Gender Studies: Terms and Debates

288 Pages·2003·8.4 MB·English

by  Anne Cranny-Francis

Gender Studies
Gender Studies
Terms and Debates
Anne Cranny-Francis
Wendy Waring
Pam Stavropoulos
Joan Kirkby
© A.Cranny-Francis,W.Waring,P.Stavropoulos,J.Kirkby 2003
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First published 2003 by
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ISBN 978-0-333-77611-7 hardback
ISBN 978-0-333-77612-4 ISBN 978-0-230-62916-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-62916-5
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cranny-Francis,Anne.
Gender studies :terms and debates / Anne Cranny-Francis,Wendy
Waring … [et al.].
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-333-77611-7 (cloth) — ISBN 978-0-333-77612-4 (paper)
1.Women’s studies.2.Feminist theory.3.Women’s studies—
Terminology.I.Waring,Wendy Elizabeth,1960– II.Title.
HQ1180 C73 2002
305.4’07—dc21 2002035792
Editing and origination by Aardvark Editorial,Mendham,Suffolk
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
Contents
Preface ix
Chapter 1 Ways of Talking 1
Gender 1
Sex 4
Sexuality 7
The Modern Subject 9
Institution 13
Patriarchy 14
Heterosexuality 17
Homosexual 20
Homosexuality 23
Lesbian 26
Gay 29
Identity 33
Experience 36
Summary 39
Recommended Reading 40
Exercises 41
Chapter 2 Ways of Thinking 42
Models of Subjectivity 43
The Linguistic Subject 45
Gender and Subjectivity 49
Psychoanalysis and Gender 50
More Than One Freud 53
Rethinking Gender: Feminisms and Identity 55
The Question of Identity Politics 55
Difference 59
Psychoanalysis and the Other 61
The Other Within 62
Lacan’s ‘Lack’ and the Power of the Phallus 63
Critiques of ‘The Phallus’ 64
Julia Kristeva and Abjection 65
v
vi Contents
Difference and Power 65
Partial Identities and Provisional Positions 68
Feminist Standpoint Theory 69
Fractured Identities 71
Cyborg Feminism 71
Queer (Non) Identities 74
Bisexual Identities 78
Masculine Identities: The Men’s Movement and Men’s Studies 79
Embodiment 83
Summary 85
Recommended Reading 86
Exercises 87
Chapter 3 Ways of Reading 89
Text 89
Texts, Bodies and Identity 91
Discourse 92
Analysing Gendered Discourse 96
Texts as Engendering Practices 100
Analysing Textual Practice 105
Genre 106
Complexity and Disjunction 109
Complex and Diverse Readers 112
Ways of Reading 114
Mainstream or Compliant Reading 115
Resistant Reading 117
Resisting the Text 118
Rewriting the Text 122
Rewriting the Reading 126
Tactical Reading or ‘Textual Poaching’ 129
Summary 136
Recommended Reading 137
Exercises 137
Chapter 4 Ways of Seeing 139
Stereotypes 140
Inequalities of Power and Access 142
Examples of Stereotypes 143
Stereotypes in Conflict 145
The Ormond College Case 146
The Hill/Thomas Case 147
Resisting Stereotypes 148
Stereotype Reversal 148
Identification 150
Narcissism 152
Contents vii
The Other in the Self 153
Introjection and Projection 154
Lacan and the Mirror Stage 155
Fashion Photography and Sexuality 156
Julia Kristeva and the Semiotic 157
Going to the Movies 159
The Gaze 159
Voyeurism, Sadism and Fetishism 160
Sexual Difference and Visual Pleasure 161
Feminism and Film-making 162
The Woman as Spectator 162
Femininity and Masculinity as Masquerade 167
Challenging the Gendered Gaze: Transvestism to
Posttranssexualism 169
Queering the Gaze 174
Summary 175
Recommended Reading 176
Exercises 177
Chapter 5 Ways of Being 178
Introduction 178
Bodies of Knowledge 179
Who Knows … ? 182
The Gendered Learner 182
Feminist Critiques of the Disembodied Knower 183
Doctored Bodies 187
Biopower: Control of the Body, Control of the Species 188
The Deployment of Sexuality 190
Challenging Reproductive Technologies 192
Cocaine Mothers and Crack Babies 194
New Bodies 196
Fashioning Bodies 197
Femininity, Masculinity and Fashion 197
Born to Shop! 199
The Freedom Bin 200
Fashions of the Body 201
Plastic Bodies 202
The Body of the Law 205
The Hysterical Body 209
Gendered Bodies in Space 211
Marked Bodies 218
Hybrid Bodies 219
Summary 220
Recommended Reading 221
Exercises 221
viii Contents
Chapter 6 Ways of Living 223
Where the Structural and the Psychic Meet: Gendered
Labour and the Politics of Work 223
Home is Where the Heart Is?: The Gendered Politics
of Intimacy 231
Sexual Space, Citizenship and Democracy 237
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Negotiation of Gender
Duality in Young Children 243
Summary 246
Recommended Reading 246
Exercises 247
Chapter 7 Conclusion 249
Bibliography 253
Index 270
Preface
This book is an attempt to approach the study of gender both as an academic
practice and as a feature of our everyday lives. We encounter issues relating
to gender even before we leave the womb – as parents plan for the birth of a
girl or a boy by preparing clothes in appropriate colours or decorating a
nursery with appropriate cultural motifs. As the protagonist of Ursula Le
Guin’s science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness(1981), explains:
