Sexual Complementarity Research Articles

PREPARING THE BRIDE TO MEET THE BRIDEGROOM: REFLECTIONS ON THE MINISTRY OF WOMEN IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MARY

Within the context of arguing for the continuity of the natural and sacramental significance of sexual complementarity, this contribution calls upon various qualities of the Marian faith, beginning with its primacy with respect to all other forms of ecclesial faith, including that of the apostles. Because her assent to God is given for all humankind, Mary is said to be the Bride of Christ par excellence. Far from exempting others from their own personal consent to Christ, however, Mary’s universal faith is presented as rendering every other act of faith possible. In virtue, moreover, of her unique personal mission as the Mother of Christians, Mary exercises an ecclesial faith: a faith that is shared. As complementary to the mission of the apostles and their successors, whom Christ employs as instruments for dispensing of his salvific graces, Mary’s mission entails preparing the self-giving faith of each of us in view of our unique, personal and salvific encounters with her Son. Because these encounters bear fruit in the form of a personal mission, the Christian might be said to thereby continue Mary’s mission of preparing others for their own “sponsal” union with Christ. Such is the fulness of the Christian life to which all are called as “brides” in the one Bride of Christ, the Church, who in Mary, already exists in the sinless splendor of perfect union with the divine Bridegroom.

Samuel Beckett and the Impasses of Sexuation in How It Is

Abstract The confusion of sexual identities in How It Is testifies to the collapsing of the imaginary register that situates male and female as distinct and complementary in society. The body as a specular whole thus gives way to a relationship to language, where the universal ‘phallic’ register inscribes irreducible feminine alterity. The tormentor/tormented couplings, as well as the serial expansion of crawlers compose fictional attempts revealing a fundamental failure to institute sexual complementarity. The sexual is thus shown to reside within speech itself, pointing to the text’s very engendering. The impossible “sexual rapport” is thus the source of creation.

Sexual Difference and the Catholic Tradition: Challenges and Resources

Sexual Difference and the Catholic Tradition:Challenges and Resources1 John Grabowski In its penetrating analysis of the modern world, the introductory statement of Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, draws attention to a seeming paradox facing modern men and women. While scientific discoveries have unlocked mysteries of life and the cosmos and growing technological prowess has harnessed these discoveries to create stunning new possibilities in human life and culture, questions of the meaning of human life and existence have become ever more vexing and their answers even more elusive.2 [End Page 111] The human person is increasingly seen as a question without a clear answer. The fifty-plus years since of the close of the Council have underscored the truth and profundity of this anthropological analysis. And often it is our highest technical achievements which most confound and bemuse us. Communication technology has made the globe smaller, enabling instantaneous and face-to-face contact between persons from all corners of the world. Yet this very technology increasingly isolates those living under the same roof from one another.3 The "information superhighway" of the internet puts an unprecedented wealth of information at people's fingertips. Yet it also brings with it information overload, new possibilities for overt deception and "fake news," limitless possibilities for aimless distraction and even addiction,4 and a never-ending flood of content aimed at the basest expressions of the seven deadly sins.5 Social media platforms enhance communication and personal expression but also reinforce the idea that personal identity is self-created and malleable. Genetic modification of other organisms and the mapping of the human genome raise the question of whether similar procedures might be applied to genetically alter human beings. Improving medical technology increasingly blurs the line between therapy and "enhancement" of the human person.6 Pushed to [End Page 112] the limit, "enhancement" opens the door to the brave new world of trans-humanism in which the very identification of what counts as "human" is put in question.7 Nowhere is this confusion more pronounced than in understanding sexual difference. While "gender" used to be the common word for describing this difference because one did not say "sex" in polite company, under the impact of existentialist and postmodern strands of feminism it is now a highly technical term whose meaning continues to be ever more rarified through ongoing contention.8 This confusion is not simply a matter of academic debate. Some educational programs, in the effort to promote acceptance of transgender students, use concepts like "the gender bread person" or "the purple unicorn" to teach children that "gender" is a complex correlation of body awareness, (self-chosen) gender identity, gender expression, romantic attraction, and sexual attraction.9 Little wonder that social media platforms such as Facebook now recognize some seventy self-chosen "genders."10 People who "misgender" others by using pronouns other than those chosen by the individual are subject to not just [End Page 113] social ostracism but, in some cases, the threat of criminal prosecution.11 The Church has recognized some of the dangers posed by these intellectual and social currents, offering a series of critiques of "gender ideology" over the last few decades as well as diagnosing some of the roots of this view. Important as this critique and accompanying diagnoses are, there is more to be said. The Catholic theological tradition, nourished by Scripture, offers resources for a deep and positive portrayal of sexual difference and its meaning. This paper will argue that in biblical and theological concepts such as sexual complementarity, the spousal meaning of the body, and—as the Gaudium et Spes indicates–a Christological anthropology, Catholic theology has the resources to account for both the unity of the human race and the difference of male and female who are together the image of God (see Gen 1:27). The paper will proceed by first examining some of the recent critiques of gender ideology put forward by the Church. It will then point to some of the cultural and intellectual shifts that helped to generate this ideology. This will be followed by a brief...

