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Discussion Thread #5 due Monday, July 23 by 11:59PM

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Discussion Thread #5 due Monday, July 23 by 11:59PM

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1. Please watch this short video ("https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FDividedStatesofWomen%2Fvideos%2F141691756548973%2F&show_text=0&width=560" ). Do you think that the concept discussed in the video can be applied to the Romero reading? The DuBois reading? Will bringing this concept into social awareness help people to overcome biases that promote disrespect and violence against the poor and people of color? Or do you think that there is something more purposeful and explicit going on? (Use examples from the readings.)

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Reading to be completed by July 20

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Reading to be completed by July 23

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"Racial Profiling and Immigration Law Enforcement..."

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"Racial Profiling and Immigration Law Enforcement..."

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Reading to be completed by July 27

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"Racial Profiling and Immigration Law Enforcement" by Romero

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1. Pick one of the modules (Gender & Sex OR Class & Trash OR Race & Incarceration *though you will have to read ahead to cover this topic by the due date of the Rough Draft*) and give a synopsis of the main arguments and viewpoints (You must cover all of the readings in the module, but you do not necessarily have to cover the films) (Title this section Background; 2 pages)

2. Give an example of how this content pressed/presses your personal beliefs and/or opinions about this topic and how you agree or disagree with the arguments presented. (Be sure to address the arguments made and not your take on the issues in general. You must make your own arguments and give your own examples here.) (Title this section according to the main claim(s) you are making. You may have more than one section title; 2 page)

3. Introduce and conclude your paper by laying out what topics you are covering and arguments you are making and whether they agree or disagree with the arguments presented among the course materials (1/2 + 1/2 = 1 page)

4. Cite all of your sources in-text and in a bibliography in the formatting style of your academic subject/field.

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Discussion Thread #4 due Monday, July 16 at 11:59PM

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Discussion Thread #4 due Monday, July 16 at 11:59PM

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1. Bettie’s article illustrates the overlap of class and race in the performative identities of high school girls in an ethnically mixed school. Hage's book chapter discusses the connection between specism and racism, namely the thought that considering animal life as inferior to human needs and desires leads to the idea that some people who are rendered animal-like get much the same treatment. In light of the readings in this course about trash, race, and power/ economic security, how do you think that performative identity and the worry about being considered invaluable (or trashy) enter in to contemporary understanding of ethnic identity in American society?

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Is racism an environmental threat? by Hage.pdf

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Discussion Thread #3 due Monday, July 9 at 11:59PM

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Discussion Thread #3 due Monday, July 9 at 11:59PM

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1. The documentary The True Cost and Spelman’s book chapter “On Taking Out the Trash” discuss what we ought to think about and do with our waste. Spelman discusses the morality and dignity of removing trash from our lives and the revulsion of those who live among waste. If this paradigm were applied to the film The True Cost, how would that affect the portrayals of the garment workers and villagers affected by chemical pollution associated with the fashion industry? Do you think that the concept of “la poubelle agreé” is a benefit or a problem when is comes to dealing with the world’s waste? Why?

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"The main problem with a strong dichotomy is that there are intermediate cases that push the limits and ask us to figure out exactly where the dividing line is between males and females,” says Arthur Arnold at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies biological sex differences. “And that's often a very difficult problem, because sex can be defined a number of ways."

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Illustration by Jonny Wan

As a clinical geneticist, Paul James is accustomed to discussing some of the most delicate issues with his patients. But in early 2010, he found himself having a particularly awkward conversation about sex.

A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby's chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine - but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother's womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male. "That's kind of science-fiction material for someone who just came in for an amniocentesis," says James.

Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary - their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions - known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs) - often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD.

When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person's anatomical or physiological sex. What's more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. "I think there's much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can't easily define themselves within the binary structure," says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London's Institute of Child Health.

These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms. Few legal systems allow for any ambiguity in biological sex, and a person's legal rights and social status can be heavily influenced by whether their birth certificate says male or female.

"The main problem with a strong dichotomy is that there are intermediate cases that push the limits and ask us to figure out exactly where the dividing line is between males and females," says Arthur Arnold at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies biological sex differences. "And that's often a very difficult problem, because sex can be defined a number of ways."

