Notes on Connell
GSS Lecture
I. Connell Ch. 7 & 8
Gender and Sexuality as History and Politics: A Dialectic
Historical and structural: can feel eternal and transcendent (i.e. “‘natural”)
Political: historical rupture and ideological contestation transform gender and sexuality; tremendous changes in meaning/experiences of gender and sexual identities
Large-scale systems and entities are gendered formations: corporations, states, political market economy (Connell 117, 120); speaks to level of structural formations outside of our individual control; often seem to us not to have gender/sexual orders embedded in them; seen as being neutral spaces often by those who inhabit them; certain notions of what it means to be a man are naturalized and taken up by corporations
Gender formation and sexual norms lived and contested at the level of the personal
How do we think about structural historical formations of gender and sexuality in relation to political movements and struggles?
Important for us to think about the idea/notion that sex/gender and sexuality are historical and politically constructed (not rooted in biological or natural orders); enduring impersonal dimension which makes it feel as though they contain a natural biological truth, this kind of structural/objective experience that produces this feeling of the biological
Understanding gendered institutions through hegemonic masculinities
War propaganda - language of what manhood looks like according to the state/military; idea that men must prove themselves
Corporate culture - men prospering in the business world; representation of aggressiveness and domineering in terms of sexuality as well as in other aspects of life; projection of what it means to be successful in corporate culture is naturalized for us
Diversity of sexual orders across time (meaning of gender in a given location) and space
Two major planetary phenomena that have impacted the formations of sex/gender/sexuality:
1) Colonialism/Imperialism:
I. Connell Ch. 7 & 8
Gender and Sexuality as History and Politics: A Dialectic
Historical and structural: can feel eternal and transcendent (i.e. “‘natural”)
Political: historical rupture and ideological contestation transform gender and sexuality; tremendous changes in meaning/experiences of gender and sexual identities
Large-scale systems and entities are gendered formations: corporations, states, political market economy (Connell 117, 120); speaks to level of structural formations outside of our individual control; often seem to us not to have gender/sexual orders embedded in them; seen as being neutral spaces often by those who inhabit them; certain notions of what it means to be a man are naturalized and taken up by corporations
Gender formation and sexual norms lived and contested at the level of the personal
How do we think about structural historical formations of gender and sexuality in relation to political movements and struggles?
Important for us to think about the idea/notion that sex/gender and sexuality are historical and politically constructed (not rooted in biological or natural orders); enduring impersonal dimension which makes it feel as though they contain a natural biological truth, this kind of structural/objective experience that produces this feeling of the biological
Understanding gendered institutions through hegemonic masculinities
War propaganda - language of what manhood looks like according to the state/military; idea that men must prove themselves
Corporate culture - men prospering in the business world; representation of aggressiveness and domineering in terms of sexuality as well as in other aspects of life; projection of what it means to be successful in corporate culture is naturalized for us
Diversity of sexual orders across time (meaning of gender in a given location) and space
Two major planetary phenomena that have impacted the formations of sex/gender/sexuality:
1) Colonialism/Imperialism: