User:Cuevas Y/sandbox

Ideas

For the Wikipedia final project, I am rather interested in the topics of either Contraceptive, Intersex, Gender, or Biological Determinism.

First initial post

So I posted on the Intersex page about Money and Anne Fausto Sterling's views of nature vs. nurture on the intersex child. This is my very first post, which derives directly from my midterm: Society plays a prominent role in the male or female's life, in which their gender is established by their behavior. According to Anne Fausto-Sterling, “bodies live within regulatory schemas...and medicine produces culturally intelligible bodies”. In other words, society selects a certain body type as the “norm”, which depicts how the male or female's body should be, now if the baby's body does not look or behave as the “norm”, then society relies on doctors to take the responsibility in shaping the “abnormal” to fit the norm with medicine or surgery. This “fixation” from the “abnormal” to “normal” is done so in a way that the body can be “culturally intelligible”, or in other words, for the public eye to be able to understand (be able to look at you and clearly distinguish if you are a male or female). Take for instance, the issue with assigning a sex for the intersex child, “the newborn's genitalia are either/or,neither/both...declare a state of medical emergency...before twenty-four hours pass, the child must leave the hospital “as a sex,” and the parents must feel certain of the decision”. Anne Fausto-Sterling illustrates the urgency for society to maintain dimorphism in sex, male and female. Money brought up one of the most renowned cases critiquing the aspect of nature versus nurture, he believed, “gonads, hormones, and chromosomes did not automatically determine a child's gender role,” he “studied hermaphrodites to prove that nature mattered hardly at all...never questioned the fundamental assumption that there are only two sexes, because [the] goal was to find out more about “normal development”. Intersexuality, in Money's view, resulted from...abnormal processes”. Money along with his team believed that an intersex child needed to have a 'sex' selected and reared to believe that they were that 'sex', along with lying to the parents of the intersex child, it was all in the matter of nurture. Ironically, Money specifically claimed, “the society in which the child is reared, not mysterious inner bodily signals, decides which behaviors are appropriate for males and which for females”. So, Money states that the external 'sex' organs are important for the child and society to categorize whether s/he is either male or female, and due to what external 'sex' organ the child has, that determines how the child should be behave. In other words, the external 'sex' organs shouldn't matter, why focus so much on manipulating and 'fixing' the 'sex' organs? Fixing the 'sex' organs meant more about normalizing the anatomy for social purposes, to fit in the dichotomy was essential for the intersex, lying and preforming these extensive surgeries without the parent's consent was the least of these doctor's concerns. Aside from lies, the system was considered sexist. For instance, physicians state, “female upbringing was resisted on social grounds...this was essentially an expression of local community attitudes with...the preference for male offspring”. Parents disliked hearing the fact that their son had to be raised and 'fixed' to be a daughter, social construct of having a male equalized to males had better opportunities, power, and would be more productive, than having a daughter. Medical professionals claimed, “ lurking inside the mixed-sex child is a real male or female body...that children are actually born with gender and contradict the idea that gender is cultural construction”. Simply, children know what gender is truly the one they belong in, no matter the amount of extensive surgeries done, children know which category they belong to and nurturing does not affect that.

A minor edit

added correct citation to sandbox and Intersex Wikipedia page.

A take-down occurred

So I had a post on the Wikipedia page on the Intersex page (in regards to my midterm), which did get directly taken down. I believe it was because I put an overwhelming amount of information in a location of the web page that just didn't seem to flow. The consistency was just not present. Additionally, the intersex page is hyper-active, so many eyes are on this page, which in competition to others who are adding their own contributions to this page, my post did seem rather weak and did not stand a chance to other's contributions.

A change of topic

I will no longer contribute to the Intersex page, instead I will be contributing to the Biological Determinism Wikipedia page.

In Response to A Message through "Talk"

I received this message on my "talk" tab Hello, Cuevas Y and welcome to Wikipedia! It appears you are participating in a class project. If you haven't done so already, we encourage you to go through our training for students. Your instructor or professor may wish to set up a course page, if your class doesn't already have one. Go through our online training for students. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place before the question. Please also read this helpful advice for students. Before you create an article, make sure you understand what kind of articles are accepted here. Remember: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and while many topics are encyclopedic, some things are not.

It is highly recommended that you place this text:

on the talk page of any articles you are working on as part of your Wikipedia-related course assignment.

In response, I just enrolled through with Adrianne Wadewitz's edit protection page. And I now place my texts as "Educational Assignments".