The start of sex

That the two sexes are physically different is obvious, but at the start of life, it is not. Five weeks into development, a human embryo has the potential to form both male and female anatomy. Next to the developing kidneys, two bulges known as the gonadal ridges emerge alongside two pairs of ducts, one of which can form the uterus and Fallopian tubes, and the other the male internal genital plumbing: the epididymes, vas deferentia and seminal vesicles. At six weeks, the gonad switches on the developmental pathway to become an ovary or a testis. If a testis develops, it secretes testosterone, which supports the development of the male ducts. It also makes other hormones that force the presumptive uterus and Fallopian tubes to shrink away. If the gonad becomes an ovary, it makes oestrogen, and the lack of testosterone causes the male plumbing to wither. The sex hormones also dictate the development of the external genitalia, and they come into play once more at puberty, triggering the development of secondary sexual characteristics such as breasts or facial hair.

Changes to any of these processes can have dramatic effects on an individual's sex. Gene mutations affecting gonad development can result in a person with XY chromosomes developing typically female characteristics, whereas alterations in hormone signalling can cause XX individuals to develop along male lines.

For many years, scientists believed that female development was the default programme, and that male development was actively switched on by the presence of a particular gene on the Y chromosome. In 1990, researchers made headlines when they uncovered the identity of this gene, which they called SRY. Just by itself, this gene can switch the gonad from ovarian to testicular development. For example, XX individuals who carry a fragment of the Y chromosome that contains SRY develop as males.

By the turn of the millennium, however, the idea of femaleness being a passive default option had been toppled by the discovery of genes that actively promote ovarian development and suppress the testicular programme - such as one called WNT4. XY individuals with extra copies of this gene can develop atypical genitals and gonads, and a rudimentary uterus and Fallopian tubes. In 2011, researchers showed that if another key ovarian gene, RSPO1, is not working normally, it causes XX people to develop an ovotestis - a gonad with areas of both ovarian and testicular development.

These discoveries have pointed to a complex process of sex determination, in which the identity of the gonad emerges from a contest between two opposing networks of gene activity. Changes in the activity or amounts of molecules (such as WNT4) in the networks can tip the balance towards or away from the sex seemingly spelled out by the chromosomes. "It has been, in a sense, a philosophical change in our way of looking at sex; that it's a balance," says Eric Vilain, a clinician and the director of the Center for Gender-Based Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. "It's more of a systems-biology view of the world of sex."

Battle of the sexes

According to some scientists, that balance can shift long after development is over. Studies in mice suggest that the gonad teeters between being male and female throughout life, its identity requiring constant maintenance. In 2009, researchers reported deactivating an ovarian gene called Foxl2 in adult female mice; they found that the granulosa cells that support the development of eggs transformed into Sertoli cells, which support sperm development. Two years later, a separate team showed the opposite: that inactivating a gene called Dmrt1 could turn adult testicular cells into ovarian ones. "That was the big shock, the fact that it was going on post-natally," says Vincent Harley, a geneticist who studies gonad development at the MIMR-PHI Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne.

The gonad is not the only source of diversity in sex. A number of DSDs are caused by changes in the machinery that responds to hormonal signals from the gonads and other glands. Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, or CAIS, for example, arises when a person's cells are deaf to male sex hormones, usually because the receptors that respond to the hormones are not working. People with CAIS have Y chromosomes and internal testes, but their external genitalia are female, and they develop as females at puberty.

Conditions such as these meet the medical definition of DSDs, in which an individual's anatomical sex seems to be at odds with their chromosomal or gonadal sex. But they are rare - affecting about 1 in 4,500 people. Some researchers now say that the definition should be widened to include subtle variations of anatomy such as mild hypospadias, in which a man's urethral opening is on the underside of his penis rather than at the tip. The most inclusive definitions point to the figure of 1 in 100 people having some form of DSD, says Vilain (see 'The sex spectrum').

But beyond this, there could be even more variation. Since the 1990s, researchers have identified more than 25 genes involved in DSDs, and next-generation DNA sequencing in the past few years has uncovered a wide range of variations in these genes that have mild effects on individuals, rather than causing DSDs. "Biologically, it's a spectrum," says Vilain.

A DSD called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), for example, causes the body to produce excessive amounts of male sex hormones; XX individuals with this condition are born with ambiguous genitalia (an enlarged clitoris and fused labia that resemble a scrotum). It is usually caused by a severe deficiency in an enzyme called 21-hydroxylase. But women carrying mutations that result in a milder deficiency develop a 'non-classical' form of CAH, which affects about 1 in 1,000 individuals; they may have male-like facial and body hair, irregular periods or fertility problems - or they might have no obvious symptoms at all. Another gene, NR5A1, is currently fascinating researchers because variations in it cause a wide range of effects, from underdeveloped gonads to mild hypospadias in men, and premature menopause in women.

