In addition to telling the time, it’s a geiger counter, a powerful magnet, and a saw that can slice through rope.
Halberstam argues that masculinity itself cannot be fully understood unless female masculinity is taken into account. I find this idea intriguing as we have grown up in a society that has found it difficult to acknowledge gender uncertainty and has been very ready to either ignore it, or acknowledge it in using pejorative terms such as ‘tomboy’ or ‘butch’. Empowering models of female masculinity have been neglected or misunderstood because of a cultural intolerance towards the gender ambiguity that the masculine woman represents. I agree when Halberstam says “that as a society we have little trouble in supporting the versions of masculinity that we enjoy and trust” (935) (think, Diet Coke ad all those years ago) yet a hint of “male femininity” (953) would be detrimental to the brand’s perception, I am sure.
Our perception of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when talking about gender ambiguity I think comes down to our social conditioning. Halberstam addresses the issue of tomboy-ism, which is perfectly acceptable whilst a girl is still pre-pubescent, she maintains, yet any continued foray into the world of the tomboy and the child will more than likely find herself defeated or ushered to the sidelines of peer groups.
I think Halberstam is right to address the notion that female masculinity has been widely ignored by society, perhaps because it is considered a ‘taboo’ subject within sexuality as Foucault might claim.
Certain questions that have been bothering me revolve around the idea of when a woman is considered to be masculine (either by herself or by society)? What are the boundaries? Also is there anything wrong with female masculinity? Has it been repressed because males see it as a threat to their species? I think the media is largely to blame for negativity surrounding female masculinity, but I also feel like it can encourage female empowerment with things like the ever-growing popularity of CrossFit. Images are published of ‘strong’, that is, athletically capable women, lifting more weights than men, covered in sweat yet are still able to fulfill their ‘feminine’ duties; of procreation and nurturing a child. Though, as Halberstam mentions, “when female masculinity conjoins with possibly queer identities, it is far less likely to meet with approval” (954), and I entirely agree. Yes, it is inspiring to be confronted with the image of female empowerment, but what has society done to us that when confronted with this idea of female empowerment and homosexuality that we shy away and go back to admiring Bond’s Rolex Submariner and wondering “how he is going to get out of this one?”
But What About Sex Changes?
As I progressed through the readings this week, I found a few similar themes that caught my attention – particularly this idea of binary constructions that continue to be upheld. It’s becoming clear to me that this idea is not only a common theme throughout these readings, but also throughout this entire course. These binary constructions (male/female, heterosexual/homosexual) bring about questions of power, masculinity, and the socially-defined concept of what is “natural” based on social doctrine.
One thing that surprised me throughout the readings, however, was that the concept of the sex change was not explictly discussed in any of the readings, and I thought that in Sedgwick’s analysis of how “sex” was defined as biological concept and how “gender” was primarily a social concept, it would have been interesting to see these ideas reconciled – in seeing how the “performative” act (to throw in Butler’s idea) of physically changing genders demonstrates how closely gender and sex are actually linked.
At a place I used to work, there was a man (let’s call him Robert) who came in almost every day to make purchases. The entire staff knew him well. Then, suddenly, he vanished for about three months – until one day he reappeared, sporting a dress, a noticeably larger bust, and an ID with the name “Marissa.” (This wasn’t the actual name, I’m changing it for privacy’s sake!) As we had known Robert quite well, the manager asked Marissa why she had decided to make a change, and she replied, “Because deep down, I had always felt like a woman.”
It was interesting to me that gender and sex were so closely linked for Marissa that it wasn’t enough to “feel” like a woman. Gender is indoctrinated into us in so many ways. It was one thing that Marissa decided to change the way she dressed, acted, and even her name in order to feel like she adhered to a certain gender description – these are all socially implicated ideas. But the changes that she made to her physical body breach the gap between the ideas of gender and of sex. She felt so passionately about being female that she chose a performative act that altered her sex, as the ultimate reinforcement to the gender that she had chosen.
