Describe and analyse an aspect of your life which has been affected by COVID-19, using what you have learned in this unit.
Sag D
SOCI1010Week10LectureSlides.pdf
PART 1: BODIES
THE BODY? • Physical body, natural fact • Instrument through which we express ourselves, that allows us to do
things, to move around and function in the physical world
CARTESIAN DUALISM Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am)
- René Descartes (1637)
• Foundation of knowledge / Western philosophy • Presumes an ‘I’ that precedes thinking
and being • Mind over matter: the thinking subject
transcends its own corporeality • The ‘I’ is a neutral observer
SOCIOLOGY AND THE BODY: EARLY DAYS • Cartesian dualism: split between the mind and the body • Not a neutral distinction, the mind is superior to the body
• Mind: culture, rationality • Body: nature, flesh/meat
• 19th C: Sociology in its early days needed to distinguish itself from fields such as psychology, anthropology, and the natural sciences. Sociology established itself as a field based on the separation and privileging of the cultural/social, at the expense of the natural.
• The subject of early sociology is a rational actor: the mind
SOCIOLOGY AND THE BODY: EARLY DAYS • Sociology emphasised the mind-body split, and culture-nature dichotomies. • Consequences:
• The body is not viewed as a source of knowledge, and is not relevant to the production of sociological knowledge. It’s too disorderly, compared to the orderliness of the rational.
• Method: scientific/positivist. To get to the truth, we need objectivity and rationality. One needs to remove oneself from the social world, and observe through a disembodied gaze. As though our bodies and experiences can be shed at will so as to have only objectivity left.
• Entrenches inequalities. E.g. perpetuates the association of women’s bodies with reproductive capacities, nature, that to be conquered; of Black and Indigenous people with animals; and Black and Indigenous women with hypersexuality, there for the taking by (white) men.
• Sociology has taken the body as a biological given, untouched by mind, world, and others, resulting in a disembodied account of social action. It did not question naturalist explanations of the body.
SOCIOLOGY AND THE BODY: POSTSTRUCTURALISM • Seeks to question and destabilise dualisms such as mind/body,
nature/culture. • Anti-essentialist: knowledge and truth are discursively produced.
They are produced through a capillary network of language, institutions, practices, technologies,… No truth as such. • The body as such does not exist: • What it means, how we understand it, how we experience it is linked to
governing knowledges at any given moment. • It is never complete, always unstable and unfinished. • It is a site through which power operates.
MY BODY
FOUCAULT AND THE BODY • French poststructuralist philosopher • Genealogy: history of the present.
How did we get to where we are today? • Foucault is interested in the relation
between knowledge and power, and how they are used as a means of social control through which ‘normal’ bodies are produced
FOUCAULT AND POWER • Power isn’t just oppressive or about force imposed from above: not
deployed by some actors over others through coercion, not concentrated in the figure of the few, not possessed by authorities. • Instead, power is diffused through discourse, institutions, knowledge,
bodies,.. It is enacted and embodied at all instances. • It works through bodies and produces bodies in particular ways. • It is not so much that we as people use power, rather, it is through
power that we become who we are. • Power is everywhere.
DISCIPLINARY POWER
Panopticon, designed by Jeremy Bentham
PANOPTICON “Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. . . . In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions - to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide – it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two.” (Foucault 1991 [1975], p. 200)
PANOPTICON • Foucault uses the panopticon to explain how power
works in contemporary societies. • The prisoners don’t know they are being watched, so
they have to assume they are under constant surveillance.
• The guards aren’t telling prisoners what to do at every instance, so the prisoners start exercising power over themselves. In other words: they start disciplining themselves, their bodies, in accordance with the rules of the place.
• They internalise the guard, they internalise power, they police their own behaviours, and ultimately they don’t realise they are doing this anymore, they behave as they are expected to behave without thinking about it.
• Power is exercised by the self on the self, not by some authority over someone else. Power becomes embodied.