Many people never discover their condition unless they seek help for infertility, or discover it through some other brush with medicine. Last year, for example, surgeons reported that they had been operating on a hernia in a man, when they discovered that he had a womb. The man was 70, and had fathered four children.

Cellular sex

Studies of DSDs have shown that sex is no simple dichotomy. But things become even more complex when scientists zoom in to look at individual cells. The common assumption that every cell contains the same set of genes is untrue. Some people have mosaicism: they develop from a single fertilized egg but become a patchwork of cells with different genetic make-ups. This can happen when sex chromosomes are doled out unevenly between dividing cells during early embryonic development. For example, an embryo that starts off as XY can lose a Y chromosome from a subset of its cells. If most cells end up as XY, the result is a physically typical male, but if most cells are X, the result is a female with a condition called Turner's syndrome, which tends to result in restricted height and underdeveloped ovaries. This kind of mosaicism is rare, affecting about 1 in 15,000 people.

The effects of sex-chromosome mosaicism range from the prosaic to the extraordinary. A few cases have been documented in which a mosaic XXY embryo became a mix of two cell types - some with two X chromosomes and some with two Xs and a Y - and then split early in development. This results in 'identical' twins of different sexes.

There is a second way in which a person can end up with cells of different chromosomal sexes. James's patient was a chimaera: a person who develops from a mixture of two fertilized eggs, usually owing to a merger between embryonic twins in the womb. This kind of chimaerism resulting in a DSD is extremely rare, representing about 1% of all DSD cases.

"Surgeons discovered that the man had a womb. He was 70."

Another form of chimaerism, however, is now known to be widespread. Termed microchimaerism, it happens when stem cells from a fetus cross the placenta into the mother's body, and vice versa. It was first identified in the early 1970s - but the big surprise came more than two decades later, when researchers discovered how long these crossover cells survive, even though they are foreign tissue that the body should, in theory, reject. A study in 1996 recorded women with fetal cells in their blood as many as 27 years after giving birth; another found that maternal cells remain in children up to adulthood. This type of work has further blurred the sex divide, because it means that men often carry cells from their mothers, and women who have been pregnant with a male fetus can carry a smattering of its discarded cells.

Microchimaeric cells have been found in many tissues. In 2012, for example, immunologist Lee Nelson and her team at the University of Washington in Seattle found XY cells in post-mortem samples of women's brains. The oldest woman carrying male DNA was 94 years old. Other studies have shown that these immigrant cells are not idle; they integrate into their new environment and acquire specialized functions, including (in mice at least) forming neurons in the brain. But what is not known is how a peppering of male cells in a female, or vice versa, affects the health or characteristics of a tissue - for example, whether it makes the tissue more susceptible to diseases more common in the opposite sex. "I think that's a great question," says Nelson, "and it is essentially entirely unaddressed." In terms of human behaviour, the consensus is that a few male microchimaeric cells in the brain seem unlikely to have a major effect on a woman.

Scientists are now finding that XX and XY cells behave in different ways, and that this can be independent of the action of sex hormones. "To tell you the truth, it's actually kind of surprising how big an effect of sex chromosomes we've been able to see," says Arnold. He and his colleagues have shown that the dose of X chromosomes in a mouse's body can affect its metabolism, and studies in a lab dish suggest that XX and XY cells behave differently on a molecular level, for example with different metabolic responses to stress. The next challenge, says Arnold, is to uncover the mechanisms. His team is studying the handful of X-chromosome genes now known to be more active in females than in males. "I actually think that there are more sex differences than we know of," says Arnold.

Beyond the binary

Biologists may have been building a more nuanced view of sex, but society has yet to catch up. True, more than half a century of activism from members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community has softened social attitudes to sexual orientation and gender. Many societies are now comfortable with men and women crossing conventional societal boundaries in their choice of appearance, career and sexual partner. But when it comes to sex, there is still intense social pressure to conform to the binary model.

