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Gender and Literature. Introduction. Why Study Gender and Literature?. 2 Recent cases: 1. Caster Semenya (by Ariel Levy) On determining gender:
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Gender and Literature Introduction
Why Study Gender and Literature? • 2 Recent cases: • 1. Caster Semenya (by Ariel Levy) • On determining gender: • “The I.A.A.F.’s gender policy states that an athlete “can be asked to attend a medical evaluation before a panel comprising gynecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist, internal medicine specialist, expert on gender/transgender issues.” It has not come up with a single litmus test for sex; its goal, like that of the I.O.C. in such situations, is to reach consensus. The federation does not define the criteria that its group of experts must use to reach their determination, however. “It seems to be working with a kind of ‘I know it when I see it’ policy,” Dreger, a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told me.Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/11/30/091130fa_fact_levy#ixzz1jt1Lu41e
The case of gender identity in sport • “Now there is an even newer term of art for people born with ambiguously sexed bodies who do not wish to be connected with the “L.G.B.T.Q.I.”—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex—camp: “disorders of sex development,” or D.S.D. By naming the condition a medical “disorder,” advocates of the D.S.D. label hope to make the people it describes seem less aberrant”.
The case of gender identity in sport • “You could go your whole life and never know” • In normal human development, when a zygote has XY, or male, chromosomes, the SRY—sex-determining region Y—gene on the Y chromosome “instructs” the zygote’s protogonads to develop as testes, rather than as ovaries. The testes then produce testosterone, which issues a second set of developmental instructions: for a scrotal sac to develop and for the testes to descend into it, for a penis to grow, and so on. But the process can get derailed. A person can be born with one ovary and one testicle. The SRY gene can end up on an X chromosome. A person with a penis who thinks he is male can one day find out that he has a uterus and ovaries. “Then, there is chromosomal variability that is invisible,” Anne Fausto-Sterling, the author of “Sexing the Body,” told me. “You could go your whole life and never know.” • All sorts of things can happen, and do. An embryo that is chromosomally male but suffers from an enzyme deficiency that partially prevents it from “reading” testosterone can develop into a baby who appears female. Then, at puberty, the person’s testes will produce a rush of hormones and this time the body won’t need the enzyme (called 5-alpha-reductase) to successfully read the testosterone. The little girl will start to become hairier and more muscular.
Half The Sky Project • 2. Amartya Sen: “107 million women are missing” • Nancy Qian: Terrible Trade-off: “On average, the deaths of fifteen infant girls can be avoided by allowing one hundred female fetuses to be selectively aborted” • “More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars of the twentieth century”
Why do we study Gender and Literature? Literary Stereotypes • Perhaps to protect ourselves from stereotypes in literature? • Mills and Boon (200 million copies sold every year): Cherokee Christmas by Sheri White Feather “'When did you know?' she asked. 'That I loved you?' His hair blew in the breeze, like silk against midnight. 'I'm not sure. It might have happened the moment I saw you. Of course I was in denial. I didn't think I was capable of loving again ... and I was hoping that ...' He turned to nuzzle her neck. 'That you would give me lots of babies.' Traci pictured Parker with a houseful of brothers and sisters. The image made her dizzy with happiness. She clung to Daniel's arm, knowing he would make a strong, caring father. 'Cherokee babies,' she said. 'Yeah.' He smiled at her, pride shining in his eyes”
Literary stereotypes • Mills and Boon: • The Sheik and the Virgin Secretary by Susan Mallery 'I wondered if you were currently looking for a mistress,' Kiley Hendrick said quietly. Prince Rafiq of Lucia-Serrat stared at the woman sitting across from him. He had thought the biggest surprise of his Monday had been to find Kiley at her desk that morning, instead of on her honeymoon. He had been wrong. 'You speak of yourself?' he asked. She nodded, keeping her gaze firmly on the pad of paper she clutched on her lap. He hadn't seen his secretary in five days. She'd taken off part of the previous week to prepare for her impending marriage. 'I take it the wedding on Saturday was not a success,' he said.
