Rubin, G. (1993). Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In H. Abelove, M. Barale, D. Halperin (Eds.), The lesbian and gay studies reader (pp. 3-44). New York: Routledge.
Eng, D.L., Halberstam, J., Munoz, J. E. (2005). Introduction: What’s queer about queer studies now? Social Text, 84-85, 1-17.
Puar, J. K. Queer times, queer assemblages. Social Text, 84-85: 121-139.
Rubin’s article highlights the special focus law, religion, and medicine have had upon sexuality. She compares the decision to engage in a specific sexuality activity to the choice one makes with food, a metaphor that the more I think about it, the increasingly apt and profound I find it to be. She illustrates the sexual essentialist perspective’s hierarchy of sexual acts, starting wit the acceptable down to the tolerable, and those that are stigmatized, pathologized and criminalized. She calls for the development of “a radical perspective on sexuality” (p. 275)* and outlines the constructivist perspective, stating that it is important to located what we see in the groupings of erotic acts with the trends of erotic discourses. The most important of which is sex negativity. This propagated ideas of “healthy” and “unhealthy” sexuality. She focuses on the criminalization of homosexuality and sodomy, the prohibition of sex with children, and the use of s/m pornography in feminist’s anti-porn rhetoric. The last example is used to illustrate that “feminism” is not the panacea to sex negativity and in fact can play an active role in propagating it. Though this is followed by the problematic challenge that this only a “so-called feminist discourse” (p. 302). She closes her argument with the idea that “Western culture” is caught in the conundrum of taking sex too seriously while not taking sexual persecution seriously enough. In order to ameliorate this we must recognize how erotic life is shaped by political dimensions.
Decades after Rubin’s piece was first published, the introduction to “What’s queer about queer studies now?” addresses the changes in the breadth of material covered by queer studies. This text draws attention to the parochial view of sexuality in Rubin’s piece, representative of it time, which does not thoroughly engage with race, transnationlalism, the global market and labour structures, diasporas, or citizenship, topics taken up by more recent queer publications. Eng Halberstam, and Munoz critique previous gay and lesbian activism that bought into queer positivism and led the way to queer liberalism, which they describe as the exogenous and endogenous workings of the queer community that have lead to the “normalization” of gay and lesbian identities. Through teasers to the following essays in this volume we are offered the following insights into queer studies:
1) Theorists need to reconsider the intersectionality of identifications such as race, sexuality, and class, and demand more than just our rights in order to keep our freedom of mobility;
2) Different identity categories cannot be collapsed as equal in their relationship to domination;
3) The increase in pop culture’s representation of queer identities has come with the price of the ascribing heteronormative gender roles to those representation;
4) Counter-homophobic discourses have been used to shift focus from American atrocities in war to the prejudices of the “enemy”;
5) The term queer often signifies and symbolizes gay white men; this conflates homonormativity with whiteness
6) We ought not confuse the fruits of gay rights advocacy, such as gay marriage, with freedom.
The introduction ends with a reference to Rubin who is quoted as calling for “gay humility” (p. 15) where sexuality does not need to be the central or singular focus of queer studies. Instead those writing in queer theory must acknowledge their “ethical attachment to others” and cease locating sexuality as the centre of queer studies (p. 15).
Puar’s article was a very dense read and I will try my best to do it justice. She is making three arguments. In the first she argues that queer liberalism has contributed to post-9/11 Islamophobia. We see this in queer scholars’ responses to Abu Ghraib Arabs and Muslims were homogenized and academics focused on Islamic homophoboia, diverting attention from the inhumane and unethical treatment of Muslims by American soldiers. Secondly, Puar utilizes Deleuze’s interpretation of the assemblage in juxtaposition to intersectionality. She argues that the terrorist is queered through his failed masculinity and the association of his body with perversion and deformity. She uses the example of the suicide bomber to demonstrate how the terrorist’s body destabilizes temporarily and space. The bomb is intimately strapped to the terrorist’s body hidden beneath clothing. When the bomb detonates the body does not carry the weapon but merges with it and the other bodies in close proximity; the terrorists shifts from being to becoming. Lastly, she applies the terrorist’s being and becoming to the turban. The turban works to both hide and reveal the terrorist body; it is infused with cultural and religious meaning, but also a refusal to assimilate into western dress. I must admit I am struggling with how this then connects to her reading of Axel’s queer diasporas and then to the notion that through the sex based torture in Abu Ghraib the terrorist is left religious impotent and is no longer a threat to the nation. The terrorist troubles the stability of identity categories.