This pressure has meant that people born with clear DSDs often undergo surgery to 'normalize' their genitals. Such surgery is controversial because it is usually performed on babies, who are too young to consent, and risks assigning a sex at odds with the child's ultimate gender identity - their sense of their own gender. Intersex advocacy groups have therefore argued that doctors and parents should at least wait until a child is old enough to communicate their gender identity, which typically manifests around the age of three, or old enough to decide whether they want surgery at all.

This issue was brought into focus by a lawsuit filed in South Carolina in May 2013 by the adoptive parents of a child known as MC, who was born with ovotesticular DSD, a condition that produces ambiguous genitalia and gonads with both ovarian and testicular tissue. When MC was 16 months old, doctors performed surgery to assign the child as female - but MC, who is now eight years old, went on to develop a male gender identity. Because he was in state care at the time of his treatment, the lawsuit alleged not only that the surgery constituted medical malpractice, but also that the state denied him his constitutional right to bodily integrity and his right to reproduce. Last month, a court decision prevented the federal case from going to trial, but a state case is ongoing.

"This is potentially a critically important decision for children born with intersex traits," says Julie Greenberg, a specialist in legal issues relating to gender and sex at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, California. The suit will hopefully encourage doctors in the United States to refrain from performing operations on infants with DSDs when there are questions about their medical necessity, she says. It could raise awareness about "the emotional and physical struggles intersex people are forced to endure because doctors wanted to 'help' us fit in," says Georgiann Davis, a sociologist who studies issues surrounding intersex traits and gender at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was born with CAIS.

Doctors and scientists are sympathetic to these concerns, but the MC case also makes some uneasy - because they know how much is still to be learned about the biology of sex. They think that changing medical practice by legal ruling is not ideal, and would like to see more data collected on outcomes such as quality of life and sexual function to help decide the best course of action for people with DSDs - something that researchers are starting to do.

Diagnoses of DSDs once relied on hormone tests, anatomical inspections and imaging, followed by painstaking tests of one gene at a time. Now, advances in genetic techniques mean that teams can analyse multiple genes at once, aiming straight for a genetic diagnosis and making the process less stressful for families. Vilain, for example, is using whole-exome sequencing - which sequences the protein-coding regions of a person's entire genome - on XY people with DSDs. Last year, his team showed that exome sequencing could offer a probable diagnosis in 35% of the study participants whose genetic cause had been unknown.

Vilain, Harley and Achermann say that doctors are taking an increasingly circumspect attitude to genital surgery. Children with DSDs are treated by multidisciplinary teams that aim to tailor management and support to each individual and their family, but this usually involves raising a child as male or female even if no surgery is done. Scientists and advocacy groups mostly agree on this, says Vilain: "It might be difficult for children to be raised in a gender that just does not exist out there." In most countries, it is legally impossible to be anything but male or female.

Yet if biologists continue to show that sex is a spectrum, then society and state will have to grapple with the consequences, and work out where and how to draw the line. Many transgender and intersex activists dream of a world where a person's sex or gender is irrelevant. Although some governments are moving in this direction, Greenberg is pessimistic about the prospects of realizing this dream - in the United States, at least. "I think to get rid of gender markers altogether or to allow a third, indeterminate marker, is going to be difficult."

So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? "My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter," says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.

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Illustration by Jonny Wan As a clinical geneticist, Paul James is accustomed to discussing some of the most delicate issues with his patients. But in early 2010, he found himself having a particularly awkward conversation about sex.

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"On Taking out the Trash" by Spelman.pdf

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Please look this over and let me know if you have questions or concerns prior to the distribution of the midterm exam tomorrow, July 2.

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Please look this over and let me know if you have questions or concerns prior to the distribution of the midterm exam tomorrow, July 2.

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Grading Rubric for PHIL 304 Midterm Exam.docx

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"Would Confucianism Allow Two Men to Share a Peach..." 

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"Would Confucianism Allow Two Men to Share a Peach..." 

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Would Confucianism allow two men to share a peach - Chan.pdf

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This touches on some themes we've been discussing so if you have the Netflix, I recommend it. Totally optional. :)

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This touches on some themes we've been discussing so if you have the Netflix, I recommend it. Totally optional. :)

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Watch Hannah Gadsby: Nanette | Netflix Official Site

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Australian comic Hannah Gadsby reshapes standard stand-up by pairing punchlines with personal revelations on gender, sexuality and childhood turmoil. Watch trailers & learn more.

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"Heteronormativity and Homonormativity as Practical and Moral Resources..."

