1. Do you believe the transsexual community will ever reach a point of pure acceptance?
2. How do you feel our culture oppresses or uplifts women who identify as lesbian or masculine?
3. What are some ways individuals can educate others on GLBTQ issues?
My first question was shaped around the article by Emi Koyoma talking about the blatant exclusion methods of women among the transsexual community. She writes about “Camp Trans” saying, “the argument was also between the post-ops telling the pre-ops they weren’t real women!” (Koyoma, pp. 699). Although I know discrimination happens among all groups, I would like to think that transsexuals who could afford to have a sexual operation could at the very least be understanding of a pre-operative population. This is the trouble with movement-changing groups: it is always the interests of the higher socioeconomic, white classes that are addressed.
The second question is prompted more from the article in our Women’s Studies’ book. Ben Barker-Benfield’s findings in “Sexual Surgery in Late-Nineteenth-Century America” is highly enlightening. The common theme that affects the ongoing surgeries throughout the article is the oppression of women’s sexuality. However, the article does not address women who identify as lesbian, rather to tame heterosexual women’s desires (at least this is how I read his findings). A captivating line in the piece read as, “Both clitoridectomy and circumcision aimed to check what was thought to be a growing incidence of female masturbation, an activity which men feared inevitably aroused women’s naturally boundless but usually repressed sexual appetite for men” (Barker-Benfield, pp. 86). This quotation, while sickening, does not address the sexual appetite that women may feel for other women. It is assumed these surgeons only found women to long for men. These surgeries are no longer common throughout the American culture (still in others) but women still have to uphold a non-sexual identity. I am curious how, over time, lesbians and masculine women have been affected by this oppressed sexuality.
Works Cited
Barker-Benfield, B., Sexual surgery in late-nineteenth-century America. International Journal of Health Services, Vol 5.2, 1975: 285-89, 293-95.
Koyoma, E. Whose feminism is it anyway? 698-708
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Brittany,
ReplyDeleteI am thrilled that you both recognized and pointed out the homophobia embedded in the medical literature on female circumcision at the turn of the century. You say that Barker-Benfield highlights just how cultural attitudes surrounding sex, gender, and sexuality shape such invasive surgeries that were performed on women. And, you forced me to think through the connections between these surgeries that appear as if they exist in a “past” and intersexual corrective surgeries: Does Chase illustrate the same thing? And, how might Chase respond to Barker-Benfield’s claim that invasive clitorectomies are a thing of the past? Thanks!