To this I pose the question: Which is more powerful, sex or gender? And how separate can these ideas really be, when one is a constant representation of the other? Like Butler said, I think that in order to move out of this idea of “a woman must be female” and “a mean must be male,” gender perceptions to change. We need to stop focusing on what is “natural” and spread our gaze to the idea of multiple gender identities.
Gender studies!
What is sex and what is gender?
In this week’s reading one thing that stood out to me was Judith Butler discussion about sex and gender. Here she sites Beauvoir saying that s she: “Claims that “woman” is a historical idea and not a natural fact, she clearly underscores the distinction between sex, as biological facticity, and gender, as the cultural interpretation or signification of that facticity…to be woman is to have to become a woman to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of “Woman” to induce the body to become a cultural sign” (902) Here a clear distinction is made between “biological sex” (Referring only to chromosomes XX, XY because sex here does not include sexuality) and “cultural Gender” which is as the quote states a cultural and historical ideology of what a woman and also a man should be. This “cultural Gender” is not natural because as it has been mentioned you have to become a woman (or man) according to social construct. Since gender is created and molded by culture it is not static but changes through time and we can observe some of the changes it can undergo in one another reading assigned for this week which is Michel Foucault “The History of Sexuality”, here he talks about aspects that have influenced and affected sexuality. He talks about the 19th century and how religious laws and civil laws focused sexuality only with in marriage relations and how fragmentation’s of these laws gave way to characters like “Don Juan”. I think the distinction between sex and gender is important to keep in mind especially keeping in mind that gender is culturally constructed. And Kosofsky in the article “epistemology of the closet” mentions that: “She is , however, a term that extends beyond chromosomal sex. That its history of usage often overlaps with what might now more properly be called gender is only one problem.”(915) This wrongfully use of terms is dangerous in my point of view because in a way we start to think that these gender difference that are culturally constructed are somehow biologically and we might start erroneously calling them sex differences. Then Kosofsky says that gender is always put as a binary as opposites but then the question arises when talking about sex what is so different between xx and xy? This question also arises in feminist studies. There is a culturally constructed idea that male and female are different, but if we compare similarities with differences, there are a lot more similarities that differences between males and females. Yet even today when there are studies done in psychology a lot more emphasizes and even media attention given to studies that find differences between males and females compared to those that find similarities. This show how embedded these cultural constructs are in our society.
Gender studies!
What is sex and what is gender?
In this week’s reading one thing that stood out to me was Judith Butler discussion about sex and gender. Here she sites Beauvoir saying that s she: “Claims that “woman” is a historical idea and not a natural fact, she clearly underscores the distinction between sex, as biological facticity, and gender, as the cultural interpretation or signification of that facticity…to be woman is to have to become a woman to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of “Woman” to induce the body to become a cultural sign” (902) Here a clear distinction is made between “biological sex” (Referring only to chromosomes XX, XY because sex here does not include sexuality) and “cultural Gender” which is as the quote states a cultural and historical ideology of what a woman and also a man should be. This “cultural Gender” is not natural because as it has been mentioned you have to become a woman (or man) according to social construct. Since gender is created and molded by culture it is not static but changes through time and we can observe some of the changes it can undergo in one another reading assigned for this week which is Michel Foucault “The History of Sexuality”, here he talks about aspects that have influenced and affected sexuality. He talks about the 19th century and how religious laws and civil laws focused sexuality only with in marriage relations and how fragmentation’s of these laws gave way to characters like “Don Juan”. I think the distinction between sex and gender is important to keep in mind especially keeping in mind that gender is culturally constructed. And Kosofsky in the article “epistemology of the closet” mentions that: “She is , however, a term that extends beyond chromosomal sex. That its history of usage often overlaps with what might now more properly be called gender is only one problem.”(915) This wrongfully use of terms is dangerous in my point of view because in a way we start to think that these gender difference that are culturally constructed are somehow biologically and we might start erroneously calling them sex differences. Then Kosofsky says that gender is always put as a binary as opposites but then the question arises when talking about sex what is so different between xx and xy? This question also arises in feminist studies. There is a culturally constructed idea that male and female are different, but if we compare similarities with differences, there are a lot more similarities that differences between males and females. Yet even today when there are studies done in psychology a lot more emphasizes and even media attention given to studies that find differences between males and females compared to those that find similarities. This show how embedded these cultural constructs are in our society.
