Chapter 7 Gender Studies

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Chapter 7 Gender Studies
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• Gender studies began as feminism and eventually
  became as well gay, lesbian, bisexual, and
  transgender studies.
• It studies the canon of male writers for how
  women have been represented in it.
• According to feminist anthropologists such as
  Gayle Rubin, the subordination of women to men
  originated in early societies in which women were
  used as tokens of exchange between clans.

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• Moreover, the pressure of what Adrienne Rich
  calls compulsory heterosexuality ensures that
  women have no other options than to more
  economically powerful men.
• Whatever its origin nature or society this
  situation of gender inequality is sustained by
  culture.

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• Images of strong, publicly competent women who
  are still hard to come by in film culture, while
  images of women who are evil because they possess
  too much power are fairly easy to find.
• The French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray
  argues that images of frighteningly powerful,
  castrating women appear so frequently in male
  dominated culture because mans first
  relationship in the world is with his mother.

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• That many women freely accede to such
  subordination is a sign of how successful
  cultural conditioning can be even when it works
  against ones interests.
• American feminist scholars Sandra Gilbert and
  Susan Gubar add important detail to this argument
  in The Madwoman in the Attic.

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• In so doing, it essentially kills them, since
  they are rendered immobile and inanimate and
  deprived of autonomy.
• Gender studies also includes gay and lesbian
  studies, as well as the study of sexuality in
  general.
• Oscar Wilde is the most famous example, but
  writers like Elizabeth Bishop and Henry James,
  who remained in the closet for most of their
  lives, were more common.

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• Gay critics interrogate the very notion of gender
  identity and question the logic of gender
  categorization.
• The normative alignment in mainstream gender
  culture of male and female with heterosexual
  masculinity or femininity must therefore be seen
  as a political rather than a biological fact.
• The variability of sexuality and of gender
  identity is quelled by the dominant discourse
  regarding gender, which enforces what it
  describes.

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• This plurality is subsumed to the binary
  heterosexual norm in mainstream culture, but its
  reality is evident throughout society.
• If normative reproductive sexuality and the
  identities that accompany it are one among many
  possible modes and vectors of sexuality, then
  supposedly marginal forms of sexuality, rather
  than being perverse deviations from a norm, may
  be manifestations of the basic multiplicity of
  sexuality.

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• There is no norm there is only a variety of
  possibilities both for gender identity and for
  sexual practice.
• These theories focus attention on the role of
  culture in establishing and maintaining gender
  norms.
• We assume cultural accouterments are expressions
  of a gender nature or ontology, but these
  theorists contend that the repetitive imitation
  of normative gender standards in fact generates a
  sense in humans of having a coherent gender
  identity that does not include deviant
  possibilities.

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• Why are the ruling heterosexual gender groups so
  interested in making sure their norms are
  enforced?
• If one looks at the numerous homemade trailers
  for the film Brokeback Mountain, especially the
  TopGun parody, this point becomes quite clear.
• The panic at the heart of heterosexual culture is
  most palpable in its fear objects.

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• But if women can be men and men women, that
  becomes a vexed and flawed undertaking.
• What these insights suggest is that homosexuality
  is not an identity apart from and completely
  outside another identity called heterosexuality.
• Sexual transitivity is stilled for the sake of
  species reproduction, but in the realms of
  cultural play, the excess of desire and
  identification over norm and rule testify to more
  plural possibilities.

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Exercise 7.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(1)

• King Lear was written at a time when
  homosexuality or sodomy was outlawed, yet
  it was also a time when James I, the new king of
  England, was making it increasingly clear to his
  subjects that he was a practicing homosexual.
• On the kings court on St. Stephens Night, 1606,
  a festival that might be counted an occasion for
  debaucheries.

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Exercise 7.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(2)

• Bray notes that the London theater was, like
  Jamess court, a locus of the homosexual
  subculture of early seventeenth- century England.
• Homosexuality is worked into the play both as
  innuendo and as a fairly explicit, if necessarily
  oblique, theme.
• The play begins on a homosocial note that very
  quickly veers into an at least jokingly
  homosexual suggestiveness.

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Exercise 7.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(3)

• One might even say that by evoking it in this
  opening dialogue, which is played out of view of
  the more public events that follow, Shakespeare
  is noting the closeted quality of life in the
  homosexual subculture to which he, as member of
  the theater, probably belonged.
• But why make a coy homosexual reference at the
  opening of a tragedy about a fathers betrayal by
  his daughters?

