Sex, Gender

1
Sex, Gender Representation.Lecture One

• Sexual Violence in Literature and The Arts.

2
Why are we interested in Representation?

• Debates around representation are central to
  feminist theory .
• For an analysis of the experiences of those who
  are represented.
• For an analysis of power relations.
• For an analysis of ascribed and elected
  identities.
• For an examination of the ways that some
  representations of women are said to cause, or
  legitimise, sexual violence.

3
Second-wave Feminism and the Representation
debate.

• Power.
• Discourse.
• Image.
• Text.
• Talk.
• Ideological.

• Image of ideal woman.
• Perpetuates gender difference.
• Perpetuates inequality.
• Permeates consciousness.
• Has material affects.

4
Kate Millet. Sexual Politics. (1971)

• One of the first examples of serious feminist
  literary criticism.
• Millet looks at representations of Women in the
  novel.
• Men and women are socialised into basic
  patriarchal values certain kind of 'sexual
  politics' through particular kinds of
  representation.
• Women inferiorised in patriarchal discourse.

5
Good Girls Bad Girls.

• Good Girls - Wife, mother. Subservient,
  Compliant. Docile. Domesticated. Virtuous. Sexy
  and Attractive. Available (to partner).
• Bad girls- Single, independent, Belligerent.
  Unruly. Outspoken/ aggressive. Sluttish. Immoral.
  Overtly Sexual Available (to anyone).

6
Good Girls Bad Girls.

• These are binary opposites, where are the women
  that fall in-between these two polar extremes?
• Feminist research shows that patriarchal
  discourse is saturated with these concepts.
• See Sue Lees research on girls and Schooling, and
  her research on the impact of these stereotypes
  on the perceptions of police and judges involved
  in Rape trials.
• Common attitude is that some women are asking
  for it.

7
Meaning and Representation.

• Do representations of women objectify them?
• Does this objectification cause violence?
• According to many feminists, Yes!
• Women are reduced to a collection of parts.
• Certain kinds of representation are a form of
  violence in themselves.
• Andrea Dworkin on Norman Mailer.

8
Ambivalence and Representation.

• Subtle shifts in signification and
  interpretation.
• Representation is fluid.
• Time, space and place affect meaning.
• Boundaries between good bad are often
  arbitrary.
• Different rules for men and women.
• Penalties for transgression.

9
The Policing of Womens Sexuality and behaviour.

• Womens sexuality and behaviour is policed through
  representation and discourse.
• Sue Lees (1989). Slags Drags. Both have
  negative connotations so women cant win.
• There are often severe penalties for minor
  infractions of rules around sexuality and
  behaviour.
• Rules are shifting, social meanings are not
  fixed, different contexts require different
  behaviour. Women must learn a subtle and complex
  systems of rules and conventions.
• The moral virtue of women is continually under
  scrutiny.

10
Other issues in the representation debate.

• Do we internalise these images?
• Are we passive or active consumers of texts?
• Ambiguity of texts.One meaning or many?
• Texts are polysemic they have many meanings.
• Relationship between author and reader?
• Intended and received meanings.
• Intertextuality.
• Questions around effects (Pornography debate).

11
What about self-representation?

• Resistance- the feminist movement.
• Limited due to dominant ideology of patriarchy.
• Lees (1997) Women have no language to
• draw on to discuss their sexuality.
• Fine (1988) The missing discourse of desire.
• Is this equally true across space and time?

12
Objectification

• When we talk about objectifying we are normally
  referring to the habit of looking at other people
  as though they were things.  

13
Sexual objectification.

• The fetishistic act of regarding a person as an
  object for erotic purposes.
• Sexual fetishism, first described by Sigmund
  Freud.
• Where the object of affection is a specific
  inanimate object or a part of a person's body.
• Fetishism, the general concept of an object
  having supernatural powers. (Durkheim and Mauss-
  Primitive Classifications Marx-Commodity
  fetishism Deleuze and Guattari- Miraculated
  objects)
• Feminists interested in non-consensual sexual
  objectification of women.

14
Objectifying Women

• Do men objectify women?
• Women as a collection of breasts, bottom, hair,
  legs, feet, etc.  
• Emphasis on youth, beauty, perfection.
• Woman, as perfect object, may trade her
  self-object for those objects that she desires.
• Sanctions for those who refuse to be objectified.
  
