GENDER STUDIES

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GENDER STUDIES

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Title: GENDER STUDIES

1
GENDER STUDIES

Gay/Lesbian Studies, Queer Theory

Critical practices that consider instability and
indeterminacy as characteristic of discourse and
subjectivity.
Theories that problematizes normal
heterosexuality and valorise a variable,
contingent, and multiple sexuality whose mobility
and potentiality is signalled by the worlds of
possibility opened up by gays and lesbians.

There is a close and natural affiliation between
this and the previous section in that feminism
posits the semiotic or pre-Symbolic Imaginary
order as a realm of bisexual/androgynous/polymor
phous sexuality prior to the subjects entry
into the male-centred Symbolic order where, among
other things, sexuality undergoes a process of
normativization towards normal heterosexuality.
The problematization of sexuality contained in
such theories as the semiotic or écriture
féminine suggested a departure from a fixed,
imposed binary heteronormativity (man/woman) in
favor of the notion of sexuality as something
that is constructed by such variables as social
norms and exigencies, ideology, culture, history.

Foucaults declarations in The History of
Sexuality (1976) that Homosexuality appeared as
one of the forms of sexuality when it was
transposed from the practice of sodomy to a kind
of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the
soul.
The sodomite had been a temporary aberration the
homosexual was now a species, inspired much of
gay theory.

This section will deconstruct and explore the
masculine/feminine binary supporting patriarchal
assumptions about sexuality, gender and sex.
And as Barbara Smith, makes clear, academic
inquiry into the nature of feminism and sexual
identity cannot be disengaged from other
contingencies such as race.

Gender designates the dynamic that accommodates a
provisional, fluid identity in which biological
(or genital) identity and socially constructed
(or performed, according to leading theorist in
gender studies, Judith Butler) masculinity or
feminity need not concur (coincide)
There is no guarantee that what one is
identified as being (biologically or culturally
male or female) will line up in a predictable and
necessary way with a particular set of sexual
behaviours or psychological dispositions or
social practices.

Studies that focus on gender also challenge
essentializing feminist discourse and its
proposition that (womens) gendered identities
are real or natural or occupy a pre-social or
pre-civilizational realm which lies in close bond
with nature.
Judith Butler proposes gender be considered as a
signifying practice we do or perform gender,
relying on the repetition of words and acts.

Gay and lesbian studies have found common cause
with the feminists as well as with gender
theorists, gay and lesbian theory has trained its
sights on gender formations as a whole, arguing
that heterosexuality can be understood as
forming a continuum with homosexuality since
the male bonding that sutures patriarchy is
necessarily homophilic and forms a continuum with
homosexuality

Traditional gender or sexual binaries were
unstable, variable and historically contingent
(supeditado) (indeed, that everyone was
potentially gay) pointed the way towards queer
theory.

Queer, a heterosexist term of abuse designating
homosexuals, was reclaimed by gay and lesbian
militants as a self-referential term or token of
pride to describe their marginal positionality
with regard to the dominant heterosexist culture.
By the 1990s queer theory was operating as an
expression and exploration of sexual plurality
and gender ambivalence in the field of cultural
production.

Analytic inquiry was no longer or not only-
limited to gay and lesbian orthodoxies or fixed
sexualities.
Broadened to consider alternative sexualities
such as drag (queens) or camp, cross-dressing or
transvestism which in turn, through their
representational or performative nature, uphold
the non-biological nature of gender construction.
Camp Exaggerated effeminate mannerisms exhibited
especially by homosexuals.

Throughout, queer scholars have pushed the
argument that hetero- and homosexuality operate
on the same continuum on which the point
demarcating normativity from non-normativity is
variable and contingent(dependiente).
The intersection among gender, gay/lesbian and
queer theories, and that of these theories with
New Historicism, cultural studies and feminist
theories underline the interdisciplinary nature
of poststructuralist critical theory.

