Question No. 5: Living Culture –
Gender, Sexuality, and Race
Gender, sexuality, and race are less biological facts than the outcome of contextually specific discourses and discursive practices. Explain with reference to no more than two aspects of identity.
Living Culture –
Gender and Race
Introduction
Gender, sexuality, and race are less biological facts of how human identity develops than the outcome of contextually specific discourses and discursive practices connected to ethnicity and cultural interchanges. The following scholastic exercise defines how social science prods the ethnic and cultural interchanges of humans in their discourse and discursive practices. In turn, the following describes how this affects human identity gender, sexual, and racial development.
Defining the Context of Discourse and Discursive Practice
Primary to the context of anything is the physical circumstance forming a particular setting. Both discourse and discursive are concepts connecting with communication and combined with context this allows for full comprehension and assessment of the information relayed. Discussion, discourse, and discursive interaction imply oral, written, or even symbolism relaying an intention of relaying ideas. Jacobs (2006) offers an example of the social context of culture connected to this explaining self-knowledge processes through “narratives of action” of one individual’s identity creating writings about “social, cultural, spiritual, personal-psychological, gender, sexual, activist and intellectual selves (p. 79).” Narratives of action describing processes of human identity development and self-perceptions derived from the written discourse takes an even wider view. “Most broadly, 'narrative analysis' is an interpretative tool designed to examine people's lives (and their sense of identity) holistically through the stories they tell (Benwell & Stokoe, 2006, p. 143).”
Benwell and Stokoe (2006) describe the way humans identify self by gender, sexuality, and race, depends on the ongoing contextual dialogue, discourse, and discursive interchange practiced. "Identity is performed, constructed, enacted or produced, moment-to-moment, in everyday conversations.” [Sic] Historically this system of self-identity development particular to gender roles often assigns specific characteristics as “natural” male or female categories (p. 49). The role culture and ethnicity play looks at Western practices human identity development of gender, sexuality, and race.
Gender
Ethnic and cultural discursive interchange influence on human identity development according to the course text provide how categorizing male and female gender identity in Western thought remained assigned to traditional roles until the advent of scientific thought. This connected to “the division of people into male and female as being natural, simply a reflection of the order of things (Benwell & Stokes, 2006, p.16).” From a socio-biological view, no gender exists because “no cultural determinants of human life” exist (McElhinny, 2003, p. 26). The question of a person identifying with either male or female gender roles culturally and ethnically looks at the psychological and behavioral traits connected with femininity and masculinity in contemporary scientific views linked with social constructs of identities in contextual discourse (Benwell & Stokoe, 2006). Discursively constituted human gender identification, according to Weatherall (2002), existed “prior to language, (and) to the idea of gender identity being discursively constituted (p. 122).” [Sic]
Assumptions continue linked with how some type of “correspondence between individuals' gender identities and the way gender is manifest” relate to cultural and ethnic constructs of society and gender identity developing in an internalized connection to cultural and ethnic related organizational process of social and socialization dialogue (Benwell & Stokoe, 2006, p. 49). At the same time, gender identity connected to culture and ethnic dialectic practices becomes problematic in the case of gender self-identification of individuals with females identifying self as male (case in point Chastity Bono) and transgendered to the male identity of Chaz Bono. The same holds true for the groundbreaking (case in point George William Jorgensen) transgender transition to Christine Jorgensen a female. In the representative aspects of Bono and Jorgensen, the contextual dialectic processes of culture and ethnicity served as barriers to the aspect of self-identity (Alsop, Fitzsimons & Lennon, 2002).
According to Alsop, Fitzsimons, and Lennon (2002) the gender identity conundrum created by cultural and ethnic discourse as exemplified by both Bono and Jorgensen, therefore, from the culture of science, shows “gendered identities manifest themselves in behaviours (p. 36)” [Sic] and very likely counter any prolonged contact with both cultural and ethnic dialectic influences assigning gender identity. This is with the assumption holding “a more eclectic strand of discursive psychology (weaving) together both the local and global discursive practices that function to produce gender in every day talk (Weatherall, 2006).”
Sexuality
Everything is sexual from a biological perspective. Within the contextual actions of dialogical cultural and ethnic practices, the assignment of sexual behavior as heterosexual “normal” behavior emerges. The assignment of male and female sexual roles through cultural and ethnic social discourse “supports a functionalist model of human social organization (McElhinny, 2003, p. 26).” The biological aspect of sexuality having no gender role remains a separate reality from typical Western cultural and ethnic practices (McElhinny, 2003, p. 26). From the cultural and ethnic dialogue, “When considered in the context of sexual selection, developmental sex differences are expected only in those areas in which the reproductive activities of males and females differ (Geary, 2002, p. 38).”
The sexual self-identity development of humans from sociological centered cultural and ethnic perspective views the dialogue practiced as categorizing the sexual behavior “expected” for the sole purpose of continuing the species. However, this is not a cognitive acknowledgement and does not make the fundamental intention any less realistic (Weeks, 1986).
