Hegemonic Sexuality and Knowledge…how will we use what we know??

Our final paper focuses on hegemonic sexuality and how it is either reflected, maintained, or challenged. I chose to analyze song lyrics and after going through many songs by various artists from varying genres, it was quite apparent that hegemonic sexuality is maintained in a majority of all the songs. By actually having to look at the lyrics in depth so I could see what the artists were saying, it helped to see how people view the way that things work in our everyday lives. Take music for instance, probably all of us in this class alone listen to music almost everyday of our lives. What do we continuously hear? Songs that tell of broken hearts, money, sex, love, family, tough times, etc. All the while, almost all the subjects maintain the normative views that we have been raised to believe and not question at all. Well, this got me thinking to the grand level that we have been influenced to think this certain way. Almost everything around us, screams maintain hegemonic sexuality (with a few exceptions)! Sports, billboards that we see when we are driving on the streets, pictures of models posing together, t.v. shows, movies, commercials, stores in the malls, cars, alcohol, cigarettes, cologne, perfume, deodorant, soap, shampoo, laundry detergent, etc. Almost everything that exists is made based off of male and female gender stratification and re-enforces these notions that the male gender is dominant, i.e deodorant for men called Axe and for women Secret.

Even condoms are distinctively differentiated: condoms for women are called “Her pleasure” and are purple in color, whereas for the names are “Trojan”, “Magnum”, “Champion”, and are black and gold.  Again, the notion of men being the penetrator and women being penetrated and being submissive is represented by condoms. When it truth, a man cannot penetrate a women unless is gives approval, and vise versa for men also. (of course under other horrible circumstances such as rape) Therefore, the act is and should be viewed as equal.

The more I have realized just how sexualized everything around us is, the more I want to try to use the things I have learned in this class to try to change it. Ever since our class discussion regarding sexuality and telling people that that we’re not homosexual, heterosexual or bisexual when someone asks us, I began using this in my life. I have tried to convince some of my friends to start doing the same but I have had a hard time explaining and changing their mindset. However, I sometimes get frustrated because I feel like I have gained so much knowledge from this class that I want everyone around me to gain some insight so that they could change their way of thinking. In the last class, we talked about what we can do with all the things that we have learned about in this class and I truly feel like this is the greatest challenge after taking a class like this. When things happen now, thoughts are triggered from this class and I think about the theories and class discussions we have had in class.

Knowledge truly does give us power, however, only if you know what to do with and how to influence others with that knowledge.I feel like I have grown and have changed many of my previous thoughts and beliefs. I look forward to using the things that I have learned from this class in my life from now on since the sociology of sexuality is truly prevalent in our lives.

Conversations of Attraction

While home for this Thanksgiving, I spent a night catching up with one of my old friends from high school. While we were reminiscing of shared memories and detailing our most recent adventures, another topic of conversation emerged: none other than sexuality. My friend happens to be a lesbian who goes to Oberlin- a bubble of progressive thought and political correctness. She is a person that finds herself attracted to people who happen to be pre-op transgender. She wants to be with someone in the nitch of looking very masculine, but still identifying as a woman. In the past this has led many of her girlfriends to ultimately publicly identifying as male.

            This gave me two things to think about. The first is the question of attraction. What is it about a certain type of person that we are drawn to? The heteronormative world is often under the assumption that gay people would be satisfied with dating anyone else who is gay. This is not true of straight people- we all have different types and attractions, yet we make this assumption to maintain our charmed circle. My friend has found herself drawn to a specific minority. This also brings to question the conversation of transgender people. Schilt and Westbrook wrote about how F to M transgender people are accepted by men in the public sphere but not by women, while in the private sphere this is not the case. In our socialized heteronormative world, transgender confuses our sense of gender relations. The more I talked to my friend, the more I realized how blurred the concept of gender has become in her liberal bubble, yet the rest of society can’t seem to breach this reality. Undoubtedly, attraction comes in all shapes, sizes, genders, and sexualities. The irony though is that once these biological women start making the physical steps towards transition my friend is no longer attracted to them.

