A grAde

In “The Technology of Gender” (1987), Theresa de Lauretis explains that “In the feminist writings of the 1960s and 1970s, the notion of gender as sexual difference was central to the critique of representation, the rereading of cultural images and narratives, the questioning of theories of subjectivity and textuality, of reading, writing, and spectatorship” (713). First, what is “the notion of gender as sexual difference”? Second, why was this notion so important to second-wave feminists (“the feminist writings of the 1960s and 1970s” that de Lauretis references)? Third, what is at least one reason that more recent generations of feminists have largely abandoned the notion of gender as sexual difference?

You can answer these questions by drawing on and citing passages in both de Lauretis’s essay and in “Gender” (2007) by Jack Halberstam

http://keywords.nyupress.org/american-cultural-studies/essay/gender/