I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one’s life, is
whether one’s born male or female. In most societies it determines one’s expect-
ations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners – almost everything. Vocabulary. Semi-
otic usages. Clothing. Even food. (p. 200)
In the same novel an interplanetary anthropologist reports from the planet
Gethen, known to off-worlders as Winter because of its intense cold. She notes
that indigenous Gethenians spend most of their time in no specific sexual iden-
tity: ‘One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling
experience’ (Le Guin 1981, p. 86). Le Guin’s fiction of the planet Gethen/Winter
is an exploration of the significance of sex and gender in the lives of members
of contemporary Western societies. As these quotes indicate, through her
protagonists Le Guin argues that sex plays a critical role in the life of the indi-
vidual, influencing everything from the way we dress to what we eat, the kinds
of things we do, how we behave, what we are likely to achieve in our lives.
Gender Studiesis an attempt to explore some of the practices and sites spec-
ified by Le Guin’s protagonists. Gender theorists explore the ways in which
we think about gender – how binaristic understandings of femininity and
masculinity shape the ways we perceive gender, and how the assumption of
heterosexuality determines the ways we constitute that femininity and
masculinity. Chapter 1 deals with many of the commonsense terms we use to
speak about gender and sexuality and how the history of these terms reveals
something of the complexity of sexing and gendering practices in our society.
For example, we look at the history of a term such as ‘heterosexuality’, which
many people assume to be an ancient term coined to describe what is assumed
ix
x Preface
to be the norm for human sexuality, only to find that it is a very recent term,
coined as the reverse side of a relatively new term ‘homosexuality’. This raises
many fundamental questions about why we now think about sexuality and
about sexed and gendered individuals in the way that we do.
In Chapter 1 we also introduce work on subjectivity; that is, how we come
to know and understand ourselves as individuals living in a particular
society. We introduce terms such as ‘subjectivity’ and ‘the subject’, which
have specific, technical meanings in this context, and we trace the theoretical
frameworks used in their formation and development. We also discuss the
ways in which individual subjects, such as ourselves, are formed in relation
to and delimited by the institutions of our society which include gendering
practices such as patriarchy. Furthermore we consider the ways in which our
own individual experiences (of sexing and gendering) are a crucial part of
what makes us who we are, and introduce some of the ways we now use to
evaluate those experiences critically.
This leads in Chapter 2 into a study of the ways in which we think about
gender, which draws on the work of theorists from a wide range of disciplines
including psychoanalysis, philosophy, history and critical theory. Not surpris-
ingly, the work of Freud is a major source for gender theory, although this
does not mean that contemporary theorists simply accept Freud’s work. Alot
of contemporary psychoanalytic theory is intensely critical of Freud’s work,
using it as a touch-stone or starting point from which to develop alternative
accounts of sex and gender. Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva
are among the many recent commentators on Freud, whose own work subse-
quently provides wholly new ways of rethinking the feminine and the mascu-
line, gendered subjectivity, and the relationship between the individual and
her/his society.
Other ways of thinking about gender are derived from historians and
philosophers such as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, who trace the
ways in which we think about the role of the individual in society, and specif-
ically the ways in which power and subjectivity are experienced. Feminist
theorists such as Teresa de Lauretis utilise some of this work but correct its
gender-blindness, to provide new perspectives on both gendering practices in
society and the theories used to explain those gendering practices.
Feminist theory and the more recent men’s movement and men’s studies,
which are also discussed in Chapter 2, have some very specific ways of
thinking about identity and the role of sex and gender in formulating contem-
porary notions of identity. In particular, they look at the concept of difference
and how it both rejects the self/other binary of Western thought and enables
strategic alliances among those with shared purpose but diverse experience
and being. We address the notion of identity and how it has been challenged
by women of colour, who use this concept to critique the feminist movement