According to Weeks (1986) the idea that “nothing is sexual” and only becomes so when social constructs (culturally and ethnically) name it thus. An example of the societal culture and ethnic based dialogue generating sexuality on religious precepts looks at Islam. Here Muslims “have developed a lyrical view of sex and sustained attempts at integrating the religious and the sexual (p. 32).” The context of dialogic socially led cultural and ethnic “norms” from this perspective therefore puts a moral code on sexuality and human behavior.
The self-identity of individuals as homosexuals connects with again, categorizing human behavior and emerges from the evolution of society. This evolution shows society more concerned with the lives of the population based on accepted morality, “uniformity, economic well-being, national security or hygiene and health, so it has become more preoccupied with the sex lives of its individuals (Weeks, 1986, p. 35).”
Historically, the cultural and ethnic stigma assigned to homosexuals as sexual deviants according to some experts began as a means for controlling society (Weeks, 1986). Cultural and ethnic contextual dialogue centered on creating human identity related to race fundamentally shows the same kind of process as the gender and sexual categories assigned by society.
Race
A logical and intelligent view of the cultural and ethnic dialogue connected to race and human self-identity looks at what Hall (1997) poses as, “Why does ‘difference’ matter – how can we explain this fascination with ‘otherness’”? Again, asking "what theoretical arguments can we draw on to help” get to the core of the answer. The answer again, according to Hall (1997) from a linguistics perspective, offers, how “‘difference matters because it is essential to meaning; without it, meaning could not exist (p. 234).” This clearly rests on a philosophical or even sociological perspective. In terms of human self-identity development what emerges from the philosophical to the scientific connected to gender identity also brought into the forefront racial identity. The switch from the philosophical to the scientific task of explaining the different characteristics of male female gender identity also led to scientists “no longer treating racial difference as a biological natural kind (Benwell & Stokes, 2006, p.20)” lends to a better understanding of the racial identity process by humans. This identity lay founded in institutionalized racism dialogue as a means for control by one racially self-identified group over another as explained by Ueland and Warf (2006).
Ueland and Warf (2006) offer, how, “The "naturalness" of whiteness--the assumption that it is not an ethnicity, hence not constructed, a position that equates ethnicity with nonwhites--is a large part of the power of institutionalized racism.” At the same time, this contextual dialectic process shows how racism assigning a cultural and ethnic identity to those deemed non-white “also takes the form of white privilege, the existence of which is typically rendered invisible (p. 50).” Historically, the socially based cultural and ethnic dialogue enforced by racist practices assigning race to individuals looks at how “identity is produced through dialogue and recognition, not by internal and autonomous choices (Ford, 2005, p. 78).”
Different cultural and ethnic discourse assigning racial differences in the identity process of human development the outcomes show the frequency of establishing “lists and canonical accounts of group identity” thus, tending giving favor for traditional behavior by humans within the racial identification. Ford (2005) considers the cultural and ethnic dialogue by racists initially setting the idea of race identity. The consequence today, according to Ford (2005) looks at the dialogue of cultural and ethnic race related categories and the human self-identity as favoring styles of behavior favoring identification with “authenticity, depth, integrity and pedigree over those presented in terms of fluidity, multiplicity, ambivalence and hybridity (p. 78).”
Conclusion
As stated in the thesis provided in the introduction gender, sexuality, and race are less biological facts of how human identity develops than the outcome of contextually specific discourses and discursive practices connected to socially based ethnicity and cultural interchanges. What the literature provided in substantiating the exploration and assumptions in this document show is a continual societal intention to control, have power over, and dictate a so-called “norm” for human behavior connected to cultural and ethnic identity of the self as this integrates with society in general. The historical record reveals the basic identity of humans evolving from less complex social beings into often complicated, limiting, and even suppressed existences based on gender, sexuality (preference), and race still existing in the global community today.
References
Alsop, R., Fitzsimons, A., & Lennon, K. (2002). Natural Women and Men Theorizing Gender. Cambridge. Polity Press.
Benwell, B., & Stokoe, E. (2006). Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Ford, R. T. (2005). Racial Culture: A Critique. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hall, S. (1997). The Spectacle of the ‘Other.’ (Ed). Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices. London: Sage Publications in Association with the Open University.
Jacobs, G. (2006). Finding the Center: Constructing the Subaltern Master Narrative. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 4, 79.
McElhinny, B. (2003). Holmes, J. & Meyerhoff (Eds). The Handbook of Language and Gender. © 2003 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Ueland, J., & Warf, B. (2006). Racialized Topographies: Altitude and Race in Southern Cities. The Geographical Review, 96(1), 50
Weatherall, A. (2002). Gender, Language and Discourse. Hove, England: Routledge.
Weeks, J. (1986). The Invention of Sex, in Sexuality. London: Routledge.