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"Heteronormativity and Homonormativity as Practical and Moral Resources..."

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To be read by Friday, June 29 and included in the response to Discussion Thread #2

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FYI this piece is also included in textbooks on the subject. I thought this formatting would be better than a scanned pdf. :)

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I mean, homosexuals have high incomes, they have high levels of education; they're owners of major credit cards. There was a survey done. So you're not talking about poor people, homeless people living under a bridge. -Reverend Lou Sheldon, a conservative Christian leader

I lived the first year of my life in a converted chicken coop in back of my grandmother's trailer. The coop was hardly tall enough for my 6'4″ father and 5'8″ mother to stand up in. My dad, a carpenter, tore out the chickens' egg-laying ledges and rebuilt the tiny inside space to fit a bed, a table, two chairs, a basin they used as a sink (there was no running water), a shelf with a hot plate for cooking, and a small dresser. They used the hose outside to wash with, and ran extension cords in from my grandmother's trailer for light and heat. My bed, a dresser drawer, sat on top of the table during the day. At night it was placed next to where they slept.

I was sick the entire first year of my life. So was my mother, recovering from a nasty C-section and a series of ensuing medical crises. By the time she and I were discharged, three months later, whatever money my parents had managed to save was used up, and they were deeply in debt. They had been poor before my birth, and poor all of their lives growing up, but this was the sinker.

After my first year, we moved from the chicken coop into a trailer. My father worked three jobs simultaneously, rarely sleeping. My mother took whatever work she could find: mending, washing, and ironing other people's clothes. But we never really recovered. We were impoverished. Growing up, I was always poor. I am also a lesbian.

This, then, is my queer identity: I am a high-femme, mixed-race, white-trash lesbian. And even after all these years of living in a middle-class gay community, I often feel left outside when people speak about their backgrounds, their families. And if you listen to the current telling of "our" queer tale, people like me would seem an anomaly. Because, we are told-and we tell ourselves-queerness can't be poor.

Yet this seeming anomaly is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It represents hundreds of thousands of us who come from poor backgrounds, or are living them still-and are very, very queer.

That would seem obvious when you combine the proportion of the population reputed to be queer (between 4 and 10 percent) with the 37 million poor people in America. Yet the early surveys done on gay and lesbian economic status in this country told a different tale: that queers had more disposable income than straights, lived more luxurious lives, and were all DINKs (Dual Income No Kids). "My book begins as a critique of those early surveys, which were done largely to serve the interests of gay and lesbian publications and a few marketing companies," says economist M.V. Lee Badgett in her new book, Money, Myths, and Change: The Economic Lives of Lesbians and Gay Men. "Those surveys are deeply flawed."

Badgett notes that "opposition to gay people is often based on the perception that queers are better off than everybody else; that we're really asking for 'special rights'-and that breeds resentment." Badgett's research shows something else. It constitutes the first true picture of queer economic reality. Among other things, Badgett found that:

Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals do not earn more than heterosexuals, or live in more affluent households.

Gay men earn 13 to 32 percent less than similarly qualified straight men (depending on the study).

Though lesbians and bisexual women have incomes comparable to straight women-earning 21 percent less than men-lesbian couples earn significantly less than heterosexual ones.

But . . . try finding representations of poor or working-class gay people on Will & Grace. See how hard you have to search for media images of queers who are part of the vast working poor in this country. Find the homeless transgendered folks. Find stories of gay immigrants, lesbian moms working three jobs, bisexual truckers falling asleep from too many hours on the road, gay men in the unemployment line. Try finding an image of queer people who are balancing on the edge-or have fallen off.

The myth of our wealth goes deep, so deep that even other gay people seem to believe it. We have tried to protect ourselves from the hard truths of our economic diversity by perpetuating the illusion of material wealth, within the confines of male/female whiteness. This is a critical aspect of how we present ourselves in this country at this point in time. We treat the poverty that exists among us-as well as the differences of class-as a dirty secret to be hidden, denied, repelled. We treat economic struggle as something that functions outside the pull of queer desires, removed from our queerly lived lives.

As Badgett notes, by celebrating the myth of queer affluence, we have "drawn attention to exactly the kind of picture that Lou Sheldon is drawing of gay and lesbian people." There is a richer-and ultimately more sympathetic-queer reality: "We are everywhere-but we're all different."

