Readings:
Introduction Mapping Embodied Deviance and Constructing Normalcy.
As
I read these articles, I could not but remember an anthropology course I once
took in which the professor proposed that all of society’s actions were
traceable to our desire to prove that we
are better than they. We
are the chosen, the one, the true peoples and that all of our actions, beliefs
and practices are the proper and correct.
Anything that they do is
wrong, deviant, evil.
It
is apparent that the “scientists”’ who did the research spoken about in these
articles did not have the scientific detachment to realize that the society in
which they grew to adulthood badly tainted their research. Their early religious training and with it
their social mores biased their research.
They were clearly attempting to prove that “European gentlemen were
biologically and culturally superior” or to put another way “European male
superiority”. They were attempting to
prove a belief system not conducting
unbiased scientific research.
If
you are the European male cited above, then when your world, as you have
constructed it, appears to destabilize you will react as they did. You will exhibit
the “symptoms of male dread and discomfort over women’s changing roles and
their demands for equal rights” you will believe that you must “guard against
the uncertainties of changing gender relations” combine this with the your
attempts at “mastery over troublesome women” and it will lead to the creation of new
diseases; nymphomania, hysteria, neurasthenia . These diseases only apply to
women but with them women can be again placed “under the dominion of male
experts”.
If
all of these “scientific” studies had not had such a detrimental impact on our
society they could be viewed as an amusing Victorian foible.
Joyce Abbott
Joyce,
ReplyDeleteExcellent observations here about the construction of women's bodies as "deviant" in response to changing gender relations brought about by the modernizations of the nineteenth century.