Refocusing

and Embodying Critical Voices

 Positing/reviewing/constructing(?) meta-
narratives
Feminism Gender Criticism
The doctrine advocating, all social, A question of dierentiation between a
political, and all other rights of women man and a woman; easily sought out as a
equal to men dictionary.com bias or stereotype dictionary.com
Literary criticism informed by feminist Gender criticism is the view of masculine
theory, or by the politics of feminism and feminine genders. Gender is not a
more broadly. It can be understood as property of bodies of something
using feminist principles and ideological originally existent in human beings, but
discourses to critique the language of rather is the product of various social
literature, its structure and being. technologies, such as cinema
Google.com
resistance resisting readers Gender is an eect of language, culture
and institutions.
Feminist studies are the analysis of
women and womens issues
Feminism Gender Criticism
Feminists argue that no man could write Gender critics claim that it is and has
with female anger, desire, and been possible for a man to write like a
selQood. woman and a woman to write like a man.
Feminists suggest that men and women Gender critics maintain that such
have dierent reading strategies and dierences arise sole out of social training
outcomes. and culture norms.
Queer Theory
Emerges from gay/lesbian studies attention to the social construction of categories
of normative and deviant sexual behavior.
Queer theory is a set of ideas based around the idea that identities are not xed and
do not determine who we are.
Queer theory suggest that it is meaningless to talk in general about women or any
other group, as identities consist of so many elements that to assume that people can
be seen collectively on the basis of one shared characteristic is wrong.
Queer theory proposes that we deliberately challenge all notions of xed identity, in
varied and non-predictable ways.
 Points for Discussion
Can gender exist in a vacuum?
Can feminists be gender critics or vice versa?
Is a critical voice interior or exterior?
Nature or nurture?
Political or social?

 One is not born, but rather becomes, a
woman.
OTHER
Women have been denied subjectivity.
Women have been reduced to objects for men.
Virginia Woolfs statement in A Room of Ones
Own (1929) that women serve as looking-
glasses possessing the magic and delicious
power of reecting the gure of man twice its
natural size.
Beauvoirs argues that in patriarchal cultures man is
the norm and woman the deviation.
 inauthenticity
Womens internalized ideology
Patriarchy constructs woman as immanence (as
stagnation and immersion in nature) and man as
transcendence (as continually striving for freedom
and authenticity), thereby impeding womens
struggle to achieve existential freedom and
autonomous subjectivity.
 The Second Sex perspectives
Objectively
Woman as object of analysisthrough a series of
cultural lenses, including biology, psychoanalysis,
Marxism, history, literature, and myth. She critiques
these cultural lenses.
Subjectively
Woman looking through the perspective of their own
lived experience, showing the processes through which
women internalize the ideologies of otherness that
relegate them to immanence and to the position of
being mans Other
 the new mestiza
Mixed or hybrid
The policy of racial purity that white America
practices
identity
The relative status accorded dierent identities
within a multi-ethnic society
Demand not just equal rights and economic
opportunity but also respect and recognition

 Political energies
Concept of dierence
Questioning of boundaries and of the integrity of
dened entities encouraged the interest in mixed,
hybrid identities
Voice
recovery work
Resurrected neglected or forgotten works by nonwhite, nonmale,
and nonheterosexual authors
Voice of testimony and experience
Reconnect literary expressions to their authors
 Dual focus on identity and culture
A literary work is studied as a product or symptom of its
culture or of its authors identity and not as a self-
enclosed unit of purely aesthetic elements.
Cultural representations are the very stu of which
identities are made, and literature is one crucial arena in
which that making is done.
Cultural representations are powerfulit comes to us
invested with authority and upheld by the social
institutions that promulgate them.

 Anzaldua insists that the primary political work is inner.
The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in
outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before
inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society.
Nothing happens in the real world unless it rst happens in
our heads.
Anzalduas work is concerned with conveying what it feels
like for a nonwhite, nonheterosexual woman to live in post-
civil rights movement North America.
hyphenated
US obsession with the presence of nonwhites in its midst and
acts as if they do not exist
 Anzaldua argues that our whole
understanding of identity has to be revised.
