binary

Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes

admin — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:23:00 +0000

I know a man who wears boots, shaves his face, urinates standing up, fucks women (his term), and still sometimes menstruates. In Between XX and XY independent researcher Gerald N. Callahan briefly and tidily introduces the flaws, silences, and prejudices of the Western sex-binary system expressed as male:masculine:man::female:feminine:woman. In so doing he also challenges the sex:biology::gender:culture equation, a half-baked, often feeble attempt by anthropologists, psychologists, biologists, and feminist and queer theoreticians to account for variations in sex and gender cross-culturally. Callahan presents case studies of infants, adolescents, and adults whose psyches, genitals, behaviors, morphologies, and internal organs and secretions don’t fit neatly into binary terms but must be made to anyway.

One chapter, “A Brief History of Sex,” will gently introduce sex, gender and sexuality to those who’ve never thought of either critically. He shows that sex-binarism often operates more to showcase medical skills, to alleviate parental fears, and to avert likely community scorn—in short, to preserve heterosexual, male-dominant norms—than to serve the immediate or future needs of the infants and sometimes adolescents whose flesh is carved and spirits wrecked. That any of them survive at all, much less thrive, such as my friend mentioned above, is testament to their strength and tenacity. Between XX and XY is useful also for its many clear and simply stated definitions of medical and surgical terms and procedures relevant to the study of sex, gender, sexual, hormones, and genitalia, although there are blips along the way (e.g., “clitorectomy” instead of “clitoridectomy,” “normal sexual intercourse,” and the like).

Nevertheless, as a reader I remain puzzled about the intended audience for this book. In the section titled “Children Who Change Their Sexes: 5-Alpha Reductase Deficiencies” Callahan pulls a classic bait-and-switch, devoting a single page to that topic before discussing in greater length species of hermaphroditic fish such as sea bass, clownfish, reef gobies, and the saddleback wrasse. Callahan could have actually discussed the so-called guevedoche syndrome (“balls at 12”) of the Dominican Republic, the fabled turnim man (male and female pseudohermaphrodites in a highland New Guinea tribe studied by Gilbert Herdt), the Pokot intersexual (studied long ago by Robert Edgerton), or even the protagonist of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex. Additionally, given the logic of his book, the section ought to have been titled: “Children Who Change Their Sex,” singular.

I think that Callahan’s reach many times exceeds his grasp. The eleven scant pages that comprise Chapter Eight, “Alternatives: Other Cultures, Other Sexes,” cover no new ground. Callahan fails to explore the politics of the yawning gulf between “MTF” and “FTM,” which are too loose acronymic glosses for “transsexual surgeries” that turn “male” to “female” or vice-versa. While discussing the problems that spotted hyenas presented to ancient Greeks, such as Pliny the Elder, and to mid-twentieth century field researchers—insofar as their genitalia are seemingly perfectly hermaphroditic—Callahan concludes that “In fact, except during copulation, female spotted hyenas completely dominate males.” This suggests that penile-vaginal intercourse inherently expresses male domination instead of mutuality or female engulfment.

Callahan makes passing reference to, but does little with, Thomas Laqueur’s path-breaking Making Sex: the body and gender from the Greeks to Freud. He cites Serena Nanda’s work amongst the Indian “neither man nor woman” hijras, but they have nothing to do with the XX, XY chromosomes of his title, and neither do the berdache, xanith, and nadle elsewhere. Callahan fails altogether to mention the works of Monique Wittig, Gilbert Herdt, Ann Fausto-Sterling, Will Roscoe, Bernice Hausmann, Walter Williams, Londa Schiebinger, Robert Edgerton, Nellie Oudshoorn, Don Kulick, and Julliane Imperato-McGinley, to name but a few. I would have liked him to situate his compelling case studies, told in correspondence, within the several score transsexual memoirs and manifestos that are easily available.