Why is it so hard to acknowledge this? Why is poverty treated as a queer secret? And why does it produce a particular kind of homosexual shame? Bear with me. Imagine what you've never allowed yourself to see before.

When I directed the Lesbian AIDS Project at Gay Men's Health Crisis, stories of the hundreds of HIV-positive lesbians who were a part of that project literally came roaring out of those women's mouths. These were lesbians who had almost never participated in queer politics or visited any of New York City's queer institutions. On those rare occasions when they had tried, they quickly departed, unseen and unwelcomed.

Andrew Spieldenner, a young gay organizer of color who has worked for years with men who have sex with men, has a name for this phenomenon. He calls it "a queer and invisible body count." It is made up of poor lesbians and gay men, queer people of color, the transgendered, people with HIV and AIDS and-always and in large numbers-the queer young and the queer elderly.

The Metropolitan Community Church, a largely gay denomination, reports that the demand for food at its New York pantry has doubled since the beginning of welfare reform in 1996. The Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center says that homeless people in their addiction programs have tripled since then. The Hetrick-Martin Institute, which serves "gay and questioning youth," estimates that 50 percent of homeless kids in New York City are queer.

"We are entering a time when the economy is going into a slump," says Joseph De Filippis, who coordinates the Queer Economic Justice Network. "This isn't going to be like the '90s, when it was easy for employers to give things like domestic-partner benefits. There are going to be more and more of us who are affected by joblessness and economic crisis. And the welfare reform law expires in 2002. It's our issue, damn it. It has always been our issue."

Ingrid Rivera, director of the Racial & Economic Justice Initiative of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, has lived this issue. "I was on welfare, I was homeless, I thought I'd be lucky if I finished high school. I am a woman of color, I am a mother, and I am queer. I've worked and lived in a poor world and I've worked in queer organizations that are primarily white. I've seen it from both perspectives, and there's a kind of disconnect. In the gay, mostly white world, race and economic justice isn't talked about as a queer issue. And because of that split, queerness becomes a white thing."

Poverty and outright destitution can happen to anyone-and the queerer you are, the fewer safety nets exist to hold you up or bounce you back from the abyss. Queerness intensifies poverty and compounds the difficulty of dealing with the social service system. The nightmares-even in this city, with its gay rights law-include:

Being separated from your partner if you go into the shelter system. Straight couples can remain together by qualifying for the family system.

Being mandated into homophobic treatment programs for drug or drinking problems and having the program decide to treat your queerness instead of your addiction. If you leave the program, you lose any right to benefits-including Medicaid.

Being unable to apply as a family for public housing.

Ending up a queer couple in the only old-age home you can afford and being separated when you try to share a room.

Barbara Cassis came from a wealthy Long Island family. But when he began to understand and acknowledge his transgendered nature, his parents kicked him out. He was homeless, young, and broke. "Thank God for drag queens," she says, looking back. "A drag queen found me crying in Times Square and took me home. She talked to me about what I was going through, let me stay with her in her apartment, taught me how to support myself, how to get clients as a prostitute or in the gay bars where I could work as I transitioned. But then she died of AIDS and I was homeless again."

The homeless shelters were the worst experience of all for Barbara as a trans woman. Often, it felt easier to just stay on the streets. If you're homeless, and you haven't transitioned-which costs a fortune-you're forced to go to a shelter based on birth gender. The risk of violence and danger is always high for everyone; the shelters are crowded, short of staff, and the staff that is there has no training in how to deal with trans or gay issues. So if you are a trans person, just taking a shower means that you're taking your life in your hands.

"It took me years to get on my feet," says Cassis, now an administrative assistant at the Positive Health Project, "to start dealing with being HIV-positive, and get the training and education I needed to find a decent job. It has also taken years for me to reconcile with my family, which I have. If it hadn't been for the kind of people the gay community often discounts and despises, I wouldn't be here today."

Like my mother said, the only difference between a poor drunk and a rich one is which drunk can hide it. The shame of being poor is an acutely public shame, difficult to hide. And queer homosexuality-the kind of queerness that makes gender differences and radical sexual desires crystal clear-this queerness triggers similar ruinous social perils.

We punish people in this country for being poor and we punish homosexuality. When both are combined, it does more than double the effect: It twists and deepens it, gives it sharper edges, and heightens our inability to duck and cover or slide through to a safer place. It forces you to live more permanently outside than either condition dictates.

