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Welcome once again to NPTEL, the National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning, a
joint venture by the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science.
As you are aware, these lectures are being recorded under the broad title of Cultural
Studies.
We are today, in the last lecture of our second module, which has been devoted to key concepts
in the field, field of cultural theory and you will recall that, we looked at a few,
a few key concepts like subjectivity, identity, ideology, power, representation, discourse
and gender..
On some occasions, we also devoted more than 1 lecture to a few topics, for instance, ideology,
representation and today we are in the second lecture devoted to the key concept gender.
You will also recall that, this module which I said, has been devoted to concepts. You
will also recall that, in the very beginning of this module, we said that, concepts may
be defined as ideas and which has a certain degree of abstractions. Concepts are tools.
They are units of knowledge or of meaning and as I said, a certain degree of abstraction
or abstractness, if you will, is always desirable, when we talk about concepts.
Why? Because they have, they would have to be applicable to different situations. Only
when they are of a certain degree of abstractness, can these be applied to understand or analyze
certain cultural situations.
So, what did we do in the last lecture? In the lecture we, I had said that, in the first
lecture on gender, I would be looking or we would be talking about more or less a traditional
way of how gender, sex, gender and sexuality have been studied in the humanities and within
that, we saw that sex was seen as something biological, something to do with our reproductive
functions and our reproductive activities.
On the other hand, gender was seen to be something that, tried to go beyond reductionist approaches,
in this case, sex was seen as simply biological and hence reductionist, an effort to dealing
the biological and the social and to argue for socio-political determinants. We also
saw that, patriarchy was seen as a political institution by a critics writing in the 60s
and 70s like Kate Millett, for instance, in her well known book *** Politics.
Then, we also saw that, gender in cultural studies, has to be related to other concepts
like power, subjectivity, consumption, the formation of identities, certainly representation,
popular culture, etcetera. Then we talked about masculinities, because usually it is
seen that, whenever we talk about gender, they, you know, there is a tendency to talk
about women, to talk about feminism, ok.
But, we said that, we would look at masculinities for a change, and we saw that, some of the
points that have been made by critics, for instance, R. W. Connell in Masculinities and
Globalization, talks about gender on a large scale, on a global scale, which is masculinities
that are determined by the state, by international relations, international trade and global
markets, etcetera, which forms a discourse of masculinities, which sees masculinity as
based, or as determined or, you know, so to speak, whose foundation is that of reason,
distance, independence and control, which in turn, seem to give rise to certain tendencies
like lack of emotional communication, sometimes wearing towards self destruction, through
addiction, violence, etcetera.
So, let me quickly refer to the key, you know, key source texts, some of the key source texts
that, are, we will be using in the current lecture on gender and these are Critical and
Cultural Theory by Dani Cavallaro. This lecture is on certain developments in the field of
gender and which, which we today call post-feminist and you know, informed by a post-structuralist
approach. There are several critics here that, you know,
several writers, several theorists we could bring to bear upon our discussion, but, owing
to, you know, certain limitations that, this is only, you know, we are going to, talking
about this only through 1, 1 lecture, I have brought in Judith Butler, who is today reputed
to be one of the best proponents or, you know, she is an exemplar of this kind of theorizing
about gender. So, at least 2 of her books, Gender Trouble
and Bodies that Matter and few insights given by Sarah Salih and Angela MacRobbie. So, I
would also of course,, refer to a, quickly to Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish.
Well, as you know, we will be now looking at gender through a post-enlightenment, if
you look at this slide here, post-enlightenment approach. The enlightenment which happened
in Europe, following the growth of science and the growth of technology, gave us, as
we know, when we did our lectures on some, some of the theoretical schools like structuralism
etcetera, Marxism, gave us, what the critics of enlightenment thought, call, grand narratives,
ok. Grand narratives like Marxism, grand narratives
like science or religion, which gave us, you know, which saw or it was knowledge based,
among other things on certain binaries. Now, post-enlightenment thinking, which is essentially,
you know, which essentially boils down to post-structuralism, to post-modernism, seeks
to sort of see through these boundaries, ok. Post-enlightenment thinking, particularly,
beginning with Nietzsche and then followed by, you know, by Michel Foucault, Derrida
etcetera, breaks these binaries, for instance, the sex slash gender binary, which is, which
is the, you could say, the bedrock of traditional feminism, you know, talking about women, women's
rights and differentiating between sex and gender is here problematized by, by critics
like Judith Butler and the rise of *** studies. If you look at the slide here, the rise of
*** studies which, you know, looks at the history of cultural representation of marginalized
groups, marginalized groups which do not follow any normative, you know, sexuality, we do
not follow any normative way of life, ok.
