Gender and Sexualities: An Inquiry

Introduction—Chapter 5: Coming of Age What are the first words that get spoken when a baby is born? Easy question, right? It’s a boy! or It’s a girl! And so, in these first moments of a new human being’s entrance into the world, the gender binary is evoked, prescribed, and reified. From the perspective of the one doing this naming, there are two possibilities, and two possibilities only: male body = boy baby, and female body = girl. The child’s socialization around gender, the sexed body, and sexuality has begun— and our collectively limited ways of perceiving and understanding gender are reinforced. Socialization rests on a highly complex and deeply subtle system of categorization of human possibility tied to an interrelated set of factors:  the perception of the biological sex of any given person, which itself conforms to subjective determinations that may well belie the “real” biological configuration of any particular body;  the expectation that a person’s gender identification, roles, and ongoing performance will conform to that perception of the sexed body (as in “male body = boy/man” and “female body = girl/woman”);  the requirement that a person’s expression of sexuality—if not their experiences of desire, even more fundamentally—support a heteronormative vision for human relating; that is, the view that o male body = boy/man = sexually desirous of and engaged with female-bodied girl/woman; or o female body = girl/woman = sexually desirous of and engaged with male-bodied boy/man Whew. That’s a lot of weight for a newborn baby to carry. And from that first moment of a baby’s birth—and even, actually, before a baby is born, given the commonplace practice of learning the baby’s “sex” before its birth—the ways that that baby is interacted with, talked to, held, and related to in every way depends upon that pronouncement of sex/gender. Every institution with which the child interacts reinforces this socialization around gender and sexuality: the medical system, the family, church, the legal system, school…In fact, it is the fundamental task of institutions to organize and regulate human experience—and the gendering of reality that is undertaken and continuously reinforced by the institutions which frame our lives is one of the key ways that human experience is organized and reinforced. As Thorne and Luria explore in their article in this chapter, play is a deeply important mechanism through which children become socialized around gender and sexuality. In the key questions that end this introduction, you will be asked to consider the ways that one of your childhood games contributed to your socialization around gender and sexuality, in order to shine light both on your lived experiences and on the larger societal-level forces that shape our understanding of our lives. As with other mechanisms for socialization, there is always also the possibility of creating sites of resistance to the dominant heteronormative script, and play, as a dynamic grounded in creativity and invention, may well serve as a place of possibility for our subverting the dominant messaging we receive as gendered and sexed beings. Perhaps your exploration of a childhood

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