Questions (in no particular order):
Does the push for queer theory to gain some “humility” and shift it’s focus from sexuality to broader issues such as transnational identities, diasporas, and the global economy imply that we have exhausted where queer theory can go in conversations of sex?
What is the difference between sexuality studies, lesbian and gay studies, and queer theory?
Can we compare Puar’s notions of being and becoming to Butler’s and other feminism notions of performativity?
How do people feel about Rubin’s call for the destigmatization of “cross-generational” romances or sexual relationships? I have read a number of feminist’s writing coming out of the 1980s and 1990s that made similar claims but none since then, and Patrick Califia in fact changed his mind. Where does this leave us?
In terms of advocacy how does a queer activist address the fact that much of the major issues on the agenda are in fact very heteronormative ones? Gays and lesbians have fought have to be let into an arguably repressive structure of marriage. EGALE (a GLBT advocacy group in Canada) who once opposed the censorship of Little Sister’s Book Store has more recently lobbied to censor the sale of the music of artists with homophobic lyrics. How to queers claim a desire not to be discriminated against while still repudiating heteronormativity?
And lastly, though this does not stem from the articles, I would like to ask something about the problematic use of the word queer to, in theory, describe the GLBTT2IQ population, when it is in fact being used to describe gays and lesbians (who are also white, middle class, non-immigrants)? I would say that very rarely does the writing on “queer” people apply to bisexuals, trans-identified individuals, two-spirited persons, or those who are intersex. In the name of inclusion have we (queers) homogenized ourselves?
*Sorry I was working with a different source of the Rubin article, my page numbers come from.
Rubin, G. (1984). Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In C. S. Vance (Ed.) Pleasure and danger: Exploring female sexuality (p. 267-319). Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Feminism and Gender Theory
Feminism and Gender Theory
Butler, J. (1990). Subjects of sex/gender/desire in Gender trouble (pp. 1-34). New York: Routledge.
Bartky, S. L. Foucault, femininity, and the modernization of patriarchal power. In R. Weitz (Ed.), The politics of women’s bodies: Sexuality, appearance, and behavior (pp. 25-45). New York: Oxford University Press.
Hammonds, E. (1994). Black (w)holes and the geometry of Black female sexuality. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.
Connell, R. W. & Messerschmidt, J.W. (2005). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender & Society, 19, 829-859.
It could just be that its been a very long week and I'm extra agreeable at this point, but I enjoyed all the articles and had no qualms or disagreements anywhere! This was an interesting collection of work from authors who approached the idea of gender identification from a different angle in each article.
In her very dense article: “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire”, Judith Butler is responding in large part to the notion of feminism put forth during the second wave. She is responding to the idea that feminism is supposed to be extending the representation of “women” in politics and language, but has largely missed how the category of “woman” is “produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought.”(2) Her critique questions how effective the feminist movement is if it seeks greater political representation for the notion of “woman” as a subject when it is a category constructed by politics itself. Butler argues that politics and language have constructed the idea of gender categories in a system of compulsory heterosexuality, which naturalizes the position of the male and creates the subjecthood of “woman” in relation to man. To Butler, the “being” of a gender is an effect which is a product of a binary heterosexual hegemony, which if disrupted, according to Foucault, would dissipate the category of sex and therefore gender too.
Next up Sandra Lee Bartky presents a Foucaultian argument of how feminine gender roles are created and maintained today. Her argument stems from Foucault’s work on Bentham’s panopticon which we looked at earlier this year. The disciplinary state of “conscious and permanent visibility” of the panopticon which induces self discipline is applied to the body. Bartky examines the Foucaultian self-disciplinary practices that construct and maintain visible femininity in three ways. First are the practices that produce a body of a small effeminate proportions by means of dieting and exercise to meet the requirements of femininity. She supplements this with a discussion of women’s exercise being relegated to aerobics and calisthenics; not lifting weights like men do because women are working out with a different purpose than men.
Women’s requirement to remain petite and not gain muscle mass is related to Bartky’s second practice of self-discipline regarding the spatiality in which women feel socially constrained to carry themselves in a far more closed and spatially restricted manner than men. Lastly, women ornament their bodies through a variety of “feminine” practices such as makeup, fashion selection, hair dressing, shaving and waxing. Always under the patriarchal panopticon which imposes these feminine standards, women undergo much self-discipline to fit into society’s institutionalized heterosexual masculine-feminine binary.