The problem intensifies when you realize what queers are in the mind of America. We stand for the culture's obsession with the erotic. It is we who are portrayed as always doing it or trying to, we who quickly become the sexual criminals at the heart of any story. We are the ones who are dangerous; our sexuality is more explosive, more explicit, more demanding, more predatory.

And so it goes for poor people: part stereotype (read trailer trash or welfare queen), part object of blame for being too stupid not to have done better. The underlying assumption is that the only appropriate desires are those that rest comfortably atop plenty of money. The desires and needs afforded by wealth-and plenty of it, earned or not-are appropriate, acceptable, good. But messy desires? Desires that combine with class and color? Desires and needs that ricochet around the erotic? These needs are not acceptable. They are condemned.

No wonder the gay movement can't see the poverty in its midst. The one thing this culture longs for and seems to value in queer life is the image of wealth. It appears to be the only thing we do right. And it is the only piece of our queerness that we can use when our citizenship is at stake. We learned this at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, when we activated that wealth to do what the government wouldn't: We built institutions to care and protect and serve our own. It is a riveting example of how we have claimed our own and valued what the mainstream culture despised about our lives. We could do the same with queer poverty.

"If the community got involved in the issues of being queer and poor," says Jay Toole, a lesbian in the LGBT caucus of the Coalition for the Homeless, "it would be like the community saying, 'I'm here, and here's my hand. You can go further, I'm here.' "

Toole is finishing school now. She plans to work as a substance abuse counselor, to go back into the shelters and bring gay people into the community, "so that they don't have to be so alone as I was. Because when Ann Duggan [from the Coalition] brought me back down to the Lesbian & Gay Center from the shelter, it was finally like coming home."

Amber Hollibaugh is the author of My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home (Duke University Press).

Amber Hollibaugh interviews author Dorothy Allison.

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I mean, homosexuals have high incomes, they have high levels of education; they're owners of major credit cards. There was a survey done. So you're not talking about poor people, homeless people living under a bridge. -Reverend Lou Sheldon, a conservative Christian leader I lived the first year of my life in a converted chicken coop in back of my grandmother's trailer.

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Discussion Thread #2 due Friday, June 29 at 11:59PM

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Discussion Thread #2 due Friday, June 29 at 11:59PM

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1. The film “Tangerine” and Rosenfeld’s article both bring attention to the ideas of heteronormativity and passing, but to differing ends. The homosexual elders Rosenfeld interviews desire to pass as heterosexual because it protects them from the discrimination and violence perpetrated against those who appear to transgress gender and sexual boundaries in a predominantly heterosexual society. The main characters in “Tangerine” hope to pass, or to convincingly enact, their roles as heterosexual women and by doing so risk exposing themselves to bigotry and transphobic violence. Interpret the following claim, based on the form of Rosenfeld’s argument, with reference to the article and the film: “Each utilizes heteronormativity to inform their personal actions, even while heteronormative structures are precisely those that disadvantage them socially.”

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Phil 304 Ethics and Cultural Diversity Online Syllabus.pdf

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Welcome to the first discussion post! Each of you are expected to contribute a unique-to-you, 3-5 (or more if you like) sentence response to the discussion question before Friday at 11:59PM. Please read the two assigned readings for the week before answering the question

The word “feminism” evokes vastly different responses from different types of people. Why do you think that is? Do you think that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s argument for global feminism as being good for both women and men is convincing? Do you think that those who have not read feminist texts but have an opinion about those whom they think are characteristically feminist should participate in debates about the importance of feminism?

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social science / feminism & feminist theory

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best sellers list new york times 2018;gifts for women;gift books;best friend gifts;inspirational gifts for women;feminist gifts;teenage girl gifts;everyone should be a feminist;feminist books;gifts for mom;teen girl gifts;feminism;women;gender;culture;essay;essays;feminist;politics;gender studies;nigeria;speech;sexism;social commentary;women's rights;women's studies;vintage shorts;ted talk;english for everyone;ruth bader ginsburg;angela davis;best non fiction books of all time;feminist theory

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feminism; women; gender; culture; essay; essays; feminist; politics; gender studies; nigeria; speech; sexism; social commentary; women's rights; women's studies; vintage shorts; ted talk; everyone should be a feminist; feminist books; gifts for mom; best friend gifts; teen girl gifts; gifts for women; gift books; feminist theory; inspirational gifts for women; feminist gifts; teenage girl gifts; english for everyone; best sellers list new york times 2018; ruth bader ginsburg; angela davis; best non fiction books of all time

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The highly acclaimed, provocative New York Times bestseller-a personal, eloquently-argued essay, adapted from the much-admired TEDx talk of the same name-from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, award-winning author of Americanah. Here she offers readers a unique d...