I feel bad for not being able to recommend the book very highly, for Callahan has a kind heart and has several useful things to say, but it doesn’t advance any new arguments, and it will probably annoy academic and research specialists.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., September 12th 2009

The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America

admin — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:39:00 +0000

By Susan Faludi

Picador

Many people are rightfully weary of discussing and analyzing 9/11. While it could be labeled insensitivity, it more likely has to do with a stifled national discourse, repugnant media spin, and a lack of in-depth processing. For the past several years, we’ve all been hibernating, trying to escape the aftermath of the terrorist attacks rather than actively deconstruct their meaning. The myth of American national security was shattered in 2001, and our belief that we—both as a nation and as individuals—could protect ourselves has evaporated.

Instead of productively handling this mass psychosis or treating the 9/11 terror attacks like another criminal act, its meaning has been buried under patriotic language, hyper-masculine war costumes, and false reports of our collective return to domesticity. In the face of our personal terrors, the media created a different account of our collective experience, marked by disturbing gender binaries and renewed focus on dismantling feminist achievement. Rather than following what should have been a thorough plan to prosecute the terrorists responsible, the news media pounced on feminism, blaming radical women for the attacks as supposed champions of the “soft” values that made the U.S. a vulnerable target.

The collective inability to make meaning of 9/11, to give the story a voice, is what Susan Faludi attempts to name in The Terror Dream. Mainstream media interpretations—from films like United 93 and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center to television shows like Rescue Me and the off-Broadway play The Guys—have only served to regurgitate the timeline, replay the events of that day, celebrate the men—and only the men—who served their city and country. No major productions have attempted to dig deeper into what it has meant for American diplomacy, hero myths, or gender.

While the U.S. government temporarily showed an interest in “freeing” the veiled women in the Middle East, American women—specifically female fire fighters and policewomen—might as well have been wearing veils for all the attention they were given in the media. Female writers who called for a collective healing, for deconstruction, for a larger discussion about religion, terror, and diplomacy were silenced. Ignored or publicly belittled before being deemed irrelevant, some of the greatest women in modern journalism, social justice, and literature were thrown under the bus. Katha Pollit, Susan Sontag, Barbara Kingsolver, and Arundhati Roy were among the many once-prominent female commentators that quickly became the media’s proverbial whipping boys. Of course if they had been boys, they would have likely been handed a comic book, asked to show up on Fox News as a talking head, and told to fight like a man. Faludi devotes an entire chapter of The Terror Dream to the story of Jessica Lynch, a U.S. soldier in Iraq who made headlines when the story of her “rescue” was spun into yet another tale of the brave men saving a defenseless women (nevermind the implicit racism that the white soldiers saved Lynch from the Arab savages).

Explaining 9/11 to ourselves is perhaps even trickier when the Bush administration couldn't explain it either. Faludi points out that President Bush’s reaction that the attacks were “unimaginable” could explain his painful blundering and his inability to act with dignified transparency and reasoned authority. Trauma can cause extreme reactions, and many went into hiding, waiting for the nightmare to end. No one was able to rouse us to collectively meet our horror head on, to question what it meant so that we could move forward, because we had a president more focused on cowboy-themed catchphrases than leadership.

Faludi is perhaps the only person who could have written this book. Her thorough understanding of the way in which American culture, gender relations, and politics fuse together makes her one of the greatest living feminist journalists. She is able to tease out truths where the rest of us are still left scratching our heads. While other brilliant female journalists, like Naomi Klein, have dismantled terrorism myths to point to a hidden agenda—in Klein’s case, a disaster capitalist dismantling and rebirth of Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with U.S. profits from the reconstruction plans—it has been difficult to name what has happened to the American psyche and specific gender ideals and relations. Deconstructing comic-book style firefighter hero myths, the return of the cowboy narrative, the Bush administration’s brief flirtation with Muslim women’s rights, and the almost complete vanishing of female voices of dissent (and reason) in the media in the aftermath of 9/11, Faludi explains the global inability to make sense of the media’s response to the trade center attacks, as well as our own inability to understand our personal reactions.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, January 3rd 2009