|
|
|
Home | Informazioni
per gli studenti | GUIDA ALLO STUDIO a.a. 2010-11 |
|
||
|
|
|||
Studi di genere
LM in Filosofia e linguaggi della
modernità
|
TEXTBOOKS that interrogate gender in the contemporary context
GENDER STUDIES: WHAT?
•
The academic study of sexual difference/gender
(Women’s Studies) began in the late 1960s
•
Initially the focus was on producing and correcting
knowledge about women in the various disciplines, mainly literature, history,
sociology
•
Soon it developed as an independent area of production
of knowledge and theory
•
Since the 1980s, Women’s Studies has developed into
Gender Studies to include in its body of knowledge also studies on men and
masculinity, in addition to studies on women, femininity and on sexuality
•
Soon the need to regard gender as “gender and its
others” brought to include ethnicity and race, age, religion, dis/ability, nationality, ideology, and citizenship
•
Feminism remains a central perspective for the study
of gender; critical thinking remains its force, together with the production of
knowledge
•
Multi- and inter-disciplinarity
defines its inquiry
•
The emphasis on gender and its others weaves together
the discourses of gender, postcolonial, and cultural studies
GENDER STUDIES: WHY?
•
Jacques Derrida (“Women”
1984): Do the women who manage these programs, do they not become, in turn, the
guardians of the Law and do they not risk constructing an institution similar
to the institution against which they are fighting? … So a problem arises: if
you keep the philosophical axiomatics, implying that
women are subjects, considering women as subjects, then you keep the whole
framework on which the traditional university is built. If someone tries to
deconstruct the notion of subjectivity within women’s studies … this would have
two consequences, one radically revolutionary or deconstructive, and the other
dangerously reactive.
•
THE EVER PRECARIOUS BALANCE
BETWEEN REVOLUTION AND REACTION
GENDER STUDIES: HOW?
•
THE NECESSITY OF CRITIQUE = FEMINIST STUDIES OF GENDER
•
Critique = exposure of contradictions and inadequacies
of any system of thought. Feminists have always interrogated the premises of
their own beliefs (from Simone de Beauvoir’s “one is not born a woman” to
Judith Butler’s “undoing gender”, feminist thought has developed a
self-critical discourse)
•
If feminist studies of gender are to remain vital in
the organization of knowledge and learning, they must question where Thought
appears to unsettle the dogma and remain engaged in the risk of the political. Where,
when, under what conditions does the demand for excellence and visibility give
way to an effort to interact and build the intellectual connections, with all
their pleasures, that women’s studies once promised, and at times, has even
delivered? Feminist studies of gender must keep its edge, its place of
indeterminacy, at once exciting and precarious. To be on the edge is to be on
the verge of discovering new possibilities for a field that may only seem to be
exhausted, precarious because in the quest for an as-yet-unimagined future,
there are never any guar
WHY FEMINISM?
•
To retain its critical edge, gender studies must be feminist study of
gender. WHY?
•
Feminism is an ism without a Bible: there are
many feminisms and many truthts about feminism
•
Feminism has only one goal: to end. When sexism stops
in our societies and cultures, feminism will happily declare its own demise
(bell hooks)
•
The problem is VIOLENCE. Violence is always racist and
sexist. The victims of violence are sexually and racially connoted.
•
Racism and sexism are a pair;
indeed sexism is one of the many forms of racism.
•
Race and sex are concepts we use to
identify people, along with class, nationality, religion, ideology,
etc.: one is black or white, male or female, rich or poor, European or
Extra-communitarian, Christian or Muslim, reactionary or progressive, etc.
•
IDENTITIES: Identities are defined through concepts:
gender, sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, age, religion, nationality,
ideology, citizenship, dis/ability, education, etc.
•
Commonly these concepts identify, group, and
divide people Which concepts are natural or cultural, true or fictional,
fundamental (essential) or
constructed (nominal)?
•
Cultural or natural?
•
The following appear to be clearly cultural:
•
Ideology : I can choose to
be fascist, communist, republican, monarchic, democratic, dictatorial, and so
on.
•
Religion: I can convert to any or no credo, as I wish.
