Long

Theorising Gender

SOC207 Lecture Seven

Dr Jordan McKenzie

A (very) brief history of Feminism: the First WAVE

•The First Wave can be understood through the campaign to permit women to vote.

•Australia 1908, Soviet Union 1917, Britain 1918, France 1944.

•Also about university access for women.

•In a broader sense, the first wave was concerned with citizenship.

Second wave feminism

•This era is typically associated with the 1960s women’s liberation movement and argued for reproductive rights, greater working/pay equality, the no fault divorce, and the prosecution of domestic violence and ‘rape in marriage’.

•The idea of gender as a socially constructed phenomenon is central to this movement.

Third Generation

•Involved radical and separatist movements, as well as more mainstream feminist figures.

• Anti-pornography campaigns.

•Continued pursuit of access to safe abortions, equal pay and political representation.

•Development of and disagreements with Queer theory

•Ongoing debates about sex work and prostitution. Sexuality as empowerment or oppression.

•Engaging with (either for or against) post-modern and post-structuralist theories.

Fourth Generation

•Greater emphasis on the pluralities of gender

•More recently, the debates about the existence of rape culture and ‘slut shaming’ have become central.

•Trans rights are more central in debates about feminism

•Increasingly common for men to identify as feminists

•Yet gender is still highly political

•NB. The existence of 4th wave remains somewhat contested.

Some Key Terms

•Sex: Biological characteristics (hormones, genitalia etc)

•Gender: Social/cultural representations of masculinity and Felinity.

•Both are traditionally understood as a Male/Female binary, though there is considerable evidence that neither Sex or Gender are limited to two options.

•i.e. Fausto-Sterling: The Five Sexes

•The influence of sex on gender is still contested

•There is a broad spectrum of approaches

Biological Essentialism

•An essentialist gender model would suggest that gender is just another word for sex differences.

•People are born with certain traits, they do not learn them.

•Therefore, someone might say that specific characteristics are ‘naturally feminine or masculine’

•Ie. Jordan Peterson: believes that men and women are fundamentally different…

Judith Butler: Gender as Performance

•Gender is performative is to argue that gender is “real only to the extent that it is performed” (Gender Trouble 1990).

•‘it is unclear that there can be an ‘I’ or a “we” who had not been submitted, subjected to gender, where gendering is, among other things, the differentiating relations by which speaking subjects come into being . . . the ‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within the matrix of gender relations themselves” (Bodies that Matter).

•“Gender is an impersonation . . . becoming gendered involves impersonating an ideal that nobody actually inhabits” (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum).

Video

“The question that preoccupies me in the light of recent global violence is, who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, what makes for a grievable life? Despite our differences in location and history, my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a “we,” for all of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous “we” of us all. And if we have lost, then it follows that we have had, that we have desired and loved, that we have struggled to find the conditions for our desire.

This means that each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies—as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of a publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.” (Butler 2003, 10)

Mary Holmes (2000) writes

“Definitions of what is personal associate it closely with the domestic or ‘private’ sphere and all that supposedly belongs within it. Women, bodies, sex, emotions and intimate relationships have been separated from the political world. Politics is defined as public, objective and rational – all qualities usually associated with masculinity. The public political sphere has traditionally been where men made decisions about what is ‘the common good’ (Benhabib 1987; Pateman 1988). Rejecting traditional definitions, feminists proclaimed that ‘the personal is political’.” (2000: 305-306)

“Crucially, if – as Judith Butler (1993) argues – power is not exercised from a single privileged location, but, rather, is practised and reworked in a diverse range of sites, then forms of power come to be seen as incomplete and potentially riven with gaps, slippages and inconsistencies. While Butler rightly sees a transformative political valence to this, one must be alert to the possibility that seemingly progressive modalities of gender politics will also be marked by points of unevenness, rendering them potentially open to unforeseen inegalitarian consequences and re-articulation within conservative forms of gender discourse. Taken together, these theoretical interventions foreground the unevenness and variability of constructions of gender hierarchy in different contexts.” (Dean 2012: 284)

Luce Irigaray:

Psychoanalytic Gender Theory

•Irigaray is an interdisciplinary thinker who works between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and linguistics.

•She writes to expose the hidden position of women or woman from philosophy, psychoanalytic theory and structural linguistics and uses these discourses as methodologies.

•Irigaray deconstructs the binaries of Western thinking by looking at how masculinity and femininity are present in these meaning making relations.

•Her conclusion is that woman is nature, matter and emotion giving a  subordinate position in relation to masculinity. Women can only have a subject position as a reflection of man.

•Her larger aim in this process is to instantiate an actual sexual difference.

Irigaray: difference and indifference

‘If we continue to speak the same language to each other, we will re-produce the same story. Begin the same stories all over again. Don't you feel it? Listen: men and women around us all sound the same. Same arguments, same quarrels, same scenes. Same attractions and separations. Same difficulties, the impossibility of reaching each other. Same ... same.... Always the same. If we continue to speak this sameness, if we speak to each other as men have spoken for centuries, as they taught us to speak, we will fail each other. Again. ... Words will pass through our bodies, above our heads, disappear, make us disappear. Far. Above. Absent from our- selves, we become machines that are spoken, machines that speak. Clean skins envelop us, but they are not our own. We have fled into proper names, we have been violated by them. Not yours, not mine. We don't have names. We change them as men exchange us, as they use us. It's frivolous to be so changeable so long as we are a medium of exchange.’

•When Our Lips Speak Together’ Luce Irigaray And Carolyn Burke (Trans)  Signs, vol. 6, no. 1, women: sex and sexuality, part 2 (autumn, 1980), pp. 69-79

Key questions:

•How should gender be understood/applied/incorporated in contemporary social theory?

•Does the acknowledgement of gendered ‘othering’ require us to rethink all social theory?

•Or can we apply what we know now to classical ideas?

•If modernity has a history of dividing people into binaries, can we say that other binaries (race, sexuality, disability etc) are a result of the same theoretical problem?

•Are progressive views about gender inequality necessarily linked to deconstructing gender binaries?