Gender and Sexuality: A Reading Reflection

Running head: GENDER & SEXUALITY1
Gender and Sexuality: A Reading Reflection
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GENDER & SEXUALITY

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Gender and Sexuality: A Reading Reflection


The question of sexuality is complex and sensitive at once. In several cultures, sex amounts to a mystery, a wrongdoing everyone must avoid. In essence, sex has been – still is – essentialized in numerous ways in order to suppress alternative worldviews of, perhaps solutions to, emerging and past challenges. To dominate, a mainstream group would draw arbitrary lines in and around sexuality. The mere discussion of a differentiated view, i.e. from a mainstream view, is ostracized, if not legally penalized. In class material, I have come to appreciate – reading, watching, discussing and researching – subtler views about sexuality. The visual language (of films), in-depth analysis (in critical essays) and ope discussions (in class) are a substance I have “mulled” over – and again – to understand and independently critique what am offered to read, watch and discuss. There are as many insights I have gained as rich class material is. For current purposes, I chose,, however, to emphasize fluidity in sexuality as a central concept of concern. By “fluidity” I mean blurring of boundaries between many concepts about sexuality such as “man,” woman,” “male,” “female,” “straight,” “gay,” etc. The critical examination of class material has, in short, enabled me to develop a wider understanding of what sexuality might or could be. To put matters into context, I share some insights I have gained over past few weeks engaging critical material on sexuality. This short reflection aims, accordingly, to share my personal opinions and insights about recent class material on gender and sexuality in order to make clear underlying concepts, proposed critiques and visual imagery in essays and films are adequately internalized and understood.
The Crying Game is, for one, a subtle narrative on politics and sexuality. Having as a main subject centuries-long English-Irish rivalry, The Crying Game engages viewers to question
GENDER & SEXUALITY

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not only human relations, damaged by politics, but also roles sexuality plays to subvert arbitrary political ideologies into more fluid interactions blurring political affiliations, sexual orientations and, not least, moral absolutism. The underlying subject in The Crying Game is, accordingly, about a more comprehensive understanding of similarities – or affinities such as Haraway's “The Cyborg Manifesto” consistently and clearly shows. That is, by questioning one's own (often mistaken) assumptions about sexuality, The Crying Game as well as “The Cyborg Manifesto” put under scrutiny underlying biases about sexuality and arbitrary ...