Discussion Post 1:
This week’s discussion is a more open in that I’m asking you to reflect on the production and performance of your own life. In your discussion forum post:
1. Consider how gender plays out in your life. When you wake up in the morning, are there things—mundane, ordinary, unremarkable—that you do even before you start the day that are shaped by gender? What about other times during the day? Describe or name a few.
1a. Now step back. How does this cluster of questions assume a cis-gendered (or cis-supremacy) perspective? Or does it? Does it presume a clear attachment to gender that may destabilized by starting from a position that values non-binary and non-conforming embodiment? Explain where or if you can, even in brief.
2. Using the critiques from the readings or drawing from our examples through the lesson, explain how one of these things—an act, a practice, a performance—is enforced? Who enforces it? Does the enforcement come from different places. Is the practice or act itself oppressive, constraining, or confining? Are you punished for not performing appropriately according to a gender order? How do you know? How is this knowledge made knowable and perceptible to you?
3. Can you hack or deprogram or challenge or resist or undermine this gender imperative whether in terms of how you name the thing, act it out, or communicate it? How would you do this in practical terms?? Would you want challenge it or undermine it? If yes or no, why? What are the risks?
And a follow-up…
4. [If you’re interested] Can you discuss how you encounter and negotiate diverse masculinities in sports? What do you think of gender and sports, whether team or individual? Have sports hindered, harmed or enabled you? Have different conceptions of gender and masculinities especially affected how, if, or why you’ve played sports? Elaborate as you need or want.
Discussion Post 2:
The Discussion Post is due by the end of Day 5. If you’re the Facilitator for the Discussion Forum this lesson, make sure to check in regularly on the Forum and submit your final post by Day 7.
In your discussion forum post, you’re being asked to broadly contextualize the concerns and ideas from the lesson in relation to an issue, example, or object around you. This is a fairly open task, so I’m happy to see how you opt to run with it.
Choose any social issue from your own life or search for a social issue. If you want, you can look at the offerings in the Week 10 Neil Show and Share or consider the examples noted throughout the lesson. If you want to pick something beyond the lesson focus or the course, that’s fine.
Briefly summarize the event, issue, or concern. Provide links to the source if needed. Outline the social communities and groups directly affected by this issue.
Apply a critical trans politics framework, including possible alliances, allegiances and solidarity, responses to discourses of subjection and practices of normalization, relationship to the state and government and capital, etc. To do this, you need to have a grasp of what Spade means wrt to the concept. In effect, you should think more so about wider social and cultural changes or transformations that emerge beyond narrow rights- or legislation-based guarantees (i.e., the beyond the contract of the state/government and subject).
At the least, try to flesh out some ideas from the lesson by focusing on the questions of normal life, life chances, subjection, and problem of legalizing forms of life. Who is served by ‘the norm’ and normalcy? Who isn’t? Who secures this ‘normal’? How do we change it? Do we change it?
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