Overview

1
Overview

• Queer Theories and Postmodern Feminist Theories
• Essentialism
• Linda Alcoff
• Luce Irigaray

2
Queer and Postmodern Feminist Theories

• Thinkers
• Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Judith Butler,
  Judith Halberstam, Jane Flax, Eve Sedgwick
• Description of Problem
• woman has been constructed through language and
  culture as a masculine construction
• woman has been constructed as a binary in
  opposition to man
• Gender and sexuality is constructed as dual,
  binary, oppositional, and fixed

3
Queer and Postmodern Feminist Theories

• Analysis
• A binary division of the world into privileged
  and unprivileged categories (man/woman,
  culture/nature, hetero/homo) replicates the
  social order
• Normative gender and sexuality roles and beliefs
  replicate a norm
• Contributions
• Deconstructing gender and sexuality norms in
  culture makes places for gays/lesbians,
  bisexuals, transgender and transsexual people-
  opens up categories and possibilities for all

4
Queer and Postmodern Feminist Theories

• Remedies
• Deconstruction of texts and cultural
  representations
• Challenging essentialist notions of sexuality and
  gender
• Providing diverse models of gender and sexuality
• Equality will come when there are so many sexes,
  sexualities and genders that one cant be played
  against another

5
Queer and Postmodern Feminist Theories

• Shortcomings
• If theories are based on dissolving political
  identities and categories, how do you create
  alliances with others?
• If there is no category of woman, how do we fight
  for womens rights?
• Creates more questions than answers
• Focused on individual, more than institutional or
  structural change

6
Essentialism

• Essentialize- to express or formulate in
  essential form, essence, inherent
• Homogeneous and ahistorical
• Some feminists have essentialized a natural
  womanhood as the basis for social change
• That leaves us with two 2 options
• Either we define woman in some way and risk
  essentializing or
• We abandon saying anything about women which
  leads to the end of political movement

7
Linda Alcoff

• Lays out two traditional ways of seeing women
• Cultural feminist- there are women and women can
  be defined by their culture and attributes
  (peaceful, ability to nurture)
• Poststructuralist- should not try to define women
  because our language and discourse entails
  hierarchies and binaries that limit women

8
Linda Alcoff

• Woman is central to feminist theorizing yet, the
  concept is problematic
• Because all knowledge and constructs are infused
  with misogyny and sexism
• We must deconstruct and de-essentialize this
  concept
• She offers a third way to look at women
• Women as subject- positional, contextual
• No universal feminine
• Gender is constructed within parameters
• Gender is not natural or university but it is
  relevant in order to claim a political position

9
Luce Irigaray

• Deconstructing content or identity of woman and
  female sexuality
• Female sexuality and the body is theorized within
  masculine parameters
• Womens bodies as oppositional to men and seen as
  lacking, envying, a hole, the negative, the
  reverse, the opposite
• Women have to move from the object of others
  definition to their own subject position

10
Luce Irigaray

• Subjectivity looks at how a woman herself (the
  "subject") saw her role, and how she saw that
  role as contributing (or not) to her identity and
  meaning
• Becoming the subject of her own sexuality-
  pleasure is diversified
• Multiple nature of female desire
• Not sacrificing any pleasure
• Not identifying with anyone in particular
• Auto-eroticism, homosexuality, love of other
  women as possibilities