Kindle Notes & Highlights
The idea of gender fluidity suggests that gender is not fixed by biology, but shifts according to social, cultural and individual preference.
Laqueur defines this shift as signifying a move from a ‘one-sex’ to a ‘two-sex’ model in late 18th-century Western Europe. Previously, Laqueur suggests, the prevailing belief – a tradition that dated back at least to ancient Greece – was that women and men represented ‘one sex’.
Ethnomethodology is the study of the ways in which people make sense of their world and create the social environment in which they live.
In her essay ‘Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality’ (1980), feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young (1949–2006) suggests that girls internalize the view that their bodies are weak. They may not see themselves as capable of physical tasks, which leads them not to practise at physical activities.
On the death of jazz musician Billy Tipton (1914–89) in the USA, it became apparent he had the body of someone assigned female at birth. Tipton, it is believed, had decided early in his adult life that he would have greater opportunities and success as a man than as a woman.
What clearly emerges is that whatever we mean when we talk about gender – whether it is biological sex, a socially constructed role we perform, a personal identity or a combination of all three – it is fluid. Biological sex is not entirely restricted to male or female.
The historical case of Sojourner Truth brings to light the ways in which gender and race intersect to disadvantage.
