title: Someone else’s gender: locating the transsexual narrative in the gendered landscape

authors: Bates, Denise J.

abstract: This thesis draws on 64 published life-stories of transsexuals to explore the structure and performance of gender in Western society. The concepts of “normal”, “natural”, or “ordinary”, gender are based on a set of largely unarticulated assumptions about the structure of gender, and how it is legitimated and maintained within a social context. The existence of transsexuals, as agents, challenges the “innocent” terms of occupation of the non-transsexed, and has given rise to a series of gatekeeping exercises to not only control and pathologise the transsexuals’ demands for re-embodiment, but also to control and constrain the transsexuals’ legitimacy as occupiers of gendered space. Transsexuals cause unease to the “normally” gendered, not so much because of the intrinsic pathology of their “condition”, but because of the structural and linguistic limitations of the existing model of engenderment.

I have gained insights into “gender-in-the-ordinary” by studying how a frequently marginalised group, transsexuals, negotiate the existing gendered landscape, and how the non-transsexed occupiers of “the ordinary” police the borders of legitimacy. This study shows that the transsexual discourse has both led, and reacted to, existing understandings of engenderment. Having identified some of the limitations of these “understandings”, I re-mapped the gendered landscape with an aim of accommodating the transsexual narrative without resorting to pathologisation. My revised model of gender contains four distinct and quasi-independent states; an organically-based conviction of being gendered, an internal understanding of one’s legitimate place on the gender binary, a socially-validated state of engenderment, and a set of socially-sanctioned roles to affirm that legitimacy. While all four states are concordant in non-transsexuals, an inconsistency of these layers forms the substance of the transsexual condition. This thesis situates the transsexual narrative within other Western discourses on gender, by recognising a common goal of genderal legitimacy within a multi-layered gender landscape.

text: Someone else’s gender: locating the transsexual narrative in the gendered landscape This thesis draws on 64 published life-stories of transsexuals to explore the structure and performance of gender in Western society. The concepts of “normal”, “natural”, or “ordinary”, gender are based on a set of largely unarticulated assumptions about the structure of gender, and how it is legitimated and maintained within a social context. The existence of transsexuals, as agents, challenges the “innocent” terms of occupation of the non-transsexed, and has given rise to a series of gatekeeping exercises to not only control and pathologise the transsexuals’ demands for re-embodiment, but also to control and constrain the transsexuals’ legitimacy as occupiers of gendered space. Transsexuals cause unease to the “normally” gendered, not so much because of the intrinsic pathology of their “condition”, but because of the structural and linguistic limitations of the existing model of engenderment.

I have gained insights into “gender-in-the-ordinary” by studying how a frequently marginalised group, transsexuals, negotiate the existing gendered landscape, and how the non-transsexed occupiers of “the ordinary” police the borders of legitimacy. This study shows that the transsexual discourse has both led, and reacted to, existing understandings of engenderment. Having identified some of the limitations of these “understandings”, I re-mapped the gendered landscape with an aim of accommodating the transsexual narrative without resorting to pathologisation. My revised model of gender contains four distinct and quasi-independent states; an organically-based conviction of being gendered, an internal understanding of one’s legitimate place on the gender binary, a socially-validated state of engenderment, and a set of socially-sanctioned roles to affirm that legitimacy. While all four states are concordant in non-transsexuals, an inconsistency of these layers forms the substance of the transsexual condition. This thesis situates the transsexual narrative within other Western discourses on gender, by recognising a common goal of genderal legitimacy within a multi-layered gender landscape.

year: 2001

title: Agent-based virtue ethics and the problem of action guidance

authors: van Zyl, Liezl

subjects: action guidance

abstract: Agent-based accounts of virtue ethics, such as the one provided by Michael Slote, base the rightness of action in the motive from which it proceeds. A frequent objection to agent-basing is that it does not allow us to draw the commonsense distinction between doing the right thing and doing it for the right reasons, that is, between act-evaluation and agent-appraisal. I defend agent-basing against this objection, but argue that a more fundamental problem for this account is its apparent failure to provide adequate argue action guidance. I then show that this problem can be solved by supplementing an agent-based criterion of right action with a hypothetical-agent criterion of action guidance.

text: Agent-based virtue ethics and the problem of action guidance Agent-based accounts of virtue ethics, such as the one provided by Michael Slote, base the rightness of action in the motive from which it proceeds. A frequent objection to agent-basing is that it does not allow us to draw the commonsense distinction between doing the right thing and doing it for the right reasons, that is, between act-evaluation and agent-appraisal. I defend agent-basing against this objection, but argue that a more fundamental problem for this account is its apparent failure to provide adequate argue action guidance. I then show that this problem can be solved by supplementing an agent-based criterion of right action with a hypothetical-agent criterion of action guidance.

year: 2009

title: Putting the draft learning progression framework - Maori in the New Zealand Curriculum - to work: An Illustration

authors: Johnson, Diane

subjects: Māori language education

abstract: How language curricula are implemented in the classroom is of critical importance. Here, we take one achievement objective from the draft Learning Progression Framework for Māori in mainstream classes and demonstrate one way in which it can be realised as a core integrated skills lesson, that is, as a lesson that introduces new language (core lesson) through all four skills - reading, writing, listening and speaking (an integrated skills lesson). The lesson is preceded by a discussion of the type of planning that accompanies the implementation of language curricula.

text: Putting the draft learning progression framework - Maori in the New Zealand Curriculum - to work: An Illustration How language curricula are implemented in the classroom is of critical importance. Here, we take one achievement objective from the draft Learning Progression Framework for Māori in mainstream classes and demonstrate one way in which it can be realised as a core integrated skills lesson, that is, as a lesson that introduces new language (core lesson) through all four skills - reading, writing, listening and speaking (an integrated skills lesson). The lesson is preceded by a discussion of the type of planning that accompanies the implementation of language curricula.

year: 2003-09