Gender Critical Theory PDF

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These notes will study gender theory and go into detail surrounding the theorists in this category....

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Gender Presentation Feminism  Like most critical tendencies since the 1960’s, modern feminism belongs to poststructuralist thinking.  It questions fixed and stable notions of gender, sexuality, and even the category of ‘woman’. Female Biology Sex Nature Anatomy Essentialism One is born a woman

Feminine Social construct Gender Culture Performance Non-essentialist Becomes a woman

Feminist Political position Sexuality as a decision Ideology Class Wo/man adopts feminism

First Wave  Late 19th – early 20th century: woman suffrage: votes for women; it is inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).  ‘Equal-opportunities feminism’: women and men should be treated as equals; struggle for education and job equality.  Important figures: Elizabeth Robins and Virginia Woolf. Second Wave  1960’s and 1970’s: radical feminism of the women’s liberation movements; strong belief that women could collectively empower one another.  Slogans: ‘The personal is political’, ‘sisterhood is powerful’; questions: what is ‘female identitiy’?  Important figures: Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963); Juliet Mitchell, The Subjection of Women (1970).

Third Wave (Post-feminism)  It challenges the notion of ‘universal womanhood’ and embraces ambiguity, diversity, and multiplicity.  ‘Intersectionality’: the various ways in which race and gender interact in shaping one’s identity, and intersect in oppressive and violent practices.  Important figures: Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987); bellhooks, Ain’t I A Woman? Black Woman and Feminism (1981); Trinh T. Minhha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989). Feminist Literary Criticism  First phase – to re-read the writings of male authors and expose the stereotyping in the male authors’ representations of female characters.  Second phase – to read women’s writings and look for positive representations of women’s experience main impulse: to establish a women’s cannon and disseminate it in education.  Third phase – interdisciplinarity, reading feminist texts and experiences comparatively in various arts and disciplines (literature, film, dance) and in conjunction with the development of technology. Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)  A great deal of the work on gender through the twentieth century has emerged in the wake of the psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud. Easthope and McGowan, p. 143.  The psycho-sexual processes that Freud describes rely upon the attribution of meaning to visible anatomical distinctions that centre on the presence or absence of the penis.

Easthope and McGowan, p. 144  The complexes that the child must go through are resolved differently (if they are resolution itself is based very firmly within the normalizing terrain of heterosexuality. Easthope and McGowan, p. 144 ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’ (1912).  This essay is exclusively concerned with men.  It can be seen to reflect the old Italian proverb: ‘All women are whores except my mother, who is a saint’. Easthope and McGowan, p. 252. Madonna and Whore  A man’s sexual drive originates with his first love, his mother, but in response to the prohibition of incest, becomes transformed into desire for another adult woman.  This leads to polarizing of ideas of women between the overvalued Madonna Whore figure who is desired. Easthope and McGowan, p. 253 Men’s Love Life  The affectionate current … springs from the earliest years of childhood … and is directed to the members of the family and those who look after the child […] it carries … components of erotic interest … diverted from its sexual aims (obstacle of incest).  Then at the age of puberty [it is] joined by the powerful ‘sensual’ current which … will … find a way as soon as possible to other extraneous objects with which a real sexual life may be carried on. Freud in Easthope and McGowan, p. 149.

Physical Impotence  The sensual current … is forced to avoid the affectionate current … and seeks only objects which do not recall the incestuous figures forbidden to it.  Such people … seek objects which they do not need to love, in order to keep their sensuality away from the objects they love.  Physical Impotence makes its appearance whenever an object which has been chosen with the aim of avoiding incest recalls the prohibited object through some feature. Freud in Easthope and McGowan, p. 150. Physical Debasement  The main protective measure against such a disturbance which men have recourse to in this split in their love consists in a physical debasement of the sexual object.  … sensuality can be freely expressed, and important sexual capacities and a high degree of pleasure can develop. Freud in Easthope and McGowan, p. 150. Women’s Love Life  In the case of women there is little sign of a need to debase their sexual object.  But their long holding back from sexuality and the lingering of their sensuality in fantasy [makes them] unable to undo the connection between sensual activity and the prohibition, and [they] prove to be physically impotent, that is, frigid, when such an activity is at last allowed them. Freud in Easthope and McGowan, p. 153. Sublimation  It is quite possible to adjust the claims of the sexual instinct to the demands of civilization.

 The very incapacity of the sexual instinct to yield complete satisfaction as soon as it submits to the first demands of civilization becomes the source, however, of the noblest cultural achievements which are brought into being by ever more extensive sublimation of its instinctual components. Freud in Easthope and McGowan, p. 155 Feminism and Psychoanalysis Laura Mulvey (b: 1941)  Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist. She was educated at Oxford and is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck College University of London. She worked at the British Film Institute for many years before taking up her current position.  Within her analysis psychic processes are grounded in social and textual conditions. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975)  In Hollywood cinema men are invited to identify with a male protagonist in looking at and desiring women as objects, while women identify with the female figures passively looked at.  Women’s own desire becomes effaced. Easthope and McGowan, p. 255  ‘the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form’. Mulvey in Easthope and McGowan, p. 168  ‘the cinema poses questions about the ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking.’ Mulvey in Easthope and McGowan, p. 169