• Womens bodies are objectified in common ways.
• In advertising, art, literature and digital
  media.
• Womens being associated with her body parts.
• Feminist argument- Women reduced to a collection
  of fragmented parts.
• Men are observers or voyeurs of female
  embodiment.
• Women often depicted with no heads, faces or
  with mouths closed.
• Mouths open for sexual provocation.
• Subtle siginifications behind these images.

15
Objectifying Men

• Is there an increasing objectification of men?
• Women objectifying men- discarding individuality
  in favour of factors such as social position,
  income, and physical appearance.  
• Machismo and sensitivity.
• Media representations of male bodies- chest,
  thighs, biceps.
• Men objectify other men.
• Homo-erotic representation? The perfect male
  physique.
• Modern ads draw on male body to sell products.

16
Subjects and Objects

• Subject-object problem arises out of the
  metaphysics of Hegel.
• Hegel's metaphysics distinguishes between
  subjects (observers) and objects (what is
  observed).
• Subjects- active, internal, social participants,
  gifted with cognition and will.
• Objects- passive, external, acted upon.
• The concept of the subject implies agency, action
  and authorship.
• Paradox- being a subject can also imply
  subjection, weakness and being dominated

17
The Objectification of the world around us.

• Objectification is an important part of how we
  relate to the world.
• we objectify the whole universe and everything in
  it in order to understand and control it
• Self as separate from the universe.

18
Women and self-objectification.

• Do women objectify themselves and each other?
• Feminists would claim that this is because of
  the dominant patriarchal discourse that compels
  women to view themselves in these terms.
• This suggests that power relations are confined
  to male/ female oppositions.

19
Sexuality and objectification.

• Sexuality just one more area where processes
  and practices of objectification take place.
• Alan Goldman- sexual acts inevitably involve the
  manipulation of ones partner for ones own
  pleasure.
• Sex involves using an other for ones own
  personal satisfaction.
• Sex is an intrinsically selfish act.
• We all objectify each other when it comes to sex.

20
Does objectification solves the problem of
selfishness in sex.

• Goldman says yes.
• If we all allow ourselves to become sexual
  objects for the purposes of our partners
  pleasure then this reduces the selfishness of our
  own individual sexual nature.

21
Some Questions to reflect on.

• Is the pornographic, objectifying representation
  of the opposite sex really any different from
  what happens between the sheets?
• Is the objectification of men acceptable in order
  to redress power imbalances?
• What happens when we objectify each other during
  consensual sex?
• Does objectification denigrate women and lead to
  sexual violence?
• Do women represent their own, and other womens
  sexuality in non- objectifying ways?
• Will alternative forms of representation really
  change the status of women in society?

22
Sexual Behaviour. Consent, Choice and Coercion.

• Questions around sexual activity, of a violent or
  pseudo-violent nature, between consenting adults.
• Do Sadistic or masochistic sexual practices cause
  rape or other forms of sexual violence? (Evidence
  suggests not).
• Are these forms of sexual activity are more
  objectifying and degrading to women than men.
• Are these forms of asexual behaviour are morally
  acceptable?
• Should society be policing individuals sexual
  conduct anyway?

23
Moral Agency.

• Moral Agents are
• Those actors who are expected to meet the demands
  of morality. Not all agents are moral agents.
  Children and animals although capable of
  performing actions cannot automatically be
  considered as moral agents. To be a moral agent
  one must be capable of conforming to some of the
  demands of morality.
• Blackwell Companion to Philosophy.

24
Moral Agency

• This raises an important question.
• Can we expect someone who is mentally ill to take
  responsibility for their own actions?
• The area of human sexuality is fraught with moral
  debates, indeed the legal machinery itself
  depends on moral judgements.

25
Epistemological relativism

• The idea that all of our judgements about truth
  and morality are situated, that is situated in
  our own cultural history and our own specific
  value systems.
• We cannot force our ideas about truth and
  morality on other cultures or individuals.
• Knowledges and belief systems are local, not
  universal.
• Trying to universalise rules around social
  behaviour is a form of oppression.

26
What are the implications of this for questions
around sexual violence?

• How can we make any judgements about human action
  and behaviour if all local knowledges should be
  equally privileged?
• What is to stop a group engaged in the abuse of
  children claiming rights to continue their
  practices on the basis of a relativist argument?
• Example genital mutilation in some cultures.