Human Dignity and Rights in the Context of Gender and the Sacramental Priesthood

Abstract This paper considers the question of women’s ordination to the sacramental priesthood in the context of human dignity and rights. Differentiating between two forms of ontological or intrinsic dignity – the universal dignity of the human being made in the imago Dei, and the particular dignity of those baptised into the imago Trinitatis – it argues that the refusal of ordination to women is a violation of baptismal dignity that constitutes a refusal of women’s rights. It analyses the arguments against women’s ordination and shows them to be based on a misreading of Thomas Aquinas, on the innovative concept of sexual complementarity which has replaced the earlier hierarchical model of sexual difference, and on appeals to mystery that might be better described as mystification. It concludes that the refusal to allow women to respond to the call to ordination is based on a modern form of essentialised sexual difference that is alien to the Catholic tradition and that violates Christological orthodoxy, insofar as it suggests that women are not able to image Christ.

A More Virtuous Understanding of Sex

To strengthen a Christian understanding of sex, this article uses the framework of virtue ethics to show how males and females can flourish in distinguishable ways. It shows a positive rather than a negative vision for sexual complementarity since humans tend to gravitate toward beauty. In so doing, it contributes to the complementarian-egalitarian debate which has come to a standstill. Some have tried to bypass the debate by proposing new avenues of conceiving of the divide, yet such proposals fail to convince those entrenched within their exegetical, theological, and social positions. A virtue-centered approach to the debate may breach the impasse and will provide a more accurate account of sex. Specifically, this article argues that motherhood and fatherhood form the essential difference between the sexes and points to humanity’s telos.

Jesus and Paul on the Meaning and Purpose of Human Sexuality

Jesus and Paul on the Meaning and Purpose of Human Sexuality Paul Gondreau We live in a weirdly schizophrenic culture when it comes to sex and marriage. Recently, I witnessed a wedding celebration of a second-generation Chinese American man and a first-generation German American woman. They opted for a dual-styled wedding ceremony, the one "Western" and the other traditional Chinese. The Western-styled ceremony, held in a hotel-like ballroom, was first. Utterly secular with no mention of God and no appeal whatsoever to religious imagery, this ceremony blurred boundaries by offering moments of inappropriate humor (the groom, for instance, entered to the theme song of 2001 Space Odyssey playing on the speaker system) and by having a martial arts instructor act as the officiator. In a word, the Western ceremony bore little resemblance to anything approaching what one could term "traditional." Indeed, it openly flouted tradition. Instead of bridesmaids and groomsmen, for instance, there were "bridespeople" and "groomspeople," as both wedding parties were composed of men and women alike. And why not? I asked myself. Declaring the male and female roles in a marriage to be interchangeable, and therefore meaningless, with biological sex having no essential bearing on the role of bride and bridegroom, our secular culture as a result has blown up all the rich and ancient nuptial symbolism that is expressive of the sexual complementarity of the spouses. Traditionally, of course, a wedding would mark the celebration of a man and a woman who stood before God and society to vow a life of love and fidelity to each other, a newly conjoined life with profound bearing on their lives, on all who know them, and on society as a whole, not least [End Page 461] of which because of the offspring their union was naturally designed to produce. The role of the wedding parties, whereby male groomsmen would flank the male bridegroom, while female bridesmaids would stand alongside the female bride, serves to magnify and enrich the symbolic significance of the complementary joining of man and woman. Today, however, such symbolic significance must be deemed retrograde, a binary straitjacket that unfairly excludes alternative forms of sexual union and sexual identity. Bridesmaids must thus give way to bridespeople, and groomsmen to groomspeople. In the particular instance of this wedding, one of the "groomspeople" was a woman, dressed in a tuxedo, who was herself in a lesbian "marriage." It would not have been a shock, at least to me, if Rod Sterling had suddenly appeared as the officiator, announcing that we had entered the nuptial Twilight Zone, or, short of that, the world of nuptial nominalism. The Chinese ceremony, on the other hand, offered an abrupt about-face. This latter was a lesson in how to observe tradition down to the finest ceremonial detail and with due regard for the most symbolic and venerable of rituals. The centerpiece was the tea ceremony, which consists of the bride and bridegroom, dressed in traditional Chinese attire, serving tea to the elders in their family. They serve the tea on their knees, except to the elders who are younger than the parents of the bride and/or bridegroom, in which case they serve the tea standing up. According to Chinese custom, the couple is not considered married until this tea ceremony is completed. I found myself moved at how powerfully this tea ceremony ritual testifies to the hierarchical structure of the family, and to the fact that marriage, because ordered to the continuation of the family line, marks the direct concern of generations past and generations present and future. As Western secular society adopts evermore a view of marriage as exclusively for the mutual benefit of the spouses, Chinese custom testifies to the larger truth: marriage marks a union that is much larger than the spouses themselves, since it is also for the benefit of children, of progeny. Ordered not simply to the private good of the partners, marriage is ordered ultimately to the good of human society itself. So much so that Chinese culture sees not the exchange of vows as the moment in which the nuptial union is realized, but a touching ceremonial gesture of...

