Beyond Politics: A Candid Evaluation of Gender Differences - A BOOK REVIEW OF: Gender,Nature, and Nurture (2nd ed.) by Richard A. Lippa

Cultural variation: A barrier to the study of sexual risk and AIDS

Culture and Sexual Risk: Anthropological Perspectives on AIDS. Edited by Han ten Brummelhuis and Gilbert Herdt. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1995, 355 pages. Cloth, $59.00; Paper, $49.00.

The bisexual challenge: Is the issue bisexuality, or is it lesbianism?

Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics: Sex, Loyalty, and Revolution. By Paula C. Rust. New York: NYU Press, 1995, 367 pages. Softcover, $16.95.

If you've seen one …

Nihon Josei no Gaiseishokuki (External Genitalia of Japanese Females). By Kanji Kasai. Tokyo: Free Press, 1995, 414 pages. Cloth, 30,000 Yen.     

Everyday Practices of Race,Class and Gender

Abstract

Those who claim or are identified with a mixed identity often find themselves confronted with negative stereotypes and questions about their defined reality. This paper discusses the social meaning of the mixed identity of bisexuality, its intersection with race and gender, and how it is understood and negotiated. Emerging out of this discussion are broad considerations for social justice and specific considerations for the bisexual community in engaging in non-hegemonic, race conscious, community development efforts. It is important to note that when I speak of women of color I assume a plurality of experience and racial identification. In fact among racial groups, the differences are often equal to or greater than the similarities. As well, I acknowledge many other sites of oppression such as class and disability as important in their intersection with bisexuality but focus here primarily on sexual orientation, race and gender to provide more depth in an area in which there is very little written.     

Living in the Past: Savage Nights, Bisexual Times

This paper argues that one cannot see bisexuality as present at all times and in all civilisations (as in the Freudian approach popularised in Marjorie Garber's recent book Vice Versa), but must see it as a socially specific conception of desire, composed of particular understandings of gender, sexuality, and selfhood. One such element of a contemporary bisexual identity is fluidity, a capacity to change one's sense of self over time, which plays an important part in contemporary bisexual discourse. In particular, the author looks at how such bisexual narratives use modernity's language of a relentless progress through time towards absolute self-realisation. The author then considers Cyril Collard's film Savage Nights as an example of this concern with the attainment of a stable identity, in order to show how a bisexual notion of fluidity may not be as radical as many contemporary bisexual writers hope.     

Cyborg Writing as a Political Act: Reading Donna Haraway in Organization Studies

Extending the works of scholars who have elucidated writing as the quintessential site for social transformation, the aim of this article is to locate the myriad possibilities for actualizing Donna Haraway's concept of cyborg writing in the field of organization studies. I contend that cyborg writing functions as a discursive mechanism by which to disrupt Enlightenment ideals of Cartesian duality, objectivity and rationality. These ideals inform the very structure of masculine privilege that emerge from having a society that is organized along androcentric values. Situating the scholarship of Jo Brewis, a contemporary scholar in the field, I illuminate how cyborg writing can be practised effectively, whereby greater richness is imparted into conceptualizations of, and theorizing on, organizational and management phenomena. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of cyborg writing, and with the identification of two trajectories that scholars can pursue in future studies. Progress along these two paths will move towards actualizing the feminist project for gender egalitarianism.     

Imperial contradictions: is the Valley a watershed,region, or cyborg?