The old notion that we can know who we are by
tracing our roots, by referring back to some stable
point of origin has to be abandoned.
All identities are hybrids, formed over time
through the interaction of multiple cultures and
constantly being transformed by new encounters
in the borderlands between one culture and
another.
 Points for Discussion
Will the focusing on the discourse on ambiguity
and ambivalence, both on gender and identity,
uproot the notion of others attached to
homosexuality/mixed-race individuals? How?
Can the mere insistence of the presence of the
hybrid or hyphenated augment the voice of
the minority?
 Performative
Uncover the assumptions that restrict the
meaning of gender to received notions of
masculinity and femininity
In opening up the eld of possibility for gender,
she aims for a feminism that avoids exclusionary
gender norms in its portrayal of acceptable
identities.

 Nothing is natural, not even sexual identity
Butler says that even anatomical dierences can be experienced only through
the categories and expectations set out by cultures signifying order.
Anatomical dierences are mapped to expectations about sexual desire
Butler argues that our cultures understanding of sexuality is ill-equipped,
therefore, to recognize bodies that confound the strict binary division
between male and female, or desires that cross, combine, or otherwise fail to
conform to a fairly narrow understanding of sex as genital intercourse
between two people, one naturally female, the other naturally male.
Butler stresses that modern culture sees sexuality as fundamental
constituent of identity.
Sex and sexual desire and activities are profound indices of who we are
Natural is socially constructed and, thus, contingent
Resignication
The established and conventional connections between anatomy and desire, and between
sexual activities and ascriptions of identity, are not inevitable; they have been dierent in
other cultures and in other historical eras, and they are open to revision.
The meanings and categories by which we understand and live our daily existence can be
altered.
 Alteration does not come easily
Ideology on masculine hegemony and heterosexist power are deeply
imbedded into our brains as well as in society
Discourse
Law (cultures signifying order)
Performative Speech Acts
Oers no resistance to power
Language, other than describing an existing fact or object can also create
something into existence. For example, uttering the existence of a blue chair
can either be an instance of description of an object seen or it can be instance
of creation, uttering something not present but a clear description of an
object or idea that might be present.
citing and repetition
Defeats referential speech
Citing - Prior knowledge to a languages terms and meanings
Repetition using old words and structures in a new instance
Languages are reproduced, are kept alive and functioning, through
innumerable acts of use; but those acts also constantly change the language.
 Butler posits that we understand sex and
gender as citational repetitions.
Various cultural discourse converge in a prevailing
understanding of what boy and girl, man and
woman signify
Identity is a trap, a hardening into rigid, binarized
categories of much more uid and heterogeneous
possibilities.
Butler calls for resignication of our received
meaningsactions that will lead to a
proliferation of the constitutive categories
into which all selves are now constrained to t
 normality
Heterosexual can be achieved only through forceful
exclusion or disavowal of all nonheterosexual desires
Homophobia
Abjection deviants as worthy targets of aggression and
punishment
Butler calls for a loosening of the categories, a
relaxation of our xation on identity.
Avoid instilling commonality of identity advocacy
towards identity politics
Instead instill a coalition of identity the understanding
that identity does not necessarily end up in homogeneity
 Identity is not something planted in us to be
discovered, but something that is performatively
produced by acts that eectively constitute the
identity they are said to express or reveal.
Butler advocates parodyand drag performances
because such subversive performances destabilize
the naturalized categories of identity and desire.
Queer theory that is interested in any and all acts, images,
and ideas that trouble, violate, cross, mix, or otherwise
confound established boundaries between male and female,
normal and abnormal, self and other.
 Points for Discussion
To what extent does performativity work in
assessing someones sexuality?
Can performativity serve as a reliable gauge in
determining ones sexuality?
Can we truly blame only the hegemonic power of
heterosexuality as the sole cause for sexual
deviation? Or are there any other causes to take
into account?
 Compulsory Heterosexuality
Heterosexuality is not natural but social, and it should be
analyzed as we would any social institutions.
Heterosexuality is compulsory because only partners of
the opposite sex are deemed appropriate, all same-sex
desire must be denied or indulged in secret, and various
kinds of same-sex bonding (including friendships) are
viewed with suspicion.
