qur"Gender Studies" in M. A. R.

Habib, Modern Literary Theory and

Criticism: A History (2008)

What is Gender Studies and What does it include?

 In general, gender studies includes feminist studies of gender, gay and lesbian criticism, and
queer theory.
 These fields are by no means distinct from one another and often overlap considerably.
 Gender studies is interdisciplinary in both its roots and its methods, having arisen in literary
and cultural theory, sociology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis.
 It examines the oppressive history of gays, lesbians, and other erotic groups, the formation and
representation of gender, as well as gender as a category of analysis of literature and culture,
and the intersection of gender with divisions of race, class, and color.

Feminist anthropologists such as Gayle Rubin and thinkers such as Michel Foucault

had highlighted the constructed nature of gender: indeed, in his History of Sexuality (1978), Foucault
had shown that homosexuality was itself an invented category, formulated by the medical
establishment in conjunction with ideologies of normative sexuality.

The birth of the Gay Rights Movement in America is often traced to the “Stonewall Riots” of
1969 in New York City, a prolonged conflict over several days in which gays, transvestites, and other
oppressed groups (of various color and nationality) offered resistance against police raiding of the
Stonewall Inn. Prior to this, especially just after the Second World War (in which young men
found the opportunity to experiment sexually), a number of gay and other erotic communities had
taken root in the margins of big cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

This led to a series of repressions in the 1950s. But during the 1960s, even before Stonewall,
policies toward gays had relaxed somewhat, and as gays assumed a certain solidarity and political
identity, further liberalization followed during the early 1970s, after which further backlashes erupted,
in terms of both legal enactments and popular feeling.

The effect of such repression was partly to solidify the alternative erotic communities, who self-
consciously struggled in the political sphere to achieve a voice, and to achieve self-definition in
theoretical terms.
Even prior to the Stonewall Riots, gay self-consciousness emerged in many aspects of culture: in the
history of literature, where figures such as Walt Whitman, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and the
Bloomsbury Group with its ethic of androgyny, and the 1930s poets W. H. Auden, Christopher
Isherwood, and Stephen Spender had variously articulated their sexuality and were revived as figures
of interest, in the novels of James Baldwin and Gore Vidal which portrayed homosexual relations and
encounters, in leading personalities of pop art such as Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, and in
pornography.

By the early 1970s, gay studies and gay theory were beginning to proliferate and to achieve a
theoretical self-consciousness.

In 1974 an issue of College English was devoted to the questions of gay identity and formulating a
gay literary tradition.

Just as women’s studies established the importance of gender as a fundamental category of analysis, so
lesbian/gay studies aims to establish the analytic centrality of sex and sexuality in several fields. The
overlap between gay/lesbian studies and women’s studies is a matter of continuing debate.

As the editors of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader state, these studies focus on the “cultural
production, dissemination, and vicissitudes of sexual meanings.”

Like women’s studies, lesbian/gay studies are informed by the “social struggle for sexual
liberation” and personal freedom, as well as by resistance to homophobia and heterosexism or the
“ideological and institutional practices of heterosexual privilege.”

Gender Studies – Feminism / Their main role – The things in common

Like feminism, they aim to break down the barriers between scholarship and politics. Some of the
important early gay and lesbian scholars include: Guy Hocquenghem, who analyzed the
psychological motivations of homophobia; the gay historian Jeffrey Weeks, who has analyzed the
history of homosexuality in Britain in relation to nineteenth-century sexual ideologies; the scholar K.
J. Dover, who published his celebrated study Greek Homosexuality in 1978; Lillian Faderman, who
studied lesbianism in the Renaissance; and Terry Castle, who conducted wide-ranging studies of the
lesbian presence in Western literary history.

Gender studies has its roots partly in feminist theory, and indeed, was until the 1980s associated
with the feminist enterprise, until lesbian critics such as Bonnie Zimmerman attacked the implicit
feminist assumption that there was some essential female identity underlying differences of race, class,
and sexuality.
Some critics, such as those associated with the Radi- calesbian collective, whose manifesto was “The
Woman-Identified Woman” (1970), urged the need for a field of inquiry distinct from mainstream
feminism, which had marginalized lesbianism.

They saw lesbianism as the purest feminism since it asserted female autonomy and refused
complicity with all forms of masculinist exploitation.

Jill Johnston’s Lesbian Nation (1973) saw lesbianism as the “solution” for feminism. The lesbian
feminist poet and theorist Adrienne Rich also affirmed lesbianism as a kind of archetypal image of
the broad feminist endeavor, and urged a dissociation of lesbian from male gay allegiances.