Is California's Imperial Valley a watershed? If so, at what level and by what topographic logic? Is it a region? If so, at what level and by what geographic logic? Are its boundaries natural, political, or multivalent on different scales? In short, this essay looks at the special (re)production of environmental conditions within a cyborg world. Here, the Valley is comprised of (a) Colorado River water; (2) migratory waterfowl; (3) the accidentally manufactured, but intentionally seeded food chain of the Salton Sea (3) the San Andreas Fault, (4) Mexican field labor; (5) public universities extension services; (6) global markets and supply chains; (7) international biotechnology, chemical and seed conglomerates, and (8) state and federal regulation of water rights, regulations and markets. The Valley is a cyborg, a historical entity comprised interdependently of nature, technoscience and humanity. This, characterization, however, raises problems with conceptions of the massive losses of migratory waterfowl from avian cholera at the Salton Sea, the agroecological devastation caused by the unintentional introduction of the Silver Leaf whitefly, and the “wastage” of constrained water rights as environmental crises of nature. The articulation of a cyborg perspective sees the environmental conditions of the Valley as the product of relations comprised of uneven and indeterminate ecological process, technoscientific trajectories, and human practices. Extending the cyborg's integration of nature, technology and social agency, a relational reading of James O’Connor's second contradiction of capitalism thesis is developed. O’Connor's political ecology and Haraway material semiotics, while broadly operating at different levels of analysis, prove surprisingly resonant.     

Hedging Against Heritage: Jewish Identity Reconsidered: Commentary on Bahar's “Coming Out as Queen”

In this paper, I first survey the ways in which bisexuality was understood by late 19th-century sexologists, by Freud and his followers, by Alfred Kinsey, and by contemporary social scientists and political activists. Then the three domains distinguished by Freud in which bisexuality is currently being examined are surveyed: biological bisexuality, psychological bisexuality (in terms of gender), and kinds of object choice. Particular areas of research that indicate how questions about bisexuality are currently being considered are mapped, for example, transsexualism. The final part of the paper is an inquiry into the ways in which objects are bisexual, a domain that has been neglected in the complex history of work on bisexuality.     

“The Many Faces of Bisexuality”: The 4th International Bisexual Symposium

The importance of diversity to bisexual politics is discussed. Given the constituency of bisexual communities, the notion of diversity includes not only those social markers of difference, but also the different ways in which bisexuality is experienced and expressed. An encapsulation of the 4th International Bisexual Symposium (IBIS) suggests how, and to what extent, the diversity among bisexuals is addressed.     

A CAMERA WITH A VIEW JenniCAM, visual representation, and cyborg subjectivity

Hailed as the originator of the digital camera 'homecam' phenomenon, Jennifer Ringley has garnered national media attention for her website, JenniCAM (Ringley 1998c), which offers viewers a constant window into the bedroom of a young woman through internet technology. Using the JenniCAM website as my primary text, I examine how Jenni integrates flesh and machine in the formation and display of a cyborg subjectivity, a hybridized identity (re)presented through the new technology of the digital camera. Towards that end I use feminist film theory to demonstrate how the construction and display of the female body-via the medium of digital camera-transforms our readings of gendered bodies as sites of knowledge production and pleasure. I assert that JenniCAM, a cyborg subject created through the integration of the electronic image and the internet, exposes more than just flesh. JenniCAM reveals cultural tensions surrounding epistemological conceptions of vision, gender, and identity and raises questions for future conversations regarding the role of technology in the representation and construction of gendered subjects.     

Technological sensibilities and the cyberpolitics of gender: Donna haraway's postmodern feminism

In this article, I discuss the far reaching implications of Donna Haraway's cyborg feminism for social and cultural theory. I argue that it allows us to re‐think the collapse of modernity not so much as the death of the social and the death of the subject, but as the eclipse of ‘Modern Man’ as the ‘natural’ anchorage of views from nowhere. Highlighting the inevitable particularism of embodiment, her notion of the cyborg marks the possibility of differential politics which combine critique with agonistique. Such an alliance could serve as particularly effective way of working through the challenge of postmodernity without either surrendering to ‘anything goes’ liberal pluralism or the romantic desperation of nihilistic fatalism.     

Building Boxes and Policing Boundaries: (De)Constructing Intersexuality, Transgender and Bisexuality

The process of social differentiation, or the process of creating boxes in which we can place other people and in which we can place ourselves, is key to the existence and persistence of social inequality. The focus of this article is on the construction and maintenance of boxes and boundaries with respect to sex, gender and sexuality. We take the existence of these boxes and boundaries for granted, organizing our lives around them in a variety of ways. Exceptions to them call our categorizations and the decisions we make based upon them into question. Particularly interesting in this context are intersexuality, transgender and bisexuality. Intersexuality, transgender and bisexuality have in common the fact that they challenge our easy reliance on categories and the boundaries between those categories. Our responses to, treatment of and understanding of these exceptions provides striking insights into our system of boxes and boundaries and, correspondingly, to sex-, gender- and sexuality-based inequalities.     