So, this problematisation that I was talking about, and let me quickly read from this slide,
there is a problematisation as I had said before, of the sex gender dichotomy, where
sex was seen as biological and gender was seen as social, under this, this very dichotomy
and we shall see, how it has been problamitized or this binary rendered untenable in today's
world. Second, the importance of representation in
*** identity. Then discussion on discourse and gender, where it is held quite radically,
that biological truths are not given truths. Biological truths, the description of sex,
description of the first part of the binary which was, many thought was reductionist,
which we know, reduce itself to, to the body, to the body, to, you know, to biology, is
seen in this new wave, you know, of gender studies, as something that you can access
only through discourse, something that is constructed through language. This of course,,
leads many to, sort of prematurely jump, you know, to, to jump to a conclusion or jump
to a counter argument, that, you know, how can sex be just a linguistic construct. They
are not denying the reality of the biological body, but, the description of sex vis a vis
gender, the description is not, you know, something that you can access without discourse.
That is the point being made. It is not to deny the materiality or the presence of the
body. Number 4 - this problematisation entails also,
the, the function of regulatory ways of speaking in the formation and determination of sexed
bodies. Now, the, this is related to point number,
point number 3, in the sense that, the, we, the point number 3 says that, biological truths
are accessed through discourse. Point number 4 says that, even this discursive accessing
of biological truths are done, you know, in regulatory ways, 'This is the way you can
talk about these biological truths' are also, are also monitored and determined, ok.
So, the, the talking about sexed bodies, whether male, whether female or, you know, of any
kind of sexed body, is also controlled by discourse.
So, these are some of the ways in which theorists like Butler, you know, in their, you know,
very famous works like Gender Trouble, have brought to our notice. This is what Butler
says. Butler, according to Butler, gender is not our only identity, this is extremely
important, we are known so often, it is also often the socio-cultural practice, also, sometimes
a linguistic practice, of first identifying somebody only in terms of whether they are
male or female, only in terms of their, you know, behaviors as masculine or feminine or
as may be, you know, what they call as being the behavior of tomboys or tomgirls, if you
will. So, she says, the gender is, is certainly
not our only identity; we are partakers of different kinds of domains and we both, as
she says, we both belong to and not belong to particular discourses. So, that no discourse
has, you know, we have to understand that, no discourse, no discourse actually has a,
actually has full control over us, ok. So, this very undecidedness or even undecidability
of who we are of our identities, you will recognize as a definite poststructuralist
move, where even sex and gender are problematized and we say that, we do not belong to, you
know, or we are not partakers of their discourses all the time. There are many different aspects
to us, where, in which gender, is not such an important variable.
Second, a very important statement, she says here, gender is always a failure. Note this,
gender is always a failure... an accumulated fact of social relations, that have become
naturalized, look at this word, naturalized over time. How is gender a failure? Gender
is a failure because, we, as you know, this is related to the first point, we are over
and above the discourses of gender, ok. So, it is not that, gender is, you know, played
out by us all the time, under all situations. And, it is only a fact, in that, it is made
by social relations and it is a fact, which is not to given, but, has been, as she says,
naturalized over time.
Then, in, in the next slide, she also calls gender, not simply a failure, not something,
it is, that is meant possibly, so to speak, naturalized, she also refers to what is called
the illusion of gender and I am reading from Butler, the effect of gender must be understood
as the mundane ways in which bodily gestures, movements and styles of various kind, constitute
the illusion of an abiding gendered self. So, if according to Butler, if one thinks
that, one has a gendered self, which is forever, which is an abiding one, which is a lasting
one, she says that, one is perhaps terribly mistaken. There is, what she calls, these
habits of behavior, which, which she calls the bodily gestures, the movements and styles
of various kinds, is only an illusion of gender that we, that we have.
