Gender ​Trouble 3 csillagozás

If gender is constructed, what is the manner or mechanism of this construction? If gender is constructed, could it be constructed differently, or does its constructedness imply some form of social determinism, foreclosing the possibility of agency and transformation?

10. oldal

Is the construction of the category of women as a coherent and stable subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations?

7. oldal

When the constructed status of gender is theorised as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and women and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.

9. oldal

“There is a growing tendency in American intellectual circles, particularly among radical feminists, to distinguish between male and female homosexuality,”(Foucault)

139. oldal

Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.” The phrase is odd, even nonsensical, for how can one become a woman if one wasn’t a woman all along? And who is this “one” who does the becoming? Is there some human who becomes its gender at some point in time? Is it fair to assume that this human was not its gender before it became its gender? How does one “become” a gender? What is the moment or mechanism of gender construction? And, perhaps most pertinently, when does this mechanism arrive on the cultural scene to transform the human subject into a gendered subject?

151. oldal

Consider the further consequence that if gender is something that one becomes—but can never be—then gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity, and that gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or substantial thing or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort. If gender is not tied to sex, either casually or expressively, than gender is a kind of action that can potentially proliferate beyond the binary limits imposed by the apparent binary of sex.

152. oldal

I confront a nonexistent object, a fetish, an ideological form which cannot be grasped in reality, except through its effects, whose existence lies in the mind of people, but in a way that affects their whole life, the way they act, the way they move, the way they think. So we are dealing with an object both imaginary and real.

164. oldal