Sexual complementarity between host humoral toxicity and soldier caste in a polyembryonic wasp.

Defense against enemies is a type of natural selection considered fundamentally equivalent between the sexes. In reality, however, whether males and females differ in defense strategy is unknown. Multiparasitism necessarily leads to the problem of defense for a parasite (parasitoid). The polyembryonic parasitic wasp Copidosoma floridanum is famous for its larval soldiers’ ability to kill other parasites. This wasp also exhibits sexual differences not only with regard to the competitive ability of the soldier caste but also with regard to host immune enhancement. Female soldiers are more aggressive than male soldiers, and their numbers increase upon invasion of the host by other parasites. In this report, in vivo and in vitro competition assays were used to test whether females have a toxic humoral factor; if so, then its strength was compared with that of males. We found that females have a toxic factor that is much weaker than that of males. Our results imply sexual complementarity between host humoral toxicity and larval soldiers. We discuss how this sexual complementarity guarantees adaptive advantages for both males and females despite the one-sided killing of male reproductives by larval female soldiers in a mixed-sex brood.

Theology of Whose Body? Sexual Complementarity, Intersex Conditions, and La Virgen de Guadalupe

This article argues that, in addition to dismissing scientific and experiential challenges, John Paul II’s theory of sexual complementarity ends up contradicting itself and therefore fails even on its own terms. In particular, Grimes contends, the Virgin Mary herself does not fulfill John Paul II’s criteria of femininity. Both during the annunciation and afterward, she acts quite queerly. Drawing upon a critical appropriation of Virgilio Elizondo’s theology of La Virgen de Guadalupe, this article argues that the interruptive of in-breaking of La Virgen into human history also serves to overturn the gender dynamics expressed during the annunciation.

Population, race and gender: on the genealogy of the modern politics of reproduction

In this article I explore the genealogy of the modern politics of reproduction. My claim is that during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a political-epistemic regime emerged that came to function as a kind of matrix for subsequent projects of regulating and intervening in processes of reproduction. In particular, I show how this regime was constituted through the three interrelated biopolitical problematics of ‘population’, ‘race', and ‘gender’. In the first part, I reconstruct articulations of the concept of reproduction with regard to ideas about the contingency and regularity of reproductive processes that played an important role for the formation of strategies of ‘improving’ the population. The next section shows that the notion of reproduction was constitutive for the formulation of the genealogical concept of race, and that it was closely intertwined with the political regulation of global reproductive relations. Third, I analyse how the concept of reproduction from the late eighteenth century on was enmeshed with ideas of sexual complementarity. Sexual reproduction, I argue, was one of the main reference points on which cultural and social assumptions about the modern order of the family, based on the parental heterosexual couple, relied. In the final part of the article I argue that rethinking biopolitics from the perspective of the politics of reproduction is crucial for understanding synchronic and diachronic entanglements of contemporary politics of reproduction that otherwise often remain unnoticed.

Men and Women in Marriage: Does it Add Up?

