These readings have brought up many questions for me. I have a lot of little ones leading to a few big ones, but in general, I’d say take you pick, and we’ll see where the conversation leads us.
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First, I’d like to examine sex as “intercourse”:
Foucault examines the relationship between sex and power/oppression, saying that now (which is to say, in the mid twentieth century) people were beginning to talk about sex in the context of rising up from oppression, as if it were a political cause.
I’m wondering to what extent we may have moved past this. To what extent is our perspective about sex and sexuality and our willingness to talk about it rebellious? To what extent do we still carry Victorian taboos? Since our generation is (for the most part) the children of the sexual revolution, are we still being rebellious when we have an open attitude about sex? Can sex be seen in an economic/political sense at all or, as Foucault suggests, must we look more to the “felicity” which is a part of its character? Do you suscribe to the “repressive hypothesis” in examining the history of sex, and, to what extent?
All of this is leading me to what I see as the big question: How do our changing attitudes about sex affect the way we read and write? What insight can it give us for literary interpretation? How might literature (or should literature) use what we know about sex to change common perspective?
Secondly, what about sex as “gender”?
Those of you who are men and reading this, to what extent do you notice gender stereotypes in which the woman is subordinate to the man in literature? To those of you who are women, same question. What disparity, if any, do you anticipate?
While there is an “essential” difference between man and woman in a physical sense, do you believe there are certain non-physical qualities (character traits, etc.) that actually are much more representative of one gender than another. If this is the case, is literature simply presenting characters who represent the real world? Should authors strive to upset preconceived gender notions? Is that approach a more realistic reflection? To what extent is realistic reflection desirable? Where does authorial intent come into play, when the same work can be read as oppressing women pointing to the folly of a society which subjugates women?
Which brings me to my main question: How does our knowledge of gender roles affect the way we read and right? How might literature be a means of change? Should it be?
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Finally, can we ever reach a point of understanding where questions of sex and gender are moot?
6 responses so far ↓
sfbull5 // 11 November 2008 at 11.15 pm
I think that Foucault’s argument that sex and power are heavily interrelated is absolutely true, but I wasn’t exactly sure where he was trying to go with that claim. It seemed like he was making some points about the relationship of sex to language, which seemed interesting, but I didn’t get as much (about that topic) from his article as I did from Bennett and Royle’s concise article “Sexual difference”. I liked their point about the gender-based difference of romance languages and how they are predominantly male-centric (such as, for example, the case where there are fifty women and only one man, yet the masculine grammatical form takes precedence because of the presence of that one man). I think they really hit the nail on the head at the end of the essay (citing Foucault) where they questioned the necessity of gender in analyzing literature. I have always thought that gender is one of a small handful of difficult-to-handle factors because sometimes it is an undeniably crucial factor, yet other times I feel that people try to force gender into being a factor when it is unnatural. For example, if a book contains only male characters, I don’t think it is intrinsically a “masculine” or “male-centric” book, just based on that information, but it is all too easy to make the argument that the lack of women implies an anti-feminine belief (for the record, I think the opposite situation is equally possible). I do agree that a limited number of categories are not sufficient to describe sexual difference, or, more aptly put, “sexual identity” (because it is, after all, an individual identity, not a grouped classification). I don’t know the answer to Foucault’s question, “do we truly need a true sex?” but I definitely think we need to reform the way we speak about and think about sex/gender.
sprinkles // 11 November 2008 at 11.49 pm
The role of sex in literature has always been a topic of interest for me. To me, it is clear that men and women have different character traits that are somewhat universal. Some would argue that if a woman attempts to portray males in literature it will be an inaccurate portrayal because she is not familiar with the psychological make up of a man. The same for a man attempting to portray females. In the reverse of that, since the sex that one identifies with controlls their psychological identity, men and women may tend to interpret texts differently. As a reader I tend to feel frusterated when reading very “femenine” texts because I can’t identify with the characters or the subtleties of the text.