It functions to ensure that women are sexually accessible
to men, with consent or choice on the womens part
neither legally nor practically taken into account.
It is an institution that punishes those who are not
heterosexual and systematically ensures the power of men
over women.
 The issue feminists have to address is not simple gender inequality nor
the domination of culture by males nor mere taboos against
homosexuality, but the enforcement of heterosexuality for women as a
means of assuring male right of physical, economic, and emotional
access.
Three topics:
Sexualized relations of power within institutions
Women are forced to look attractive as demanded by heterosexual desirability and
normal expressions of sexuality.
Lesbian experience lesbian continuum
Challenge the notion that women need men by calling attention to ways in which
women interact with one another.
Patriarchal society is hostile and threatened by womens independent action.
the sharing of a rich inner life
By desexualizing the term lesbian, Rich calls attention to the variety of bonds formed
between women and to the various functions those bonds play in womens lives.
Formation of sexuality
law of compulsory heterosexuality plays a crucial role in the formation of selves, i.e.
mothers bond with baby girls is rift with heteronormative inclination
 Points for Discussion
Can Richs theory on compulsory heterosexuality
challenge the notion of intimate yet nonsexual
relationships between men? Or is its postulation prove
much more problematic if its addressed towards
individuals whose identities are considered the
oppressors?
Wouldnt the formation of the lesbian experience or even
compulsory heterosexuality force women who identify as
nonheterosexual to abide to a compulsory homosexual
Law? Isnt compulsory considered as pervasive?
Wouldnt it threaten to dene homosexuality as nothing
more than a mirror image of the heteronormal behavior
and further push gays and lesbians toward the fringes?
 Homosociality (from Between Men)
A term applied to the social bonds formed between
persons of the same sex
Distinguished from homosexualitysexual desire
between persons of the same sexthey exist on a
continuum with it.
The continuum between homosocial and homosexual
desire is disrupted by the often intense homophobia.
But the opposition between homosocial and
homosexual is less pronounced in women.
 Metaphor of the closet
Modern gay and lesbian history recounted by gay liberation
movements following the Stonewall
Open secret
Contradictory and constraining rules about privacy and disclosure, public and
private, awareness and ignorance, has shaped the way in which many questions
the value and epistemology (knowledge) have been a conceived and addressed
not only in gay subculture but in modern Western society as a whole.
The second Axiom
Sexuality and gender constitute conceptually dierent realms
Treating sexuality as part of gender perpetuates heterosexist
assumptions about sexuality
Sedgwick says that while lesbian, gay, and anti-homophobic
scholarship have much to learn from feminism, one cannot assume
that the interests of the various actors coincide.
 Points for Discussion
Is there a real need to come out?
Which institution indulges one to come out, the
majority and the known, or the minority and the
unknown?
Whose need does coming out truly serve? Is there
anything at all to hide?
Is the hidden an ideology posited by the
heterosexual more than the homosexual?
Is it possible that the homosexual institution is more
responsible for the idea of coming out?
 the basis of womens oppression is biological as well as historical
Wittig, as a lesbian, refuses to be heterosexual and that means she
refuses to become a man or a womancategories which she regards
as political, not as natural givens.
Woman as transhistorical and eternal essence
Woman as a social construct
One Is Not Born A Woman
Rejects biological explanations for inequalities and dierences between sexes
immediate given, the sensible given, even those physical features that
appear to constitute the standard categories of sex or race are not, in fact, the
result of direct physical perception, as we might intuit; rather they are mythic
constructions, which reinterpret physical featuresthrough the network of
relationships in which they are perceived
Women as prehistorical matriarches in which women were the creators
of civilization
From a lesbian vantage point, matriarchy and patriarchy are equally
oppressive because equally heterosexist.
 Naturalizing
Presume that the foundation of sex dierence is
heterosexuality, which she redenes as a tacit, unquestioned,
and forced social contract
Because lesbians are not dependent on men, they cannot
be real women; but because they lack economic,
ideological, and political privilege, they cannot be men.
