The first event organized by Sabancı University Gender and Women's Studies Center of Excellence (SU Gender) as part of the 8th of March International Women's Day events took place at Sabancı University on Wednesday, 1 March 2017. Rebecca Jordan-Young, Lecturer at Barnard College, Columbia University, talked about the state of femininity and masculinity and sex from the neuroscientific and gendered perspectives.
Alev Özkazanç moderated the second panel of the series of events with the theme “Gendered Perspectives to Health, Body, Sexuality”. Alev Özkazanç, as a feminist and queer, stated that the gender problem of people is linked to the current period.
Rebecca Jordan-Young started her speech by introducing a concept what she called “three-ply yarn” and used in her work. She stated that feminists and scientists had for years made some distinctions between the concepts of sex, gender and sexuality. She added that sex was about the body. She said the concept of gender was defined by the social structures, legal regulations and informal rules. She said that the codes of gender from the top down could be woven into the inner psychology, but sexuality could be absorbed into gender. She underlined that sexuality was multi-layered and that what we see as "normal" and "perverted" sexuality could vary from period to period.
Rebecca Jordan-Young said it was through these distinctions that many feminists had began to look at this issue. She added that 20-25 years ago, some feminist scientists had began to look at the body. She underlined that it is necessary to look more closely at things related to the body and that traces of gender can be seen when looking at naked bodies. Rebecca Jordan-Young described how, from this perspective, they saw how gender created in osteoporosis, for example.
She said that doctors could not define intersex individuals, i.e. those whose sex cannot be determined on the basis of sexual organs and chromosomes, without using the concepts of gender and sexuality. She stated that classifying and directing people according to certain norms was related to raising heterosexual people.
Having indicating that the ideas about sex are binary, Rebecca Jordan-Young expressed that there was this idea arguing that the sexes complement or fight each other. She said that research over the years had tried to prove that the Y chromosome carries masculinity, but the argument that the sex could be defined and determined by XY chromosomes was refuted and there were many different factors that determine the sex.
Rebecca Jordan-Young said that some assumptions about sex hormones led scientists to look for hormones in certain places, which prevented certain scientific evidence from being observed. Rebecca Jordan-Young underlined that both male and female bodies produced all of the hormones. “We all use testosterone either directly or by converting it to estrogen,” she said. She argued that sex was not a holistic state of the body, but a function, and that we could evaluate sex-related organs and hormones in the body according to their functions over time, or at that moment, and define sex accordingly. In other words, she stated that, like gender, biological sex could be defined as something that was constantly happening or changing, not something that existed or was fixed.
Source: GazeteSU