•
Nationality: nations are born and die,
their boundaries and definitions change and people can change nationality; many
people have dual or multiple nationalities.
•
Class only today is clearly me
•
Sex and race appear to be natural: one is—does
not become—female or male, one is—does not become—black or white.
•
Gender and ethnicity, on the contrary, appear
to be cultural.
•
Gender is the business facts of sex, so to speak
(Myra Jehlen). Ethnicity is the cultural
expression of a race (Werner Sollors).
•
Indeed, either cultural … or natural?
•
But is this truly so? Is it really true that one does
not rather, at least in part, also become female or male, black or
white?
•
Simone de Beauvoir in 1949 declared that one is not born a woman, rather
becomes a woman. For example, I know that Vladimir Luxuria
has become female, and that Michael Jackson has become white. Or should I say
“more female” and “whiter,” instead?
•
Rather, both cultural … and natural?
•
Racial and sexual identities are more complex than the
assumed separation of nature from culture may lead us to believe. Race and sex
are not only natural; they are natural and cultural; biologically
given and intellectually constructed. They are “truth and truly fiction”
(Merle Collins “Crick Crack”)—both identity and identification.
•
Feminist Studies of Gender:
Interdisciplinary and Intercultural
•
Multiple approaches and tools are required to retain
the richness and plurality of lived lives. To engage the question: Who we are
as humans, with our individual and collective diversities?
•
The interdisciplinary, intercultural approach to feminist
studies of gender engages cultural and postcolonial studies as well.
•
Decolonization of language and thought
•
Feminist production of knowledge participates in the
decolonization of language and thought
•
The fight against sexism and racism is the fight
against colonialism
•
Colonial empires were grounded on racism and patriarchy
•
William Blake, Europe Supported by Africa and
•
•
RACE SEX EMPIRE
•
William Blake’s allegory captures the function played
by race and sex in the representation of empire
•
The rhetoric of the
•
William Blake makes clear that the Center
and the Peripheries are interconnected and that the racialized
and sexualized body—colored and female—carries the
meaning of the relationships
•
INTERCONNECTIONS/INTERSECTIONALITY/COMPLEXITY
•
The Colonial, the Postcolonial and the Global are a
network. There is no Europe without Africa and the
•
Critical inquiry must make clear how these
interconnections work within the Global; it must question how racial and gender politics
function within the power networks
•
POSTCOLONIAL
STUDIES
•
There is no colonial, no postcolonial, no global without the Transatl
•
GENDER STUDIES
•
Gender studies insists that all human
culture is gendered and must be acknowledged as such to counter the patriarchal
universalism of traditional representations instrumental to male supremacy and
female discrimination; gender being a cultural construction can be changed,
thus gender studies participates in the feminist political project to make the
world more just by demanding equal opportunities between men and women in
society and representations of male and female in culture that liberate humans
into imagining a future that is more plural and hospitable.
•
CULTURAL STUDIES
•
The culture produced by critical thinking is thinking that
enables us to rethink the present in terms that deconstruct the colonial and
patriarchal frame to decolonize language and thought, so that the sexist and
racist violence instrumental to colonial imperialisms can no longer be
repeated. This is why such thinking must be gendered.
•
Culture as Cultures
•
All these critical approaches together go hand in hand to help us
represent the complexity we actually inhabit and to enable us to think through
categories that are more democratic. We might say that these inter-disciplines
(“studies”) take “The Culture” out of the natural history museum (where it was
frozen into the dead body of the now-extinct stuffed animal) and bring it back
to life into our lived relational experiences to be re-presented as shared
cultures—in the plural. Culture as cultures is defined as negotiation; no
culture can exist but in contact with another culture (Jean Loup Amselle) . The border is where
cultures come alive (Gloria Anzaldùa).