Wittig argues that the very existence of lesbiana class of
individuals who are not-woman, not-manrefutes the
naturalized division between the sexes that supports
institutionalized heterosexuality, thereby exposing the
articiality of the ruling sex/ gender system.
 Points for Discussion
How easy is it for sexuality to escape the concept of
gender?
Can an individual truly escape the bonds that dene
sexuality and gender as social construct?
Or is it much easier for a homosexual to identify oneself by
abiding to binary descriptions of sexualitygay or
straight?
Can we truly use the label gay as an all encompassing
term involving all non-heterosexual identications?
Or should we dierentiate gay from lesbian from
bisexual from trans to straight?
 criture fminine feminine writing
criture
Since Socrates, writing had been considered a secondary
notation of primary activity, speech.
The theory of criture by Derridas Of Grammatology (1967) and
Writing and Dierence (1967)
Deconstructiondid not simply reverse the hierarchy between
speech and writing; it redened the terms of that hierarchy
Whereas speech had been made to stand for immediacy, presence,
truth, Logos, God, and Oneness, Derrida argued that speech itself had
never actually manifested Truth directly; instead, like writing, it was
structured through the dierence, between the signier (the word) and
the signied (the meaning). In any act of language, there was a lag, a
discrepancy, between a sign and what it meant. To the extent that
philosophy existed in language (spoken or written), it was structured
like writing.
 Logocentrism Derridas term for the search for a
fundamental Truth or Logos
Binary oppositions (i.e. mind/matter, light/darkness, presence/
absence, nature/culture, good/evil, etc.), the rst term of each being
desirable and the other shunned.
Male writers made use of gures of femininity to
bring out what had been marginalized from
traditional philosophical discourse.
These guresveils, shadows, enigmas, gurative
language itselfrepresented resistance to the One,
the Light, the Truth, and, implicitly, the idealization of
the Male itself.
 Cixous criture
Did not simply privilege the female half of an existing binary opposition
between male and female; like other theorists of criture, she questioned
the very adequacy of either/ or logics to name the complexity of cultural
realities.
Described the physical (as opposed to metaphysical) sensations of a woman
who is speaking for the rst time in public.
She postulated that Logocentrism is structured in such a way that the
opposition between male and female is set up as a relation not between
A and B but between A and not-A.
Freuds geometrical concept of castration denes woman not in terms of what she has
but in terms of what she lacksthat is, a penis.
One half of the opposition is essentially destroyed for the other half to make sense. Both
sides of an opposition are dened in terms of one of its elements.
Anyone simply trying to unrepress the obscured term, the feminine, is likely to reproduce
the very structures he or she is resisting.
Cixous declares, I am not a feminist.
Feminism, for her, participates in the same logic of opposition as traditional logocentrism
or its companion, phallocentrism (the description of sexual dierence as a dierence
between having and lacking the phallus).
 Cixous acknowledges that the female body has been
repressed.
Maybe there is no body itself, only bodies that have had
power and bodies that havent.
Granted, power and authority and law have presupposes the
male bodybut on the condition that no actual body be
represented at all. Thus, both men and women would have
everything left to say about the body, and that everything
would no longer fall neatly into any given category.
By writing as if the female body could be asserted, Cixous frees
it from invisibility and, at the same time, does not make it into a
new model for the universal human being . The new opposition
is not between male and female, but between a logic of the One
and a logic of heterogeneity and multiplicity.
 Points for Discussion
Is it considered problematic for a straight actor to
play a gay character? Can he/she fully embody
the essence of the character even if his/her body is
an external observer looking in?
Wouldnt Cixous crit prove unstable in an
instance where the body is organically one gender
while the mind is systematically another? Can
transmen and transwomen fully carry the voice of
the body they transmuted from?
 The History of Sexuality
Foucaults objective is to falsify what was known as the
repressive hypothesis.
This thesis states that sexual desires have been repressed and
silenced since the eighteenth century.
Foucault demonstrates that sex as an object of knowledge was
called into being once people began talking about it through
the confession.
According to Foucault, knowledge is expressed through
discourse, or the way we talk about things.
Discourse about sex through the act of confession brought into
the interplay of relations of power a certain truth about
sexuality.
