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The "Straight Mind" In Russ’S The Female Man, Susan Ayres
The "Straight Mind" In Russ’S The Female Man, Susan Ayres
Faculty Scholarship
In The Female Man Russ contrasts our present-day heterosexual society with two revolutionary alternatives: a utopian world of women and a dystopian world of women warring with men. The novel functions as what Monique Wittig calls a "literary war machine" because it tries "to pulverize the old forms and formal conventions." Specifically, Russ critiques the "straight mind"—heterosexual institutions that regulate gender—by showing how two representatives from "our world" respond to those institutions. She also shows two alternative worlds that further undermine, but do not solve, the way heterosexual institutions regulate gender.
In responding to the straight mind and to the …
The Central Mistake Of Sex Discrimination Law: The Disaggregation Of Sex From Gender, Katherine M. Franke
The Central Mistake Of Sex Discrimination Law: The Disaggregation Of Sex From Gender, Katherine M. Franke
Faculty Scholarship
Contemporary sex discrimination jurisprudence accepts as one of its foundational premises the notion that sex and gender are two distinct aspects of human identity. That is, it assumes that the identities male and female are different from the characteristics masculine and feminine. Sex is regarded as a product of nature, while gender is understood as a function of culture. This disaggregation of sex from gender represents a central mistake of equality jurisprudence.
Antidiscrimination law is founded upon the idea that sex, conceived as biological difference, is prior to, less normative than, and more real than gender. Yet in every way …