Identities on the move : contemporary representations of new sexualities and gender identities

386 Pages·2015·2.61 MB·English

by  Castro-Borrego

Identities on the Move
Identities on the Move
Contemporary Representations of New
Sexualities and Gender Identities
Edited by Silvia Pilar Castro Borrego and
Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Identities on the move : contemporary representations of new sexualities and gender
identities / edited by Silvia Pilar Castro Borrego and Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7391-9169-9 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-9170-5 (electronic)
1. Women--Identity. 2. Women immigrants. 3. Feminism. 4. Sex. 5. Sex role. 6. Sex
role in mass media. 7. Women in mass media. I. Castro Borrego, Silvia del Pilar. II.
Romero Ruiz, Maria Isabel.
BH39.H445 2011
111'.85--dc22
2010037457
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
To my sister, Rosa, and my brother, Curro, through love and
blood.
To Rafael, a true companion and soulmate.
Introduction
Silvia Pilar Castro Borrego and
Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz
Gender Strike! Seeing Gender and Sexual Identity in the
Twenty-first-Century
In spring 2012, the research project “New Sexualities and
Gender Identities” celebrated an international conference at the
University of Málaga, Spain,[1] under the auspices of the Iberian
Association of Cultural Studies which placed the emphasis on
the roles of gender and sexual identity in the struggle for
equality, in the light of post-structuralism, postcolonialism, and
cultural feminism. This perspective urges us to read and
interpret different cultures and different texts in ways that
enhance personal and collective views of identity which are
culturally grounded. This questions the postmodernist concept
of identity by looking into more progressive views of identity
and difference addressing post-positivist interpretations of
intersectional categories such as sex, gender, class, agency,
and race. As a consequence, an individual’s identity is
recognized as culturally constructed and the result of power
relations. Proceeding from this collective work, the present
volume investigates the ways in which the development of new
sexualities and gender identities has become a crucial issue in
the field of literary and cultural studies in the first years of the
twenty-first century. However, this creative process has its
origins in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the
twentieth century. Given the wide ranging discussion among
feminist theorists about the relationship between sexuality and
gender identity, this book addresses the contributions of
cultural studies and literary studies to the shaping of a concept
of identity focusing on identity markers such as power, gender,
race, agency, and sex.
The roles of gender and sexual identities in the struggle for
equality have become a major concern in the field of literary
and cultural studies in the first years of the twenty-first century.
The legacy of this process can be traced back to the last
decades of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century.
The Victorian preoccupation about the female body and sexual
promiscuity was focused on the regulation of deviant elements
in society and the control of venereal disease; homosexuals,
lesbians and prostitutes’ identities were considered out of the
norm and against the moral values of the time. Besides this,
black women’s bodies were stigmatized with racial stereotypes,
and their sexuality became a virtually taboo subject in both
black and white public discourse. If this is true of black sexuality
in general, then it is more the case for homosexuality within
black communities. As Cheryl Clarke states, “homophobia
divides black people as allies, it cuts off political growth, stifles
revolution, and perpetuates patriarchal domination.” [2]
The relationship between sexuality and gender identity has
also attracted the interest of postmodernism and post-
structuralism as well as all types of feminisms during recent
years. The book wishes to offer creative insights to pressing
issues and to engage in productive dialogue answering
questions such as how we respond to and organize our lives
around these constructs, and what shifts or transformations we
have undergone as adults and scholars in our own thinking and
behavior around gender.
In our contemporary societies these concepts are being
questioned, together with dominant representations of gender
and sexuality, and issues like human trafficking for the purpose
of sexual exploitation, child sexual abuse, sexual violence, and
AIDS have come to the fore. In particular, the status of
prostitutes, homosexuals, lesbians, transgendered people,
transvestites, etc., as “others” has been the center of debate.
But all this discussion has made the connections between
gender and sexual categories, on the one hand, and certain
codes of behavior, on the other, seem unnecessarily complex.
To this, contemporary phenomena like globalization,
transnationalism, and migratory movements have contributed
greatly, and the sexual submission of men, women, and children
greatly, and the sexual submission of men, women, and children
under extreme economic and social circumstances is certainly
not less than in previous generations and societies, but has
mostly shifted out of “sight.”
Our contributors in the different chapters of the book seek
to address the topic of new sexualities and gender identities
and their representation in postcolonial and contemporary
Anglophone literary, historical, and cultural productions from a
transnational, transcultural, and anti-essentialist perspective.
We seek to include the views and concerns of people of color, of
women in the diaspora, in our evermore multiethnic and
multicultural societies, and their representation in the media,