In the late 1960s, gay and lesbian scholars
silent regarding their sexuality or the presence
of homosexual themes in literature began to
speak.
Their work brings into being a new school of
gender theory in the 1980s.
Gender critics, inspired by Foucaults work on
the history of sexuality, began to study gender
and sexuality as discursive and historical
institutions.

Gender Theory and Gay/Lesbian Studies,Queer
Theory- which linked gay/lesbian scholarship to
such public concerns as HIV/AIDS.
Gender and gay/lesbian theorists are concerned
with unearthing a hidden tradition of homosexual
writing and with examining the gender dynamics of
canonical literature.

The building of a counter-tradition is difficult.
There have been many gay writers from Sappho to
Tennessee Williams- but few of them wrote openly
about their lives and experiences.
Heterosexual culture was intolerant of gay
perspectives women were put in the attic for
being mad, gays were put in jail for being
perverse.
Wilde is the most famous example, but Elizabeth
Bishop and Henry James who remained in the
closet were more common.

Much gay/lesbian work is concerned with tradition
building, but gay critics also interrogate the
very notion of sexual identity and question the
logic of gender categorization.
They question the relation of gender categories
to sexuality and physiology.
The relation of such categories as masculine and
feminine to such stable bodily and psychological
identities as male and female or man and woman is
contingent (depending) and historical.

The normative alignment of male and female with
heterosexual masculinity or femininity in the
dominant gender culture must be seen as a
political rather than a biological fact.
They question the opposition between heterosexual
and homosexual, interrogating the identity of
each and the hierarchical relation (mainstream
and margin) between the two they are
differentially connected moments of a continuum
that includes numerous other possible variations.

18
THEY QUESTION THE OPPOSITION BETWEEN HETEROSEXUAL
AND HOMOSEXUAL A CONTINUUM

Heterosexuality contains a moment of
homosexuality, when the child identifies with the
parent of the same sex, or when heterosexual men
relate to each other while competing over women,
and homosexuality comprises both masculinity and
femininity, in mixed and variable amounts.

The dominant discourses assume that there are
stable identities such as masculine and feminine
or man and woman or heterosexual and homosexual,
that give rise to the discourses that describe
them.
But such identities are produced by discourse and
by cultural representation.

The alignment of dominant discourse with
stable identities as in compulsory
heterosexuality- is the result of a politically
enforced naturalization of a particular form of
sexuality that comes through constant repetition
and rote learning (Memorización).

21
NORMATIVELY

Heterosexual men are masculine and heterosexual
women are feminine because the reigning cultural
discourses instruct them in behavior appropriate
to the dominant gender representations and norms,
stigmatizing non-normative behavior.
The identities of male or female and the norms of
reproductive sexuality are effects of enforcement
procedures that operate through cultural and
legal discourse, privileging certain object
choices and psychological dispositions while
denigrating others.

Gender identities as woman are not
pre-discursive foundations but normalizing
injunctions (mandates) produced by discursive
performances
Continuities between a variety of sexual
practices across a variety of possible gender
formulations (masculine lesbian, masculine
heterosexual woman, feminine gay man, feminine
heterosexual man, etc.) are erased and subsumed
to enforced norms of oppositional identity
(either masculine heterosexual or feminine
heterosexual, either heterosexual or homosexual).

Connected, related terms are displaced in favor
of essential, total identities.
vs
They substitute an entire representation
lesbian- for a plurality of connected gender and
sexual possibilities that might include lesbian
as one moment but that are not fully reducible to
such categorical singularity.

Lesbian is internally differentiated into a
plurality of possibilities (varieties of
feminine, varieties of masculine, etc.) and
externally differentiated through its connection
to or disconnection from a plurality of other
possibilities.
It is not a singular totality that stands opposed
to another singular totality the normative
heterosexual woman, for example, who in any event
generally engages in relations that contain
homosexual components, as do men with men.

