SOCI 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Kaja Silverman, Performativity, Gender Binary

• School: York University
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOCI 1010
• Professor: Maria Wallis

Document Summary

Lecture 6: bodily imaginary or counting past two. As we have been discussing in the course, analyses about how gender identities form has often been polarized around biology and culture. The biological analyses emphasizes our biological sex, or the sexed body as the origin of our gender subjectivities, while those on the culture side, insist on the social construction of our gendered subjectivities. We have further discussed and provided criticism about the biological; primarily that gendered identities can not simply be the effect of our biological bodies. This criticism is largely based on: biology can not account for differences in gender formation, biology fails to recognize that our understanding of our biological bodies themselves is mediated through culture. She argues that a cultural analysis is necessary to understand differences in both biology and our cultural understandings of sex, sexuality and sexual identity. The other side of the opposition is culture or the social construction of gender identity.