film, popular culture, subcultures, and the arts.
In this light, and starting with a historical perspective, Logie
Barrow’s chapter is about history labels and liminality
concerning different aspects of identity including gender. He
claims that ascription is essential within an intellectual and class
framework and that the market is based on a historical range of
class relations. Gender and ethnic issues have been prevalent in
the United Kingdom in comparison with class ones, and all kinds
of ascription, including intellectual, are intermingled with one or
more dimensions among which are gender, religion, and
ethnicity, as we shall see in many contributions in this book.
According to the social historian, class factors helped gender-
formation intensely in the past. In this sense, Foucault’s notions
of discourse and power as producers of knowledge become
once more fundamental in the discussion of sexuality and
gender identity.
According to Foucault, societies are continually changing
and are controlled by power relations. Identity and the body
acquire meaning through different discourses, and these can be
characterized as ways of describing, defining, classifying, and
thinking about people, things, and even knowledge and abstract
systems of thought. In his view, relations of power and
knowledge are part of social and political structures which
assign men and women labels depending on their gender, class,
and race, using binary codes. In this sense, those individuals
that do not comply with what is seen as “normal” are regarded
as “deviant,” especially in relation to gender and sexuality
issues. In his first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976),
Foucault establishes that power is exerted through “capillary
forms,” that is, through various and intricate ways, and not by
individuals or single groups; rather, he talks of diverse and
shifting positions of power and resistance within a network of
relations.[3] As a consequence, at different historical periods the
preoccupation about morality and deviancy produced different
discourses based on the classification, surveillance and
intervention through a gender policy which was applied to
dissident individuals.
A historical analysis of the precedents of human trafficking
for the purposes of sexual exploitation can be also found in
Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz’s contribution to this volume. In
particular, white slavery in the nineteenth century is considered
as a historical form of sex trafficking, which has become a
modality of migration and movement of people across borders
in contemporary culture. This is a transnational business, where
mafias and criminal organizations are involved, poverty being
the main reason for the exploitation of women and children who
are treated as commodities. In this context, women’s sexuality
is subdued and their agency is curtailed if not destroyed. The
implications of feminists in the political economy at a global
level are focused on two discourses which have as their aim to
construct women’s identities and agency: the victimization
discourse and the empowering discourse.
This is also part of the project that current Muslim feminism
endorses according to Mariam Bazi. Here Foucauldian notions of
knowledge and power are relevant together with patriarchal and
colonial discourses which determine Muslim women’s sexuality
as deviant. These have contradictory identities and are
marginalized by sexist and religious predicaments, being
subject to control, exclusion, and injustice in the name of Islam.
Making recourse to Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial concepts, Bazi
affirms that both East and West identify Muslim women as
sexually exotic and as a religious category that categorizes
them as “the other;” she also argues that they resort to
“mimcry” in their struggle over agency.[4] Similarly, she follows
Fataheh Farahani when she affirms that diasporic elements
affect Muslim women’s sexuality, the latter being constitutive to
their migratory procedure. Thus, transnational feminism is
involved in social reform for Muslim women on the premises
that the Quran establishes equality between the sexes and as a
result Islamic laws must be changed to avoid further
discrimination.
Postcolonial discourses of domination concerning racism,
sexism and heteronormativity are equally present in Kate
Joseph and Antje Schuhmann’s chapter about gender(ed)
representations of women soccer players in South Africa as
transgressive queer bodies. As stated above, this volume is
about the re-writing of gender identities, and for this Judith
Butler’s theories become essential. For her, sex and gender are
not natural but cultural constructs that are reproduced by
citation, that is, by repetition of certain traits and modes of
behavior which are attributed to a particular sex and/or gender.
Butler introduces the notions of “drag” and “gender
performance” as a parody to explain the idea of a primary
gender identity.[5] Thus, women soccer players represent
masculinity, but also blackness so that postcolonial ideas
connected with slavery and colonization bring to the fore
questions of regulation of “the other.” In this sense, black
women’s bodies come under scrutiny as perverted, oversexed
and non-feminine, and this is the representation of them that
can be discovered in South African print media. All this reveals a
process of gender stereotyping which reproduces the traditional
binaries described by Butler that need to be eradicated for the
sake of new sexual identities.
Judith Butler’s ideas of performative gender are also
conspicuous in David Walton’s contribution to this edition to
enhance the analysis of the notion of hyperbolic bodily
exhibitions. These provide the possibility of subversive
repetitions that can be discerned in two sketches of the British
series Little Britain. At the same time, Walton makes use of