Also just a question. When writing what is the best way to write in a gender neutral manner? Is it better to write his/her or to pick one and stick with it?
sparkling_bears47 // 12 November 2008 at 1.43 am
I have to say, the novel that immediately jumped out to me when reading these essays would have to be Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The novel, beyond being a gorgeous examination of love, starts with a male protagonist who, half way through the novel, turns into a woman. The book really works to make Orlando’s gender unclear. It’s also interesting how people’s perceptions of her/him change. When Orlando’s a man, he acts as an ambassador. But as soon as he turns into a woman, he’s no longer allowed to hold the post. It’s a strange and touching examination of gender dynamics and how little they actually mean.
david // 12 November 2008 at 3.39 am
Foucault, as well as B&R, seemed to criticize the sublimation of sexuality into identity. Displaced through discourse, sex, since the prudish Victorian Age, has been confined and relegated to meaning (e.g. to morals or to reason). Foucault’s central aim is not to respond to the original act of repression or to try to explain it away, since the explicit “statement of oppression and the form of of the sermon refer back to one another; they are mutually reinforcing” (Foucault, 8). He understands that repression itself has come to precede sexuality, constituting and driving the will for knowledge across the metaphor. So rather, Foucault attempts to bypass the repressive hypothesis, which is really bold and seemingly impossible if you think about it, to try to bring into focus the history of sexuality, to ask why it is we continue to do what we do.
B&R evoke similar questions of gender based on essentialism–”The notion of essentialism here consists primarily in anatomical or biological difference… Various kinds of gender-stereotypes are then articulated, as it were, on to this essentialism.” (B&R, 154). They seem to attribute limiting gender roles (men=strong, women=weak) to a misinterpretation of the body, but coming back to Foucault, I wonder if they got it backwards; I’d say, and maybe they said this too, that the body is secondary to the will for knowledge, for in a dialectical mode of thought, man/woman and all the connotations tied to such identities seem to arise from the primary model of master/slave, i.e. a model that gives meaning to the world.
spotofbother // 12 November 2008 at 11.31 am
To the very first question, about how relevant Foucault’s essay is today, I think it still has a relevance in that sex is still extremely discursive, and this discursiveness is still a bit ridiculous. With that said, it is true that a more free manifestation of sex is accepted in the mainstream than when Foucault was writing.
The other question that I thought was interesting was “can we ever reach a point of understanding where questions of sex and gender are moot?” because I think there is no way in the present or the near future that we can. I would point to the fact that a large minority of the population want to deny women the right to abortion, the right to their own bodies. This is an extremely phallocentric point of view, and thus requires that questions of gender are not moot in order to point out that, rights here become extremely singular, and rigid, modes of thought feminists have been quick to ascribe to men. Because they don’t believe that women should have abortions, all women should not be allowed to have abortions. The law ignores the multiplicity of situations from which the need for abortion arises, and subjugates all of these situations under one, rigid, and I should say, masculine law. I think that it is still an issue of debate is proof enough that we need these questions of sex and gender in order to show how arbitrary certain things are. We need to show certain things as unfair binaries, as things dominated by males, when they should not be…
mercurylanes // 15 November 2008 at 3.44 pm
It’s interesting revisiting this question after having moved on to Gilbert and Cixous, who both have very strong opinions about what it means to write from a specifically female perspective. It’ll probably be even more interesting to get back to it after reading Judith Butler.
To some extent the question of gender in a text is a question of fairness. Based on essentialist/dualistic notions of gender, readers tend to react differently to texts based on the works’ perceived “maleness” or “femaleness.” In a society where one gender is hierarchically favored over another, the fairness of the reading is at stake–the story being that typically (sadly) works perceived as “female” (either based on the gender of their author or in terms of their subject matter or what have you) are more readily dismissed.
But if there is no “true” sex, and if reader responses to maleness and femaleness (and, beyond that, the notion of a male/female duality itself) are more a response to social conditioning than they are to something actually inherent in the text, the question of fairness becomes a lot more complicated (in a lot of ways, actually, but i’ll gloss ‘em). Is the “fair” thing to read and write by attempting to disregard gender entirely? Cixous argues no. Is it fair to treat a text as gender-neutral, and is this really what we want? Does fairness ask that everything be treated as “the same”? And is it fair to treat as the same something that is inherently fluid and varied?
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