диссертация (1169135), страница 11
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Postmodernfeminists, align with all postmodernists reject phallocentric thought, the traditionalmale (phallus) dominated absolute ideas that believe in centrality holding thestable relation of signifier and signified.Postmodern feminists, derive their ideas from psychology or fromexistentialist thoughts or from post structuralism.
Helen Cixous, along with Frenchfeminists like Kristeva and Irigaray draws on the theories of Jacques Lacan, whoseworks were both a ground for analysis and criticism. Laugh of Medusa is afeminist essay that "seeks to empower women while denouncing their agelessoppression under patriarchal social structure"167. Cixous believes that genderidentity is constructed inside language168.
Cixous locates the feminine writing inthe pre-oedipal or imaginary stage, where the binary opposites of phallocentric andmale domination are not yet constructed, rather it is the phase associated withmother's body. She argues that such female writing practice can deconstruct the164Soderback F. Motherhood According to Kristeva: On Time and Matter in Plato and Kristeva. Philosophia: ajournal of feminist continental philosophy, 1/1, 2011, pp. 65-87.165Oliver K. Julia Kristeva's Maternal Passions. Journal of French and Francophone philosophy, Vol. XVIII, No 1,2008-2010, pp. 1-8.166Tong R. Feminist Thought.
Avalon Publishing, 2013. p.270.167Cixous H. The Portable Cixous. Columbia University Press, 2010. p.21.168Blyth I., Sellers S. Helen Cixous: Live Theory. New York, London: Continuum, 2004. p.37.45phallocentric culture that has inscribed meanings to women's bodies. Languagearising from absence is a chain of endless substitutions that remove us from thetruth. There is the danger that the pre-existent language will speak for us169. Cixousasks women to express their desires and identities in their writings, which are freefrom phallocentric base. "Woman must write herself: must write about women andbring women to writing"170.Simone de Beauvoir is another known figure of postmodern feminism.
Herwell-known statement, "one is not born, but rather becomes a woman"171, provesher idea that neither biology, nor psychology makes femininity. Social structuresand upbringings shape woman as the second sex. She asserts that throughouthistory women had to construct their identity in dependence to men. Beingregarded as man's other, a woman can't enjoy an autonomous existence. Inmarginalized position, women have only fulfilled men's desires.
While men havebeen self/subjects, women have been regarded as other/object to thistranscendental, obsolete and essential subject. While she doesn't design aclearemancipatory path, she generally believes that "All women must make themselvescompletely independent of men through work"172. Women must refused to beconfined to any dependent and marginalized position to men.
" let her have herindependent existence and she will continue none the less to exist for him also,mutually recognizing each other as subject, each will yet remain for the otheranother"173. Beauvoir, believing in natural differences between men and womenclaims for the reciprocal relations between women and men. By mutualrecognition, Beauvoir means "put oneself in the other's place. As subject in a given169Cixous H. The Hélène Cixous Reader. Psychology Press, 1994.
p.95.Cixous H., Cohen. K., Cohen. P. The Laugh of the Medusa. The University of Chicago Press, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1976,pp. 875-893.171Beauvoir S. The second sex. London: Jonathan Cape, 2009. p. 396172Leighton J. Simone de Beauvoir on Woman.
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975. P.37.173Beauvoir S. The second sex. London: Jonathan Cape, 2009. p. 68).17046experience or situation and then to be able to retreat again as an object facing theother."174One of the current notable poststructuralist feminists is Judith Butler (1956),an American gender theorist. She is eminent for her deconstruction of conventionalgender norms mainly in her "Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion ofIdentity", and the book that followed it under the title of "Bodies That Matter: Onthe Discursive Limits of Sex". In these two works she has introduced the theory ofperformativity, that will be the framework of the present thesis. To discuss thetheory in details, the following section is particularly allotted to Judith Butler'sperformative theory and her poststructuralist ideas on gender identity.1.2.
