Love, Gender, and Sex Redux

Posted: Wed, Apr 29, 2026

Today

Greene
Start to talk about Ding’s pet project: Use love (eros) to think about sexuality, and sexuality to think about gender, and to do so constructively/generatively (world-making rather than world-deconstructive)
Watch Gender Troublemakers (1993), featuring Mirha-Soleil Ross (“Jeanne B.”) and Xanthra Phillippa MacKay [cw: sex]
Reminder: Course evaluations!

Wittig @ Barnard 1979, as part of S&F VI: “lesbians are not women.”
But of course lesbians are women! How do you define ‘lesbian’ without ‘woman’?
Frye: Notice how when defining ‘lesbian,’ we are making use of concepts and meanings available from a heterosexual world? Of course this distorts ‘lesbian.’ (pp. 156ff)
- “Speaking of women who have sex with other women is like speaking of ducks who engage in arm wrestling.”
You have to have a way of generating new concepts and new meanings.
- It can’t be that the meaning of ‘lesbian’ is in the eye of the beholder; if anyone can be a lesbian/vegan by merely identifying as a lesbian/vegan then nobody is a lesbian/vegan.
- “The president is not a king.”
- So you have to have a way of generating new shared concepts and new shared meanings.
- This is the point of community (not a sense of “inclusion”): its own world of shared social meanings and social relations; social reality/world is no more than social meanings and social relations.
“Forget the images you’ve learned to attach / To words like cock and clit, / Chest and breasts. / Break those words open”
“I’m a dyke, woman, female.”