And, secondly, and secondly, the important point here is, this way of thinking is a critique
of what we call traditional feminism.12:58 PM 5/10/2013 12:58 PM 5/10/2013 12:58 PM 5/10/2013
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Next, she also says that, the, the working out of one's *** identity is actually fraught
with anxiety. This is the word she uses on *** anxiety.
She says that, sexuality is to be a certain, you know, or to be a certain gender need not
mean possessing a certain sexuality. It may even mean non-sexuality, sexuality. We always
try, you know, we always look at behaviors, as you know, its many markers, whether it
be of dress or ways of walking or ways of talking, gestures by, you know, made by your
hand, etcetera, we are always looking, you know, at them as markers, as certain kind
of sexuality. But Butler says, a - there is no, you know, there is, so to speak, there
is no benchmark on, you know, sexuality there are many, many, in fact, many sexualities,
ok. It is only, you know, femininity, as is represented
perhaps by, you know, by certain markers in, for instance, in popular culture, in films,
in television, in, you know, in glossy magazines for instance, ok, which create the illusion
of a sort of benchmark of femininity, or also of masculinity.
But she says, well, there is no, you know, there is only illusion that is created by,
by representation and she also has this important point that, it may even mean non-sexuality,
ok. So, the markers that we have, may be something
that is read by people, since they are culturally trained, but, it may also,metimes mean or
suggest, you know, the possibility of non-sexuality. Next, she says, there will be anxiety about
gender as identity and practice, is created by regulatory practices.
Now, that, you know, because we live in a culture, because we live in certain discourses,
before, because we live in so many, you know, in a, you know, in a, in surroundings or in
an environment where there are, so, you know, so many cultural objects, so many things,
that sort of remember, Altrusa says, beckoning or, you know, interpolating, calling us to
how 'hey this is the way you should look like' or 'this is the ultimate, you know, feminine,
you know, thing to do, if you want to be feminine', ok.
So, she says that, there is always an anxiety in people to, to sort of not just simply to
live up to those benchmarks or normative markers, but, also how to grapple, how far to, you
know, to actually spend one's, one's energies, how often to, you know, try and meet, so to
speak, those standards. So, there is anxiety about gender as identity,
since it is created by certain regulatory practices, of how you are to look or behave
in a, you know, if you are in a certain, if you want to be identified as belonging to
a certain gender. Then she says there is a fear of loss of identity of no longer, as
she says, no longer belonging to an accepted sexuality, ok.
So, both anxiety and there is also fear of say, the loss of one's sexuality, if you are
not going by those markers, you may be, you know, called say, manly women or a womanly
man. So, there is always, because of this regulatory practices, because of this, you
know, standards, so to speak, which are actually illusions, that have been, have been set in
society by regulatory practices. Gender is a difficult, difficult term. It is a difficult
business, in keeping up with those markers.
Then she, you know, we learn that, there, therefore, there are multiple modes of femininity
and masculinity. There is no one way of being feminine or masculine. There are multiple
modes, which are potentially enactable. We may not enact them for fear of, as she says,
or for anxiety or for fear of losing one's gender identity. Nevertheless, it does not
do away with the important fact that, there are potentially many ways in which gender
may be enacted, ok, each of which is, so to speak, a legitimate one, in its own right.
Therefore, sex and gender are malleable. Sex and gender are changeable. Sex and gender
or both, sex and gender are fluid. So, you, you see here, the shift from talking about
gender as fluid and sex as a given, as fixed, to both as being malleable, changeable, fluid
and not to given. This is a very important shift in the post-feminist and fear movement.
Cavallaro, you know, comments on Butler's work in this way and I am reading straight
from his, you know, straight from his book, Critical and Cultural Theory. Cavallaro's,
you know, opinion is this - Butler argues that gender is performative. This is perhaps
one of the most important words in post-feminism, particularly as propounded by, you know, Judith
Butler, which he says that gender is not to given, all right, but, we also have to understand
it, how much further, by looking at gender as performative.
This, I think, if you, if you have to zoom in on one word, which is one of the foremost,
important contributions in this field, that, this word is that, of performativity. Judith
Butler, Cavallaro here, Judith Butler argues that gender is performative. This implies
that a person's gendered identity is produced through performance and role playing, ok.
This is not, so that, we would say that this is non-ontological, right. It is performance
and as he says next here, the word repetition, performance being repeated several times that,
instantiates that, that behavior as masculine or feminine.
