Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

identity construct #3: gender 119
Semioticians agree with essentialists that people possess distinct girl
parts and boy parts, if you will. Some have the ability to give birth. Testosterone
courses through some bodies more than others. Neither essentialists
nor semioticians challenge the idea that we are biologically different. Different
so-called racial groups have biological differences in skin color, hair
texture, facial features, and so forth. But semioticians want to address the
meanings assigned to these biological differences as well as to study how
those meanings have come to take on consequences in the way people are
treated and how they interact. For instance, semiotics teaches us that the
idea that women are maternal because they possess a uterus and that men
are aggressive because they have bigger muscles and more testosterone is
nothing more than an idea. In semiotic terms, the physical signifi er uterus
becomes attached to the signifi ed maternal through arbitrary and conventional
use, not because their relationship is intrinsically connected. Because
society considers this relationship between the signifi er and the signifi ed
natural, a woman who abandons her child will be considered particularly
monstrous (i.e., a woman who is not a woman) while a father who does the
same is considered, at worst, to be a louse or a dead-beat dad, but not an
aberration to his sex category.
Our small liberal arts university in South Carolina provides two excellent
examples of the way gender is both learned and practiced every day.
In the 1950s, Furman University was moved from downtown Greenville to
the foothills of Paris Mountain. It may not have been a coincidence that at
the new campus all of the men’s dormitories were located next to the hard
sciences and athletic buildings, while the women’s residence halls were
nearest the lake, the music building, and the academic halls that housed
humanities courses. The very design of the campus at once inculcated and
practiced the ideological underpinnings of gender discourse in the 1950s.
By stating that this was likely not a coincidence, we are not implying that
it was a conspiracy on the part of architects, administrators, or teachers in
order to manipulate the generation who would carry on these specifi c gender
and educational agendas. On the contrary, it was simply logical that the
planners map out the new campus in ways that made sense to them. What
the semiotic model wants us to question is why this particular layout was
seen as normal and proper.
In the late nineteenth century, as the women’s movement gained strength
in Western society in part because of the effects of the Industrial Revolution,
empirical scientifi c experiments set out to prove what had been a staple of
modernism: The brains of women are too delicate to withstand the rigors of
intellectual thought, so women ought to be excluded from studying in fi elds
other than the arts, as well as from even entering institutions of higher