            Another intriguing component of the conversation was my friend’s relationship with her mother. They are unusually close, but her mom comes from a more traditional Irish background. My friend came out to her probably 5 years ago, and she has never fully accepted it. However, she is making steps towards understanding and loving that part of her daughter. But a new issue has emerged. Her mother refuses to see her with a masculine looking woman and insists that she just date a girl who looks like a girl. Now I found this particularly peculiar. I would think that she would rather see a couple that looks slightly more heteronormative with a male/female binary, in appearance anyways. I asked why this was the case and the explanation my friend gave was that her mom likes conformity and if her daughter had to be gay then she would rather is be ‘normal gay’. Here I began to wonder that as our society is progressing are we simply just expanding the Gayle Rubin’s charmed circle to include certain types of gay couples. Is there a normalized and socially accepted image of a lesbian couple? Is the lack of acceptance more about gender than sexuality? If a person can accept a couple that looks like two women but not women that look more like men, perhaps the emphasis has been placed on maintaining the feminine/masculine binary that infiltrates all of society rather than the within one couple. I don’t know if this is an overall societal view but it certain presents some possibilities.

Charmed Circle at Lakeside Mall?

      

     Have you ever wondered what people think, say, or look when you do something out of the ordinary, not fitting for the “charmed cirlce”? My two teammates and I decided to test it out. Last weekend we were at the Lakeside Mall and decided to see people’s reactions of us pretending to be together as a couple. I am Causasian, 5’9, Erika is Caucasian, 6’3, and my other teammate Marshea is African American, 5’5. We wanted to see if the reactions received would be similar or different with the pairs: Erika and I, Marshea and I, and then Erika and Marshea.  I have to note that Erika tends to get stared and glared at for her height on an everyday basis because women are not usually that tall.

        First off, we paired Marshea with my Erika and I was the “spy” and watched people’s reactions. We went to a shoe store and at first just looked at shoes so that we could get the ambiance of the store. Then they held hands together and put their arms around one another while they were discussing the shoes. It was amazing how quickly people completely lost focus of what they were doing, i.e., women that were trying on their shoes stopped to look at them. One older Caucasian lady even dropped her mouth wide open as she looked up at Erika and down at Marshea with this disgusted look on her face. Another woman had a confused look like she had never seen anything like it before. It was interesting how the ambiance of the store had a more tense feeling to it. Then they decided to pretend Marshea was buying Erika shoes, with Erika taking her wallet and then Marshea saying, “No baby, I am gona buy them for you.”  The African American cashier was in state of shock for a second because she just stood there before she actually took the money from Marshea. After she bagged the shoes she did not know who to give the bag as she was about to hand it to Marshea but then gave it to Erika. We found it so funny how thrown off guard the cashier was at such a simple act because had it been a man and woman it would have been perfectly normal for one partner to buy something for their partner. As they were about to enter Macy’s these two guys watched them from the front and then turned around so they could watch from the back and they laughed. Another woman actually made a “hmph” sound while looking up at Erika! We could not believe that this woman actually did that. All we could do was laugh when we walked away from her.

        Next, I was Marshea’s girlfriend and Erika was the spy. We chose to go to another shoe store so that the setting could kind of be the same. We first went in and felt out the store the same way we had at the other store. Then Marshea and I began holding hands while looking at shoes. Erika said that one woman shook her head at us. People definitely noticed us holding hands but did not stare as long as they had with Erika and Marshea. The ambiance of the store was also a little more relaxed; people did not react so drastically with Marshea and I. While walking through the mall Erika said that some black girls stated, “Why did she have to choose a white chick?”

       Lastly, Erika was my girlfriend and we went to our third shoe store. We all agreed that the ambiance of this store had the least change out of the three stores. Marshea said that some people looked twice at us to make sure that we were holding hands but no one really stared. As we were walking around Marshea said that some guys were staring at us with smiles on their faces and some older women looked at us with surprise. Although, we all agreed that our match was the one that received the least amount of negativity and surprise.