In Black (W)holes and the geometry of Black female sexuality. (More Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theory), Evelynn Hammonds engages with the silenced subject of Black female sexuality. Struggling with the White normative state of existence, and the seeming need to identify as a Black lesbian rather than just a lesbian (which on its own would connote a White lesbian), Hammonds wants to revisit feminism with a new look from Queer theory. Part of the problem Hammond argues, is “a question of knowing about the production of black female queer sexualities.”(4) Yet since black female sexuality has been largely a product of silence, erasure and invisibility in dominant discourse, Hammonds asks: “are black lesbian sexualities doubly silenced?”(4) In other words, the visible White female sexuality inadvertently shapes the invisible Black female sexualities which are inseparable.
Hammond is looking for Black feminist theorists to reclaim their sexuality through a counternarrative and power analysis that positions the black female as the subject. Her goal is not only to make black females more visible, this would not undo the history of erasure or challenge the power structures that created that invisibility; Hammond wants to create a “politics of articulation” whose focus would be black female agency to interrogate the power constraints that created the “politics of silence” from which their sexualities have been produced.
In the final article of our diverse collection of gender theories, RW Connell maps the recent history of hegemonic masculinities. Having got its start as a generalized “male sex role” theory in social psychology, the concept came under criticism with increased recognition of varying levels of masculinity and oppression between men, especially between straight men and gay men. These themes of power and differences were coupled with Gramsci’s idea of hegemony in the context of masculinity, which helped understand masculinity as a practice of dominance over women as well as other men. This hegemonic masculinity was not enacted by many men, nor was it violent in nature; the hierarchy was constructed through culture, institutions and persuasion.
Approximately twenty years after the term was coined, Connell, as one of the founding scholars, sought to review the concept and suggest several reformulations. The most interesting of these reformulations concerns gender hierarchy, and the need for more focus on gender relations rather than on the sole activities of men because “gender is always relational, and patterns of masculinity are socially defined in contradistinction from some model…of femininity.”(848) Most feminist research would contextualize femininity as only subordinate to masculinity in gender relations under patriarchy, but Connell reminds us that women are central in helping to construct masculinities as well; women are the mothers, schoolmates, girlfriends, sexual partners and wives.(848) In other words to better understand hegemonic masculinity we need to understand the holistic relationship of gender relations, and to recognize “the agency of subordinated groups as much as the power of dominant groups in the mutual conditioning of gender dynamics…”(848)
What do you think Hammond would have to say about this suggestion of Connell's? Hammond is looking for counternarratives and politics of articulation to better define the marginalized subjecthood of Black female lesbians, and here Connell is suggesting that you cannot separately analyze genders, they are always relational and must be looked at in terms of their dynamics.
Can a gender be considered exclusively from others, can a gender be independently defined as theorists like Hammonds seem to advocate for, or are gender relations inextricable and formulated completely in relation to each other? Where would each of these theorists sit on the subject?
Could the Foucaultian self-discipline model presented by Bartky work in terms of keeping various masculinities in gendered roles in a way similar to her femininity argument?
Butler, J. (1990). Subjects of sex/gender/desire in Gender trouble (pp. 1-34). New York: Routledge.
Bartky, S. L. Foucault, femininity, and the modernization of patriarchal power. In R. Weitz (Ed.), The politics of women’s bodies: Sexuality, appearance, and behavior (pp. 25-45). New York: Oxford University Press.
Hammonds, E. (1994). Black (w)holes and the geometry of Black female sexuality. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.
Connell, R. W. & Messerschmidt, J.W. (2005). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender & Society, 19, 829-859.
It could just be that its been a very long week and I'm extra agreeable at this point, but I enjoyed all the articles and had no qualms or disagreements anywhere! This was an interesting collection of work from authors who approached the idea of gender identification from a different angle in each article.
In her very dense article: “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire”, Judith Butler is responding in large part to the notion of feminism put forth during the second wave. She is responding to the idea that feminism is supposed to be extending the representation of “women” in politics and language, but has largely missed how the category of “woman” is “produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought.”(2) Her critique questions how effective the feminist movement is if it seeks greater political representation for the notion of “woman” as a subject when it is a category constructed by politics itself. Butler argues that politics and language have constructed the idea of gender categories in a system of compulsory heterosexuality, which naturalizes the position of the male and creates the subjecthood of “woman” in relation to man. To Butler, the “being” of a gender is an effect which is a product of a binary heterosexual hegemony, which if disrupted, according to Foucault, would dissipate the category of sex and therefore gender too.
