The Role Of Sex And Gender As A Cultural Norm - 1507 Words

The role of sex and gender as a cultural norm is everchanging. From definition to terminology to legality and politicization, these topics vary from one culture to the next and one era to the next. One of the strongest examples of a culture carrying very different ideas of sex and gender is an early Northern European Culture. Carol Clover, in her essay â€Å"Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe,† identifies a â€Å"one-sex, one-gender model †¦ that plays out in the rawest and most extreme terms a scheme of sexual difference that at the level of the body knows only the male and at the level of social behaviour, only the effeminate, or emasculate, or impotent† (Clover, 19). This model of sex and gender most contrasts the†¦show more content†¦Defining queer as one large non-normative category allows it to account for not only sexual non-conforming people but also gender non-conforming transgender people. This is important because throughout much of the 20th century and even into the mid 1990’s, the fight for transgender liberation is misunderstood and not taken as seriously as the fight for gay liberation. During this time, strict labels and lack of recognition of intersectionality causes the liberation movement to fragment and â€Å"draw a distinction between ‘orientation queers’ and ‘gender queers’† (Stryker, 147). Susan Stryker, in her writing Transgender History, argues that this distinction in type of queer causes a sense of homonormativity, disenfranchising transgendered people even more than originally, by refusing to acknowledge the similarities between the two groups. This split definition of queer continues to affect liberation in relation to collective memory and mnemonic capacity, analyzed by Elisabeth Armstrong and Suzanna Crage’s article â€Å"Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth.† Armstrong and Crage consider the riot at Compton’s Cafeteria in 1966 to lack memorability in part because â€Å"homophile activists were mostly white, middle class, gender-normative men with more social resources than the patrons of Comptons† (Armstrong and Crage, 10). These men viewed themselves as homophile, not queer, and therefore did notShow MoreRelatedGender And Gender Identity1648 Words   |  7 PagesIn light of performativity, political transformation via hegemon ic cultural practices continues to advocate for gender parody. Overall, the recent exploration of alterity ethics complements performativity politics by exploiting the subversive potential of gender identity as well as female identity. 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