The truth is then reworked in the process of psychoanalysis and
the science of the sexual.
 Foucault is interested in uncovering what he
call the genealogy of knowledge.
He uses genealogy as a method to refute
taken-for-granted truths.
He then aims at refuting the truth claim
attached to the Repressive Hypothesis.
 Ars erotica and Science Sexualis
Foucault distinguishes between two ways
sexuality was spoken about:
Ars erotica or erotic art is an eastern conception of sex.
Sex is seen as an art and not something dirty and
shameful.
Scientia sexualis, the science of sexuality. This science
developed from the act of confession staring 17th
century. Sex is seen as something one should repress, a
sin.
 Ars Erotica
In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure
itself, understood as a practice and accumulated
in experience; pleasure is not considered in
relation to an absolute law of the permitted and
forbidden, nor by reference to the criterion of
utility, but rst and foremost in relation to itself; it
is experience as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its
intensity, its specic quality, its duration, its
reverberations in the body and the soul. (p.57)
 Scientia Sexualis
Let us put forward a general working hypothesis.
The society that emerged in the nineteenth
centurybourgeouis, capitalist, or industrial
society, call it what you willdid not confront sex
with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the
contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery
for producing true discourses concerning it. Not
only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do
so; it also set out to formulate the uniform truth of
sex.
 Confession and the Science of Sex
According to Foucault, scientia sexualis developed
in the West.
It emerged from the act of Christian confession
starting the Counter Reformation.
Sex through the process of confession becomes
discourse, something to talk about.
A xation with nding out the truth about
sexuality arises, a truth that is to be confessed.
 We Other Victorians
Repressive Hypothesis
The story goes, through the European history, human
beings moved from the society where the talk about sex
and sexuality were freely expressed, into the period
where all these free expressions were repressed and
became forbidden.
Western society moved from the end of Renaissance
into the Victorian of 17th century. In this period, sexuality
was conned only within a home.
 The repressive hypothesis claims that of
the reasons why this occurred, is the rise of
capitalism during that time
Production is at the heart of capitalism. Thus any
kind of unproductive activity is incompatible with
the work ethics.
Workers energy should be geared at production
therefore sexual activities are to be corrected and
disciplined
 Madness which was an integrated part of the society
was dened as abnormality.
It was viewed as a pathology that impaired social
productivity and should be put away from others. This
gave birth to asylum and mental hospital.
Any form of sexuality that was not productive was to
be corrective. Adultery was seen a wrong act while
homosexuality became a third sex.
Non productive sexuality is then not essential to
society. It should be suppressed. Such disciplinary
methods were deployed in all disciplinary institutions
like prisons, hospitals , schools and universities.
 Points for Discussion
Can sex be used as a weapon? Is the use of sex as
a form of liberation and revolution by the LGBT
community justied? Was it eective? Or did it
made LGBT individuals even more susceptible to
discrimination as sexual deviants?
What could possibly be other eects of
prohibition, censorship and denial of sexual
discourse? Some say the answer to everyones
problem can be solved through sex? True or false.
 castration
When children observe that some people have
penises and others do not, Freud asserted, they
assume that everyone must at rst have had one,
and that in some people it had been cut o.
Psychic consequences
The boy takes seriously the fathers threat of castration as the
punishment for punishment for incest, thus experiencing
castration anxiety.
The girl tries to deal with her inferiority, thus feeling penis
envy.
 Female Sexuality (1931),
Femininity (1932)
Feminists have treated his theories with
ambivalence: on the one hand, he had the merit
of describing human sexuality as a question, not a
given; on the other hand, his phrase anatomy is
destiny seems in the nal analysis to uphold the
sexual certainties he himself questioned.
 Fetishism
analysis of the consequence of sexual dierence
Certain men, Freud claims, cannot accept the evidence
that the woman (the mother) doesnt have a penis. In
order to fall in love with women and not become
homosexual, they choose as a substitute some object
that will continue to support the sexual interest they
originally had in the missing maternal penis.
 Points of Discussion
Has societys view of fetish change the way they
see sexuality?
