Practicing vaginistic femininity: Doing bodies, enacting normative heterosexuality
Journal Title: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology - Year 2015, Vol 6, Issue 2
Abstract
Vaginismus is a female sexual pain disorder, characterized by contractions of the pubococcygeus (PC) muscle that surrounds the outer third of the vagina, which makes penetrative penile-vaginal intercourse (coitus), insertion of a finger or tampon and gynecological examinations hard or impossible, and painful for the woman. The condition is believed to be associated with negative beliefs, attitudes or experiences related to sex. Vaginismus has important social repercussions in everyday life, which acquire meaning in the context of hegemonic heterosexuality. In line with theories of performativity, heterosexuality and gender are normatively and performatively linked sets of practices, with coitus being the central practice of heterosexuality and thus defining for one’s gender. Thus, the inability of vaginistic women to perform coitus impairs their performance of normative heterogender. In this article I address gender experiences of women with primary vaginismus, by looking at social and bodily practices they engage in. In the first part of the article, I explore how women with primary vaginismus do (vaginistic) heterogender. In the second part I address the practices they do in order to ‘overcome’ vaginismus, thus improving their performance of normative heterogender, and argue that these practices are gendering themselves.
Authors and Affiliations
Stephanie Stelko
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP41040
- DOI -
- Views 222
- Downloads 0
Issue Number 11-12 of the Journal “Transilvania”, Sibiu, 2013
My review presents a special double number of the journal “Transilvania”, focused on alternative ways of presenting the Sociological School of Bucharest. The coordinator on this issue was professor Zoltán Rostás. This...
‘Based on a true story’: Ethnography’s impact as a narrative form
“To what extent is a sense of beauty stimulated through rich description and capturing the imagination? Insights are lost through an author's inability to captivate their audience. Movements gain momentum through lead...
Fansubbers. The case of the Czech Republic and Poland
The paper presents a comparative analysis of Czech and Polish “fansubbers.” Fansubbers (also referred to as subtitlers) is a general term, which describes people who create subtitles for foreign language movies and TV...
Paratext and meaning-making in indie games
The essay discusses the role of paratext in framing players’ experience of videogames, focusing on the indie game scene and specifically examining three types of paratext: game title, game description, and the readme f...
High school and university students’ opinions about politics
This paper is a part of a larger thesis, which compares two groups’ relations to politics, based on empirical sources. The main question, which can be answered only partly in this paper is, what are the particularities...