Men and Women in Marriage argues on three grounds that marriage should be confined to heterosexual couples: that the procreation of children, or at least ‘openness’ to it, is essential to marriage; that the sexual complementarity of parents is necessary for the fostering of right relations between men and women; and that this is what both Scripture and natural law tell us. This article subjects these grounds to critical analysis and finds each of them wanting, in part because the last two lack any evident empirical corroboration.

Productive paradoxes of a feminist translator: Carmen de Burgos and her translation of Möbius' treatise, The Mental Inferiority of Woman (Spain, 1904)

Synopsis In the early twentieth century, the controversial work of the German neurologist Paul Julius Mobius was published in Spain, The Mental Inferiority of Woman, translated it into Spanish by the feminist writer Carmen de Burgos. Despite the fact that this book was considered an important work of reference in the first three decades of the twentieth century by science historians, its translation by a feminist has been considered to be a paradoxical event. This article re-examines this paradox in the light of different primary sources that mention the translation: letters, press reviews, scientific articles or other texts which refer to Mobius' work by different authors of the time, including the translator herself. These different materials have allowed me to draw a slightly different interpretative map than the one accepted until now on this issue. Particular attention is paid to discussing the tension and pressure of the historical context which trapped the translator, both as a woman and as a feminist, within the paradigm of sexual complementarity that she defended.

Mourning the Law

In his 1992 text ‘Force of Law’ Jacques Derrida makes the radical claim that the aura of law’s legitimacy is always achieved by virtue of an ideological sleight of hand. I argue that the radicality of this claim does not lie in its abandonment of the rule of law, nor is this claim a call to political quietism. Rather, Derrida charges us with the responsibility of interrogating the moments of law’s force or ideology. Following this suggestion I argue that one important way that the law has maintained its aura of legitimacy is on the basis of an ideological appeal to the presumed natural or transparent nature of sexual complementarity. Through a reading of Hegel’s use of the Greek mythological Antigone, I argue that one important way that the impossibility of the necessary encounter between law and the singular case has been covered over, is by way of an appeal to the presumed naturalness of heterosexuality. The conclusion of my analysis is that the illusion of law’s legitimacy is not necessarily achieved with reference to the feminine, nor by virtue of an appeal to the transparency of heterosexuality, but it is no coincidence that it has been achieved in this way so often in the history of political philosophy either. However, no matter how the illusion of law’s legitimacy is achieved, it will always require a sleight of hand; it will always be ideological and therefore political. This analysis therefore serves as an example of how deconstruction can be mobilized as much more than a philosophical meditation on the impossibility of justice; rather, it offers a mode of analysis of critical importance to social and legal theorists.

"I", "Uuu", "Shhh": gritos, sexos e metamorfoses entre Os Matis (Amazônia Brasileira)

Por meio de dados etnográficos provenientes dos Matis, grupo de língua pano, este artigo tematiza a ritualização do antagonismo sexual na Amazônia. Em particular, analisa-se o pequeno repertório de sons ou gritos que homens e mulheres utilizam em certos contextos rituais, argumentando que eles formam um sistema que deve ser interpretado à luz da complementaridade sexual e da transformabilidade generalizada que caracterizam as cosmologias ameríndias. Pretende-se ademais contribuir para o debate, recentemente reavivado, entre americanistas e oceanistas, que têm no complexo das flautas, máscaras e cultos a elas associados um foco privilegiado de interesse.

Sexing the Body: Representations of Sex Differences in Gray's Anatomy, 1858 to the Present

Anatomy texts are seen as authoritative sources for knowledge about natural sex differences. The concepts of a natural, biological sex and of a natural difference are, however, increasingly difficult to sustain. A growing number of scholars have pointed to the fact that `sex' as much as `gender' is a historical and social construction. This article examines how the multiple-edition anatomy textbook, Gray's Anatomy, has portrayed the sexed body and male/female differences during the course of its publication, 1858 to the present, focusing on specific parts of the anatomy, namely the sex organs or `organs of generation', the pelvis, the skull and the brain. An analysis of textual descriptions and graphic illustrations reveals that the male body has been the stable norm or standard against which the female body has been compared and implicitly judged as underdeveloped, weak or faulty. Only rarely has the male body been compared with the female body. Reflecting long-standing views about sexual complementarity and natural differences between men and women, some comparisons emphasize the reproductive functioning of females or imply that females are intellectually inferior. It would appear that the discipline of anatomy has remained largely immune from broader public debates about sexual inequality and gender representations.