CYBORGS OR GODDESSES? Becoming divine in a cyberfeminist age

New digital and biogenetic technologies-in the shape of media such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, genetic modification and technological prosthetics- signal a 'posthuman' future in which the boundaries between humanity, technology and nature have become ever more malleable. We are more aware than ever that what we call 'nature' is open to manipulation by varieties of biotechnology such as gene therapy. Computer-assisted technologies transform perceptions of body, time and space. Dreams of merging humans and machines into new intelligent cybernetic organisms leave the realm of science fiction and enter everyday reality. As the taken-for-grantedness of what it means to be human shifts and blurs, we might consider how myth, literature and popular culture have furnished the Western imagination with a gallery of fantastic and monstrous creatures on the margins of human and non-human. One contemporary example is that of the cyborg, who serves as a metaphor of the various ways in which the contemporary west is currently experiencing the hybridization of human nature. One version of the cyborg popular with cultural theorists-especially feminists- has been the vision articulated in Haraway's 'Manifesto for Cyborgs'. Termed here as Haraway's 'cyborg writing', it expresses important values about gender, politics and technology; but whilst the cyborg subverts many of the dualisms of western culture, Haraway's comment that she would 'rather be a cyborg than a goddess' inadvertently reinforces one final, often unspoken dichotomy of modernity: that between religion and the secular. Therefore the implications for feminist theory and praxis of a recovery of the goddess are explored. To concur with Haraway, such a project is prone to an inversion of traditional gender stererotypes, enclosing women in a realm of unreconstructed 'nature' at the expense of empowering them to engage with new technologies. Other models of 'becoming divine', however, promise more radical reconfigurations of the religious symbolic of western modernity, a symbolic that has sanctioned the equation of technology with the disavowal of embodied finitude in the name of a quest for transcendence. Irigaray's concept of the 'sensible transcendental' refuses the simplistic distinctions between sacred/secular, spiritual/material, divine/human. Far from representing a female version of the patriarchal sky-god, or even a bucolic, romanticized 'mothergoddess', therefore, Irigaray's model of 'becoming divine' offers an exciting addition to the critical and reconstructive resources of cyberfeminism.     

The Psychopolitics of Bisexuality

This article begins with the observation that multiple current uses of the term “bisexuality” render the practice of sexual desire for both men and women invisible. It then centers on the use of the term in contemporary psychoanalytic gender theory and argues that here, too, its use to mean the mix of male and female genitals or of masculinity and femininity renders bisexual desire invisible. Although theorists suggest that psychic bisexuality can work clinically to deconstruct gender polarities, the essay argues that any use of masculinity and femininity reinstates rather than challenges such polarities.     

Don't Forget the "B": Considering Bisexual Students and Their Specific Health Needs

Many college health center staff are consciously addressing issues of cultural competency; however, the needs of 1 minority group—bisexuals—are often overlooked. In this article, the author briefly discusses bisexuality, provides an overview of health issues related to bisexuals, and lists specific strategies to address the needs of bisexuals within college health.     

Growing Up with a “Spoiled Identity”

Abstract

Being a lesbian, gay or bisexual youth means having the stigma of homosexuality or bisexuality. A stigma is anything that discredits an individual and leads to one being assigned a “spoiled identity.” With reference to lesbian, gay and bisexual youth, the stigma is considered a blemish on one's character that often leads to stereotyping and stigmatisation. This homophobia puts many lesbian, gay and bisexual youth at risk for suicide, chemical abuse, dropping out of school, verbal and physical abuse, homelessness, prostitution, HIV infection, and psychosocial developmental delays. Approaches and strategies for working with lesbian, gay and bisexual youth are suggested and trends and issues about homosexuality in the United States, with a potential impact on lesbian, gay and bisexual youth, are discussed.     