What I found the closet…
I decided this week to reflect on Sedgwick’s text, despite of my love for Foucault…but maybe love blinds us and my questions about Epistemology of the closet will be more accurate because I did not get it as well as Foucault’s text (Ah, Michel <3)
The first thing that I noticed was the title. Epistemology is “the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion” (Oxford Dictionary, online edition). Sedgwick’s project is to analyse the theory of knowledge that is behind the gay and lesbian representation in modern Westerner culture, its components, its structure, it’s language whether it is the spoken or the unspoken. And that is the first thing I found very interesting: Sedgwick shows that homosexuality traditionally opposed to heterosexuality is actually the same concept: one is part of the others. Inheriting from Derrida’s deconstructivist method and reading of the “differance”, she underlines that visible oppositions are actually invisible combinations: “categories presented in a culture as symmetrical binary oppositions- heterosexual/homosexual, in this case-actually subsists in a more unsettled and dynamic tacit relation according to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with but subordinated with term A; but second, the ontologically valorized term A depends for its meaning on the simultaneous subsumption and exclusion of term B; hence, third, the question of priority between the supposed central and the supposed marginal category of each dyad is irresolvably unstable, an instability caused by the fact that term B is constituted as at once internal and external to term A.” (p.913)
What really caught my attention here is that idea of a ÈtacitÈ relationship, based here on the confusion between the internal and external constitution of homosexuality in regard with heterosexuality. It is the work of a thinker and theoretician to reveal that confusion, and say explicitly the implicit i.e. the fact that homosexuality is part of heterosexuality, in order to bring awareness in the perceptions that one might have of the other. And this is the second aspect of the text that interested me, that idea that identity comes only with differentiation, and that this differentiation in society is doubled by a power dynamic and an institutional structure that validates the polarity in favour of one dominant group, term, concept.
This leads Sedgwick to emphasize in her book ” the implicit condensation of “sexual theory” into “gay/lesbian and antihomophobic theory”, which responds roughly to our by now unquestioned reading of the phrase “sexual orientation” to mean “gender of object-choice”, condensation that is” very damagingly skewed by the specificity of its historical placement.” (p.920) : the theorist shows that amongst all the sexual practices, the dominant heterosexual society has picked up on the “anal erotic salience of male homosexuality” to identify the “other sexuality”, and that it has divided sexuality in a dyadic practise, when indeed, sexuality cannot be defined as an ontological/identity status but an act with variations.
But the text, probably because it is an abstract, does not answer the puzzle first stated: the fact that ” the gender of object choice has emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, has the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of “sexual orientation”. (p.913) Why has for example “the category of “the masturbator” […] should by now have entirely lost its diacritical potential for specifying a particular of person, an identity” compared to the end of 19th century scientific attempt to classify “types of sexual individual”? (p.913) Is it because those practices of sexuality are shared by everyone and offer no grasp to the identifying heterosexual-self as a face of dominant society, to define himself by difference? therefore no possibility to identify the Other’s practise as perversion?
It got me thinking of Blue is the warmest color, Golden Palm of Cannes awarded movie that I saw at the VIFF festival. A 6 minutes very explicit sexual scene between two (female) characters obviously made the entire audience very uncomfortable. And I wonder now if it was because the scene was explicit, or if it was because it was long, or if it was because it was between two women therefore less commonly showed on screen, or if, because the entire movie is about a love story and not a lesbian love story (and we actually focus on the passion between the two characters much more than on the fact that they are women), leaving no room for differentiation, it shows a passionate sexual practice in its nudity, or genuineness? Because it projects under the audience’s eyes a passion and a drive that everyone could experience in one’s sexuality, in its irrational physical and spiritual aspect, whether one likes “same gender/sex persons” or not?
