Word: sexualizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this a "radical" and "leftist" undertaking? To some people, yes. But to others, it is a way to challenge an existing discourse of misogyny and homophobia. It is not to deny the validity of "Western civilization and popular culture," but to ask why women and sexual minorities have been excluded from it. Capitalism and the Enlightenment have made women, gay men and lesbians more visible, but they have not allowed them to speak fully. And as Ambinder's statement that "Harvard needs fewer English Ph.D.'s who study sex and gender" implies, maybe they still do not have that right...
...have its roots in the medieval tradition of courtly love, which originated in southern France in the eleventh century largely as a reaction to the drabness and poverty of life at the time and to the oppressive rigidity of the feudal system. It eventually would become a justification for sexual activity outside the normative channels of marriage (see, for instance, the story of Tristan and Isolde or of Lancelot and Guinevere), something that might have motivated its subsequent popularity...
...hold the ideal of romantic love in low esteem. It greatly values physical beauty, which is transient and vacuous and often serves to justify sexual behavior that would otherwise be recognized as unacceptable. It breeds vindictive jealousy at least as often as it does altruism, and it hypocritically presents as selfless what is immensely egotistic. C.S. Lewis writes in the preface to The Screwtape Letters: "In human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one's fellow; to make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one's own--to hate...
...meanings attached to categories of masculinity and femininity. It does not deny that anatomical sex determines whether one is male or female but suggests that the value placed on these categories is culturally determined. In the first page of Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler argues that "to claim that sexual differences are indissociable from discursive demarcations is not the same as claiming that discourse causes sexual difference." Using admittedly complex language, Butler states that sexual difference is tied to social discourse, which does not mean that it is entirely socially constructed, as Ambinder seems to believe...
...this a "radical" and "leftist" undertaking? To some people, yes. But to others, it is a way to challenge an existing discourse of misogyny and homophobia. It is not to deny the validity of "Western civilization and popular culture," but to ask why women and sexual minorities have been excluded from it. Capitalism and the Enlightenment have made women, gay men and lesbians more visible, but they have not allowed them to speak fully. And as Ambinder's statement that "Harvard needs fewer English Ph.D.'s who study sex and gender" implies, maybe they still do not have that right...