Gender

Question 1

Two main branches of feminist criticism

Answer 1

‘Anglo-American’ (literary realism, close reading, liberal humanism with focus on historical data/non-lit material)

‘French Feminism’ (Builds on post-structuralism, deal with language, psychology, representation before dealing with literature).

Question 2

What is images of women criticism? Name some of its scholars?

Answer 2

The search for female stereotypes in male writing and criticism e.g. Mary Ellmann

Question 3

What is ‘thought by sexual analogy’?

Answer 3

Comprehending all phenomena in terms of our original, simplistic sexual difference - all forms are subsumed by our concept of male and female temperament.

Question 4

Who proposed eleven major stereotypes of femininity? give some examples…

Answer 4

Mary Ellmann - passivity, instability, spirituality compliance, irrationality, figures of the Witch and Shrew.

Question 5

What is the explosive tendency?

Answer 5

Each stereotype has a limit, after which it explodes, leading to vulgarization and reorganization of the advantage, now in fragments, around new center of disadvantage e.g. Mother stereotype slides from idol to castrating and aggressive and controlling.

Question 6

What does Simone de Beauvoir link to woman’s identity as Other?

Answer 6

Alienation to her body, particularly her reproductive capacity, which features draining physical events that tie women to their bodies in a way that men are not.

Question 7

Why did de Beavoir recognize that the decision to strengthen masculine rational faculties/critical powers, to exist as a pour-soi (a transcendent subject that constitutes her own future by means of creative projects) is anxiety-inducing for women?

Answer 7

According to de Beauvoir, women’s independent successes are in contradiction with her femininity, since the ‘true woman’ is required to make herself object, to be the Other’.

Question 8

What was the main hypothesis put forward in Betty Freidan’s ‘The Feminine Mystique’?

Answer 8

Women suffer under system of false values under which they’re urged to find personal fulfillment vicariously through husbands/children. This restricted wife-mother role usually leads to sense of unreality/spiritual malaise in absence of genuine, creative, self-defining work.

Question 9

What is ‘standpoint theory’ and who proposed it?

Answer 9

What one knows is affected by one’s subject position in society - Dorothy E Smith.

Question 10

What is ‘bifurcation of consciousness’ and who proposed it?

Answer 10

Subordinate groups are conditioned to view world from perspective of dominant group. Dorothy E Smith.

Question 11

Which two subjectivies or ‘worlds’, did Smith reflect on from her own life in the development of many of her sociological theories?

Answer 11

The dominant, masculine-orientated, ‘abstract’ world of academic and ‘concrete’ world of wife/mother.

Question 12

Who extends Smith’s standpoint theory and in what way?

Answer 12

Patricia Hill Collins, by focusing on particular epistemological standpoint of black women.

Question 13

What is matrix of domination theory and who proposed it?

Answer 13

One’s position in society is made up of multiple contiguous standpoints, rather than just one essentialist standpoint - Patricia Hill Collins.

Question 14

Why is matrix of domination not a dichotomous, top-down theory of oppression?

Answer 14

Unlike top-down models, which propose power operates from top by forcing unwilling victims to bend to will of more powerful superiors, Collins proposes that individual can be oppressor, oppressed or both at the same time, as each person derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege from multiple systems of oppression that frame everyone’s lives.

Question 15

According to Collins, on what three levels can individual resist/experience oppression?

Answer 15

Personal biography
Group/community level - race, class, gender
Systematic level of social institutions

Question 16

From which approach does French feminism move away after 1968?

Answer 16

Beauvoir’s aims at equality, which was seen as a covert attempt to force women to be like men.

Question 17

What occurs during the Oedipal crisis according to Lacan?

Answer 17

Father splits the dyadic unity between mother and rest of world, this marks entry into the Symbolic Order, which is synonymous with the acquisition of language and the Primary Repression, which in it itself leads to the opening of the unconscious.

Question 18

What is the Primary Repression?

Answer 18

Repression of the desire for Imaginary unity with the mother

Question 19

Outline the main argument put forward in Butler’s ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’

Answer 19

Assumption of lesbian identity not only affirms, but also constrains, legislates, determines and specifies identity in homophobic ways and so argues for the subversion of gender and sexual identity by destabilizing categories that make them up.

Gender is an original for which there’s no original - tries and fails to reproduce its own ideal image of itself and ‘natural’ sex/gender is only social performance and psychic scripting.

Question 20

According to both Butler’s theory of psychic mimesis and Freud’s of melancholic incorporation, how is the self/gender constituted?

Answer 20

Through differentially gendered Others, which means that gender can never be fully self-identical.

Melancholic incorporation of other as result of loss into self is what leads to self’s incapacity to achieve self-identity, as it will always be disrupted by the Other, which is the very condition of the self’s possibility.

Question 21

What is the main way in which heterosexuality naturalizes itself?

Answer 21

By setting up illusions of continuity between sex, gender and desire and placing itself as the origin of a causal sequence to which homosexuality is portrayed as a derivative, a failed mimesis.

Question 22

How does Chodorow’s ‘object relations theory’ differ from Freud’s approach to psychoanalysis?

Answer 22

Agrees that sexual orientation and gender are ‘made’ not ‘born’, but situates innate drives in context of interpersonal relations not sexuality (‘relationship-seeking’ over ‘pleasure-seeking’)

Question 23

How does gender identity form according to object relations theory?

Answer 23

Symbiotic relationship to primary caretaker and the dissolution of this relationship through differentiation and individuation.