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Exercise 7.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(4)

• Lears mad fantasies are explicitly linked to
  theatrical exhibition, and one conclusion we
  might draw is that Shakespeare, by depicting a
  play within a play at a moment charged with
  homosexual references, is referring to the
  homosexual subculture of the London theater
  itself.
• The play portrays compulsory heterosexuality as
  successfully healing itself and reattaining its
  dominant status and place after a fall into
  psychological fragmentation.

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Exercise 7.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(5)

• Edgar most explicitly articulates the plays
  critique of heterosexuality when as Tom he speaks
  of having served the lust of my mistress
  heart, which equates heterosexuality itself with
  demonic possession by the foul fiend.
• Heterosexuality is dangerous because it contains
  an instability while it would seem to assure a
  mans identity as a masculine male, it leaves the
  man dependent on women for certification.

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Exercise 7.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(6)

• Which is to say, given the slang meaning of
  nothing, he is a woman.
• If women are the soft spot of the heterosexual
  regime, its point of proof as well as of
  vulnerability, it is because the exchange
  relationship that establishes that system is
  reversible.
• I say this because those left to rule at the end
  of the play- Kent and Edgar- are men who
  apparently love men not women.

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Exercise 7.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(7)

• The dangerous and destructive feminization of men
  occurs when women assume traditionally masculine
  powers, when they, as it were, become men.
• That Lear cannot ultimately survive the
  experience and must pass on power to Edgar
  suggests just how deadly feminization is
  conceived as being within the early
  seventeenth-century cultural gender codes.
• Within the Renaissance bodily code, Lears loss
  of temper and rash actions based on momentary
  emotions are coded as female.

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Exercise 7.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(8)

• The price he pays for behaving like a woman is to
  become a woman.
• When his Fool speaks of him as nothing, he adds
  a sexual spin to Lears loss of power Thou hast
  pared the wit o both sides and left nothing i
  the middle. Here comes one o the parings.
• He can now be had from behind by his phallic
  daughter.
• Earlier, the Fool had compared the division of
  Lears kingdom to the breaking of an egg into two
  ends or crowns why, after I have cut the egg
  i the middle and eat up the meat, the two crowns
  of the egg.

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Exercise 7.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(9)

• And he is described as suffering an eyeless
  rage.
• In contrast, one important feature of the new
  masculine figure who takes Lears place as ruler
  is his detachment from women.
• I will have such revenges on you both /That all
  the world shall- I will do such things-/What they
  are yet I know not.
• Edgar and Kent, the two characters most capable
  of restorative violence, are also those most
  associated with homosocial relationships.

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Exercise 7.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(10)

• This ideal of isomale relations is not only
  homosocial, but also homosexual.
• It is permitted in relations between men.
• Undercover homosexuality is a parallel social
  structure to compulsory heterosexuality in early
  seventeenth-century England.
• In isomale relations, the feminized heterosexual
  male can be repositioned in a dominant masculine
  posture if he receives service from another male.
• With Kent, the Fool is a figure of homosocial
  healing who is also suggestive of homosexuality.

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Exercise 7.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(11)

• Cordelia is called fool because in some respects
  she is the Fool.
• What these cross-gender confusions suggest is
  that the sites of retraction- hovel and cage- are
  curative because they are outside the exchange
  system of compulsory heterosexuality.
• We witness that turn in the mad scenes on the
  heath.
• Edgar is the character who is most capable of
  enacting the new masculinity the play demands
  after compulsory heterosexuality has been shown
  to be both deficient and dangerous.

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Exercise 7.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(12)

• When Lear sheds his clothes and joins Edgar in
  nakedness, the visual display evokes
  homosexuality, and so as well does Edgars
  vocabulary of possession, which at the time was
  associated with sodomy.
• Edgar undergoes with Lear the experience of
  liquefaction that is effeminization.
• If Edgar is teacher, he also refers to himself as
  a childe or young knight about to be initiated,
  since his encounter with Lear prepares him for
  his assumption of the kings place.

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Exercise 7.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(13)

• The scene of Greek tutelage between the learned
  Theban and Lear prepares the substitution of
  younger ruler for older king, and constitutes an
  endorsement of homosexuality as a reparative
  alternative to heterosexuality.
• The plays ending is noteworthy for its
  emotionality.
• The play is at its most gender-radical when it
  seem to suggest that those traits are contingent
  rather than ontological or natural.

