Gender

JIANG Lulian & XU Minghao

College of Foreign Studies
November 11, 2021
 “Women” as the subject of feminism

 marginalized and distorted status quo of women in

the male-dominated culture √

 women --> the subject of feminism ?

 becoming a woman, becoming what kind of woman,
becoming the woman who named ?
 “Women” as the subject of feminism in Patriarchy

Feminist theory
Butler

• existing identity --> the category of

women

• The term women denotes a common

identity.
?
• The category of women is a coherent
and stable subject.
 “Women” as the subject of feminism in Patriarchy

• Political assumption--> a universal basis for feminsim; an identity assumed to

exist cross-culturally

• Notion --> “the oppression of women has some singular form discernible in
the universal of hegemonic structure of patriarchy or masculine domination.”

“its failure to account for the workings of gender oppression in the concrete
cultural contexts in which it exists.”
 “Women” as the subject of feminism in Patriarchy

Gender intersects with radical, class, ethnic, sexual, and religious

modalities of discursively constituted identities.

It becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and

cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained.
“Women” as the subject of feminism in Patriarchy

“In the construction of the category of women as a coherent and

stable subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender
relations? And is not such a reification precisely contrary to feminist
aims?”

把妇女范畴建构为一致的、稳定的主体，是不是对性别关系的一种不明智
的管控和物化呢？这样的物化不是正好与女性主义的目的背道而驰吗？
 “Women” as the subject of feminism in Psychoanalysis

Problem 1:
The diversity of women is ignored

Problem 2:
The concept of subject of women is a privilege in male culture.
 “Women” as the subject of feminism in Psychoanalysis

Three stages in Lacan’s Psychoanalysis

• assume the child is a boy

• Psychoanalysis can only talk about the imaginary and symbolic
stages from the boy’s point of view, but not about how the girl
goes through them
• the subject produced is in the boundary of patriarchy, but also the
subject is the male subject
 “Women” as the subject of feminism in
Juridical Systems of Power

Foucault

• juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to

represent.

• juridical subjects are invariably produced through certain exclusionary practices

that do not “show” once the juridical structure of politics has been established
 “Women” as the subject of feminism

Therefore, women can not be named and distinguished by the subject

produced by the hegemonic patriarchy or by the juridical systems of power,

because they are all exclusive.

 Sex / Gender

• sex is regarded to have biological intractability while gender is

culturally constructed.
• the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sex
bodies and culturally constructed genders.
• in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is
otherwise restricted by it.
 Sex / Gender

What is “sex” anyway? Is is natural, anatomical,

chromosomal, or hormonal?

“the distinction between sex and gender turns

out to be no distinction at all”
 Sex / Gender

Gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed

nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as
“prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on
which culture acts.
Speech Act Theory and Butler
 Speech Act Theory and Butler

Butler
• "Within speech act theory, a performative is that discursive
practice that enacts or produces that which it names."
 Speech Act Theory and Butler
Discourse produces gender.

• “It’s a girl!”

• The nurse’s utterance is a performative act that initiates and

constitutes that infant’s way of being in the world.

• The “infant-body,” which is also called “it” before it is “girl-

ed” or “boy-ed,” has no social identity. When the body is
identified as “girl,” the utterance imposes “girl-ness” upon the
body, therein interpellating the “infant”/”it” into “girl.”
 Speech Act Theory and Butler

• In the hospital, the nurse announced today that the baby

was a woman, and perhaps tomorrow she will announce in
a play that the baby is a man.

Which one is the felicitous performative?

 Derrida’s theory of “iterability”and
“citationality” and Butler

• Iterability: it means, then, that every sign is context dependent and context independent.
That is, the fit between a sign and its present/determinate meaning in context is loose, just as
the fit of the sign in context to its symbolic “code” is loose.

• Citationality: citationality is the semiotic heart of explicit performativity. The explicit

performative reanimates the grammatical structure of the citational act, interdiscursively
bringing into play multiple events that it sutures together through the very event of its
utterance. In doing so it balances the tension of iterability.
 Derrida’s theory of “iterability”and
“citationality” and Butler

• From the moment the nurse first announced that the baby was a girl, even
though the girl had acquired a gender and the girl had been “Girled,” the
process of “Girling” the girl was not complete, it must also be shaped
through the repetition of different authorities and through the
reinforcement or questioning of this naturalized result from time to time, so
that the girl acquires a relatively stable gender.
 Butler versus Traditional feminism
The first wave of feminism
It focuses on women’s suffrage and political equality for women. It is thought that
both genders are the same, so women should have the same rights as men in terms
of political rights and participation in social and public affairs. The wave’s biggest
success was the ratification of the 19th amendment which gave women the right
to vote.
The second wave of feminism
It turns to focus on the unique body-related experience of women. On the one
hand, it reveals how the patriarchy established rule with the woman’s body as the
object, and on the other hand, it discusses the subject of gender through practice
of body from the perspective of constructivism, and thus put forward the
proposition of identity politics.
Bulter
She deconstructs the traditional gender theory, always examining an uncertain
gender generated in discourse, and turned to an anti-essentialist thinking.
 Identity or Gender identity?
 Which one should be first?

It is difficult to draw specific boundaries since “persons” only become intelligible

through becoming gendered in conformity with recognizable standards of gender
intelligibility. However, this leads us to more confusion.
A. Is the identity of a person unchangeable?
B. Why only person with identity could become intelligible?
If such questions have not be well solved before the notion of “the person” within
philosophical discourse is established, there might be the “coherence” and
“continuity” between sex, gender and desire, which points to the “truth” of sex.
 Cultural matrix

 For example, we can often see such judgments.