A Rather Late Update Due to Fear

I notice and recognize that it has been quite a while since I posted anything on Wikipedia, but that is because I have numerous fears. The fear of being taken down, and/ or the fear that my ideas don't measure up to other's standards. Anyways, this is a project that I will be graded on, and well, it won't hurt if I try. I cannot sit in the corner of fear, for I will never know what possibilities could happen if I do post my contributions. After mustering myself to contribute to some pages, I decided it was time to contribute a post on the Biological Determinism Wikipedia page, and include a citation. Here is what I posted:

As Londa Schiebinger in "Has Feminism Changed Science?" describes the existing gender issue of the pipeline, in which "if more girls entered the educational end of the pipeline, more women would be turned into credentialed specialists and empty into the science job pool". Simply put, a much higher percentage of women need to be placed in the science and mathematical fields to produce an end result of a couple females who persisted and attained their Ph. D's in their male dominated fields. As for men, the amount of men who pursue within the scientific field, most likely carry through and a higher percent of males attain their professional degrees. Males outnumber females in scientific and mathematical realms due to their gender assignment. Schiebinger elaborates, "Factors that will lead girls to reject science as a career are thought to be cultivated very early-even moments after birth. In one study, parents were asked to describe their newborn babies-at a time when one of the few things they knew about the child was its sex." Parents described their male offspring as adventurous and observatory, as for female offspring, they were noted to be more fragile. Parents encourage their boys to conquer, enlighten, and provide the boost of ego to be successful within the scientific field. Simultaneously, parents treatment towards their female child carries the responsibility of teaching them homemaking skills and to abstain from "rough-and-tough play". Schiebinger notes, "adults tend to give children toys that reinforce sexual stereotypes". Girls are given dolls and encouraged to voice out their emotions, while boys play with cars and balls. Society has molded the norm for children to have distinct modes of play and interaction, which leads to advertisements and manufacturers who "insist that toys be clearly gendered". Handing a toy to a child, depending on their gender may seem harmless at their young age, yet "toys create aspirations, hone conceptual skills, and encourage certain behaviors to the exclusion of others."

A Positive Note

So I contributed to the Biological Determinism page, and guess what??! The post actually stayed up, I am so excited! I am thinking of sticking to this topic and expanding to more than 500 words of the mandatory word count, and I will peer review someone from my group on this topic.

Giving My Presentation

So I gave my presentation to the class on Tuesday December 3rd, and I have to say, I thought I did pretty well. I don't get nervous during presentations, and well I got to showcase my worst and best case scenarios to the class. I was going to make a power point, but I chose to talk my experiences out, instead of having them written on a slide. What I wish I had done, but I was too concerned about the time limit for each of us to present, is that my peers showed their actual pages they worked on and walked the class through their pages. I didn't do that, I just directly showed the class my sandbox. Either way, I still feel that I did a pretty good job in the presentation.

On a Negative Note

I posted on the Gender page and included a citation. This post soon got taken down, and well I resorted to the justification that just like the Intersex page, the Gender page also has many eyes feasting among new contributions to the page. At least I tried, right...?! Here is the post that I tried posting up:

According to Londa Schiebinger, many have argued that science should have a gender. Additionally, "Sir Francis Bacon, the seventeenth-century English ideologue, called for the Royal Society of London to "raise a masculine philosophy". Karl Joel, 19th century German historian of philosophy, desired to return to "manly philosophy" and "applauded the arrival of a masculine epoch". Another advocate of the male gender of science, Kant, who also was a philosopher, believed that anyone who wanted to engage an an intellectual profession, needed to sport a beard. On a different perspective, specifically, the female perspective, Mary Wollstonecraft, "in her efforts to create equality between the sexes, encouraged women to become "more masculine and respectable". On board of supporting the notion that science was masculine, was Evelyn Fox Keller, a feminist American physicist, "declared that science is "masculine," not only in the person of its practitioners but in its ethos and substance." Gender is the prime reason in which women feel estranged and left out of the realm of science. As for women who did participate within science, shadowed the masculine voice in their publications or utilized their male partners to carry out their own findings of science. Society played a leading and influential role into women in the public and private sphere. As more women entered the Primatology sciences, in which they were to leave society behind and delve deep into adapting within the dark premises of the wild jungles where years passed by them. Once women were allowed within the public sphere of science, they became secretive about their pregnancies and "took trips for their work", to indulge in giving birth without experiencing the negative stigma of society. Some women disguised themselves in looking like men and experienced the outside societal judgments of working alongside a male scientists.

Polishing and Turning Things In

Well this class was a very interesting class, for one, I would love to continue on with Wikipedia. I learned so much within the breadth of ten weeks, and this project is just the tech savvy representation of that. Now, I have to clean up my sandbox, which is what I have done today. I noticed that I needed to add sections with interesting titles and write down what I did and the active life of my postings. I also plan on posting an image onto the Biological Determinism page, specifically under the section titled, "Sociobiology". Simultaneously, I need to peer review two of my classmates posts, so I will be peer reviewing Tania's and someone from my own page's contributions. I am now working on getting the Microsoft word document put together and I plan on submitting that tonight, if possible. Thank you Professor Phillip for your teaching and thank you Wikipedia for this wonderful experience!