Student presentation

1. Butler, J
(1999) Gender
Trouble
Louise Spencer-Young
Katie King-Lewis

2. “Women” as the subject of
feminism
 Feminist theory has assumed that there is an existing
identity of women which represents feminist interests
and goals.
 Representation is a controversial term:
 it can work within a political process to “extend visibility,
legitimacy to women as political subjects.”
 Function of language to either reveal or distort women.
 There is now controversy around what constitutes the
category of women.

3.  So if women are the subject of feminism; the
construction of feminism in politics was formed by the
patriarchal society to which they are supposed to be
opposing.
 The subject of feminism is crucial for politics and
feminist politics.
 It becomes impossible to separate out gender from the
political and cultural intersections in which it is
produced and maintained.

4. The compulsory order of sex,
gender and desire
 “Originally the distinction between sex and gender
serves the argument that whatever biological
intractability sex appears to have; gender is culturally
constructed”
 When gender is radically separated from sex gender
becomes a “free-floating artifice” with the consequence
that “man and masculine might just as easily signify a
female body as a male one” This poses more problems

5. Gender: the circular ruins of
contemporary debate.
 “When the relevant culture that constructs gender is
understood in terms of such a law or sets of laws then it
seams that gender is as determined and fixed as it was
under the biology-is-destiny formulation”.
 For Beauvoir, gender is constructed but can arguably
take on other genders “the one who becomes a woman
is not necessarily female” (transgender)
 For Beauvoir women are the negative of men, for
Irigaray women are represented falsely as the subject
and the other.

6. Identity, sex and the
metaphysics of substance.
 Identity is assured through the stabilizing concepts of
sex, gender and sexuality.
 There are very different ways in which the category of
sex is understood depending on how the field of power
is articulated
 “The category of sex would its self disappear and
dissipate through the disruption and displacement of
heterosexual hegemony”.

7.  The lesbian emerges as a third gender that promises to
transcend the binary restriction on sex imposed by the
system of compulsory heterosexuality.
 Gender can denote a unity of experience of sex gender
and desire.