SOC633 FINAL

Question 1

Gleeson: Individual agency and trans people

Answer 1

taking control of the way you are perceived. “Trans people struggle with mastering the way they, in particular, will be perceived, and mastery over this moment of encounter (the aleatory exchange) through exercises, affectations, and physical changes is the focus of transitioning.” (Gleeson)

Question 2

Gleeson: passing and trans people

Answer 2

Orientation to cis majority. “Those undergoing transition must prepare themselves for encounters with strangers, through whatever changes are required to get them ‘read’ correctly.” (Gleeson)

Question 3

Social Reproduction

Answer 3

the unpaid labour of staying alive

Question 4

Dispossession

Answer 4

no access to means of life

Question 5

Wage labour

Answer 5

sell capacity to work. unpaid and poorly paid labour process – sustain life.

Question 6

Divisions of labour

Answer 6

gendered and racialized. Unpaid reproductive labour = women
Poorly paid reproductive labour = racialized women

Question 7

Obstacles for trans people – paid labour

Answer 7

getting and sustaining employment. Exclusion from households of origin causes them to need to find employment to survive.
Due to discrimination they disproportionately end up unhoused and turn to sex trade work to survive.

Question 8

Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR)

Answer 8

Revolutionary moment – Black Power, Gay Liberation, feminism, anti-war, student, labour activism, anti-poverty organizing

Revolution – thorough-going transformation, eliminating key systems of rule (e.g. capitalism)
VS.
Reform – making improvement within the limits of the current system

Question 9

Crenshaw and politicization

Answer 9

In turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women.

For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class.

Question 10

Consent and contract

Answer 10

Things turned into property – exchanged on market
Exchange as transactional – governed by contract

Question 11

contract – voluntary, between formally equal partners

Answer 11

based on the formal equality of parties as buyers and sellers, despite substantive inequalities based on age, gender, racialization, colonial or migration status, categorization as disabled, class and/or sexuality

Question 12

labour contract

Answer 12

Sell our capacity to work
In exchange for a wage
Formal equality/substantive inequality – compelled to sell capacity to work to earn survival.
Exploitation built into labour contract – employer profits

Question 13

Sexuality and “survival projects”

Answer 13

Organize our lives to meet our wants and needs in the context of dominant social relations.

Question 14

Desexualized aging

Answer 14

Senior sexuality as unproductive, once they age out of productivity, they are isolated and outcasted which causes lonliness

Question 15

Social reproduction and responsibilities

Answer 15

Adulthood as time of caregiving and paid labour - peak responsibilities
Sexuality aligned with productivity (production/reproduction) normalized, that does not align is stigmatized, regulated

Question 16

Organize sexuality around survival projects (FERGUSON + MCNALLY)

Answer 16

Ferguson and McNally describe as, “the inner connections of household, neighbourhood and community activities with the monetized social activities (predominantly wage-labour) necessary to market-dependent reproduction, wherein food, housing, transportation, clothing and so on must be purchased as commodities.”

Question 17

Separation of work from sexuality (FREUD)

Answer 17

Freud argued that sexual repression was necessary to orient life energy productively, as paid work was powered by life-energy redirected from the sexual sphere: “civilization is obeying the laws of economic necessity, since a large part of the psychical energy which it uses for its own purposes has to be withdrawn from sexuality.”

Basically, sexuality needs to be repressed in order to be productive in work.

Question 18

confinement of sexuality (MARCUSE)

Answer 18

Marcuse – repression of sexuality is “enforced by the need for sustaining a large quantum of energy and time for non-gratifying labour, perpetuating the body’s desexualization to make the organism into a subject-object of socially useful performances.”

Question 19

Marine Cooks and Stewards Union

Answer 19

The union, after long internal struggles which vitalized the rank and file and transformed practices, took up the fight for justice for queer and racialized crew members on passenger liners, which meant among other factors overcoming a history of racist exclusion.

The organization of work and life for crew on these passenger liners created possibilities for particular expressions of queer life, including political articulation in ways that were relatively rare in that time period.

Question 20

Queer work (BERUBE)

Answer 20

divisions of labour, stewards jobs tended to be associated with particular kinds of workers. Bérubé noted most steward work was “stereotyped as the “women’s work” or “colored work” — the personal service and the housekeeping.” Particular areas of this work were associated with queer workers, “Some stewards’ jobs are also stereotyped as “queer work” — activities that gay men are supposed to be especially good at… pastry chefs, waiters, bedroom stewards, pursers, wine stewards, florists, hairdressers, and telephone operators.”

Question 21

Legality and worker protection

Answer 21

Criminalization doesn’t help sex workers – makes them vulnerable. Worker rights and safer sex – increasing agency. Safer sex, not just knowledge but the ability to implement (vs client preference)

Question 22

Impossibility of consent in sex work (FARELY)

Answer 22

The silence of most of those in prostitution is a result of intimidation, terror, sexual violence, and shame. Their silence, like the silence of battered women, should not be misinterpreted, ever, as their consent to prostitution.

Question 23

Pros of porn (BERG)

Answer 23

make more money in less time and feel authentically good.

Question 24

Cons of porn

Answer 24

great deal of work to keep body marketable (unpaid labour). Pleasureless

Question 25

Basis for power for sex workers?

Answer 25

Safer sex
Sex positivity
Worker status
Unionization/organizing

Question 26

Respond to Dyer’s (2019) argument that childhood is inherently queer. Discuss that is meant by “queer childhood” and how children learn hegemonic sexual patterns.

Answer 26

The idea that children are queer is connected to hegemony and power and the way soceity works. It shows the social construction of sexuality and the way the organization of society through hegemony can make normalized some patterns and not others. Children are not born conformists but explore the world and feel strongly. The article by Dyer talks about how children are hard to read, emotionally intense and intimate in ways that do not match up with social norms. That makes them queer, but not necessarily Igbta.

Children start queer, not shaped by hegemonic pattern but getting erotic in wired ways as they play and explored. Power means inequality and that means unequal outcomes in sexuality. Some kids were stigmatized and blamed for not conforming to the norms, for example bullied for not fitting gender. Others learn to fit in quite well and take for granted that everyone else is heterosexual like they are. Overall, the power structure of society makes us normative or queer.
That is how hegemony works.

Question 27

Sexuality around survival projects

Answer 27

Sexuality is presented as natural but it’s actually socially constructed around survival projects and varies by culture

Question 28

Commodity fetishism

Answer 28

Commodities have a power over us. Ex. Housing and grocery prices seem to be out of our control, have agency over us. You may have money but not enough to obtain that product. We wanna be like commodities in circulation.

Question 29

Contradictions of capitalism

Answer 29

Complex
Productivity: only channel energy towards this only which causes sexual repression
Hedonism: motivated like “the dream” (ex. Consumerism of lottery tickets), the idea that anyone can make it motivates us to be productive.

Question 30

Who are prominent trans activists?

Answer 30

Sylvia Rivera (Spanish) and Marsha P. Johnson (Black)