Gender and Sexuality

Watch one of the following documentaries about gender and sexuality and answer one short essay question about how gender intersects with other identities (such as race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion).
Gender and Sexuality
This lesson will help you to think critically about something that might seem very familiar and natural: gender. We will also learn about an aspect of the human experience that is often overlooked or confused with other phenomena: sexuality.

Cultural Views of Gender
Gender, the focus of Chapter 7, is a crucial aspect of the human experience. Gender almost always becomes a core relation of power and is closely related to race, class, religion, and other phenomena that help shape our world. We see variations of male dominance and female subordination (i.e., patriarchy) in many different sites around the world, over much of human history but there are and have always been other ways of organizing societies.

As we will learn, gender is not as "natural" as it feels. Like all aspects of human social life, it is cultural, and culturally constructed, and it changes as cultural mores and values change. Not that there aren’t biological differences, of course; it is just that what those differences signify is assigned by culture processes. Cultural views of gender-related dissimilarities in particular have often been used to justify enduring inequalities. These inequalities then map onto myriad other power relations, including, as we have already discussed in this course, those of race. Those who are considered lesser, or weaker, are often feminized in everyday conversation, some in quite vulgar ways.

Cultural Views of Sexuality
Many of us confuse biological sex, gender, and sexuality. Chapter 8 deals with sexuality: erotic desires, beliefs, and practices. The relationship between one’s biological sex at birth, their gender identity, and sexuality can be complicated, especially if the ways they relate to one another do not match up with dominant norms and mores of a given society. As we will see in this chapter, when viewed through a sociocultural lens, sexuality can be a tool of oppression, violence, or liberation.

Paris is Burning: 1991 Documentary about drag queen balls in NYC. (you’ll need to have access to netflix to watch this).
https://www.netflix.com/title/60036691
Stonewall Uprising: 2010 documentary about the Stonewall Riots in NYC in 1969 in which the LGBT community stood up to police harassment, and changed the face of sexuality politics in America.
https://www.pbs.org/video/american-experience-stonewall-uprising/

Response (minimum 200 words): Your response should be in two paragraphs. One paragraph summarizing the movie you watched. Another giving one example of intersectionality in the film you watched. How does gender intersect with race, class, ethnicity, nationality, or religion in the film you watched to alter the mode of discrimination or the strategies individuals use to overcome it.