A comparative analysis of Judith Butler’s views on identity and AnthonyGiddens’ structurarion theoryJudith Butler, a poststructuralist feminist, believes in the fluidity ofconstructed identities. She deconstructs the known binaries, which are not morethan naturalized illusions. Her "Gender Trouble" is an attempt to trouble andcollapse the accepted and idealized understandings of gender, especiallyheterosexuality. Heterosexual scheme of body represents the desire of bodies withespecial anatomy to the bodies with opposite anatomic configuration. Butlerargues, "Social and linguistic implications follow from this ostensibly irreduciblefact"175.Butler denounces the earlier understanding of women as category,considering that categorization overpasses the cultural, class, racial, ethnic,etc…differences.
Categorizing bodies based on sex imposes binary dualities onthem and defines bodies as heterosexual "in order to maintain reproductive174Tymieniecka A.T. Phenomenology world Wide: foundations-Expanding Dynamic Life. Kluwer AcademicPublishers, 2002. p.578.175Turner W. Genealogy of Queer Theory, volume 12 of American Subjects. Temple University Press, 2000. p.109.47sexuality as a compulsory order. Repeated over time, categorization fixes, boundsand stabilizes what counts as a properly sexed body"176.She deconstructs the binary of sex/gender, rejecting Beauvoir's definition ofsex and gender.
Sex is not a natural category, neither is it the origin of gender as acultural one; rather both sex and gender are cultural constructs with no originality.Body is not regarded as a natural “mute facticity"177. Body like gender is shapedby discourse, so it fails to precede discursive inscriptions that shape it.
The idearejecting the preexistence of natural body before the cultural norms blurs thesex/gender distinction.Body is not associated with gender before signification; rather it ismaterialized socially, culturally, and historically. Materiality is "an effect ofpower, as power’s most productive effect"178. It refers "how particular ideas aboutthe body come to have life, how they begin to order reality…It does throughdiscourse".
Body, as a "matter" cannot be separated from discourse and isproduced by that process of signification. Materialization of body defines theintelligibility of bodies. "To materialize is to become meaningful; it is to fit withina particular frame of intelligibility, in this case heteronormativity"179.For Butler "The category of "sex" is, from the start, normative; it is whatFoucault has called a "regulatory ideal …sex produces the bodies it governs"180.Sex is a normative frame or cultural regulatory norm that leads to the way ourbody appears through life. Indeed, through time regulatory processes are imposedon subjects to materialize sex and create idealized norms and expectations.
Incultural contexts, gender roles represent biologically given anatomy, the sex.Body, materialized as an effect of sex," is always already determined within thisregulatory frame, and the subject has a limited number of “costumes” from which176Lioyd M. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. UK: Polity, 2007. p. 73.Butler J. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity.
New York: Routledge, 1990. p.129.178Butler J. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of "sex". New York: Routledge, 1993. p. 2.179Lioyd M. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. UK: Polity, 2007. p. 73180Butler J. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of "sex".
New York: Routledge, 1993. p. 1.17748to make a constrained choice of gender style181. The limited possibilities forexistence of sex confines the construction of bodies as the heterosexuals. Sexdetermines the qualification of bodies and confines the viable subjects. In fact, sexregulates "which bodies matter"182and excludes the abjects, who "fail to count asbodies"183.The heterosexual matrix allows certain identifications and forecloses othersand produces "a domain of abject beings those who are not yet ‘subjects’, but whoform the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. The abject designateshere precisely those ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which arenevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject,but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable’ is required to circumscribe thedomain of the subject"184.Definitely, Butler means that through assuming sex, through beingsubjectified we gain identity, whether as socially viable or abjected subjects.
Sex"is, thus, not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will beone of the norms by which the "one" becomes viable at all, that which qualifies abody for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility185.Body as a matter is a site where power is exercised, at the same time that thepower forms the subjects, it is sustained by the performances of that subject. “forpower to act, there must be a subject”186. "if conditions of power are to persist,they mustbe reiterated;the subjectisprecisely the siteof suchreiteration”187.The subject is not an individual.
"It is a linguistic category, a placeholder, asstructure in formation. Individuals come to occupy the site of the subject (the181Salih S. Judith Butler. New York: Routledge, 2002. p. 56.Butler J. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of "sex". New York: Routledge, 1993. p. 4.183Ibid. p.15.184Ibid. p. 3.185Ibid. p. 4186Butler J. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997.p.203.187.
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