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Exercise 7.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(14)

• But it is also that of the homosexual man who
  must live out the form of compulsory
  heterosexuality while yet experiencing feelings
  that must remain silent.
• Now consider the play from a feminist
  perspective.
• How does the depiction of women reproduce
  traditional stereotypes regarding women?
• How do these stereotypes appear in the opening
  scene?
• After the opening scene, Goneril and Regan change
  dramatically.

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Exercise 7.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(15)

• Goneril and Regan become viler and viler as the
  play proceeds.
• Is the play about female power and the danger it
  poses for men?
• What might that be?
• Is there a symbolic connection of some kind
  between that fact and fate of patriarchy in the
  play?

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Exercise 7.2(1)

• The one of the three expressly lesbian poems that
  Elizabeth Bishop wrote- Exchanging Hats- had to
  go unpublished (while one of the others- The
  Shampoo- was refused publication by Bishops
  usual outlet, the New Yorker, because of its
  sexual allusions says something about the
  problems faced by gay writers in the recent past.

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Exercise 7.2(2)

• What colors are used and why?
• Why does she call their cries traditional?
• Bishop eventually begins to lend thematic
  significance to the roosters.
• She mocks their combativeness and seems to relish
  their deflation and death.
• Peter was told by Christ that he would betray him
  by the time the cock had crowed three times.
• Why does Bishop turn to this story?
• How is this morning different?

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Exercise 7.2(3)

• In the Waiting Room is a remarkable and
  debatable poem.
• When the poem was written, lesbians could not
  live openly.
• Quite literally, a man would have the right to
  poke around in one of your essential cavities,
  and you would have to grin and bear it.
• The girl in the poem reads National Geographic
  while her Aunt Consuelo is inside with the
  dentist.

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Exercise 7.2(4)

• What she describes, in other words, may be her
  own reactions to things as much as the things
  themselves.
• Why would she carefully study the photographs?
• What do you make of that image?
• Can you tell which is male and which female?
• Why the repetition here?
• What do you make of the word horrifying applied
  to the girls sense of their naked breasts?

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Exercise 7.2(5)

• Notice that she implies that she wanted to stop
  to look longer, but she was too shy to do so
• She seems to seek even more reassurance in the
  lines that follow.
• In space and time, she wants to fix a boundary
  between herself and the feelings now safely
  inside the magazine.
• All of this makes the next line striking and
  interesting- Suddenly, from inside.
• Compulsory heterosexual sex is pain for a lesbian.

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Exercise 7.2(6)

• What follows suggests that things are not
  clear-cut for the girl.
• Where do you think the stress falls?
• Does that seem like a plausible reading?
• If so, what do you make of her confusion of
  herself with the aunt?
• That would seem to make a certain sense.
• Or does she mean that she did not think she was
  her foolish aunt?
• Read the reat of the poem on your own.

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Exercise 7.2(7)

• Notice as well the odd configuration of inside
  and outside in that stanza, and think about how
  that might bear on this reading.
• You might take the trouble to look up anandrous
  and avernal and ask why she uses these words.

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Exercise7.3(1)

• The narrator of The Aspern Papers clearly adores
  Jeffrey Aspern, but does he love him?
• Consider how Asperns relations with women are
  characterized in the first chapter.
• Why does he seem so bent on diminishing the
  significance of Asperns relations with women?
• Do you get any sense of the narrators sexuality
  in this chapter?

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Exercise7.3(2)

• To not come means to not ejaculate, and that
  might also be a symbolic signal of sexual
  detachment.
• Are there other ways in which sexuality seems
  implied in the setting, action, and
  characterizations in the story?
• Drawers is an old slang term for womens
  underwear.

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Exercise7.3(3)

• What do you think the tale is about then- a man
  with sexual yearnings toward a maternal figure,
  or a man with negative feelings for women who
  clearly prefers other men?
• Psychoanalytic theorists describe masochism as a
  process that converts pain into pleasure.
• One of the more homoerotic moments in the text
  occurs in this chapter.

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Exercise7.3(4)

• He idealizes and idolizes the paternal figure as
  an alternative, and idolizes the paternal figure
  as an alternative, and he has strongly charged
  negative feelings toward the mother, some of
  which are erotic in character.
• He imagines himself pelting her door with
  flowers, and the door would have to yield.
• What does Aspern represent?
• The relationship with Tina is tinged by
  expediency.
• Do you detect signs of bad faith, of reasoning
  that excuses what should not be excused?

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Exercise7.3(5)

• What do you make of his intense feeling of shame
  upon