In an influential and controversial essay entitled “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian

Existence” (1980), she introduced the idea of a “lesbian continuum” to denote a range of experiences
between women, including mutual practical and political support, bonding against male tyranny, and
sharing a rich inner life.

Separatist lesbianism was also advocated by the Chicana lesbian poet and critic Gloria Anzaldua in
Borderlands — La Frontera: The New Mestizo (1987), and by Monique Wittig in her essay “The
Straight Mind” (1980), as well as by Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which is Not One (1977), which urged
the autonomous existence of lesbians.

During the 1970s the separatist modes of lesbian theory grew, helped by the development of women’s
studies programs.

This era saw the beginnings of an attempt to integrate issues of sexuality, gender, and race.

In her powerful essay “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” (1977), Barbara Smith offered a
controversial lesbian interpretation of Toni Morrison’s Sula.

Much of this earlier work aimed to deconstruct stereotypes of lesbians as unnatural or sexless,
and to redeem a hitherto neglected tradition of lesbian thought and writing, as well as
reinterpreting “conventional” figures such as Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf.

It was underlain by certain assumptions: that there was a definable lesbian identity, and that there
was an analyzable category of lesbian experience.
 Queer Theory

 A more radical kind of approach, known as queer theory (a derisive term subversively adopted
as a positive designation), emerged in the 1990s, grounded in a Conference on Queer Theory at
the University of California, Santa Cruz.
 Queer theory was imbrued with many of the anti-essentialist assumptions of
poststructuralism, especially the undermining of any fixed sexual identity, viewing identity as
a subject position created by cultural and ideological codes.
 It more clearly emphasized sexuality rather than gender in the formation of identity.
 Indeed, the lines of allegiance were also shifted from gender to sexual orientation: lesbian
theorists now identified with the theorizing of gay men rather than with straight women.
 But much of this theory, as in work by Diana Fuss, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick, attempts
to deconstruct any absolute distinction between hetero- and homo-sexuality.

Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work Gender Trouble (1990) saw all gender as a cultural performance;
similarly, Lee Edelman’s Homographesis (1994) deconstructed the notion of gay identity; while
Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990) exhibited the operation of homophobia in the
supposedly normal system of gender.

Her earlier, vastly influential work Between Men (1985) saw a continuum between male sexual and
non-sexual relationships.

Much queer theory, such as Simon Watney’s Policing Desire (1987) and Donna Haraway’s “The
Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies” (1989), attempted to analyze the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s
and its presentation in the media.

 Other queer theorists such as Michael Moon drew attention to the “queer” attributes of what
presumed to be sexual normality.

The American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe stirred public controversy, related to government
funding for art, with his homoerotic, sadistic, and masochistic photographs which aimed to exhibit gay
sexuality.

Later gay and lesbian theory also attempted to cast attention on writers from other cultural
backgrounds such as Garcia Lorca and Yukio Mishima.

 ********* Gender theory continues to debate issues of sexuality, its relation to power
structures, and to a radically democratic agenda. **********
Gayle Rubin (b. 1949)

A feminist anthropologist, Gayle Rubin has produced influential studies of gender, her work
embracing anthropological theory, lesbian literature, sadomasochism, and feminism.

In her early essay “The Traffic in Women” (1975), she originated the expression “sex/gender
system,” which she defined as the arrangements whereby society transforms biological sexuality
into products of human activity. In other words, she saw sex - spanning gender identity, fantasy,
and notions of childhood - as itself a social product.

In a later essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” (1984), she made an
influential new distinction between gender and sexuality which highlighted the limitations of
feminism: she acknowledged that feminism was a potent theory of gender oppression.

But this must be incorporated into a radical theory of sex which explains sexual oppression (by way of
example, she points out that lesbians are persecuted not just on account of their gender but also
because of their sexual orientation).

In general, she argues in this essay that, like gender, sexuality is political, and that the modern
sexual system has been the object of political struggle.

Industrialization and urbanization have led to a reorganization of family relations and gender
roles, enabling the formation of new identities and new erotic communities (for example, gays,
and subsequently other groups such as transsexuals and transvestites in enclaves of cities such as
New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles) (LGR, 16, 34).

The emergence of these erotic communities provoked various periods of sexual panic or
repression in the 1880s, 1950s, and again in the 1980s.

This persecution from right-wing groups was both psychological, urging the damage resulting
from illicit sex (blindness, stunted growth, socialist views), and institutionalized in legislation such
as the 1885 Act, which outlawed “indecent acts” between consenting adults, or the Family
Protection Act (introduced in 1979 but never actually passed), which was a broad assault on
feminism, homosexuals, and non-traditional families (LGR, 5- 8).