      After we were done we talked about the three different matches and discussed why we thought we got the reactions that we did. We felt that Erika and Marshea received the most attention and negativity because they stood out the most because of the huge difference in height and then the fact that one is white and the other is black. It was discrimination of race and homosexuality both working against them. The reason that we thought that Erika and I got the least amount of stares and negativity is because we fit in the best. We are closer in height and our race does not stick out so it was not as “bad” compared to the other two matches. We also realized how judgmental people are and how even in a mall setting there is this “charmed circle” of who fits in and who does not. When I thought about it some more by myself, the one book that popped up in my mind was “Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers” and the Sex and Race chapter.  “Some black women would laugh low in their throats when the saw a black man with a white woman”.(118) It is clear that even today there are discriminations against interracial couples and then you add the non-heterosexual sexual aspect to it in a heterosexual world and the norm is thrown off. In the end, we felt like we got something out of the test because we got to see how race, ethnicity and sexuality form the foundation to how this society works. 

Tulane’s Time Warp

A few weeks ago I went to Tulane’s production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of watching this movie, it is a cult classic about two strong examples of the hetero-monogamous dyad (Brad and Janet) who find themselves stuck at an old castle filled with transvestites, other-worldly people, and manufactured men. In the song, dance, and sexual encounters that ensue, the Rocky Horror Picture show makes a mockery of society itself.

The movie deals with the discourse of sexuality throughout. For instance, the leader, Frankenfurter- a sweet transvestite from transsexual transelvania- has been making his equivalent of ‘the perfect man’. Here we see a conversation of masculine sexuality. This man (Rocky) has the ideal body of a man with the mind of a child. The only way he can be ‘made a man’ is by having sex. His masculinity is not complete without a sexual act. Those this seems to be propelling the idea of a male dominated society, where real men emerge as powerful in the bedroom, as Mackinnon would argue, it actually heads a very different way. The scene in fact is queering this ‘perfect masculinity’, for who is creating this man- a transvestite. As Seidman would say, this is a concrete interaction in which the heteronormative reality is being pushed. Brad and Janet look on in shock as the satirical representation of heteronormative society. However, by the end of the movie, they have both had affairs (even same-sex) and are dressed in drag. No longer resisting this initially thought strange place, they have engulfed themselves in the queered world. Though they were ‘happily’ engaged upon entering the house, they seemed to (unintentionally) take one from the book of Laura Kipnis and destroy their monogamous dyad once they learned of other possibilities. Rocky Horror manages to present the hegemony of society and then turn it topsy-turvy on itself.

  
            Beyond what the movie itself showed about society, the audience was that much more revealing. In probably no other circumstance on Tulane’s campus will you find yourself surrounded by men in drag, women (and men for that matter) in lingerie, with a lap dance to your right and free condoms to your left. While I was sitting there listening to hundred of my fellow students belting ‘Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me’, I found myself wondering what it was about this hear and now that was leading to this outright expression of sexuality. Is this an environment that students constantly want or was it just a joking excuse to be ‘silly’? Tulane, a school predominantly focused on reinscribing heteronormativity, was getting queered during the two hours of this movie. And I’ll be damned if not every single person there was having a good time doing it. But where do we go from here? Was that just one outlet? Are we even looking for more? Ingraham says that heteronormative culture encourages everyone to ‘think straight’. Can Tulane continue to blur this reality and do they even want to?

I never knew I wanted to be a prostitute

You’d think since this is something I want to do so badly that I’d know more about it, but since reading Wendy Chapkis’s chapters on sex workers I’ve discovered there’s a lot I didn’t know about the debate surrounding the type of prostitution I have planned for my future.  I don’t foresee myself ever wanting to have children of my own, but I am fascinated by the idea of being able to carry a child for someone else as a surrogate mother.  I think the human body is a beautiful and wondrous instrument, and I would love the opportunity to experience fully my reproductive potential.  Furthermore, I’ve always thought that would be the greatest gift I could give another person or couple who for whatever reason could not perform that function themselves.

