8. Gender Studies and Queer Theory
Gender theory came to the forefront of the theoretical scene first as feminist theory but has subsequently come to include the investigation of all gender and sexual categories and identities. Feminist gender theory followed slightly behind the reemergence of political feminism in the United States and Western Europe during the 1960s. Political feminism of the so-called "second wave" had as its emphasis practical concerns with the rights of women in contemporary societies, women's identity, and the representation of women in media and culture. These causes converged with early literary feminist practice, characterized by Elaine Showalter as "gynocriticism," which emphasized the study and canonical inclusion
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In the context of postmodernism, gender theorists, led by the work of Judith Butler, initially viewed the category of "gender" as a human construct enacted by a vast repetition of social performance. The biological distinction between man and woman eventually came under the same scrutiny by theorists who reached a similar conclusion: the sexual categories are products of culture and as such help create social reality rather than simply reflect it. Gender theory achieved a wide readership and acquired much its initial theoretical rigor through the work of a group of French feminist theorists that included Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, who while Bulgarian rather than French, made her mark writing in French. French feminist thought is based on the assumption that the Western philosophical tradition represses the experience of women in the structure of its ideas. As an important consequence of this systematic intellectual repression and exclusion, women's lives and bodies in historical societies are subject to repression as well. In the creative/critical work of …show more content…
"Queer theory" questions the fixed categories of sexual identity and the cognitive paradigms generated by normative (that is, what is considered "normal") sexual ideology. To "queer" becomes an act by which stable boundaries of sexual identity are transgressed, reversed, mimicked, or otherwise critiqued. "Queering" can be enacted on behalf of all non-normative sexualities and identities as well, all that is considered by the dominant paradigms of culture to be alien, strange, unfamiliar, transgressive, odd—in short, queer. Michel Foucault's work on sexuality anticipates and informs the Queer theoretical movement in a role similar to the way his writing on power and discourse prepared the ground for "New Historicism." Judith Butler contends that heterosexual identity long held to be a normative ground of sexuality is actually produced by the suppression of homoerotic possibility. Eve Sedgwick is another pioneering theorist of "Queer theory," and like Butler, Sedgwick maintains that the dominance of heterosexual culture conceals the extensive presence of homosocial relations. For Sedgwick, the standard histories of
These sociologists reject the idea of a unified explanation of the experiences of all women. They accept multiple different viewpoints from multiple different sources. Postmodern feminists do not even believe that there is one definition of “woman.” There is a disagreement between radical feminists and postmodern feminists on the idea of the patriarchy. According to this branch, the patriarchy does not exist.
They mention the transition of “the closet,” as being a place in which people could not see you, to becoming a metaphor over the last two decades of the twentieth century used for queers who face a lack of sexual identity. Shneer and Aviv bring together two conflicting ideas of the American view of queerness: the ideas of the past, and the present. They state as queerness became more visible, people finally had the choice of living multiple lives, or integrating one’s lives and spaces (Shneer and Aviv 2006: 245). They highlight another change in the past twenty years as the clash between being queer and studying queerness (Shneer and Aviv 2006: 246-7). They argue that the active and visible contests over power among American queers show that queers now occupy an important place in our culture. They expand on the fact that queerness, real, and performed, is everywhere (Shneer and Aviv 2006: 248). This source shows the transformation in American culture of the acceptance of queerness. It makes an extremely critical resource by providing evidence of the changes in culture throughout the last two decades. Having the information that queerness is becoming more accepted in culture links to a higher percentage of LGBTQ youths becoming comfortable with their sexual identity. However, compared to the other sources, this
One definition of gender is the membership of a word or grammatical form, or an inflectional form showing membership, in such a class. Gender critics take masculinity and feminism, as well as male and female, and use those theories to analyze writings. In books, or other writings, masculinity and feminism are used in order to describe how a character is seen by other characters. Feminism is the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men. It is also a feminine character. After the women’s rights movement, women began to write works and put in their own views and beliefs. This era became known as the feminist writing era. Women felt that by writing their feelings and then getting their works published, that people would see why women should be equal to men.
In an effort to legitimize all subcategories of sexuality considered deviant of heterosexual normatively, queer theory acknowledges nontraditional sexual identities by rejecting the rigid notion of stabilized sexuality. It shares the ideals of gender theory, applying to sexuality the idea that gender is a performative adherence to capitalist structures that inform society of what it means to be male, female, gay, and straight. An individual’s conformity to sexual or gendered expectations indicates both perpetration and victimization of the systemic oppression laid down by patriarchal foundations in the interest of maintaining power within a small group of people. Seeking to deconstruct the absolute nature of binary opposition, queer theory highlights and celebrates literary examples of gray areas specifically regarding sexual orientation, and questions those which solidify heterosexuality as the “norm”, and anything outside of it as the “other”.
My Family Case Study will examine the ‘Nguyen’ family and their current struggle with family finances. I will present the family, their history, and their response to the challenge of dealing with the crisis related to the family finances.
Seidman, Steven, Nancy Fischer , and Chet Meeks. "Transsexual, transgender, and queer." New Sexuality Studies. North Carolina: Routledge, 2011. . Print.