FOUCAULT AND POWER • Power is a normalising project: ensuring that people internalise the
rules and norms
BIOPOWER • 17th-18th century: shift from sovereign power to biopower, from the
power to kill to a power invested in life. No longer a king who decides who will be allowed to live and who must die, but a power that is about managing every aspect of life. • 2 poles of biopower that are intimately connected: • Anatomopolitics: This is disciplinary power. It’s about the
management of the individual body. It aims to make individuals behave, turn them into ‘docile bodies’. • Biopolitics: This is about the species body, and its aim is the
management of the population. • Life and the living become something that can be studied and known.
But rather than finding the truth of life and the living, the knowledge that is created produces people /bodies in particular ways.
BIOPOWER: CONSEQUENCES • This about the norm, about coaxing people into adjusting themselves to that which is
normal. All the while, the impression is created that individuals choose to do the things they do.
• The problem is that this marginalises people who don’t, won’t, or can’t fit within this norm: queer bodies, trans* bodies, intersex bodies, non-white bodies, ill bodies, fat bodies, disabled bodies,…
• These bodies are singled out, because the way power operates is to try to make them fit with the norm, to integrate them into the social body, in accordance with dominant knowledges.
• Link between power and knowledge: How does science or medicine shape how we understand and experience ourselves/our own bodies? E.g. trans* bodies, intersex bodies, disabled bodies.
• Dominant knowledges shape what we view as normal and abnormal, as natural and unnatural. The aim is to eradicate the abnormal and the unnatural.
• Never absolute, it is an ongoing project, and things change.
PART 2: GENDERED BODIES
SEX VS GENDER • Sex: anatomy: male, female, intersex. Still largely viewed in binary
terms. Sex characteristics (primary and secondary), hormones, chromosomes,… • Gender: culturally determined meanings of what it means to be male,
female, intersex, trans* (although also still largely viewed in binary terms). Meanings of masculinity and femininity - qualities, traits, behaviours, roles, feelings, etc. • In our culture, we still largely believe that sex determines gender.
Even though it is to some extent accepted that gender is cultural, we still tend to think that sex and gender are linked by nature. “Your genitalia determine whether you’re good at doing laundry.”
GENDER BINARY Male Masculine Mind Rational Thinking Culture Public Strong Hard Subject
Female Feminine
Body Emotional
Feeling Nature Private
Weak Soft
Object
INSTITUTIONS AND GENDER • Institutions produce and normalise (often binary) gender difference • Family • Education • Religion • Work • Politics • Culture • Medicine
LEARNING ABOUT BODIES… THROUGH BODIES
FROM A ONE-SEX MODEL TO A TWO-SEX MODEL
ONE-SEX MODEL • Thomas Laqueur: Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to
Freud (1990) • Prior to 18th C: understanding that women and men had the same
reproductive structure • ‘Male’ reproductive system is external, ‘female’ reproductive system
is internal (vagina/penis, ovaries/testicles) • Women’s sexual desire and orgasm are the same as that of men • Difference of degree, rather than kind: two different forms of one sex • Medically, ’female’ reproductive system is inferior to ‘male’
reproductive system
TWO-SEX MODEL • 18th C: shift to two-sex model • ‘Male’ and ‘female’ reproductive systems are fundamental opposites • New vocabulary: e.g. ovaries instead of female testes • By late 18th C: only male orgasm seen as essential to reproduction • ‘Normal’ women were understood not to have sexual desires. Sexual
desire in women is abhorrent. • Bodies are proof of the gender binary: sex determines gender. • Nature becomes evidence of the gender binary
TWO-SEX MODEL • 20th C: science aims to explain the two-sex model • Starts from the two-sex model • Scientists as neutral, rational observers who can study the body as
such • Problems: • Scientists live in a particular historical and cultural context that is saturated
with binary gender • What is ‘the body as such’? Does the body exist independent of context, does
the body precede context? Is the body a stable entity, unchanged over time?
MAKING SEX • Not to deny the existence of ‘sex’, but to show that “almost
everything one wants to say about sex - however sex is understood - already has in it a claim about gender.” (Laqueur 1990, p. 11) • Gender and sex are linked, but not in the traditional understanding
that sex defines gender. The point is that sex itself has no objective meaning, sex/the physical body is always understood – and thus experienced – from a particular contingent cultural vantage point. This means that my earlier claim that sex is anatomy/biological is too simplistic.