•
REPRESENTATION-ACTION
•
Change through the creation of figures capable of
becoming actions (figurations= figure/action, Donna Haraway)
•
POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY (Audre
Lorde)
•
THE WORDS ARE PURPOSES / THE WORDS ARE MAPS (Adrienne
Rich)
•
Decolonialization of language and
thought (Angela Carter)
•
Liberating Words and Images
•
If we understand the need for culture to be useful for
us (rather than merely decorative and entertaining), then we understand why
writers like Rushdie and Saviano are perceived as
being so threatening. They liberate words and images that might enable people
to change the world. If the postcolonial is not simply a chronological
descriptor (after the colonies) but an epistemological frame, then thinking
postcolonial-ly may bring to develop theoretical
concepts to communicate the complex relation between nature and culture
and to account for representations of the world that negotiate between
essentialism/fundamentalism (belief in natural origin) and nominalism/constructivism
(belief in relative discoursive practices). It is in tune with the project inaugurated by
feminist studies of gender.
•
Naturculture
•
Feminist theorist Donna Haraway
has coined the term naturculture, a single
word to emphasize the necessary relation and impossible separation between the
two: I cannot possibly conceive nature other than within my own cultural
paradigm; my understanding of the world I inhabit is cultural; my definition of
nature is culturally determined.
•
Ethnicity and Gender
•
With reference to racial and sexual differences, we
use the terms ethnicity, related—not equal—to race, and gender,
related—not equal—to sex. Ethnicity indicates race and
culture (Stuart Hall and Werner Sollors): biological
features joined with national, religious, ideological affiliations. Gender
refers to the business facts of sex (Myra Jehlen):
the significance and currency in culture and society of sexual difference.
•
The Risk of Aseptic Concepts
•
After the colonial and nazi-fascist
abuses of race, and the patriarchal abuses of sex, the
articulation of racial and sexual identities has emphasized cultural
construction over biological origin, and critical discourse has privileged the
examination of ethnic and gender difference. However, critical theories of race
and of sexuality warn us against facile simplifications that tend to reduce naturculture to culture only, leaving race and sex
in the shade of ethnicity and gender. The task is to retain the complexities,
tensions, and unrepresentability of sex and race as
we struggle to account for gender and ethnicity.
•
Give Back the Body
•
Divorcing Gender and Ethnicity from the unsayable of the biological risks leaving in the dark the
lived lives that feed racisms and sexisms. It risks leaving
•
Discourse must play in the dark (Toni
Morrison)—re-memory, give back a body to the dis-membered,
the forgotten, erased and censored by centuries of discrimination and
exclusion.
•
Race and sex must remain visibly present within
ethnicity and gender, so that thought inhabits the encounter, the cross-roads,
the borderland where no essentialist identity, no “pure race” (nor pure
ethnicity) and no pure masculinity or femininity (nor dual gender) may exist.
•
GenderSex Difference &
INTERSECTIONALITY
•
Teresa de Lauretis identifies
a gendered subject position within the sex/gender system
In Excentric Subjects
(1999): Between gender and the body … there is no simple
and linear cause-and-effect
or origin and telos relationship, but
rather a network of passages, translations, nuances and mutual influences.
In Technologies of Gender (1987): The female subject of feminism
is one constructed across a multiplicity of discourses, positions, and
meanings, which are often in conflict with one another and inherently
(historically) contradictory
Audre Lorde, Zami 1982: Being women together was not enough. We
were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different.
Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black women
together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not
enough. We were different … it was a while before we came to realize that our
place was the very house of difference rather than the security of any one
particular difference
Rosi
Braidotti, In metamorfosi (2004): Uno degli
effetti più significativi della tarda postmodernità
in Europa è il fenomeno della transculturalità o
dello scontro di culture nello spazio sociale plurietnico o multiculturale
europeo... I paradossi, le dissimmetrie di potere e
le frammentazioni del contenuto storico attuale richiedono … che spostiamo il
dibattito politico dalla questione delle differenze fra culture a quella delle
differenze all’interno di una stessa cultura. (…)
Il soggetto del femminismo è … sessuato; lui o lei è motivato/a dalla coscienza politica delle disuguaglianze ed è
impegnato/a a sostenere la diversità e la differenza come valori positivi e
alternativi
Gayatri C. Spivak, In Other Worlds (1987) By focusing my attention on feminist
marginality, I am not trying to conquer the center,
but to reach for the irreducibility of the margin in all its aspects
Luce Irigaray, Etique de la différence
sexuelle (1985): sexual difference represents one
of the problems, rather the problem about which our
age must think … everything must be reinterpreted: relationships between
subject and discourse, subject and the world, subject and cosmos, micro- and macrocosmos. Everything. Beginning
with the subject that has always been written as masculine, although it
pretended to be universal and neutral: Man. Man is not neutral but
sexed…
Any epochal change requires a change in the perception of space and
time, how we live in places and how we shape identities
desire
occupies the space of the gap. If you give desire a permanent definition, you
suppress it as desire. Desire requires an attraction; the shifing
of subject and object in their relation of proximity or distance. Any epochal
change requires a change in the economics of desire. A new epoch means a different relation between:
--man and god
--man and man
--man and the world
--man and woman
•
We must interrogate our history through and through to
understand why sexual difference has played no part in it—neither empirical nor
transcendental. Why has it missed its ethics, its aesthetics, its logic, its
religion, the micro- and lacrocosmic
realization of its own destiny.
