all kinds of things I’d never heard of or particularly noticed before. And in a larger sense, the question, as with the slide shows of scantily clad women, is why this is news? And why pretend the article is about helping women accept their bodies through humor, which I don’t think it does?

The Women’s Media Center has compiled a series of clips exposing the racist and sexist discourse surrounding Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court:

Via Racialicious.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Amy Poehler, Sarah Silverman, Julie Lewis-Dreyfus Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Christina Applegate, Jane Krakowski, and Mary Louise-Parker candidly discuss getting older in Hollywood. The discussion starts about about 1:00. It’s not particularly organized, but it’s nice to hear perspectives from the inside:

Via Feministing.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.