Listen to the podcast – podcast – Radiolab – Gonads: X & Y – https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/gonads-xy.
- How each documentary or podcast relates to the course content, including the textbook and lectures?
The podcast relates significantly to what the lecture articulates and the course content about gender, sexuality and sex. It also aligns itself on the same line as the book on the Gendered world elucidates on the notions of gender. For instance, the podcast starts with gender, where molly asks her mum if she had conceived a baby of the opposite gender what she could have named him. The gender issues align with what the book says there are two genders, i.e. male and female. The podcast also discusses primordial germ cells encompassed in a person’s body, which the book termed as chromosomes, and the book elucidated them being the thing responsible for individual sex identification. The text on gendered world detailed sex as the complex interplay of genes, hormones, environment, and behaviour with loopback effects between bodies and society. Therefore, we can say the podcast relates to the book definition as the loopback effect of culture on molly has enabled her to associate herself as feminine. The podcast also touches on the notion of the society two sex spheres where they have shared doctrinal roles, and the podcast elucidates this on the male Daniel Webster who was a senator and undersecretary to three presidents. That makes relation to what the contents said that political roles are doctrine by society to be male roles.
- What are your thoughts about the documentary or podcast?
My thoughts about the podcast are that rats share the same chromosomal hormones as humans and borrow much sex-wise from them. Besides, I think the main reason that David zarkower used the experiment by using rats in because it would give him an estimate of what human genes are composed. Additionally, I think that intersexuality is also present in other animals and not only humans. The podcast states that the experiment done by other scientists of the female rate ovary showed the ovary trying to reorganize itself in testis is similar to what some humans scrotum being divided to form a labia like feature.
- Did it help you better understand the material or see the subject in a new way?
The podcast helped me understand the notion of sexuality in a new way that we have tens of thousands of genes and not only the typical X and Y. also, the podcast aided in the understanding of intersexuality even in rats as I used to think or humans is intersexual, which I affirmed it to come from mixed culture interaction.
Furthermore, the podcast enabled me to know that genes and chromosomes are different and that genes are tiny, while chromosomes being relatively more significant. Also, I am amazed to learn that whatever we term as X and Y chromosomes never looks like the letter given to them, and the letter is just a way of identification made by scientists.