Question 24

According to object-relations theory how does the formation of male and female gender identity diverge?

Answer 24

Boys achieve identity through separation from mother and the world of emotional intimacy that she represents and therefore have later difficulty dealing with emotions as they are seen as ‘feminizing’ and so threatening and the denial of the Oedipal love for mothers leads to misogyny.

Girls on the other hand don’t need to seperate from mother in order to achieve adult gender identity and so continue intense mother-daughter bond, this leads to unconscious desire to form attachments which means women suffer greater dependency needs, as their self-identity is tied to their relationships with others.

Question 25

Outline a biologically deterministic theory of gender difference

Answer 25

Geddes and Thompson argue gender differences are caused by metabolic state.
Women have an anabolic metabolism (conserve energy) and so are passive and uninterested in politics.
Men have a catabolic metabolism (expend surplus energy) and so are energetic and interested in social and political issues.

Question 26

Give a real life example in which a biologically deterministic take on sex differences was used to oppress women

Answer 26

1970s, advocated that women shouldn’t become airline pilots because they would be hormonally unstable once a month and so less able than men to perform duties.

Question 27

Causally constructed

Answer 27

According to social learning theory, gender is constructed through social leaning - that is, social forces play a casual role in bringing gendered individuals into existence and so gender is casually constructed.

Question 28

What was Kate Millet’s problem with gendered behavior?

Answer 28

It reinforces women’s subordinated social roles, therefore feminists should aim to diminish influence of socialization.

Question 29

What is the basis for Chodorow’s theory of gender development?

Answer 29

Women are usually primary caretaker of both genders, as mothers are more likely to identify with their daughters, they resultantly unconsciously prompt daughters not to individuate, meaning that girls develop flexible and blurred ego boundaries. Mothers are more likely to encourage sons to psychologically individuate themselves, resulting in well defined and rigid ego boundaries within males.

Question 30

What is Chodorow’s problem with current gendered personalities?

Answer 30

The play a role in women’s oppression, making women overly attentive to others needs and detriment to own and men emotionally deficient

Question 31

How does Chodorow suggest that we should counteract the oppressive nature of gendered personalities?

Answer 31

By having both males and females equally involved in parenting.

Question 32

Who proposed the theory that genders were created through eroticization of dominance and submissiveness and the resultant oppression of women caused as a result of the sexual objectification of women?

Answer 32

Catharine MacKinnon

Question 33

How did MacKinnon propose gender is constructed?

Answer 33

Constitutively constructed - in defining them we must make reference to the position they occupy in sexualized dominance/submission dynamic.

Question 34

What did MacKinnon believe would end the subordinates status of women?

Answer 34

Legal restrictions on pornography.

Question 35

Outline Butler’s normativity argument

Answer 35

In attempting to define what constitutes a ‘women’, some feminists have unwittingly implied that there is a correct way to be a women - fixing the term ‘woman’ operates as a policing force that generates and legitimizes certain experiences, while delegitimizing others.

Butler believes ‘woman’ can never be defined in a way that doesn’t prescribe some “unspoken normative requirements”

Question 36

Who coined the term ‘intelligible genders’ and what is it?

Answer 36

Genders are viewed as legitimate if they exhibit a sequence of traits in a coherent manner - sexual desire follows from orientation, which follows from feminine/masculine behaviors that follows from biological sex.

Question 37

What is meant by ‘gender core’?

Answer 37

The supposed natural progression of traits from sex to gender, to orientation, which is according to Butler an illusion created by ideals that seek to render gender uniform through heterosexism.

Question 38

Heterosexism

Answer 38

Discrimination or prejudice against homosexuals on the assumption that heterosexuality is the normal sexual orientation.

Question 39

Gender dimorphism

Answer 39

Belief that one must be either a masculine male or a feminine female.

Question 40

How does the concept of gender cores perpetuate a heterosexist social order, according to Butler?

Answer 40

They reflect a dimorphic view of gender that implies women and men are sharply opposed and therefore that it is natural to desire the opposite sex.

Question 41

Who proposed the particularity argument and what is it’s main premise?

Answer 41

Elizabeth Spelman - gender realists mistakenly assume that gender is constructed independently of race, class, ethnicity and nationality, when in fact differences in women’s background will shape their sexuality.

Question 42

Give an example of a way in which oppression of black women has differed from that of white women

Answer 42

During slavery black women were hypersexualised (always sexually available) - the rape of a black women was deemed ‘impossible’. In contrast white women were perceived by the dominant white culture to be pure and sexually virtuous - often in fact black men were wrongly accused of the sexual assault of a white women as an excuse for lynching e.g. to Kill a Mockingbird

Question 43

What is white solipsism? Give an example of a theorist accused of it

Answer 43

The assumption that all women share a common characteristic or ‘core’ of ‘womaness’ - often white, middle class western straight women have posited own gender conditioning cultural features as a metaphysical truth for women of all backgrounds, privileging women like themselves, while marginalizing the experiences of other women.

Eg Betty Friedan in ‘Feminist Mystique’ saw domesticity as main vehicle of women failing to recognize that those from less privileged backgrounds already worked outside the home.

Question 44

Quote Elizabeth Spelman in relation to her particularity argument against gender realism

Answer 44

“females become not simply women, but particular kinds of women”

Question 45

What is gender realism?

Answer 45

The idea that women all share some characteristic, feature, condition or criterion that defines their gender (it is a metaphysical take).