Two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation:  Scopophilia – sexual instincts  Narcissism – ego libido Scopophilia  Pleasure in looking  Pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight.  Sexual satisfaction comes from watching an objectified other through a controlling gaze. Narcissism  Identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectators fascination with and recognition of his like.  As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look. To-be-looked-at-ness The woman displayed functions on two levels:  Erotic object for characters within screen story.  Erotic objects for spectator within auditorium. Threat of Castration  ‘But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure … also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure.’ Mulvey in Easthope and McGowan, p. 174. Sadism and Fetishism

The male unconscious escapes castration anxiety through:  Sadisms – devaluation and punishment of the guilty object (film noir).  Fetishism – turning woman into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring (cult of female star). Easthope and McGowan, p. 255  In his essay on ‘Fetishism’ Freud argues that this is an essentially male response to the threat implied to women if they are seen to lack the phallus, the fetish being a fantasy object erected in place of the lack, which is disavowed. Easthope and McGowan, p. 255. Camera  The camera becomes the mechanism for producing … flowing movements compatible with the human eye … in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator’s surrogate can perform with verisimilitude. Mulvey in Easthope and McGowan, p. 175

Cinematic Codes  Playing on the tension between films as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changing in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. Mulvey in Easthope and McGowan, p. 175. Radical film-making  The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical

filmmakers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialects and passionate detachment. Mulvey in Easthope and McGowan, p. 176 Hélène Cixous (b. 1937)  Hélène Cixous is one of the most renowned French feminist critics.  She was born in Algeria, educated in France and from early in her life studied literature in many languages.  She is known for her experimental writing style, which cross the traditional limits of academic discourse into poetic language. The Newly Born Woman (1975)  Her primary concern is to undermine the logocentrism (the idea that meaning is fully present in the word) and Phallocentrism (the privileging of the phallus as the ultimate signifier) inherent in Western philosophical discourse. Easthope and McGowan, pp. 253 – 254 ‘Sorties’  What Cixous seeks are ways out (sorties) from the rigid structures that place woman in a gendered and heterosexually determined relationship of difference to man.  She posits a notion of the feminine as a positive source of energy, instability, diversity … accepting rather than repressing the other of the ‘I’. Easthope and McGowan, p. 254. Female / Feminine  While male sexuality is centred on the penis, female sexuality is multiply diverse … spread throughout the body.

 While the masculine depends upon the rigid binaries that structure language … feminine reverberate with the instabilities of that which ‘comes-before-language’. Easthope and McGowan, p. 254. Bisexuality  There are some exceptions … those uncertain, poetic persons … men or women: beings who are complex, mobile, open. Accepting the other sex as a component makes them much richer more various, stronger and to the extent that they are mobile – very fragile. Cixous in Easthope and McGowan, p. 158 Écriture Feminine  Writing is the passageway, the entrance; the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me – the other that I am and am not, that I don’t know to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live – that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me … which is indeed what gives me the desire to know and from which all life soars. Cixous in Easthope and McGowan, p. 160. From ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’  It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, asnd this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice will never be theorized, enclosed, encoded which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist…  Her writing can only keep going, without ever inscribing or discerning contours … she lets the other language speak the language of a thousand tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death…  Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible. Unconscious

 Listen to woman speak in a gathering … she doesn’t ‘speak’, she throws her trembling body into the air, she lets herself go, she flies … she vitally defends the ‘logic’ of her discourse with her body … she exposes herself.  … she inscribes what she is saying because she does not deny unconscious drives the unmanageable part they play in speech. Cixous in Easthope and McGowan, pp. 162 – 163. Mother  In woman there is always, more or less, something of the “mother” repairing and feeding, resisting separation, a force that does not let itself be cut off …  (I do not mean the role but the “mother” as no-name and as source of goods). There is always at least a little good mother milk left in her. She writes with white ink. Cixous in Easthope and McGowan, pp. 163 – 164.

Body  Woman must writer her body, must make up the unimpeded tongue that bursts partitions, classes, and rhetorics, go beyond the discourse …  Now, I – woman am going to blow up the law … let it happen, right now, in language. Cixous in Easthope and McGowan p. 165  ‘he she its pass, he she its fly by, he she its pleasure in scrambling spatial order, disorienting it, moving furniture, things, and values around, breaking in, emptying structures, burning the self-same, the proper upside down’. Cixous in Easthope and McGowan, p. 166.