27
Marquis De Sade 1740-1814

• The novel The 120 Days of Sodom, (1785) catalogs
  a wide variety of horrific sexual perversions
  performed on a group of enslaved teenagers
  Manuscript lost during the storming of the
  Bastille not published until 1904.
• The novel Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795)
  culminates in the rape and mutilation of the
  female characters mother.
• In The Sadeian Woman And the Ideology of
  Pornography (1979), Angela Carter provides a
  feminist reading of Sade, seeing him as a "moral
  pornographer" who creates spaces for women. By
  contrast, Andrea Dworkin saw Sade as the
  exemplary woman-hating pornographer, supporting
  her theory that pornography inevitably leads to
  violence against women.

28
Leopold Von Sacher Masoch (1836-1895)

• This novel tells of a man, Serverin von
  Kusiemski, so infatuated with a woman, Wanda von
  Dunajew, that he requests to be treated as her
  slave, and encourages her to treat him in
  progressively more degrading ways.
• The relationship arrives at a crisis point when
  Wanda herself meets a man to whom she would like
  to submit.
• At the end of the book, Severin, humiliated by
  Wanda's new lover, ceases to desire to submit,
  stating that men should dominate women until the
  time when women are equal to men in education and
  rights
• This ending can be viewed as both misogynist and
  feminist.

29
Sadism, masochism, contract, consent, choice and
coercion.

• Terms and Concepts.
• Sadism- The deriving of sexual gratification or
  the tendency to derive sexual gratification from
  inflicting pain or emotional abuse on others.
• Masochism- the deriving of sexual gratification,
  or the tendency to derive sexual gratification,
  from being physically or emotionally abused
  humiliated or mistreated, either by another or by
  oneself. It can also be defined as a willingness
  or tendency to subject oneself to unpleasant or
  trying experiences.
• Gilles Deleuze (2004). It is highly unusual to
  find one individual who is into both Sadism and
  Masochism.
• Comparing the work of Sade with Masoch, one is
  struck by the impossibility of any encounter
  between a Sadist and a masochist. Their milieus,
  their rituals are entirely different there is
  nothing complementary about their demands.
  (Deleuze 2004 126).

30
S M

• Sado-masochism is the combination of sadism and
  masochism. The deriving of pleasure, especially
  sexual gratification, from inflicting or
  submitting to physical or emotional abuse.
• Sandra Lee Bartky- the Eroticization of
  relations of domination and submission.
• Feminist critiques of SM.
• SM is a form of sexual violence it can also cause
  sexual violence.
• Many feminists suggest that patriarchal sexual
  relations require women to be submissive and weak
  and that SM practices are an extension of this
  with male power becoming erotically charged.
• SM an expression of a women hating culture
  (Bartky 1997 48).

31
Some liberal perspectives Feminist and Lesbian SM.

• Sexual liberalists and some Feminist and Lesbian
  SMers disagree.
• But SM aficionados point out that much of the
  violence is theatre.
• SM between two consenting partners is liberatory-
  gender play trust pure form of sex uses whole
  body defended on the grounds of sexual freedom.
• Feminist condemnation of SM is sexually
  repressive and that to stigmatise those who enjoy
  SM is to play into the hands of the political
  right.

32
Issues of consent and Contract in SM practices.

• To engage in SM, one must engage in a contractual
  relationship.
• Sacher Masoch (Who gives his name to masochism)
  required female partners to sign a contract with
  precise clauses (Deleuze 2004).
• To enter into a contract is to agree to its
  conditions.
• Issues of trust are paramount.

33
Choice and Coercion.

• SM is a matter of personal choice and individual
  freedom.
• Should the state legislate against private sexual
  preferences and practices?
• Paternalistic state has legislated against
  homosexuality and anal sex.
• Norms and values change over time.
• Is individual freedom an appropriate basis for
  sexual morality?
• The harm principle John Stuart Mill.
• The example of sadism and self-control.
• Should all of our rights be curbed because of a
  few individuals?
• How do we protect those who are unable to choose?
• Might individuals be coerced into participating
  in these practices due to wider discourses around
  sexuality and marital duty?
• Non-consensual sex between partners.
• Marital Rape.