“Male expresses masculine and female expresses feminine.”

Question: How does it come into being in understanding the category of sex?
Butler deeply explores into asymmetrical oppositions and holds that regulatory
practices generate coherent identities through the matrix of coherent gender
norms.
Cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires
that certain kinds of “identities” cannot “exist”.
 Cultural matrix

In detail, that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in
which the practices of desire do not “follow”from either sex or gender.

However, their persistence and proliferation constructs rival and subversive

forces even expose regulatory aims of that matrix.
 Main notions about regimes of power
to produce the identity concepts of sex

 Irigaray: There is only one sex, the masculine, that elaborates itself in and through the
production of the “Other”.
 Foucault: The category of sex, whether masculine or feminine, is a production of a diffuse
regulatory economy of sexuality.
 Wittig: The category of sex is always feminine under the conditions of compulsory
heterosexuality.
In all, the intention of Butler is to clarify that the category of sex depends on how the field
of power is articulated, and the sex is the substance within hegemonic language.
 Gender in metaphysics of language
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 Genealogy
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 Herculine
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 Ostensible “cause”

 The sex which is the substance within hegemonic language is regarded as“truth” of sex.

 Insistence upon the coherence and unity of the category of women

 Do not assume in advance what the content of “women” will be. They propose instead a
set of dialogic encounters by which variously positioned women articulate separate
identities within the framework of an emergent coalition.

 Failure to acknowledge the specific cultural operations of gender oppression by the

simple elaboration of cultural differences as the selfsame phallogocentrism or
compulsory heterosexuality
 Essence of gender performativity

 There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is

performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.

 The substantive effect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the

regulatory practices of gender coherence.

 It is the constant performative actions that leads to the repeated stylization of the body,
gradually constructing the relatively internal coherence and continuity of gender beings.

 Gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of free floating attributes. It is not a being, but
is always a doing. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and
resignification.Even when gender seems to congeal into the most reified forms, the
“congealing” is itself an insistent and insidious practice.
 Homosexual desire

 The emergence of homosexual desire transcends the categories of sex, contests that
“sex” as a mark, even can erase or obfuscate it.

 Bodily pleasure is not inevitably limited to penis and vagina. But when culture
repeatedly identifies these organs as the source and location of sexual pleasure, other
areas of the body tend to fall silent.

 She calls for an alternative economy of pleasures and a specifically feminine form of
erotic diffusion, understood as a counterstrategy to the reproductive construction of
genitality.
 Homosexual desire ?

 Sexuality and power are coextensive. There couldn’t be a subversive or emancipatory

sexuality which could be free of the law prohibitions.

 Those prohibitions are invariably and inadvertently productive in the sense that “the

subject” who is supposed to be founded and produced in and through those prohibitions

does not have access to a sexuality that is in some sense “outside,” “before,” or “after”

power itself.
 Homosexual desire ?

 Power relations continue to construct sexuality for women even within lesbianism.

For example, the “presence” of so-called heterosexual conventions within homosexual

contexts as well as the proliferation of specifically gay discourses of sexual difference, as in

the case of “butch” and “femme”.

 Homosexual desire ?

 It cannot be explained as chimerical representations of originally heterosexual identities.

And neither can they be understood as the pernicious insistence of hetero sexist

constructs within gay sexuality and identity.

 The repetition of heterosexual constructs within sexual cultures both gay and straight.

Gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy.

 The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief

the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original.

 Interpellation

 Practices of interpellation are acts of hailing or naming through which subject positions
are brought into existence.

 The famous example of interpellation is the policeman’s hailing “Hey, you there !” and
an individual’s recognition that it is he who is being hailed and then accepts the terms.
Through this “mere one-hundred-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a
subject.

 Ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects. Individuals are always-

already interpellated by ideology as subjects. In order to be a subject, one must always
have been already subjected to pre-established norms.
 Phallus in Lacan

 For Lacan, the phallus is not merely the organ, but a privileged signifier as it inaugurates
the process of signification. It anchors the system of representation and upholds the
categories of masculine and feminine.

 The primacy of the phallus in Lacan’s model of the psyche highlights a sociolingual
structure that is fundamentally male-centered. Girls, perceiving their lack, conform to the
linguistic and social prescriptions of femininity, which is constituted as the passive
negative of masculinity.

 Although Lacan undermines male authority by portraying phallic identity as ultimately

bogus, it leaves little recourse for women, who access phallic power only through
heterosexual relations.
 Lesbian Phallus
 For Butler, she essentially repudiates the phallus as an exceptional signifier. It has no
intrinsic link to the penis, can be displaced and form symbolic relationships with other
body parts, male and female. The phallus is an imaginary effect and the privileged
signifier which gains that privilege through being reiterated.

 By positing the possibility of the Lesbian Phallus, Butler’s conclusion calls for “…a
displacement of the hegemonic symbolic of (heterosexist) sexual difference and the
critical release of alternative imaginary schemas for constituting sites of erotogenic
pleasure”.

 She accedes that while the lesbian phallus is still a “fiction” it is a “theoretically useful
one” as it generates possibilities for “imitation, subversion and the recirculation of
privilege.” So she regards that a lesbian phallus is more “interesting than satisfying”.
谢谢大家！