Suchergebnisse

On Thursday September 12, 2019, Shannon Manning spoke to our Political Careers Lecture Series. She spoke about her 20 years' experience in grassroots advocacy and communications. Shannon Manning serves as Senior Vice President of Advocate Engagement at DDC Public Affairs, a public relations organization which handles public and private sector PR. Shannon has played a […]

Over two decades ago, anthropologist Gayle Rubin began a now-classic article with a deceptively simple declaration: "The time has come to think about sex" (1984). Although Rubin was not the first thinker to place sex at the center of her work, her systematic sketch of Western sexual ideology made it possible to think about the political ramifications of sex in new and productive ways by disentangling the physical acts of sex from gender and sexuality (i.e., how we understand, interpret, and ascribe meaning to those acts). Among her many useful insights was the recognition that sex and sexuality are part of a hierarchical value system that serves as the basis for other forms of social, economic, and political power. Sex is the starting point of all human life and, consequently, sexuality subtends all other institutions from marriage to families, communities, states, and international organizations. What Foucault (1978) called biopower—the regulation of bodies, including sex—has continued to change and expand, giving rise to new forms of biopolitics—the regulation of populations and sexuality. Such regulations include moral policing and criminal sanctions, biomedical intervention, family and immigration laws, and a host of other tools that have tended to establish heterosexuality as the only normal and sanctioned sexual behavior. Regulating sex, and particularly reproduction, is an essential objective of the state because, ultimately, sex and reproduction are key to how the state regulates the fundamental element of its own composition: citizenship.