While I have no intention of performing this service for money (outside of the expenses that automatically come with pregnancy) I have recently become familiar with the debate surrounding the institution of surrogacy (particularly commercial but also altruistic), a debate that echoes the rationale and wording of anti-prostitution arguments if not using the word “prostitution” outright, which is most often the case. Chapkis very briefly references an argument against sex work that aligns it with gestational services to the extent that neither is “work” and should not require pay.  In addition, her discussion of the attempts to de-stigmatize erotic labor through certification of workers as “sex therapists” in the medical arena is a topic that often invites the term “sex surrogate” in reference to the “therapist” aiding an individual in sex education, practice, and fulfillment.  These two points in Chapkis’s book caught my attention due to my interest in surrogate motherhood, so I decided to look into just what connections are being made between gestational surrogacy and prostitution. I was shocked.  Like I said, I never knew I wanted to be a prostitute.

Children, Photos, and Nudity

Recently, I have noticed stories popping up about nudity in reference to children. One of which was about Brooke Shields and an artistic photo that was taken of her when she was ten years old, nude from the waist up. It has recently been placed in a London art museum, but, due to public outcry and a police visit, it was actually taken down. The reason being is that people claim it is a “magnet for pedophiles”. The article uses words such as exploitation and disturbing to describe the photo.

Queering the Boot

Yesterday I was out with a couple friends and we went to the Boot. Most Tulane students are well aware of what the Boot entails: music, a ton of alcohol, and hook ups. My friends and I were having a blast dancing, when I saw one of my favorite guy friends there and we ended up hanging out for the rest of the night. This is where the point of this story beings. About a month and half ago, he come out of “the closet”, even though he “has known since he was gay in elementary school”.  While we were dancing he kept telling me that he thought this one guy was “gay” and that he was so attractive but did not what to do about it because he did not know how the guy would react.  

Gleeful about Sex

Recently on an episode of Glee, a new comedy that satirically follows a motley teenage glee club in an Ohio high school, there was a particularly revealing focus: sex and the teenage obsession with it. The episode was about the perceived nerdy glee club’s hope to climb the social hierarchy of high school by utilizing sexualization, a path that apparently draws in all curious teens. This is a direct materialization of Gayle Rubin’s misplaced scale. In this rural, “conservative” high school, the topic of sexuality is both unusually hushed and disproportionately intriguing. Rubin says that there is a cultural assumption that sexual things are more important, and this glee club sees bringing sexuality to their school as the only way to be “cool”.

Overnight Lez

\”Click me\” 😉

While sniffing around on El Universal, one of Mexico’s biggest news sources, I ran across a column in which women have written to Cecilia Rosillo (sexy profile pic included, who studied in a famous Mexican University) to pose various sexual inquiries, among them:  “Is oral sex normal too?”, “Sex with adolescents” (an 18 year old asking if it was safe to have sex with his 17 year old girlfriend, or if that might cause cysts, etc), and my personal favorite “Lesbian, Me?!” In the last question, a 28 year old woman admits to very little sexual interest for 8 months, only to meet a new female colleague, want to go to bed with her, and wonder if all of a sudden she’s a lesbian. The good “scholar’s” response states that one does not “turn into” a lesbian, but it’s something that’s been around one’s whole life and that if she hadn’t noticed it by now, she most likely was not a lesbian. If her desires persist, she should see a sex therapist, especially since that would mean having to tell her son.

Talking Sex

In the Dark, Nina Simone

Nothing pleasurable is going on under the sheets.

In a recent discussion (among people who had little business asking) regarding the number of sexual partners each of us had had, it struck me how far we’ve come in the frankness with which we feel compelled to articulate sex. Homos, hookers, hos, and perverts are exciting things to talk about –not just “in the sewing circle” but on billboards, reality TV shows, and even around the proverbial kitchen table. Does all this discourse mean progress? Have we started the antibiotics of dialogue and begun to swing open the Baptist doors? To me it seemed this must be what was happening…until Monsieur Foucault shed a little light on the subject.