PART 3: PERFORMATIVITY
JUDITH BUTLER: GENDER TROUBLE
• Foundational text (1990) in queer theory that revolutionised gender studies and our understanding of gender and sexuality
• ‘Doing’ gender, rather than ‘being’ gender • Challenges simple distinctions between sex and gender • Challenges notion of gender identity • Gender is performative
SEX VS GENDER • The logic goes that sex is biological while gender is cultural, often in
accordance with binary understandings and systems of categorisation. • But would sex mean anything if we didn’t already have a cultural category
of gender? • Sex is a system of categorisation that relies on the existence of the cultural
category of gender. • Without gender, the exclamation “It’s a boy!” means as much as “It’s a
vase!” • It is through gender that sex comes to be read as pre-discursive, as existing
as some sort of natural-given, immutable category that is prior to culture.
IS GENDER A CONSTRUCTION? • Commonly, gender is viewed as a construction. • However, the notion of construction implies that someone is doing the
constructing, that there is a constructor prior to gender. • Determinism: bodies are passive receptacles of culture. There is a body,
and gender is imposed on this body. This sounds a lot like the cultural equivalent of ‘biology is destiny’. • Autonomy/free will: if gender is culture, then we can take it on at will. We
can construct it for ourselves. • But what if it is neither? If there is determinism, that means gender cannot
change. If there is free will, it means that we could all take on gender as we please. We know that neither is true.
PERFORMATIVITY "Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being." (Butler 1990, p. 55)
OOOOOFFFF…
PERFORMATIVITY • the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts: we consistently, in a
constant never-ending process, repeat certain idea(l)s of gender through our bodily acts, and we do this… • within a highly rigid regulatory frame: that means, according to particular
idea(l)s that are contextual, but also punitive: if you cross the line, there is some sort of punishment – sometimes life threatening – waiting. This frame is heterosexuality and binary gender, in which sex, gender and sexual orientation are thought to be inherently coherent and stable, it’s rigid in that it’s difficult to suddenly change. This then… • produce[s] the appearance of a substance: because these gendered acts are
constantly repeated, by so many people, in so many contexts, and so consistently, we get the impression that gender is natural, and/or is the expression of some sort of pre-existing original 'master-gender' that is an inborn characteristic of people based on their (felt) sex.
CONSEQUENCES OF PERFORMATIVITY • Performative means that it does something, produces an effect. • The notion of a core of gender, and of identity, is an effect of the
repeated ‘doing’ of gender, not a cause of gender. • We come into being through gender. There is no ‘I’ before gender. • The ‘I’ as we understand it emerges with and through gender. • We cannot think or experience ourselves without gender. • We body forth gender in our every action. • The repetition of acts always takes place in relation to the normative.
GENDER AS DOING, NOT BEING • Gender as repetition of acts implies that gender is a ‘doing’, not a ‘being’. • Performativity draws into question the notion of an internal core of gender
and of gender as a construction. • It also draws into question the notion of stable, constant, and congruent
gendered identity. • It is a doing without an end. There is no master-gender that can be
achieved. • Because there is no master-gender, gender is always a copy of a copy. • That means that failure is inherent in gender, which opens up possibilities
for change.
DRAG: PERFORMANCE VS PERFORMATIVITY
DRAG: PERFORMANCE VS PERFORMATIVITY • Exposes the notion that sex and gender are not intrinsically connected, that
gender is not the outward expression of an internal core. • “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender
itself” (Butler 1990, p. 137) • Exposes that gender is imitation, that gender is copy. • But if we accept that gender comes into being through repetitions of acts, then
drag is not a copy of an original, it’s a copy of a copy. • Drag, then, is a parody, not of an original gender, but of the very notion of the
original. • Performance: something a person does, produced by a person. • Performativity: gender produces the person.
WHY DOES THIS MATTER? • System of categorisation • System that distributes power: social control • Who gets to count as normal and who doesn’t, marginalisation • Real violence • Change is possible