So, Cavallaro again, repetition plays a vital part in this process, for it is by performing
certain acts repeatedly, that the individual acquires an apparently coherent identity.
Look at the word here, apparent. The individual by, by repeating, you know, accepted or acceptable
or even, you know, desired gender practices with their relevant markers, begins to believe
that he or she has a stable or coherent gendered identity.
On the other hand, the reality is that, it is only because of these repetition or reiteration
of certain performances or, you know, as you know, gender performances, that we have this
illusion of a coherent, stable, gendered self and gendered behavior.
So, repetition, again, repetition plays a vital part in this process, for it is by performing
certain acts apparently, sorry, repeatedly, that the individual acquires an apparently
coherent identity. Repetition, moreover, is dictated by what a particular culture, this
is, what we have already talked about, repetition of what, if you ask, reputation of what and
I, just a while ago, I had said that, you know, what is desired, right, what is expected.
So, repetition is dictated by what a particular culture expects of its members, by dominant
ideologies and by ways of organizing *** behavior, ok.
So, gender performativity hinges, and this is another important word, on reiterative
practice of regular *** regime. So, it looks like, we have all sort of, you know,
have this, you know, you know, interpellation by, by ideology, by dominant ways of organizing
*** behavior that, this is, you know, how a particular gender behavior should finally,
arrive at.
Therefore, to summarize this quickly, according to Butler, gender is performative, that is,
it is non-ontological, it is a matter of performance and role playing, which is instantiated by
repetition and reiteration, by what? By the ideologies of *** regimes.
Now, I am quoting straight from Butler, I think this is from her book Gender Trouble,
'the category of sex is, from the start, normative, normative in the sense of laying down certain
rules or norms of behavior. Normative also, you know, in the sense of
normal. What is normal is always prescribed, something that is not, you know, something
that does not fall from the heavens. These are codes that are normalized by repeated
use and by, you know, the dominant ideologies. Now, she brings in Foucault here, 'the category
of sex is, from the start normative; it is what Foucault has called a 'regulatory ideal'.
This is the, in an ideal, that has to be reached, through, you know, through certain regulations.
This is the ideal way of, say behavior or having markers, etcetera, of behavior. In
this sense then, sex not only functions as a norm, but, is part of our regulatory practice
that produces the bodies it governs. Now, this is very important, ok.
This is how the body is produced. Sex not only functions as a norm, but, is part of
a practice that produces the bodies. This is where the, the poststructuralist element,
you know, in, in looking at sex, also as socially constructed, comes in. It seems to, when you
first look at it, seems to, because you are so attuned to the traditional way of looking
at the binary of sex versus gender, ok. That it, it, at first is difficult to accept
it, but, you begin to understand that, these are the ideologist, the regulatory practices,
that, you know, the bodies are produced by. Again, let me, you know, reiterate, it is
not that, we do not have the kind of bodies that we have, the kind of gendered bodies
that we have, but, the, you know, the bodies also are produced by dominant discourses.
This is, you know, when you write about bodies, when you talk about bodies, it is through
language and it is through discourse. This is a very valuable contribution of post-feminism.
That is, those regulatory force, sorry, whose regulatory force is made clear, as a kind
of productive power, the power to do what? The power to produce, demarcate, circulate,
differentiate the bodies it controls. More about this will be, you know, we will have
to unpack this a bit, as we go on.
Thus, sex is a regulatory ideal, whose materialization is compelled through certain highly regulated
practices. In other words, sex, therefore, is, an ideal construct, construct of the discourses
of regulatory practices, that tell you that, there is a, you know, that, that is there
is, as Foucault says, a regulatory ideal to be achieved.
So, again in Bodies that Matter, Butler writes, now this is, I am quoting from Bodies that
Matter, 'I began writing this book by trying to consider the materiality of the body only
to find that the thought of materiality invariably moved me into other domains', ok.
So, Bodies that Matter, now matter, of course,, you can, you know, understand that, it is
a play on matter. Matter has bodies that are important, as bodies that matter, something
that matters and also materiality, because this is the play in, you know, on the word,
term matter here. So, she says that, while, you know, while
trying to explore the body and its materiality, the body has a material form. She, she says
that, while exploring it, I found that I, I know this led me to many other domains,
so much so that, let us look at the next sentence that she says here, 'I tried to discipline
myself to stay on the subject, but, I found that I could not fix bodies as simple objects
of thought'. So, she, you know, there is a realization, you know, obviously, here, that
one could not speak even of the materiality of the body, without running into problems,
without, you know, there is no simple way of talking about bodies even, you know, as
material entities.
