Examination of Sexuality

12 Pages 3118 Words

s discussion of transvestites or cross-dressers. Cross-dressing heterosexual men (dressing in women’s clothing) pose a threat to traditional society that presents male and female gender categories as immutable categories that have no room for malleability. “On a social and cultural level the two groups (male and female) are mutually exclusive…” (Woodhouse, p. 117). This is maintained and strictly enforced in our male-dominant society through approval of masculinity and disapproval of femininity. “Outside of the closely demarcated boundaries of the drag act or the fancy-dress party, men cannot appear in any item of women’s clothing without immediate loss of the superior status attached to the male and the full imposition of ridicule and censure” (Woodhouse, p. 119). We see examples of this ridicule from very early childhood and adolescence with boys being scorned and called a “sissy” for playing with dolls or expressing feminine traits which are reserved for the secondary, inferior female role and “should be eradicated” (Woodhouse, p. 119). There is a vice-grip on the primacy of masculinity which refuses to let go of pointing out that which is not masculine, and giving it a value. “Any man who is effeminate cannot be heterosexual, there must be something wrong with him” (Woodhouse, p. 137) and is therefore considered “less than.” “To deviate from this [primacy] status is to take a step down; to adopt the trappings of the second sex is akin to slumming it or selling out. And those who protect and maintain the primacy of masculinity cannot allow this to happen or the whole edifice would crumble” (Woodhouse, p. 119). “And identity politics as well as science has an interest in keeping them [”homo” and “hetero”] opposite” (Garber, p. 231).
However, the categories of sexuality (homo-, hetero-, and bisexual) and the use of the term “homosexual” to characterize the individual as a �...