Everything about Gender Theory totally explained
== Gender Studies ==
Gender studies is a
field of
interdisciplinary study which analyzes the phenomenon of
gender. Esh EshIt examines both cultural representations of gender and people's
lived experience. Gender Studies is sometimes related to studies of
class,
race,
ethnicity and
location.
The philosopher
Simone de Beauvoir said: “One isn't born a woman, one becomes one.”
In Gender Studies the term "gender" is used to refer to the
social and cultural constructions of masculinities and femininities. It doesn't refer to biological difference, but rather cultural difference. The field emerged from a number of different areas: the sociology of the
1950s and later (see
Sociology of gender); the theories of the psychoanalyst
Jaques Lacan; and the work of feminists such as
Judith Butler. Each field came to regard "gender" as a practice, sometimes referred to as something that's
performative.
Feminist theory of
psychoanalysis, articulated mainly by
Julia Kristeva (the "semiotic" and "abjection") and
Bracha Ettinger (the "matrixial trans-subjectivity" and the "primal mother-phantasies"), and informed both by
Freud, Lacan and the
Object relations theory, is very influential in Gender studies.
Studying gender
Studies of gender have been undertaken in many academic areas, such as
literary theory, drama studies,
film theory, performance theory, contemporary
art history,
anthropology,
sociology,
psychology and
psychoanalysis. These disciplines sometimes differ in their approaches to how and why they study gender. For instance in anthropology, sociology and psychology, gender is often studied as a practice, whereas in cultural studies representations of gender are more often examined. Gender Studies is also a discipline in itself: an
interdisciplinary area of study that incorporates methods and approaches from a wide range of disciplines.
Influences of gender studies
Gender studies and psychoanalytic theory
Sigmund Freud
Some feminist critics have dismissed the work of
Sigmund Freud as sexist, because of his view that women are 'mutilated and must learn to accept their lack of a penis' (in Freud's terms a "deformity").
On the other hand, feminist theorists such as
Juliet Mitchell,
Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin,
Jane Gallop,
Bracha Ettinger,
Shoshana Felman,
Griselda Pollock and Jane Flax have argued that psychoanalytic theory is vital to the feminist project and must, like other theoretical traditions, be adapted by women to free it from vestiges of sexism.
Shulamith Firestone, in "Freudianism: The Misguided Feminism", discusses how Freudianism is
almost completely accurate, with the exception of one crucial detail: everywhere that Freud writes "penis", the word should be replaced with "power".
Jacques Lacan
Lacan's theory of sexuation organizes femininity and masculinity according to different unconscious structures. Both male and female subjects participate in the "phallic" organization, and the feminine side of sexuation is "supplementary" and not opposite or complementary. Sexuation (sexual situation) — the development of gender-roles and role-play in childhood — breaks down concepts of gender identity as innate or biologically determined.
Critics like Elizabeth Grosz accuse
Jacques Lacan of maintaining a sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. Others, such as Judith Butler and Jane Gallop have used Lacanian work to develop gender theory.
Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva has significantly developed the field of Semiotics. In her work on
abjection, she structures subjectivity upon the abjection of the mother and argues that the way in which an individual excludes (or abjects) their mother as means of forming an identity is similar to the way in which societies are constructed. She contends that patriarchal cultures, like individuals, have had to exclude the maternal and the feminine so that they can come into being.
Bracha Ettinger
Bracha Ettinger worked from the late Lacanian theory to expose Freudian and Lacanian blind spots concerning the feminine, the maternal, and the female specisicities in the bodily Real, and developed their potential for thinking subjectivity and transforming the Symbolic. She articulated a feminine, pre-maternal and maternal "matrixial" sexual difference. Ettinger articulated the matrixial borderspace unconscious sphere of "subjectivity as encounter" where "I" and "non-I" emerge in jointmess without rejection and without symbiosis, starting from the infant's primordial contact (transconnectivity) with female body, phantasy and trauma (before birth). The matrixial is a feminine difference that informs gender and has particular relevance to mother-daughter relations. Ettinger structures subjectivity with a "trans-subjective" dimension and reattunement of jointness-in-differentiation, and suggests that primary access to the maternal and the other occurs via aesthetic proto-ethical affects of "fascinance" and "primary compassion", which arise before and also beside "abjection". She argues that blindness to these processes, as well as the therapist's production of "ready-made mother-monster" harm women by destroying or harming the transformational potentiality of mother/daughter relations, the mother-daughter transmission and the potential of creativity.