Next up Sandra Lee Bartky presents a Foucaultian argument of how feminine gender roles are created and maintained today. Her argument stems from Foucault’s work on Bentham’s panopticon which we looked at earlier this year. The disciplinary state of “conscious and permanent visibility” of the panopticon which induces self discipline is applied to the body. Bartky examines the Foucaultian self-disciplinary practices that construct and maintain visible femininity in three ways. First are the practices that produce a body of a small effeminate proportions by means of dieting and exercise to meet the requirements of femininity. She supplements this with a discussion of women’s exercise being relegated to aerobics and calisthenics; not lifting weights like men do because women are working out with a different purpose than men.
Women’s requirement to remain petite and not gain muscle mass is related to Bartky’s second practice of self-discipline regarding the spatiality in which women feel socially constrained to carry themselves in a far more closed and spatially restricted manner than men. Lastly, women ornament their bodies through a variety of “feminine” practices such as makeup, fashion selection, hair dressing, shaving and waxing. Always under the patriarchal panopticon which imposes these feminine standards, women undergo much self-discipline to fit into society’s institutionalized heterosexual masculine-feminine binary.
In Black (W)holes and the geometry of Black female sexuality. (More Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theory), Evelynn Hammonds engages with the silenced subject of Black female sexuality. Struggling with the White normative state of existence, and the seeming need to identify as a Black lesbian rather than just a lesbian (which on its own would connote a White lesbian), Hammonds wants to revisit feminism with a new look from Queer theory. Part of the problem Hammond argues, is “a question of knowing about the production of black female queer sexualities.”(4) Yet since black female sexuality has been largely a product of silence, erasure and invisibility in dominant discourse, Hammonds asks: “are black lesbian sexualities doubly silenced?”(4) In other words, the visible White female sexuality inadvertently shapes the invisible Black female sexualities which are inseparable.
Hammond is looking for Black feminist theorists to reclaim their sexuality through a counternarrative and power analysis that positions the black female as the subject. Her goal is not only to make black females more visible, this would not undo the history of erasure or challenge the power structures that created that invisibility; Hammond wants to create a “politics of articulation” whose focus would be black female agency to interrogate the power constraints that created the “politics of silence” from which their sexualities have been produced.
In the final article of our diverse collection of gender theories, RW Connell maps the recent history of hegemonic masculinities. Having got its start as a generalized “male sex role” theory in social psychology, the concept came under criticism with increased recognition of varying levels of masculinity and oppression between men, especially between straight men and gay men. These themes of power and differences were coupled with Gramsci’s idea of hegemony in the context of masculinity, which helped understand masculinity as a practice of dominance over women as well as other men. This hegemonic masculinity was not enacted by many men, nor was it violent in nature; the hierarchy was constructed through culture, institutions and persuasion.
Approximately twenty years after the term was coined, Connell, as one of the founding scholars, sought to review the concept and suggest several reformulations. The most interesting of these reformulations concerns gender hierarchy, and the need for more focus on gender relations rather than on the sole activities of men because “gender is always relational, and patterns of masculinity are socially defined in contradistinction from some model…of femininity.”(848) Most feminist research would contextualize femininity as only subordinate to masculinity in gender relations under patriarchy, but Connell reminds us that women are central in helping to construct masculinities as well; women are the mothers, schoolmates, girlfriends, sexual partners and wives.(848) In other words to better understand hegemonic masculinity we need to understand the holistic relationship of gender relations, and to recognize “the agency of subordinated groups as much as the power of dominant groups in the mutual conditioning of gender dynamics…”(848)
What do you think Hammond would have to say about this suggestion of Connell's? Hammond is looking for counternarratives and politics of articulation to better define the marginalized subjecthood of Black female lesbians, and here Connell is suggesting that you cannot separately analyze genders, they are always relational and must be looked at in terms of their dynamics.
Can a gender be considered exclusively from others, can a gender be independently defined as theorists like Hammonds seem to advocate for, or are gender relations inextricable and formulated completely in relation to each other? Where would each of these theorists sit on the subject?
Could the Foucaultian self-discipline model presented by Bartky work in terms of keeping various masculinities in gendered roles in a way similar to her femininity argument?
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