What is Feminism? How does feminism affect the world we live in today? Was feminism always present in history, and if so why was it such a struggle for women to gain the respect they rightly deserve? Many authors are able to express their feelings and passions about this subject within their writing. When reading literary works, one can sense the different feminist stages depending on the timeframe that the writing takes place. Two such works are ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by, Charlotte Gilman and ‘Everyday Use’ by, Alice Walker; the feminist views within each story are very apparent by the era each author lives in. It is evident that a matter of fifty years can change the stance of an author’s writing; in one story the main character is a confident and strong willed young woman looking to voice her feminist views on the world, while the other story’s main character is a woman trying to hold on to her voice in a man’s world which is driving her insane.
Halperin, David. "Is There a History of Sexuality?." The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry
Sexual orientation and normatively defined genders (male and female) recently entered popular circulation as more acceptable. Less attention is drawn to their defining characteristics due to a lessening of interest in their potential to be considered atypical. This is exemplified by Bo’s seamless ability to exists as a bisexual without ever claiming the title of bisexual. Now, society takes an invested interest in sexuality that is perceived as nonstandard. Thus, as per Foucault’s theory, great attention is directed toward non-normative sexuality. That which dominates public conversation enters specific sex acts into discourse, creating new species based on these sex acts. While a succubus is not an actual human species determined by sex acts, new terms defining people based on their sexuality are entering popular dialogue, such as polyamory. Society’s obsession to link all aspects of existence to sexuality is not likely to diminish, so as time progresses, different aspects of sexuality, sex acts, gender, and sexual orientation will continue to enter the cultural lexicon as designations for a new classification of deviant sexual behavior. While this will perpetuate the fascination and oppression of and with sexual minorities, it will give people like Lost Girl’s Bo, a sense of identity. Giving a person a word or classification for their previously misunderstood behavior is a gift and a curse. The present is allowing someone the choice to come out of the closet, as that which is not categorized is unable to be understood or expressed in meaningful
...it is always or only symptomatic of a self-inflicted homophobia. Indeed, a Foucaultian perspective might argue that the affirmation of “homosexuality” is itself an extension of a homophobic discourse." (320/121) As we can see, Judith Butler believes that resistance to identity is a means of resisting power from the outside. Her revision of Foucault comes about as a means to do this as Foucault's notions of power leave no room for resistance from the outside.
Judith Butlers book entitled ‘Bodies that Matter’ examines and questions the belief that certain male-female behaviors are natural within our society. The behaviors that Dr. Butler has distinguished between in this book are femininity and masculinity. She believes that through our learned perception of these gendered behaviors this is an act or performance. She implies that this is brought to us by normative heterosexuality depicted in our timeline. In which, takes on the role of our language and accustomed normalization of society. Butler offers many ideas to prove some of her more radical idea’s such as examples from other philosophers, performativity, and worldwide examples on gender/sex. Some philosophers that seem to be of relevance to her fighting cause are Michel Foucault, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and George Herbert Mead. Her use of the doctrine of constitution takes ‘the social agent as an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts” (Performative). In other words, Dr. Butler will question the extent to which we as a human race assume the given individualism between one another. She has said that “this will constitute him-or herself” (Butler 13). She also wonders to what extent our acts are reputable for us, rather, by our place within dialect and convention. Dr. Butlers followings being of a postmodernist and poststructuralist practice, decides to use the term “subject” rather than “individual” or “person” in order to underline the linguistic nature of her position. This approach should be of credit to philosopher Jacques Lacan because symbolic order gives the system and signs of convention that determines our perception of what we see as reality.
Sex and Gender Arianna Stassinopoulos wrote in the 1973 book The Female Woman: "It would be futile to attempt to fit women into a masculine pattern of attitudes, skills and abilities and disastrous to force them to suppress their specifically female characteristics and abilities by keeping up the pretense that there are no differences between the sexes" (Microsoft Bookshelf). In her statement, we see a cultural feminist response to the dominant liberal feminism of the 1970s. Liberal feminism de-emphasized gender differences, claiming that women were the equals of men and that this would be obvious if only they were offered the same opportunities as men with no special privileges necessary. On the other hand, cultural feminists such as Stassinopoulos claimed that women's unique perspective and talents must be valued, intentionally emphasizing the differences between men and women. A third type of feminism, post-modernism, is represented in Sexing the Body by Anne Fausto-Sterling.
Somerville, Siobhan. "Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body." Gender, Sex, and Sexuality. New York: Oxford University, 2009. 284-99. Print.
Simone de Beauvoir, in her 1949 text The Second Sex, examines the problems faced by women in Western society. She argues that women are subjugated, oppressed, and made to be inferior to males – simply by virtue of the fact that they are women. She notes that men define their own world, and women are merely meant to live in it. She sees women as unable to change the world like men can, unable to live their lives as freely as men can, and, tragically, mostly unaware of their own oppression.
Feminist criticism is a study of works written by female writers, describing women's life or representing women's consciousness. Arlyn Diamond and Lee R Edwards, in the foreword to The Authority o Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, point out that "feminist critics, obviously, are distinguished by virtue of their particular concern with society's beliefs about the nature and function of women in the world, with the transformation of these beliefs into literary plots, with the ways in which artistic and critical strategies adjust and control attitudes toward women. Compared with the long tradition of...