CRJ #2

When Carole Vance said ideas about gender and sexuality must not be understood as “natural” or unchanging “truths” but as “social constructions,” she meant that the ideas about gender and sexuality should be produced in societies in a particular time and place. Social construction theory is the violation of our folk knowledge and scientific ideologies that would frame sexuality as “natural” determined by biology and the body.
Essentialism is the belief that human behavior is predetermined by genetic, biological or physiological mechanisms and is not subject to change. Essentialism also outlines that human behaviors which show some similarity in form are the same. In relation to essentialism, biological determinism is the belief that biology determines fundamentally all behavior and actions.
The social constructionist argues against essentialist views of identity in favor of historical and cultural approaches and methods. Social construction says that the relationship between sexual acts and sexual identities is not a fixed one. When someone says that sex/gender is socially constructed, it means that sexuality is viewed in relation to culture and history instead of genetics or biology.
I found that Charlotte Furth’s article about androgynous males and deficient females was very interesting. The Chinese account of “Systematic Aid for the Disorders of Yin” was a fascinating seventeenth-century gynecological text. It explained that human males are not “pure yang” and females are not “pure yin” but sexual differentiation depends on the momentary balance of fluid forces. Yin-yang in Chinese thought, are the two complementary forces or principles whose interplay makes up all phenomena. If there is disorder in yin-yang influences at the time of conception, multiple births, physical and functional defects was a result. The article also stated that medical authorities categorized biological insufficiency in men and women as a product of old mothers and young fathers producing overripe daughters and vigorous mothers and feeble fathers producing weakling sons. Medical authority also defined the sexually normal in terms of reproductive capabilities. The sterile person, even though he or she looks normal and is capable of intercourse, is among those with a basic biological defect. On the other hand, the physically anomalous person is fully human but useless.
I liked that the text explained that the sex of a child is determined simply by the relative ascendancy of yin or yang ch’i present at the moment of conception. They also listed some other environmental influences such as, day, date, month or season of the year, direction, moment in the menstrual cycle of a woman, wind, and weather. However, I do not agree that old mothers and young fathers produce overripe daughters and vigorous mothers and feeble fathers produce weakling sons. I do not think that this is a good definition of a biological insufficiency in men and women. I also liked Li Shih-Chen’s ideas on “human anomaly. He concluded that changes of sex were among the possible “transformations of yin and yang.” I think that gender inversion is an important term and explains why men become females and females become males. Gender inversion is when the gender characteristics or roles of one sex are assigned to the opposite sex. Overall, I enjoyed reading about the history of China and their biology and gender boundaries. A lot of time has passed and I think that the idea of switching genders because you were born with both parts or born with the wrong parts is becoming a lot more accepted. I also think that switching genders is more acceptable because the gay and lesbian communities are becoming larger and more open.