25
GENDER STUDIES ALSO EXAMINES THE STRUCTURES OF
MALE HETEROSEXUAL OPPRESSION.

Both cultural and social, that have contributed
to the marginalization and exclusion of
homosexuality.
The more rigorous forms of heterosexual
masculinity originate in sexual panic, a fear or
anxiety in heterosexual men regarding their
sexual identities.

26
THE CULTURAL AND SOCIAL VIOLENCE EXERCISED
AGAINST HOMOSEXUALS ORIGINATES

From the instability of heterosexual identity, a
fear that such identity may be a
contingent/dependant construct that serves as a
defense against a potentially overwhelming
reality of diverse sexual choices and identity
possibilities that exist simultaneously in the
self and in society.

Gender Studies has analyzed the repressed
homosocial strains that motivate the
heterosexual traditions construction of
compulsory heterosexuality and normative
masculinity.
One of the most interesting and subversive
approaches to develop out of gay/lesbian and
gender theory Queer Theory- pushes this point
even further.
Homosexuality is not an identity apart from
heterosexuality. Everyone is potentially gay, and
only the imprinting of heterosexual norms cuts
away those potentials and manufactures
heterosexuality as the dominant sexual format.

Suppressed homosexuality is queered into being in
the various kinds of homophilia central to
heterosexual culture, from football to film star
identification.
Sexual transitivity is silenced for the sake of
the labor of large-scale species reproduction,
but in the realms of cultural play, the excess of
desire and identification over norm and rule
testify to more plural potentials.

29
ADRIENNE RICH (1929)

Poet, major voice in American feminist since the
late 1960s. She has explored the ways in which
patriarchal society oppresses women and the ways
in which women have responded to that oppression.
Her analysis of compulsory heterosexuality is
her most lasting contribution to literary and
social theory, wide range of topics, from the
silencing of womens voices to the history of
childbirth and motherhood.

Like Elaine Showalter and Susan Bordo, Rich links
patriarchal oppression to power exerted directly
(and often violently) on womens bodies.
Her concern with the psychic and social supports
of sexual identity also links her work to the
queer theory of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick.

Increasingly identified with the womens movement
throughout the 1970s, composing poetry with
feminist themes but also for the first time
writing prose.
By the mid-1970s she was openly lesbian, and she
was exploring all aspects of what she calls
lesbian experience.
Her work in the 1980s and 1990s also included new
attempts to connect to her Jewishness, her family
and the poetic tradition.

32
COMPULSORY HETEROSEXUALITY AND LESBIAN
EXPERIENCE (1980)

This essay has been widely influential. It marked
the end of sisterhood feminism, the assumption
that all women were sisters in their shared
oppression.
She highlights the presence of both lesbians and
heterosexual women in the feminist movement and
calls on feminism to acknowledge its fear of
lesbians.
As those hostile to feminism often dismiss it as
the complaints of a small group of lesbians.

Many 1970s feminists went out of their way to
prove their heterosexuality.
Lesbians and lesbian experience became
practically taboo within the movement (except in
its more radical branches).
Her essay, along with the feminist work of women
of color and of working-class women, challenged a
feminism that claimed to speak for all women yet
assumed the viewpoint of a heterosexual,
middle-class white woman.

Much of the feminist work of the 1980s was
devoted to considering the ramifications of these
differences (of race, class, and sexual
orientation) for the category woman and to
attending to how such differences would
strengthen or weaken feminist activism.

Richs main purpose is to consider the extent to
which heterosexual desire and identity are
fundamental to womens oppression.
Heterosexuality is not natural but social, and it
should be analyzed as any social institution.
How is heterosexuality established and
maintained? What groups resist it? What
alternatives must be suppressed for it to
prevail? Who benefits from and who is harmed by
this institutions dominance? What forms of
enforcement underwrite the dominance?

Heterosexuality is compulsory because only
partners of the opposite sex are deemed
appropriate, all same-sex desire must be denied
or indulged in secret, and various kinds of
same-sex bonding (including friendships) are
viewed with suspicion.
Compulsory heterosexuality ensures that women are
sexually accessible to men, with consent or
choice on the womens part neither legally nor
practically taken into account.