•
A reason is certainly to be found in the dissociation
of body and soul, sexuality and spirituality. Everything has beed conceived in order to keep them separate, even
opposite, to prevent them from being united.
•
For the ethics of sexual difference to be possible, a
place for the dwelling of each sex, each body, each flesh must be costructed.
•
This requires a memory of the past and a hope for the
future.
•
SINGLE CREATION?
•
Sexual difference has always served procreation, never
the creation of culture.
•
This has produced a pathological subjectivity, places
on either end of sexual difference
•
Language regarded as an ideal situated outside the
body that produces it
•
Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs (1990) So
my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries,
potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might
explore as one part of needed political work.
•
FRACTURED IDENTITIES
•
There is not even such a
state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in
contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Gender,
race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible
historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy,
colonialism, and capitalism.
•
I do not know of any other
time in history when there was greater need for political unity to confront effectively
the dominations of 'race', 'gender', 'sexuality', and 'class’. .. White women
discovered the non-innocence of the category 'woman'. Cyborg
feminists have to argue that 'we' do not w
•
Monsters have always defined
the limits of community in Western imaginations. The Centaurs and Amazons of
ancient
•
Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different political
possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and
Woman
Susan Moller Okin, Is
Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (1997)
What should be done when the claims of
minority cultures or religions clash with the norm of gender equality that is
at least formally endorsed by liberal states (however much they continue to
violate it in their practice)?
But cultural groups are always gendered:
the sphere of personal, sexual, and reproductive life provides a central
focus of most cultures; home is where much of culture is practiced, preserved,
and transmitted to the young
most cultures have as one of their principal aims the control of women by men
Those who practice some of the most controversial
such customs--clitoridectomy, the marriage of
children or marriages that are otherwise coerced, or polygamy--sometimes
explicitly defend them as necessary for controlling women, the servitude of
women is presented as virtually synonymous with "our traditions.“
Most culture clashes are gender related
none of the defenders of multicultural group rights has adequately addressed the troubling connections between gender and
culture, or the conflicts between multiculturalism and feminism.
COMPLEXITY
What colonial, postcolonial, global, racial, gender politics is at stake
in the construction and deconstruction of the images we produce? Examine, for
example the Am Express “red” campaign:
JUDITH BUTLER, Precarious Life 2004
If the humanities has
a future as cultural criticism, and cultural criticism has a task at the
present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human where we do not expect
to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense. We
would have to interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the
limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can
sense.
This might prompt us, affectively, to
reinvigorate the intellectual projects of critique, of questioning, of coming
to understand the difficulties and demands of cultural translation and dissent,
and to create a sense of the public in which oppositional voices are not
feared, degraded or dismissed, but valued for the instigation to a sensate
democracy they occasionally perform.
JUDITH BUTLER, Undoing Gender 2004
Sometimes a normative conception of gender can
undo one’s personhood, undermining the capacity to persevere a livable life. Other times, the experience of a normative
restriction becoming undone can undo a prior conception of who
one is only to inaugurate a relatively newer one that has greater livability in its aim.
If gender is a kind of a doing, an incess
Academic debates seems woefully out of synch
with the contemporary political usage of such terms (gender, feminism, queer,
theory, homosexuality) … the effort to take distance from gender marks two
political movements that are in many ways opposed to one another