Weekly Journal Sociology Transgender Study
An important aspect of this course is keeping up with course readings and coming to class prepared to discuss these readings.
To facilitate this process, each class for which there is assigned reading due you must submit a reading synopsis and response in your Reading Journal on Blackboard before class. For each entry, you will type a one-page synopsis of the readings, followed by a one-page response (you are welcome to write more, but are not required to do so). You will also come up with at least three discussion questions related to the readings. You should label each section (i.e. Summary, Response, Discussion Questions).
Make sure that your entries address the readings as a whole. The best way to do this is by synthesizing the readings. Do not simply think about each reading individually, but also think about why I assigned them together and how they relate to one another. In other words, identify what the readings have in common, focusing on key themes, arguments, points, and concepts.
Weekly Journal Sociology Transgender Study
While the summary is a synopsis of the readings, your response section should engage more critically with the readings. You can respond to the readings as a whole or a particular aspect of one or more of the readings. Some ideas for your response section include: offering a critique or counterargument; relating the reading to other course material; relating the reading to current events or personal experience; discussing new questions or issues that emerged from your reading.
In the discussion question section, pose a minimum of three questions related to the week’s reading. What questions does the material raise for me? What aspects or issues raised in the reading would you like to explore in class? What confused you? What would you like to know more about? Questions should primarily take the form of clarification and development (i.e. questions about concepts or points in the materials that you were unclear about and/or that you think were important and would like to further address in class) or discussion (i.e. questions related to the materials that could form the basis of a discussion in class and that you would like to pose to your classmates). Questions that can help facilitate a discussion of central points, concepts, arguments, theories, etc. in the readings are highly encouraged. Further-research questions (i.e. questions raised by the course materials that require further research/reading to answer) are also welcome, though questions of this type should be included in addition to rather than in place of the minimum three clarification, development, and discussion questions.
Weekly Journal Sociology Transgender Study
Journal entries should demonstrate to me that you have done the reading and engaged with it in a meaningful way. We will use your entries to guide class discussion. As such, please bring a copy with you to class. Late entries are not accepted, nor will entries be accepted in lieu of attendance.
Training and Transpassing Across Sex-Gender Walls in Iran
Something happened in 2003–4: transsexuals and transsexuality in Iran suddenly became a hot media topic, both in Iran and internationally.
The medical practice of sex change by means of surgery and hormones dates to at least the early 1970s in Iran; for nearly three decades the topic had received occasional coverage in the Iranian press, including a series of reports (presumably based on real lives) published in a popular magazine, Rah-i zindigi (Path of Life), beginning in 1999.1
Iranian press coverage of “trans-” phenomena increased sharply in early 2003, however, and it has continued intensely ever since—sometimes the reports directly address transsexuals and transsexuality, and sometimes they pertain to them in the context of other people marked as “vulnerable to social harm,” such as prostitutes (both male and female) and runaway girls, who reportedly live trans-dressed lives. It was these last two topics that drew the attention of documentary filmmaker Mitra Farahani to the subject of transsexuals in Iran. Her documentary Just a Woman won international acclaim at the 2002 Berlin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and elsewhere and seems to have ignited broader international attention to the issue of transsexuality in Iran. A flurry of articles appeared in the world press in 2004–5. The Guardian, for example, wrote on July 27, 2005, that “today, the Islamic Republic of Iran occupies the unlikely role of global leader for sex change,” adding, “Iran has even become a magnet for patients from eastern European and Arab countries seeking to change their genders.” A number of television documentaries in France, Sweden, Holland, and the United Kingdom followed, as well as several independent documentary film productions (Abdo 2000; Eqbali 2004; Fathi 2004; McDowall and Khan 2004; Harrison 2005; Stack 2005; Tait 2005)….
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