Compulsory heterosexuality is an institution that
punishes those who are not heterosexual and
systematically ensures the power of men over
women.

38
IN THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMILY, KATHLEEN GOUGH LISTS
8 CHARACTERISTICS OF MALE POWER IN ARCHAIC AND
CONTEMPORARY SOCIETIES

deny women their sexuality(clitoridectomy and
infibulation)
force it upon them (rape, wife beating,
father-daughter incest)
command and exploit their labour to control their
produce (marriage and motherhood as unpaid
production, male control of abortion,
contraception, etc)
control or rob them of their children (seizure of
children from lesbian mothers)

confine them physically and prevent their
movement (rape as terrorism, purdah, foot
binding, veil)
use of them as objects in male transactions
(arranged marriages, call-girls, geisha)
cramp their creativeness (witch and female
healers prosecutions, erasure of female
tradition)
keep them from large areas of knowledge and
culture (non-education of females).

40
CATHARINE MACKINNON IN SEXUAL HARASSMENT OF
WORKING WOMEN

argued that sexual harassment is a form of sex
discrimination because the act reinforces the
social inequality of women to men.
She said women are horizontally segregated by
gender and occupy an inferior position in the
workplace.

41
Kathleen Barry

describes all the enforced conditions under which
women live subject to men
prostitution, marital rape, father-daughter and
brother-sister incest, wife beating, pornography,
bride price, selling of daughters, genital
mutilation, and purdah.
Women are expendable as long as the sexual and
emotional needs of the male can be satisfied.
Women are sexual being whose responsibility is
the sexual service of men.

As compulsory sexuality is central to preserving
the inequality between men and women, Rich argues
that the issue feminists have to address is not
simple gender inequality nor the domination of
culture by males nor mere taboos against
homosexuality, but the enforcement of
heterosexuality for women as a means of assuring
male right of physical, economic, and emotional
access.
Feminism cannot truly comprehend the sources and
system of inequality if it does not analyze the
institution of compulsory heterosexuality.

43
THREE TOPICS IN ADRIENNE RICH COMPULSORY
HETEROSEXUALITY ESSAY HAVE BEEN ESPECIALLY
IMPORTANT FOR FEMINIST LITERARY THEORY

1- Sexualized relations of power within
institutions women face the trials experienced
by all subordinates in hierarchical institutions
and they must also present themselves as
attractive according to dominant standards of
heterosexual desirability and be concerned with
sexuality in the appropriate ways (e.g., be
flirtatious within the proper bounds, be
supportive of male superiors).
Such expectations, rarely conscious, even more
rarely explicit, permeate public male-female
relationships. They form part of a larger
unwritten set of rules about the relative
positions of men and women in society.

2. Lesbian experience and the lesbian continuum-
challenges the notion that women need men by
calling attention to all the ways in which women
interact with one another, all the activities
central to their lives that do not involve
connection to a man.
She wants to highlight how hostile to and
threatened by womens independent action
patriarchal society is and the prevalence of such
action despite the price paid for it.
The lesbian continuum includes a variety of
relationships between and among women, ranging
from the sharing of a rich inner life, the
bonding against male tyranny, to the giving and
receiving of practical and political support.
By desexualizing the term lesbian, Rich calls our
attention to the variety of bonds formed between
women and to the various functions those bonds
play in womens lives. Lesbian existence
comprises both the breaking of a taboo and of a
compulsory way of life.

Questions of sexual identity How is sexual
identity formed?
Through what processes of psychic identification
does a self form heterosexual and/or homosexual
desires?
Rich is more suspicious if psychoanalytic
understandings of these processes than are many
queer theorists but she recognizes that the law
of compulsory heterosexuality plays a crucial
role in the formation of selves, even as she
notes that the early bond of the girl baby with
her mother works against the injunction to be
heterosexual.