Can the anatomy of sexual organs surpass the
institution of sexuality?
 castration
Why, Lacan asks, did Freud need the concept of castration
at all? Women are not castrated men, are they? Little
boys dont really believe their fathers will castrate them,
do they? Its ridiculous to think that Mommy once had a
penis and lost it, isnt it? How could a theory so manifestly
absurd and disprovable have been taken seriously? The
outrageousness of these infantile sexual theories is of
course the point. The human being comes into sexual
epistemology unprepared. But why did Freud imagine
that these were the theories that came most readily to
mind to stanch the wound created by the discovery that
not everyone resembles me, and that that has something
to do with sexuality?
 functioning of language and the functioning of
desire
As soon as man begins to speak (there is no getting
away from the masculine universal), he must launder
everything important or even routine about his bodily
life through linguistic structures that dont exactly
correspond to biological requirements.
Lacan denes desire as what is left of absolute
demand when all possible satisfaction of needs has
been subtracted from it. In other words, desire is
what by denition remains unsatisable.
 the Otherthe very locus evoked by the recourse to
speech
Linguistic structures preexist the subject and are not created by
man.
The otherdesignates a mirror image, a counterpart or
competitor, another person.
The Other, capitalized, designates the Symbolic dimension
itself insofar as the subject has to relate to it.
The very fact of speaking routes everything through the Other.
The intuition that somehow one has lost direct connection with
the bodythat something about the body is missingis itself a
rst denition of the concept of castration. This lost object that
is dened retrospectively is also called, objet petit a. The lost
object is one that the subject never had, the loss brought into
being symbolization itself.

 universal castration
A specic castration caused by the encounter with
sexual dierence.
The castration that counts is the symbolic
castration of the motherthe mother as not-all
(not all there is for the child, not a total body
form, not entirely focused on the child without
other relationships).
The father as both the instatement of language and the
prohibition of incest
 Feminine Sexuality (1972-73)
there is no sexual relation
If there were sexual relation, that would imply that the
sexes are complementary, that they t together to make
a whole. It doesnt.
Womens pleasure is supplementary, not
complementary, to a sexual universe that revolves
around the position of the one, the phallus, the center.
 Woman does not exist
Woman as a fantasy complementarity
If woman existed, women could not.
In order for woman to surpass the imminence
of the phallic signier, Lacan adds God to the
couple.
God is the third who keeps two form
collapsing in one.
Its not that Lacan believes in God, but that the
position God occupies in the structure (that of
the Other) cannot disappear.
 Points of Discussion
Though Lacans discourse is highly phallocentric,
he uses it to displace the phallus. Could an anti-
phallic discourse still be considered as believable
even if the institution uses phallocentrism to
displace the very thing it tries to prove?
Wouldnt a biologically male anti-phallocentric
speaker lose credibility when, in fact, he himself
carry the very organ he tries to resist?
 The best homosexuality is in America, like
the best everything else, and California,
where all national tendencies achieve their
most hyperbolic expression, is a living beach
of writhing male bodies.
The expansion of the free market has also opened
up possibilities for a rapid spread of the idea that
(homo)sexuality is the basis for a social, political,
and commercial identity.
 Change in America inuences the rest of the
world in dramatic ways.
Stonewall Riots of 1969 in New York
Became internationally known as the symbol of a new
stage of gay armation
The macho gay man of the 1970s, the lipstick lesbian
of the 1990s, are a global phenomenon, thanks to ability
of mass media to market particular American lifestyles
and appearance.

 American books, lms, magazines and fashions
continue to dene contemporary gay and
lesbian meanings for most of the world.
Development of modern homosexualities
means the break with traditional assumptions of
a connection between gender role and sexual
deviance, thus repudiating the assumption in
Western societies that homosexuals are women
and men who want to be the opposite sex.
 Points of Discussion
Can global queering be truly the answer towards
discrimination?
Would you consider global queering as the bane
that further complicates individual cultures
perspective of what it takes to be homosexual?
Would you consider the Pinoy homosexual as
liberated on the insistence of global queering? Or
would you consider global queering as a poisoning
of the well, further convoluting the image of
Filipino gay?