Bodies therefore, move beyond these boundaries of biology. This is a first point. That is
why, there is a need to question those very boundaries, that bound, so to speak, bound
one discourse off from another, that bracket of one discourse from another, ok.
Now, we again look at the, you know, look at the topic of, you know, the body of, the
sexed body. Then we find that, we have to move, you know, the question, the very boundaries
of what it means to be, not masculine, feminine gender, but, also, what it means to be male
and female, from a biological point of view. And therefore, as she says, there has to be
resistance to the fixing of the subject, the fixing of the gendered and the sexed subject.
Now therefore, you by now, you, I am sure have realized that, there is the definite
shift from Simone de Beauvoir to Judith Butler, but, Butler in her book Gender Trouble acknowledges
the indebtedness to, to Simone de Beauvoir's the Second Sex, you remember, the famous quotation,
one is not born but, becomes a woman, which by Simone de Beauvoir, and this, she, she
further, you know, she, she gives a twist to the term becoming. So, she says that, yes,
one is not born a woman, but, becomes one, which is Beauvoir terms, but, she sees becoming
as, you know, not an end. She sees in a typical poststructuralist way. She says the process
of becoming a woman. So, in this case, even man has one that is endless, or you could
even say in Derridan terms, one that is endlessly deferred.
So, you never reach the full meaning of being a man or a woman. You never reach the full
potential of being, so to speak, masculine or feminine. Why? Because, the construction
of masculinity and femininity or even of male and female, are never givens and they change
for time, from time to time, from époque to époque, ok
And that is why, you know, she says, a mode of becoming, a mode of becoming male or female
or masculine or feminine that has no end. To be a woman, is a mode of becoming that
does not ever end. It is applicable to all gendered orientations, not just man and woman,
you know, we talk about, you know, *** ambiguity here, when one does not want to
arrive at a proper identification of oneself, as either masculine or feminine. It is, ambiguity
is very important here and the ambiguous categories are also masculine, you know, sorry, marginalized
categories. And important is, she says that this could
lead to any number of directions. This becoming, she says which is not, never an end or never
reaches an end, which is an endless process, may lead to many directions. It is not this,
you, that you, one is going towards, you know, one ideal, the regulatory ideal is given to
us, as Foucault says, by, by discourses or regulatory practices, but, in reality, as
Butler says, ok, the, the, you know, as, this whole process of becoming may lead to different
directions of *** and gender practices altogether. This really is, as I have, we
have written here, this is the central thesis of her book Gender Trouble.
Then, I am reading, reading this relation to Beauvoir, as given by Butler. If there
is something right in Beauvoir's claim that one is not born, but, rather becomes a woman,
it follows that woman itself is a term in process, woman is a term in process, a becoming,
a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive
practice, it is open to intervention and re-signification.. This is most important, you see, how she,
you know, she uses Beauvoir's words and how she moves beyond it in her insistence on the
factor. We can, you know, it is, it is a process that has no end and secondly that, it is subject
to, you know, to re-signification, it is subject to intervention by people themselves, in fashioning
their own gendered practices.
Therefore, to look at it, you know, you know, as a diagram, gendered or gendered subjectivities
are always in process and one does not know in, in, in real terms, one does not know where
it leads us to.
Therefore, sex which we saw, which we saw in our last lecture, through traditional gender
studies, as something that is biological and reductionist, is through this turn, what we
would, we can easily call the *** turn, the queering of gender studies, the ***
turn in gender studies, is, be goes beyond biology and means regulatory ideals; sex is
normative. It is, it is not just a reproductive part, it is also a productive part.
Why? Because, through discourse, through repetition, through reiteration, sex is a productive power
in discourse. It only, through, you know, gives us an illusion, as we said of a stability,
of *** stability, of, you know, biological stability, only through discourse and hence
apart from being a reproductive power, it is also a productive power. Sex is also, through
regulatory practices, made an ideal construct. Sex is stylization, ok, in the sense, of both
trying to keep up to a gendered ideal and, you know, just a while ago, we, as we saw,
both in trying to, to re-signify and to intervene in the, you know, the process of acceptance.
