Gender Trouble: Chapter Two

Round two. Here we go.

Theorists to know

Engels: attempts to locate the historical structures that originated gender-based oppression

Levi-Strauss: his nature/culture distinction lead to speculations of a natural woman/constructed woman binary (i.e. sex vs. gender)

Riviere: homosexual men wear a mask of exaggerated heterosexuality to conceal his femininity from himself; masculine women wear a mask of femininity to conceal her desire from the (punishing)male gaze

Rose: we use heterosexual desire to divide the genders; gender identity is then undermined and subverted by repressed sexuality

Lacan: language is insufficient to express repressed desires;

Foucault:

Rubin: with queer sexualities becoming more prominent, the potential to chuck gender identities increases

Key terms

introjection

Key Ideas

1. the attempt to conceptualize a historical matriarchy only serves to perpetuate the myth of a natural womanhood

2. within a structuralist system, women become objects of exchange that act as relational terms for their male exchangers. their lack of identity reaffirms the masculine identities.

3. Lacan asserts that men "have" the phallus (are subjects with desire) and women "are" the phallus (are objects which are desired). this situates men as subjects and women as extensions of the subject (by symbolizing the man's desire, subjectivity, and autonomy. it makes more sense to think of "are" as "are for." Because the ideals perpetuated by the "have-phallus" and "being-phallus" are predicated on a phantasm/ideal, their identities must fail as we try to fuse the binary.

4. the taboo of incest solidifies gender identity through one of two options: 1) the child rejects and deflects the opposite parent and internalizes the same parent's identity or 2) the child forfeits their relation to their same parents and consolidates external ideas about gender into one identity. these taboos are what create the mainstream identity.

5. language is a structure. language both constructs limits of identity but limits of identity also construct language. consequently, there may be multiple "laws" that are informing the perception of gender. the body becomes another symbol/text that language interprets but which also limits language.

6. desire and repression of desire (e.g. taboos) provide an opportunity for juridical systems to consolidate power. for the dominant identity to exist, there must be suppressed or prohibited identities.

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