Acting out our Gender
Acting out our Gender
“The Perverse Implantation” by Foucault
The Perverse Implantation” by Foucault looks at the history of sexuality and how western culture has been narrowed down to a heterosexual couple. Foucault argues that prior to the 18th century, discourse on sexuality focused on the productive role of the married couple, which was monitored by both canonical and civil law. This reminded me of Marx when he writes of this type of ideology as “…one type of sexuality that was capable of reproduction labor power and the form of family” (898). Translated in Marxist terms, we could read this as capitalists controlling sex and sexuality in order to maintain not only control over their populous of workers, but to control the stability of their work force. In the 18th and 19th centuries, he argues, society took an increasing interest in sexualities that did not fit within this union of heterosexuals. It was this group of “sub-people” that were searched out and punished for their deviance. Legal actions against minor perversions were multiplied: sexual irregularity was annexed to mental illness. During childhood, norms are set and if one deviates the slightest from the accepted form of sexual activity, that person is alienated and looked upon as someone with a problem. The nineteenth century has been the “age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of ‘perversions'”.
Foucault notes how repression has caused a backlash into a more “perverse” and secretive society. Indeed, curiously, the powers that sought to eradicate these people, was in fact the one creating them. Foucault argues that it is through the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated modes of conduct.
I think all sexualities were seen as generally the same, until people began actively looking for and policing differences. This is the idea the power does not inhibit, but rather it produces. Instead of saying we all should adhere to n (normal), it says we should all adhere to n, but not to x, y, z etc. And it is through this definition of x, y, and z that power produces subjects that perpetuate it and resist it
From repression to multiplication: a discourse of sexuality by Foucault
As pointed out by Foucault, since the nineteen century we have witnessed a multiplication of expressions of sexualities, especially of irregular sexualities, ranging from homosexuality who has certainly earned and developed its own discourse, to the once taboo topic: the sexuality of children, in short, all the forms of perverse sexualities that had been repressed by conventions or by law up until then. But Foucault refuses to consider this outburst of once condemned expressions as a “outbreak” caused by the rigidity of repressions, but rather the result of the change in the type of power that exercises on the body and on sex.
According to Foucault, the emergence of the discourses on these peripheral sexualities was conditioned by a change of power. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the discourse of sexuality had centred on matrimonial relations and this was the result of the governing of laws: “canonical law, the Christian pastoral, and civil law” (893). These laws marked any deviation from this centre as abominable and prohibited: debauchery as a sin, incest as a crime, sodomy as a “general unlawfulness”, etc. However, since the nineteenth century, this power mechanism, which was once mainly enforced by laws and sought to eliminate any irregular sexualities, began to change as medicine, pedagogy and psychoanalytic therapy came into its disposal. This new form of power began setting up even closer surveillance on sexuality as they exposed and specified the peripheral sexualities.
Moving away from simple prohibition which clearly has not been able to fulfill the task, new operations have been put into place: “lines of penetration”, “incorporation of perversions”, “specification of individuals” and “devices of sexual saturations”. Instead of clear barriers, indefinite lines of penetration have been constructed by educators and doctors so that the child’s sexuality is always been monitored; instead of juridical incrimination, the psychological, psychiatric and medical category of homosexuality has been incorporated into the discourse: the homosexual has become a specified life form with recognizable traits of morphology and physiology; instead of the symbol of matrimonial relations, the family milieu has become a “complicated network, saturated with multiple, fragmentary, and mobile sexualities” (897). So the characteristic of this new form of power is that it ceased to eliminate the human sexuality to a single form, and that by allowing multiplication of singular sexualities it is able to exercise and assert itself on a larger scale, to gain pleasure from this exercise of monitoring, specification and even inciting, hence the “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure”. So if we were to think that the multiplication of unorthodox sexualities in modern societies is the result of the weakening of power, Foucault’s analysis testifies that they are the new centres of power which never cease to loosen its control.