Sex is a process and sex is ultimately also a forcible reiteration, ok.
So, you see, how, you know, how it, this, this kind of thinking, this turn that gendered
studies has taken in culture studies, and in theory, you see how very different it is
from, you know, the older binary way of looking at, as, you know, sex and gender as two different
things, which, say when we are, says has nothing to do with society, ok.
Next, we, we, we come to an important word, a very interesting word, you know, from girl,
girling. Butler says the, there is, you know, in becoming a girl, there is a process of
girl, of girling, and let us read from her. She says, consider the medical interpellation,
again this medical hailing out, which shifts an infant from an it to a she or a he, the
moment the baby is born, there is, obviously the first thing that, you know, one would,
one of the first things, at least that would be, hail, you know, it, hailed the baby as
a male or female and declare to, you know, the parents, are whether it is a, you know,
male or female or a boy or a girl, so, she says, is a process of girling. It shifts an
infant from an it to a he or a she or a he and in that naming, the girl is girled, ok.
Look at the parallel here, with Simone de Beauvoir's 'one is not born a woman, but,
becomes one'. In that naming, the girl is girled, brought into the domain of language.
This is a very clear, working out of what she means by interpellation, by gender interpellation,
by, what she means by, you know, something which was considered, considered reductionist,
as sex being, you know, part of discourse.
So, naming the girl, the girl is girled, brought into the domain of language and kinship through
the interpellation of gender. But that girling of the girl, she says, does not end here,
end there, does, not end only in the hospital or in, you know, the birthing environment.
On the contrary, that founding interpellation is reiterated by various authorities and throughout
the various intervals of time to reinforce or contest this naturalized effect. The naming
is at once the setting of a boundary and also the repeated inculcation of a norm.
So, this whole process that, she says, of girling is, you know, it sets the boundary
of, of girl, of girlhood, of, of girl behavior, girlish behavior and in the, also it is a
repeated, repeated inculcation and instantiation of a norm.
A scholar on, you know, on, Butler scholars, so to speak, Sarah Salih hails this book Gender
Trouble, sorry, Gender Trouble should be in italics, Gender Trouble makes trouble, she
says. How does this book make trouble? She says, Gender Trouble makes trouble by
calling the category of the subject into question, by arguing that, it is a performative construct.
So, the, the, the whole category of subject, we have talked about subjectivity, of, you
know, of being a subject, the process of, of becoming, in, in the lecture on subjectivity.
But, she says, how, makes trouble in the sense of, of how the, some accepted terms, you know,
terminology in fact, is shaken by these reformulations by Judith Butler. By calling the category
of the subject into question and by showing, by working it out and showing that the subject
is nothing, but, a performative construct. All that you thought was your inner life,
your inner choices for instance, all these are actually the result of performance. Then
Gender Trouble makes, Gender Trouble makes trouble in another way, by asserting there,
there are ways of doing one's identity, not just in, not just in the sense, not in the,
not only in, in subject or subjectivity, in the category of identity now, is also, you
know, made, kind of rendered into a trouble or, or rendered problematic.
How? That identity, remember, the distinction we, we, you know, we had a very, of course,,
a very elementary distinction between subjectivity as inner and of identity as how, you know,
society looks at you, where subjectivity is seen and one's inner life and identity is
seen as how society looks at you, that was an elementary distinction. I am not saying
that, this is without, you know, its problems. However, one easy way of looking at it is,
as, identity as a social labour. Gender Trouble makes trouble she says, Sara
Salih says, by asserting that identity is doing, identity is also a performance, according
to the regulatory practices. It is something we do, something we do, something we practice,
in a bid to approximate the regulatory ideas that are given to us by society.
And then she says, please look at the slide, Gender Trouble will, you know, cause even
further trouble for those who have a vested interest in preserving existing oppositions
such as male, female, masculine, feminine, gay, straight, or, you know, homosexual and
heterosexual. She says that, in future and that which is
happening now, more, more problematization would be done and people will have to rethink,
those as she says, those who have a vested interest, those who have a political interest
in maintaining the divide, in maintaining the distinction, a very sharp distinction
between male, female or homosexual, heterosexual etcetera are not, they are not going to be
accepted so easily, once this fearing of gender is done, both in theory and in practice.