Feminist approaches to texts  Consider the representations of women.  Identify bodily images or sexual connotations. Explore the presence of binary oppositions.  Discuss whether women are subjects / objects.  Examine masculine / feminine ways of narrating.  Think about assumption of male / female readership. Queer Theory  Definition of ‘queer’ – ‘odd, singular, quaint; open to suspicion; counterfeit; slightly mad; having a sensation of coming sickness; sick, ill (dialect); homosexual (slang). Chambers dictionary.  ‘queer’ gained currency in the English Language in the United States and elsewhere as (usually) a derogatory term for (usually male) homosexual.  In the late 1980’s and 1990’s … homosexuals themselves began to ‘reclaim’ the word.  ‘Queer’ shakes up our codes and codings of male and female, or masculinity and femininity, or bi-heter – and homo-. Bennett, A. and Royle, N. (2004) ‘Queer’ in An introduction to literature, criticism, and theory. 3rd edn. Harlow, England; New York: Pearson / Longman, p. 188.  As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick comments, ‘queer’ can refer to ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made to signify monolithically’.  ‘queer’ challenges all gender and sexual essentialisms. Bennett and Royle, p. 188.

Judith Butler (b. 1956)  Judith Butler is professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the co-director of the program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.  She had published work on philosophy, pornography, feminist and psychoanalytic theory, film, the politics of race, war and grief.  ‘queer’ … in some contexts … appeals to a young generation who want to resist the more institutionalized and reformed politics signified by ‘lesbian and gay’…  In some contexts it has marked a predominantly white movement that has not fully addressed the way in which ‘queer’ plays within non-white communities. Butler (2013) ‘critically queer’ in Hall, D.E (ed) The Routledge queer studies reader. London: Routledge, p. 21.  The term [‘queer’] will be revised, dispelled, rendered obsolete to the extent that it yields to the demands which resist the term precisely because of the exclusions by which it is mobilized. Butler, p. 21 Gender Trouble (1990) ‘Woman’ as effect of discourse  Butler argues that a progressive gender politics would be concerned not as much with authenticating the subject woman, as with tracing the genealogy of the discursive constitutions of women.  The questions asked then would not be ‘what is woman’ or ‘what does she want’, but how has woman been understood to ‘be’ and what are the terms and consequences of those understandings? Easthope and McGowan, p. 258

 Feminist critique ought … to understand how the category of ‘women’, the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought.  The fragmentation within feminism and the paradoxical opposition to feminism from ‘women’ whom feminism claims to represent suggest the necessary limits of identity politics. Butler in Easthope and McGowan, pp. 192 – 194.  Perhaps, paradoxically, ‘representation’ will be shown to make shown to make sense for feminism only when the subject of ‘women’ is nowhere presumed. Butler in Easthope and McGowan, p. 195. Performativity  While Butler has long argued that readers might grossly oversimplify the idea of performativity by overemphasising one’s ability to choose a new sexuality or gender at will, her emphasis on identity roles open to subversion has had the positive consequence of allowing for connections among high theory, political activism and quotidian choices. Hall, D.E. (2006) ‘Gender and queer theory’ in Malpas, S. and Wake, P. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to critical theory. London; New York: Routledge, p. 108. Queer approaches to texts  Question heterosexist power structures.  Consider social / cultural construction of gender and sexual identity.  Discuss the representation / invisibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual characters.  Examine fluid forms of gender, sexuality, identity, desire, language, relationships.

 Focus on marginal rather than dominant. Notes Simone de Beauvoir  Was first to say there were dualities (or binary oppositions) in Western metaphysics language structures.  One binary is also more powerful than the other i.e. culture / nature, body / mind, white (light) / black (darkness / obscurity).  Woman is usually inferior. They are usually nature rather than culture.  Women are sexualised – more body than mind.  Women are thought of as mysterious so more black than white.  Simone de Beauvoir wanted to break these binary oppositions. Women are always lacking something. To do with religion. Eve come from the rib of Adam. Man is first one you think of and woman comes after. Man is not identified as male but as the absolute human subject. Women are identified by their gender.  She is always the other.

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Julia Kristeva  Structuring of binaries is from language and how we use it.  She was after Beauvoir.  Freud and Lacan are patriarchal which causes problems.  When we enter language we enter a system that is patriarchal – unchallenged male mindset dominates.  Next to the symbolic (language we all speak) is semiotic which doesn’t fix women in a secondary place.  Semiotic – not fixed e.g. literature – ambiguous. Defamiliarisation. Instead of a policeman – police force so that it’s not fixed.  Phenotext – fixed, symbolic language.

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Genotext – opens up possibilities. Poetic language – Semiotic. Jane Austin, Dickens – Symbolic. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf – Semiotic. Unreliable narrator – semiotic – gaps, uncertainty about gender.

Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)  Always speak with both symbolic and semiotic – not trapped by language.  Science fixes the meaning – symbolic. Freud’s theory is patriarchal.  Try to understand how adult’s minds have a sexual process.  Starting point is anatomy – male sexuality.  Symbolic – heterosexuality is the norm.  First love for a man is his mother (Oedipus Complex).  Man has to repress desire for mother and shift to another woman.  If characteristics are like his mother then he needs to make her like a whore because he cannot have sex if they are like his mother so uses debasement.  Like mother or whore.    

Affectionate – mother. Sensual – whore. Need to combine the two for healthy sexual life. Avoids mother figure (affectionate) because will not allow sensual side.

 Women do not have the need to debase the man to have sex with them. Hold back their sexuality as don’t want to appear like whores. Haunted by the whore figure. Women are naturally holding back. Fantasy instead.

 As a result, makes them unable to undo c...