Understanding Gender, Identity Politics, and Foucault's Insights on Sexuality
Explore the evolution of the concept of gender, the significance of identity politics in social movements, and Foucault's groundbreaking perspectives on the historical construction of sexuality. Delve into the distinctions between sex and gender, the impact of marginalized identities in political actions, and the transformative narratives around sexuality and repression in modern society.
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Gender 1) Grammatical term, referring to the classification of nouns (in languages including Latin, French, and German) as masculine, feminine, or neuter. It is derived from the Old French term for genre which, in turn, derives from the Latin genus, meaning birth, family, or nation, but also referring back to older and broader meanings such as kind or type. 2) The other use of gender, to refer to the (human) state of being male or female, also dates back to the fourteenth century, but it s not until the twentieth century that the latter usage becomes common. 3) In the late twentieth century, thanks largely to the influence of feminism, gender tends to be distinguished from sex, with the former seen as referring to the culturally attributed characteristics associated with being a woman or a man, and the latter viewed as a matter of nature or biology.
Identity Politics Identity politics involves joint political action by individuals who feel themselves united by membership in a marginalized social category (ethnicity, gender, class, religion) that gives them common political interests. Many scholars equate the term with the tendency to treat social identities as both predetermined and unchanging as well as with a simple-minded view of politics shaped by such essentialist views of social agents. BUT: identity politics has been the basis of some of the most progressive social movements in history, especially in modern times.
Foucault: History of Sexuality The Will to Knowledge (La volont de savoir, 1976), The Use of Pleasure (L'usage des plaisirs), and The Care of the Self (Le souci de soi, 1984), Confessions of the Flesh (Les aveux de la chair, 2018). Sexuality has a history: an erotic practice or preference has not always, everywhere, been assumed to have the same significance; sexuality , as we think of it today, is an invention of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, produced by specific techniques for eliciting confession about individual desires and classifying and interpreting what was disclosed.
Foucault 2 Counterintuitive: commonsensically, sexuality is biological, genetic, psychological, deep- rooted, individual, private and defining; it is ours . The repressive hypothesis: while covering up piano legs, the Victorians were also producing the most extraordinarily detailed statements about their own, and other people s, sex lives. To which labels were given, creating a classificatory and disciplinary division between the norm and the perverse .
Foucault 3 The waning of the influence of the church in modernity and the concomitant rise of clinic-based sexology and, later, psychoanalysis (the talking cure replaces confession). Sexology took as its principal object the study of the sexually sick : modern sex stopped being simply a matter of acts (sanctioned or sinful) that one carried out, and became instead a means of identifying individuals and groups within the population, via the inscription of sexuality in diagnostic medical discourse. The sexual scientists of the nineteenth century did not invent techniques and methods for uncovering the hidden truths about sex; rather they produced sexuality as a new category of knowledge.
Foucault 4 As well as making it possible to introduce social controls into this area of perversity [. . .] it also made possible the formation of a reverse discourse: homosexuality began to speak on its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or natural status be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified .
Foucault 5 Western scientia sexualis vs. Eastern ars erotica: in Eastern erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself and techniques of bodily pleasure are the only features of sex that are sought and refined vs. Western insistence on finding the underlying motivation for individual sexual behaviour and producing techniques to pathologise and treat the sexually sick . Maybe an orientalist simplification, but it expresses F s sense of a move from sex discourse based on pleasure to one of the control and organisation of populations.
Sexology nineteenth century: psychoanalysis and sexology Sexology: pseudo-scientific investigations of sexual behaviour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886); Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman (1894); Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1903) Causal relationship btw. sexual desire and gender. Non-heterosexual sexual practices or desires tend to be associated with forms of gender dysmorphia.
Sexology 2 Krafft-Ebing: of female homosexuality as the masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom, uranism may nearly always be suspected in females wearing their hair short, or who dress in the fashion of men . Ellis: women are characterized by a certain docility and receptiveness, possessed of an emotional nature and a tendency to suggestibility, less able than men to stand alone .
Sexology 3 The outcome of such characterizations is a vision of maleness and femaleness as opposed and complementary, interdependent in their definitions. Weininger : The ideas man and woman cannot be investigated separately; their significance can be found out only by placing them side by side and contrasting them .
Of one flesh Until at least the middle of the eighteenth century the human body was conceived as being of one flesh possessing both male and female sexual organs. The humoral theories of the Renaissance period, for example, suggest that women possessed the same sexual organs as men, only internal rather than external to the body, due to women lacking the heat that was necessary to push those organs outwards. Freud: the distinction between the sexes has no firm basis in either biology or psychology: a certain degree of anatomical hermaphroditism occurs normally, and in every normal male or female individual, traces are found of the apparatus of the opposite sex, suggesting that both men and women possess an originally bisexual physical disposition .
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1992) Not only did the idea of sex not always exist, but before about 1800 in Europe bodies were seen in radically different ways from those we take for granted. Far from our ancestors living in a world in which sex was a fundamental reality given by biology, the primary reality for them was a divine order, an order in which bodies were oddly insubstantial things. Women s and men s bodies in pre-Enlightenment accounts are indices of a metaphysical reality. The disposition of organs shows a mutability which would simply provoke incredulity in us: a girl chasing her swine suddenly springs an external penis and scrotum; men associating too much with women lose the more perfect hardness of their bodies and regress towards effeminacy
Laqueur 2 Rather than bodily morphology providing evidence of an underlying biological reality, it merely makes vivid and more palpable a hierarchy of heat and perfection that is in itself not available to the senses . The one-sex model described woman as a lesser version of man. Men would, in Christian theology, have been placed below the diverse orders of the angels, but above the whole of the animal kingdom. What emerges after the Enlightenment to replace this view is the notion, familiar to us, of a fundamental polarity between the sexes based upon discoverable biological differences: No longer would those who think about such matters regard woman as a lesser version of man along a vertical axis of infinite gradations but rather as an altogether different creature along a horizontal axis whose middle ground was largely empty .