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"No, you are not entitled to your opinion" reading

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"No, you are not entitled to your opinion" reading

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The ABC's popular Q And A show revolves around opinion. But not all opinions are of equal value. ABC TV

Every year, I try to do at least two things with my students at least once. First, I make a point of addressing them as "philosophers" - a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning.

Secondly, I say something like this: "I'm sure you've heard the expression 'everyone is entitled to their opinion.' Perhaps you've even said it yourself, maybe to head off an argument or bring one to a close. Well, as soon as you walk into this room, it's no longer true. You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for."

A bit harsh? Perhaps, but philosophy teachers owe it to our students to teach them how to construct and defend an argument - and to recognize when a belief has become indefensible.

The problem with "I'm entitled to my opinion" is that, all too often, it's used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for "I can say or think whatever I like" - and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.

Firstly, what's an opinion?

Plato distinguished between opinion or common belief (doxa) and certain knowledge, and that's still a workable distinction today: unlike "1+1=2" or "there are no square circles," an opinion has a degree of subjectivity and uncertainty to it. But "opinion" ranges from tastes or preferences, through views about questions that concern most people such as prudence or politics, to views grounded in technical expertise, such as legal or scientific opinions.

You can't really argue about the first kind of opinion. I'd be silly to insist that you're wrong to think strawberry ice cream is better than chocolate. The problem is that sometimes we implicitly seem to take opinions of the second and even the third sort to be unarguable in the way questions of taste are. Perhaps that's one reason (no doubt there are others) why enthusiastic amateurs think they're entitled to disagree with climate scientists and immunologists and have their views "respected."

Meryl Dorey is the leader of the Australian Vaccination Network, which despite the name is vehemently anti-vaccine. Ms. Dorey has no medical qualifications, but argues that if Bob Brown is allowed to comment on nuclear power despite not being a scientist, she should be allowed to comment on vaccines. But no-one assumes Dr. Brown is an authority on the physics of nuclear fission; his job is to comment on the policy responses to the science, not the science itself.

So what does it mean to be "entitled" to an opinion?

If "Everyone's entitled to their opinion" just means no-one has the right to stop people thinking and saying whatever they want, then the statement is true, but fairly trivial. No one can stop you saying that vaccines cause autism, no matter how many times that claim has been disproven.

But if 'entitled to an opinion' means 'entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth' then it's pretty clearly false. And this too is a distinction that tends to get blurred.

On Monday, the ABC's Mediawatch program took WIN-TV Wollongong to task for running a story on a measles outbreak which included comment from - you guessed it - Meryl Dorey. In a response to a viewer complaint, WIN said that the story was " accurate, fair and balanced and presented the views of the medical practitioners and of the choice groups." But this implies an equal right to be heard on a matter in which only one of the two parties has the relevant expertise. Again, if this was about policy responses to science, this would be reasonable. But the so-called "debate" here is about the science itself, and the "choice groups" simply don't have a claim on air time if that's where the disagreement is supposed to lie.

Mediawatch host Jonathan Holmes was considerably more blunt: " there's evidence, and there's bulldust," and it's not part of a reporter's job to give bulldust equal time with serious expertise.

The response from anti-vaccination voices was predictable. On the Mediawatch site, Ms. Dorey accused the ABC of "openly calling for censorship of a scientific debate." This response confuses not having your views taken seriously with not being allowed to hold or express those views at all - or to borrow a phrase from Andrew Brown, it " confuses losing an argument with losing the right to argue." Again, two senses of "entitlement" to an opinion are being conflated here.

So next time you hear someone declare they're entitled to their opinion, ask them why they think that. Chances are, if nothing else, you'll end up having a more enjoyable conversation that way.
Read more from Patrick Stokes: The ethics of bravery

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Every year, I try to do at least two things with my students at least once. First, I make a point of addressing them as "philosophers" - a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning. Secondly...

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This movie is rated R for violent scenes and elicit sexuality. If you are concerned about viewing it, please email me for an alternate film assignment.