It was during the early decades of the twentieth century that new erotic communities were formed,
mass-produced erotica became available, and the possibilities for “sexual commerce” expanded
(LGR, 34).
By the 1970s relatively large-scale sexual migrations had occurred, large enough to affect certain
political landscapes.

Though they were subjected to legal persecution based on the ideology that they were dangerous,
inferior, and undesirable, these new communities - gays, for example - enjoyed a new solidarity,
possessed a literature and a press, and were engaged in collective political activity.

In other words, they had a social and political identity (LGR, 17).

Rubin urges that a radical theory of sex must explain and denounce erotic injustice and
oppression.

Some of the obstacles to its formation include:

sexual essentialism, the idea - fostered by medicine and psychoanalysis - that sexuality is somehow
natural, standing above time, context, and history; sexual negativity, the idea that sexuality is a
dangerous and destructive force; and the notion of a sexual hierarchy which distinguishes between
acts that are permissible, ranging through questionable acts to those considered with extreme
contempt.

Underlying this hierarchy is the notion of a single, ideal sexuality.

Rubin urges all those who consider themselves progressive to rethink these fundamental issues of
sexuality and gender.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (b. 1950)

An American critic and poet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has produced pioneering work in the field of
gender studies, especially in queer theory.

Her major works include Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985),
Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Tendencies (1993), A Dialogue on Love (1999), and Touching
Feeling (2003).

In general, Sedgwick aims to show that the discourses of gender and sexuality, usually confined to
a narrow-ghettoized mode of analysis, are not marginal but integral to Western culture, and to
the operations of power, race, and class.

Indeed, in Between Men, she states her view, influenced by Lacan, French feminism, and
deconstruction, that all human culture is structured by the “drama of gender difference.”

This book’s focus is on male homosocial desire, as expressed especially in a series of English
novels.

HOMOSOCIAL AND HOMOSEXUAL

She defines the term “homosocial” as denoting “social bonds between persons of the same sex”.

Though this term is meant to be distinguished from “homosexual” and often denotes a kind of male
bonding which is indeed homophobic and marked by a hatred of homosexuality, she hypothesizes -
through the notion of desire - a continuum between the two terms, which has been disrupted in our
society but was intact in certain periods, as for example in ancient Greek culture.

 The brutal homophobia of our own society is tightly knit into the structure of our family, gender,
age, class, and race relations.

This situation contrasts with the relatively continuous connection between female homosocial
and homosexual bonds: there is a much more congruent connection between women loving women
and women promoting the interests of women.
Sedgwick’s basic purpose is to analyze male homosocial bonds “through the heterosexual
European erotic ethos,” and to reconcile historicist Marxist approaches, using ideology as an
analytic category, with structuralist feminist perspectives in the analysis of sexuality.

Her focus on male homosocial desire places it in the structural context of triangular heterosexual
desire: the rivalry between two men for a woman’s love entails a stronger bond between the two
men than that of either with the woman; this bond is mediated by what Gayle Rubin calls the “male
traffic in women,” the use of the woman as an exchangeable “symbolic property’’.

 She also shows how homophobia has been a tool for manipulating male bonds and the entire
gender system, and how it interacts with divisions of class and race.

She insists that the distinction between the sexual and non-sexual is fluid, given that sexual
relations affect the distribution of non-sexual forms of power, including “control over the means of
production and reproduction of goods, persons, and meanings”.

The relationship between Male Homosocial Desire and Patriarchal Power

She argues that there is a special relationship between male homosocial desire and the structures
of patriarchal power; the status of women and gender definitions and relations is deeply inscribed in
structures, such as male homosocial relationships, that seem to exclude women (BM, 25).

Sedgwick sees the erotic triangle not as an ahistorical, Platonic form but as a construct informed
by gender, language, and class, as a register of relationships of power and meaning (BM, 27).

In general, Sedgwick’s work shows the sheer fluidity of the distinctions between homosexuality
and heterosexuality, as well as the contextual and indeterminate and contingent nature of both gender
and sexuality. What counts as “sexual” or “homosexual” can vary.
Judith Butler (b. 1956)

The American philosopher Judith Butler has contributed influentially to the study of gender, feminism,
and political and ethical theory.

Her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) is arguably the most
important book produced in the field of gender studies.

Her central argument (extending through this and many of her other works) is that what we call
gender is not an inherent fact or attribute of human nature but a performance, a cultural
performance. Her other works include Bodies that Matter (1993), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the
Performative (1997), and Giving an Account of Oneself (2005).