Laqueur 3 What is also marked after 1800 is that bodies are being thought of in a different way, as the foundation and guarantor of particular sorts of social arrangements. no one was much interested in looking for evidence of two distinct sexes until such differences became politically important . Sex is a motivated invention born of gender: inextricable link between the ways in which bodies are imagined and the political and cultural imperatives of gender. The body does not automatically give itself to be interpreted in this or that particular way: Two sexes are not the necessary, natural consequence of corporeal difference. Nor, for that matter, is one sex .
Judith Butler (b. 1956) Ways in which we become subjects: subjectivation (particularly in the imposition of gender and of heterosexuality). Gender is performative: certain acts and gestures are not expressive of an already existent, essential, stable, coherent gender, but rather work to produce the effect of a coherent gender. Speech Act: a verbal utterance that makes something happen. When a minister or judge says, I now pronounce you husband and wife, this statement changes their legal status. A speech act, also called an illocutionary act, can be a statement, command, question, or promise; it is a communication that follows certain rules and that assumes certain relations between the speaker and the listener.
Butler 2 Speech acts are described in J. L. Austin s How to Do Things with Words (1962), and in the works of John R. Searle, including Speech Acts: And Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969) and Expression and Meaning: Essays in the Theory of Speech Acts (1979). The non-naturalness of gender and even more radically of the gendered body, the production of gender via the repetition of certain acts, gestures, etc., and the regulatory frame within which all of this takes place. Gender: one of the ways in which the subject is regulated or controlled, but the reliance of gender upon repetition opens up some small possibility of resistance.
Butler 3: Drag Drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself as well as its contingency . The parodic imitations of gender identity that drag artists perform paradoxically reveal that there is no original gender to be imitated; indeed, all gender is based on practices of imitation, repetition, and re- enactment.
Masculinity studies Relatively new (from the late 80s). To be distinguished from men s rights movements. Similar to that of other gender studies to analyse and appreciate the individual and socio-historical- cultural formations over universal norms the reason is different. While women have been obscured by being too much in the background, men have been obscured by being too much in the foreground (Harry Brod). The normative (in terms of gender, sexuality and race is invisible (kings, superheroes).
Masculinities Men s studies seeks to explode the myth that men in general benefit from patriarchy, and celebrates a multiplicity of masculine identities over socially imbedded stereotypes. Crisis in masculinity: changes in employment, the family, and the gender order and which together are constituted as a more general crisis. These might include health-related indicators - high male rates of ulcers, suicides, hypertension, heart attacks, and even earlier deaths, including suicide, educational under-performance, and criminal or anti-social behaviour.
Masculinities 2 In Britain: new laddism , a positive endorsement of some of the practices of young men, including alcohol consumption, rejections of school or work-based values, sexism, as part of an overall male backlash against the rising presence of women in many areas of social life and against feminism in particular. The fields of interest now considered under the umbrella of men s studies include: the body, sport, sex, family (particularly fathering), military service, representations of masculinity in culture and art, violence against women, and masculinity in institutions.
Hegemony Hegemony describes the kind of cultural power wielded by the dominant ideas of a culture or society; it derives from the Greek hegemon, meaning leader or dominant force. The term is associated primarily with Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937, Italian neo-Marxist philosopher), who discusses how ideologies are produced and disseminated within a capitalist culture. Gramsci makes a distinction between ideologies produced and enforced by the state, which are directly shaped by the interests of the ruling classes, and ideologies produced through civil society, through forms of representation that are not directly and overtly connected to state control. The ideologies produced and circulated within civil society create a worldview that becomes popular and pervasive; rather than being identified with the ruling class, these ideologies establish hegemony in being adopted and enacted by most of the population.
Hegemonic masculinity R. W. Connell: the currently most honoured way of being a man, requir[ing] all other men to position themselves in relation to it Based on Antonio Gramsci s theory of cultural hegemony: a ruling class maintained its legitimacy without force. Connell: Ascendancy which is embedded in religious doctrine and practice, mass media content, wage structures, the design of housing, welfare taxation policies and so forth.
Queer Theory and Transgender Studies Gender crossing, passing, gender bending, transvestism, transgenderism, and unintelligible genders all non-normative practices or presentations of gender. Annamarie Jagose has defined queer as describing those gestures or analytical models which dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire, and as focusing in particular on mismatches between sex, gender and desire . Celebrates the liberation of gender identity from an implied compulsory desire (unlike sexology).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009) Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985): male social relationships often also conceal latent homoerotic desire. Thus, the homoerotic is ever present, even within conservative patriarchal structures. A minoritizing view of homosexuality and a universalizing view coexist in our society. The minoritizing view is the idea that because only a small segment of the population is gay, attitudes and legislation that have an impact on homosexuality affect relatively few people (a fixed notion of sexuality). The universalizing view is the idea that sexuality is fluid, or perhaps contagious, and that homosexuality is therefore a threat to the heterosexual norm. This latter view can also be expressed more positively as an understanding that everyone is in some way influenced by same-sex relationships, whether they be homosexual or homosocial.