The notion of the lesbian continuum recognizes
that sexuality comes in many forms and results in
many different behaviors a variety badly
captured by the simple dichotomy
homosexual/heterosexual.
Two lies sustain compulsory heterosexuality
women are inevitably drawn to men and women turn
to women out of hatred for men.

Desire is neither unitary nor fixed once for
all. Women especially suffer in a heterosexual
regime that ignores the fluidity of desire in
favor of channeling that desire toward
heterosexual unions in which the needs of the
male are primary.
Adrienne Rich

48
BARBARA SMITH (1946)

A pioneer of black feminist and lesbian
criticism.
Despite the achievements of the womens
liberation movement and the civil rights movement
during the 1960s, the feminist movement seemed to
speak primarily from the perspective of white,
middle-class, heterosexual women, and the civil
rights movement for black men.

In Toward a Black Feminist Criticism she says
All segments of the literary world do not know
that Black women writers and Black lesbian
writers exist,
Smith assumed the task of establishing a
tradition of black womens writing and a
specifically black feminist and lesbian criticism.

The 1970s were a rich time for black womens
writing, with the beginning of the careers of a
generation of writers like Toni Morrison, Toni
Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and June
Jordan the formation of organizations which
provided an alternative to mainstream feminism
and the recovery of early writers.

This renaissance of black womens literature
inspired the black womens liberation movement.
Its members agreed that women of colour
experience oppressions different from those of
white women and black men, because of their race,
sex, sexuality, and economic status.
They were committed to the liberation of black
women from racism, sexism, heterosexism, and
classicism in culture as well as politics.

52
TOWARD A BLACK FEMINIST CRITICISM
(1977)

She points out the absence of scholarship on
black womens writing, which she links to black
womens invisibility in the mainstream feminist
movement.
Feminist initially emphasized the universality of
womens experiences and the bond forged by their
differences from men.

To correct the limitations of this universalizing
assumption, Smith calls for a redefinition of the
goals of the womens movement and for an
autonomous black feminist movement.
Smith shows evidence of black womens
invisibility. Both black and white male critics
ignore or denigrate black womens literary
accomplishments, and even some feminists omitted
women writers of color from the studies they
published in the 1970s.

54
SMITH ENUMERATES PRINCIPLES FOR A BLACK
FEMINIST APPROACH, A BLACK FEMINIST CRITIC
SHOULD

Explore both sexual and racial politics in black
womens writing
Assume that there is an identifiable literary
tradition
Decipher the common themes, motifs, and concepts
in black womens literature that derive from
writers political, social, and economic
experiences

Examine the specific black female language in
this literature
Demonstrate an existing tradition of Black
womens art
Try to be innovative and daring, following the
model of black womens literature.
Assert the political implications of a literary
work and its connections to the situation of
black women.

Smith devotes a substantial portion of the essay
to a reading of Toni Morrisons novel Sula (1973)
from the perspective of black lesbian feminism,
focusing on the relationships between women.
It is a pioneering analysis of the novel, though
some criticized what they saw as a fabrication of
lesbian themes.

However, Smith notes that Morrison did not intend
to view the relationship between the two main
characters, Sula and Nel, as lesbian, and that
her reading of the lesbian connotations in their
relationship exemplifies how a black lesbian
feminist perspective might deepen our
understanding of the nuances and political
possibilities of a text.

She provided a model for later writers who
stressed the differences among women.
A key debate in feminism has concerned
essentialism, with most feminists opposing the
view that gender, ethnic, and racial identities
are determined by biological essences rather than
by cultural differences.
Some have criticized Smiths insistence on a
separate literature and criticism for black women
as essentialist.

She has dismissed it as a narrow academic debate,
arguing that she shares an objective political
status with other Black females in this country
not altered by economic or educational
variables.
Toward a Black Feminist Criticism is intended
as a consciousness-raising piece to call
attention to the common ground black women share.

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