So, we have a few very important questions therefore, that are raised by Judith Butler
and I would read these out, these are, I would say, enormously important. The first question
that Butler asks is, is there a gender, you know, is there a particular gender, which
persons are said to have, or is it an essential attribute that a person is said to be, look
at that, is it, is gender something to be possessed or is gender to be, is something
to be or to existent, as implied in the question. What gender are you?
Why she is saying this here is, because, all this while she is already, is already sort
of argued very well that, gender is a performance; gender is fluid; sex also is fluid, because
it is a matter of discourse. It is also a construction. So, she says, is there any point
in asking what gender are you, since, remember, we, she had said the gender is malleable,
gender is changeable and the word, that phrase, potentially enactable.
So, is there any point in asking a question like this, 'what gender are you?' when there
are potentially so many ways in which gender may be acted out, when, where we dismiss the
idea of an ideal to be achieved and remember, what she says, it, it takes you to different
directions or in different directions, ok. Question number 2, when feminist theorists,
these are, these are extremely, you know, sharp, penetrating questions that Butler,
you know, is giving us, in, in, you know, or bid to create trouble, gender trouble,
when feminist theorists claim that gender is the cultural interpretation of sex or the
gender is culturally constructed vis a vis sex, what is the manner or mechanism of this,
this construction? How do you say that this has been done? Ok.
So, she is asking, this is, there is a need to work this out, there is a need to talk
about how this very mechanism of thinking of gender as only, as culturally constructed
has been worked out. Question number 3, if gender is constructed, could it be constructed
differently, or does its constructedness imply some form of social determinism, foreclosing
the possibility of agency and transformation, ok.
So, is there are way in which all these, hitherto ways of constructing gender and showing gender
is a cultural construct, is it possible for us to construct them differently and therefore,
create gender trouble. Number 4, does construction suggest that certain
laws generate *** differences along universal axes of *** difference? Can we claim that,
you know, there is a universal axes or there are several axes along which gender difference
can be categorically, you know, marked out and constructed.
And the last 2, how and where does the construction of gender take place and what sense can we
make of a construction that cannot assume a human constructor prior to that construction?
How can we make any sense of such a construction, when we do not have a human constructor prior
to that construction, meaning the construction itself, you know, the process itself is the
product, in this case.
So, we, we now come to, you know, quickly look at, what are, what the keywords that
we used. The keywords that we used in this, you know, lecture were postfeminism, ***,
performativity, performance, reiteration, illusion, instability, regulation etcetera.
So, we will just look at one or two questions.
For instance, what is entailed in the move from traditional feminism to post-feminism?
There is a problematisation here, in the sex gender dichotomy and it, you know, focuses
on the importance of representation in *** identity and, you know, biological truths
that, biological truths are, are accessed through discourse, they are not givens and
there are, you know, the, the regulatory ways of speaking in the formation of sexed bodies.
Second, how do theorists like Judith Butler consider the body as problematic? The body,
body is problematic because, there is a need to move beyond boundaries and we have to question
the boundaries of materiality, in materiality, language and, you know, abstract things like
language and tangible things. These are the binaries, you know, very poststructuralist
way that we have to deconstruct and there has to be resistance to the fixing of the
body and the labeling of bodies.
Finally, summarize the formulation of, reformulation of gender as a category as argued by Butler.
The, in post-feminism, we find that gender is relative and contextual, it is into summarizes
this lecture also in a way. It is a shifting phenomenon, non-substantive,
there are relative points of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets
of relations, there is the, totality is an illusion which is, you know, permanently deferred,
you know, is an endless process, where one never arrives at a certain gender and we also
see it as open coalition, open assemblage, ok.
So, this is, there is this, you could say, a fashioning, right, a, a fashioning of, of
refashioning, self fashioning of gender, that you can do or one can do without, you know,
sort of without trying to achieve or without trying to reach a certain ideal of gender,
which is nothing, but, you know, an ideal that has been set up by what, you know, Butler
and the rest call regulatory practices, after Foucault, regulatory practices that are determined
by power in society. Thank you and in the next lecture, we shall
be looking, we shall be beginning the next module, the third module, wherein you also
have about 9 to 10 lectures, on sites, s i t e s, on sites, where, you know, culture,
culture happens, right. So, see you next time and thank you.