In Gender Trouble she takes the title of her book from the John Waters film Female Trouble, which
starred the drag queen Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead) acting the part of the heroine.

This kind of impersonation of women, says Butler, dramatizes the signifying gestures through
which gender is produced.

Butler sees herself as conducting what Foucault calls a genealogical inquiry, one that investigates
the political motivations behind assigning origins and fixed identities to the categories of gender
and sexuality, which are actually the effects of defining institutions, in this case, phallogocentrism
(the grounding of masculinist domination in absolute terms beyond debate or discourse) and
compulsory heterosexuality.

Her approach draws upon feminist, lesbian, and gay perspectives as well as on the work of
poststructuralist thinkers such as Foucault.

But the effect of her work, in deconstructing the category of woman, has been to distinguish
lesbian studies from feminism.

She argues that the very category of woman, the starting point of much feminist inquiry and
activism, is no longer stable; it is a category produced by power structures and intersects
intimately with race, class, politics, and culture.
 BODY – CULTURAL NORMS

In the most brilliant section of her book, she argues that the body itself is shaped by political forces.
Both the distinction between sex and gender and the category of sex itself presuppose that there
exists a somehow neutral body prior to its sexual signification.

Indeed, the tradition of Christianity saw the body as a non-entity, as a “profane void,” signifying
a fallen state.

Equally, Cartesian dualism (between mind and matter) saw the body as so much inert matter,
attached to the thinking essence of the human.

Even the existentialism of Sartre and de Beauvoir viewed the body as “mute facticity.”

Nietzsche and Foucault, too, saw the body as a surface or blank page on which cultural values
were inscribed.

In all these cases, materiality and the body are assumed to exist prior to signification: not only is
the body indifferent to signification, but signification (as in Descartes’ dualism) is the act of a
disembodied consciousness.

The body is simply regarded as external to the signifying process, which is the province of the
thinking mind.

Drawing on Mary Douglas and Kristeva, Butler argues that it is cultural norms that maintain the
boundaries of the body, its permeability sanctioned by the hegemonic order.

For example, homosexuality violates the kinds of permeability permitted.

Part of Butler’s argument is that taboos on incest and homosexuality have been generative
moments of the formation of gender identity along a grid of compulsory heterosexuality.
 Foucault – Regulation and the Law – Externally Imposed - Internal

Foucault helps us to see that regulation and the law are not somehow externally imposed upon bodies
that are already there, but are internal to the bodies they subjectivate, whose subjectivities they form
and motivate along given orientations.

This disciplinary production effects a false stability and coherence of gender, as a natural and fixed
identity.

But in fact, there is no organizing principle or identity underlying the acts, words, and gestures
occurring at the body’s surface: these gestures are performative and the identity they express is a
fabrication through the discourse of corporeal signs.

The “regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence” actually produces the gendered bodies that it
purports to describe objectively.

This fabrication produces the illusion of an interior core of gender, which conceals its political and
discursive origin.

In fact, the gendered body is performative, and “has no ontological status apart from the various
acts which constitute its reality”.

Butler observes that the practices of drag artists parody this notion of an original gender identity,
revealing the distinctness of anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance, dramatizing
the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity.

They do not parody any original identity but the very notion of an original.

So, the body is not a being but a surface, a signifying practice within a field of gender hierarchy
and compulsory heterosexuality.

There is no essence of gender: it is repeated acts that create the notion of gender, which is a
stylized repetition of acts.

This performative character of gender opens up performative possibilities for gender configurations
“outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality”.

In a conclusion entitled “From Parody to Politics,” Butler suggests that the instability of the
“subject” in the category of women highlights the foundational restrictions of feminist political
theory.
 The Agency – Prediscursive ‘I’ – The Determination of the ‘I’

She argues that it is wrong either to see agency as a prediscursive “I” (prior to the networks of
language, discourse, and signs) or to view the determination of the “I” by discourse as somehow
foreclosing agency.

Butler – Agency - Repetition

She reformulates agency as related to how signification and resignification work: if gender is
created by signification, by “a regulated process of repetition,” we can define agency as a
variation on that repetition.

It is only within signifying practices that we can subvert the notion of identity, signifying body
surfaces as a site of “dissonant and denaturalized performance”.

Hence the critical task is to engage in local strategies of “subversive repetition” to displace
gender norms, recognizing that there is no agency or reality beyond discursive practices.

Then, “a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old”.

Butler’s powerful critique of the notions of identity and body on which gender is constructed is
an important step toward reconfiguring the performative potential of gender.

But the connection between performance or parody and politics remains abstract.