Literary Theory
Post-modern influence
The emergence of
post-feminism affected gender studies, causing a movement in
theories identity away from the concept of fixed or
essentialist gender identity, to
post-modern fluid or multiple identities .
See
Donna Haraway,
The Cyborg Manifesto, as an example of post-identity feminism.
The development of gender theory
History of gender studies
Women's studies
Women's studies is an interdisciplinary academic field concerning
women,
feminism,
gender, and
politics. It can include
feminist theory,
women's history,
women's fiction and
women's health.
Men's studies
Men's Studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that includes discussions of
men's rights,
Men's health, feminist theory,
queer theory,
patriarchy, as well, social, historical, and cultural representations of men and
masculinity.
Judith Butler
The concept of gender performativity is at the core of Butler's work, notably in
Gender Trouble. In Butler’s terms the performance of gender, sex, and sexuality is about power in society. She locates the construction of the "gendered, sexed, desiring subject" in "regulative discourses."
A part of Butler's argument concerns the role of sex in the construction of "natural" or coherent gender and sexuality. In her account, gender and heterosexuality are constructed as natural because the opposition of the male and female sexes is constructed as natural.
Criticism
Rosi Braidotti has criticized gender studies as: "the take-over of the feminist agenda by studies on masculinity, which results in transferring funding from feminist faculty positions to other kinds of positions. There have been cases...of positions advertised as 'gender studies' being given away to the 'bright boys'. Some of the competitive take-over has to do with gay studies. Of special significance in this discussion is the role of the mainstream publisher Routledge who, in our opinion, is responsible for promoting gender as a way of deradicalizing the feminist agenda, re-marketing masculinity and gay male identity instead."
Calvin Thomas counters that, "as Joseph Allen Boone points out, 'many of the men in the academy who are feminism's most supportive 'allies'
are gay,'" and that it's "disingenuous" to ignore the ways in which mainstream publishers such as Routledge have promoted feminist theorists.
Gender studies is criticized by
Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young for being a discipline that "philosophizes, theorizes and politicizes on the nature of the
female gender" as a
social construct, to the point of excluding the male gender from analysis. They also assert that the 'gender' in gender studies is "routinely used as a synonym for 'women'. Such criticism is irrelevant both to Butler and to contemporary psychoanalytically informed Gender studies since Kristeva and Ettinger contribute different insights concerning sexual difference and the maternal in terms of pre-Oedipal and "abjection" (Kristeva), and "trans-subjective coemergence" and psychic "pregnance" (Ettinger), concepts and processes that inform gender and identity before and beyond social constructs.
In "Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History", Trent University (Peterborough, Canada) historian and theorist Bryan Palmer argues that the current reliance on poststructuralism — with its reification of discourse and avoidance of the
structures of oppression and struggles of resistance — obscures the origins, meanings, and
consequences of historical events and processes. Palmer seeks to counter the current intellectual fashion of "gender studies" with an eloquent argument for the necessity to analyze and appreciate lived experience and the structures of subordination and power in any quest for historical meaning.
Palmer is concerned with the emergence of "language" as a central focus of intellectual
work in recent decades. He locates the implosion of theory that moved structuralism in
the direction of poststructuralism and deconstruction in what he calls "the descent into
discourse." Few historians who champion poststructuralist thought, according to Palmer,
appreciate historical materialism’s capacity to address discourse meaningfully. Nor do many of
the advocates of language within the field of social history have an adequate grounding in the
theoretical making of the project they champion so ardently. Palmer roots his polemical challenge in an effort to "introduce historians more fully to the theoretical writing that many are alluding to and drawing from rather cavalierly."
Acknowledging that critical theory can contribute to an understanding of some aspects of the past, Palmer nevertheless argues for the centrality of materialism to the project of history. In
specific discussions of how critical theory is constructing histories of politics, class, and
gender, he traces the development of the descent into discourse within social history, mapping the limitations of recent revisionist texts. Much of this writing, he contends, is undertheorized and represents a problematic retreat from prior histories that attempted to address such material forces as economic structures, political power, and class struggle.
Theorists associated with gender studies
Further Information
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