Gay and Bisexual Married Men's Attitudes and Experiences

Abstract

In this study, 20 gay or bisexual men's experiences of coming out to wives were explored. Specifically, their attitudes and behaviors before, during, and after marriage were examined. Findings were provided about upbringing, reasons for entering marriage, and the coming out process. Through semi-structured interviews information was obtained about the factors which led up to the revelation of homosexuality or bisexuality and about how these men experienced their relationships with their wives and family after coming out. The interviews revealed the fears which prevented these men from coming out earlier in their lives. The most common reason for entering marriage was due to social and family pressure and because of the desire to have a normal, healthy life. Attitudes toward gays and lesbians were negative before marriage and worsened following disclosure.     

(Dis)embodied encounters between art and academic writing amid a pandemic

The current account recounts the authors’ artistic virtual interactions during the COVID‐19 period of quarantine to discuss how connections between art, writing, humans’ embodied struggles and technologies can enable forms of feminist writing, as a cyborg practice, which have the political potential to meaningfully voice embodied experiences of inter‐sectionality and vulnerability that remain increasingly under‐expressed, in a neoliberal world of pandemic. Presented in a creative prose, whereby theory interweaves with artistic performances, poetry and extracts of the authors’ virtual exchanges, this account reflects how hybrid, non‐conventional, cyborg writing explorations can connect different bodies in an academic text even when these bodies are physically kept apart. By invoking hybridity that counters the masculine conventions of academic writing, this text aspires to produce academic knowledge that writes and speaks of embodied experiences of othering that urgently seek expression under the COVID‐19 pandemic. The current account builds on the burgeoning stream of organizational literature on writing differently and especially feminist forms of writing integrating genre‐blurring prose, poetry and art‐based research.     

Organizing the organism: a re-casting of the bio-social interface for our times

I present a future-oriented look at sociology and anthropology's historical appropriation of the concept of organism. The ‘future’ of which I speak is one in which the biological and technological are blending together. In cultural and science studies, the figure of the ‘cyborg’ is often discussed in this context. But the cyborg tends to be treated as a specifically ‘postmodern’ innovation, whereas the organism has always invited the cyborg's ontological ambivalence. This sensibility goes back to the dawn of both the modern biomedical sciences and the social sciences. I begin on the relatively familiar terrain of the role that emerging medical conceptions of the organism in the mid-nineteenth century played in the formation of such founding figures of sociology and anthropology as Emile Durkheim and Franz Boas. I then move to the specific ‘relativization’ of Darwin's theory of evolution that fostered turn-of-the-century conceptions of the social organism, including that emergent entity, the ‘superorganism’, which figures prominently – albeit differently – in the attempts to characterize the uniquely ‘human’ character of culture and technology. Finally I look at one very explicitly ‘constructivist’ approach to the social organism promoted by the distinguished chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, who was in turn anathematized by Max Weber in one of the original episodes of sociology's disciplinary boundary maintenance. The pride of place that Ostwald gave to ‘catalysts’ in consolidating and enhancing social organisms – from business firms to academic disciplines – earns his perspective a second look in our time. I end with directions for further exploration, which include reviving Norbert Wiener's cybernetic vision.     

Lived experience of Iranian bisexual women: a thematic analysis

Abstract

Normative homo-sociality, physical sex-segregation and other oppressive gender politics in Iran raise questions about the development of bisexuality as an “identity” among Iranian women. This study examines the lived experience of Iranian bisexual women. Six self-identified bisexual women were recruited by two announcements in Iranian LGBTI community social media. After in-depth online interviews, data were coded and analyzed by inductive thematic analysis method. Seventeen themes in three broad patterns (identity, social structure and relationship) are found across and within the data. Themes such as biphobia, confusion and self-definition are in concordance with studies of the western bisexual population. Themes related to social structure are unique and reflect the particular socio-cultural condition of non-heterosexual women in Iran.