Gender and Literature • Objectives of this course • To introduce you to theories of gender that are important for reading literature. • To introduce you to poems, short stories and novels specifically written by writers who wish to open out the canon to new expressions of sexuality. • To introduce you to writers that you may have not have read whose work attempts to describe a locus or place for the irrepressible struggle between constructions of sexuality and gender
Gender and Literature • How the course is organised? HISTORY We look at works from writers from different periods that have helped us define our understanding of gender today. THEORY Every 2 weeks we will discuss a different theoretical approach to the question of gender. We will then use these gender theories to give us new readings of the stories and poems: • Psychological & Psychoanalytical (Freud, Lacan, Klein and Chodorow) • Historical/Political (Michel Foucault and Judith Butler) • Feminist (De Beauvoir, Woolf, Irigaray) • Masculinist (Connell) • Queer Theory (Butler, Penney) • Transgender identity (Boylan)
Gender and Literature • What is Gender? • If male and female describe the different sexed bodies, then masculine and feminine describe different genders. Gender is, many argue, a broader term than sex. It refers to the masculine and feminine identities formed in society through a combination of social, cultural, political and physiological realities. Theorists such as Judith Butler have recently argued that gender should be regarded in terms of a continuum and no longer in terms of polar oppositions or binary oppositions. Such theorists even seek to break down our understanding of the sexed body in terms of a simple binary opposition. They refer to medical cases where children born as hermaphrodites are occasionally raised as a gender they later react against. What is Sexuality? Sexuality is generally regarded as a narrower term than gender. It is a construct more closely aligned with clear physiological sexual difference. However, recently sex and sexuality have also been read historically and have therefore been further removed from notions of biological essentialism.
Gender and Literature • Judith Butler also questions any attempt to regard sexuality as a “ground” on which gender is constructed. Thomas Laquer argues that sex itself is a “cultural construct”: • No particular understanding of sexual difference historically follows from undisputed facts about bodies…Organs that had been seen as interior versions of what the male had outside-the vagina as penis, the uterus as scrotum-were by the eighteenth century construed as of an entirely different nature” (Cassin, Untranslatables, 376)
Judith Butler • Butler: “gender in “English-language” contexts usually refers to a cultural meaning assumed by a body in the context of its socialization or acculturation, and so if often makes use of a distinction between a natural and cultural body in order to secure a definition for gender as an emphatically cultural production.”…but…”what is the mechanism of the production” • OR: GENDER AND THE OTHER: • “The assignment of gender arrives through the enigmatic desire of the other, a desire by which somatic life is infiltrated and that, in turn, or simultaneously, incites a set of displacements and translations that constitute the specific life of the drive, or sexual desire.
Gender and Literature • What then is Desire? • The tendency in literature is to focus on those poems and stories that deal with the attraction between individuals. In other words, it is ironic that in attempting to get to the heart of these individual identities that we must focus on those episodes where both parties strive to lose their individuality so as to be part of a “greater whole”. • In other words, we must talk about Desire, Attraction and Orientation • Raewyn Connell argues that Gender is performed or assumed within the “reproductive arena”. While important “queer theorists” such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler recognize that gender is “constructed” through discourses of power, they strive to move discussions of gender away from notions of reproduction that may exclude homosexuality. These theorists focus on the ‘practices’ of sexuality and on what Butler describes as ‘performativity’.
Desire and Attraction • For this reason the majority of the literature on this course will focus on aspects of DESIRE • The desire to be ‘truly’ masculine or feminine (i. e. to conform to cultural stereotypes) • The desire to Overcome Unconscious Desires (Oedipus and Elektra complexes and the “Mirror Stage”) • The desire to be the ideal Lover • The desire to experimentally Self-Fashion one’s Sexual Identity • The desire to escape gender “roles” • It is when attempting to deal with DESIRE that most of our heroes, heroines, anti-heores, and anti-heroines will struggle most visibly with how to manage and control their gendered identities.
Writers on Desire and Sex • Writers obviously write differently about desire and attraction than theorists. That is why we read them! • Octavio Paz: “Sex is the primordial source. Eroticism and love are forms derived from the sexual instinct: crystallizations, sublimations, perversions and condensations which transform” • “sexuality, violence and aggression are necessary components of copulation and therefore of reproduction; in eroticism, aggression ceases to serve procreation and becomes an end in itself. In short, while the sexual metaphor through all its variations always says reproduction, the erotic metaphor, indifferent to the perpetuation of life, places
The Sacred and Sex • In two notably ascetic religions, Buddhism and Christianity, the union of the sexual and the sacred also plays a role, and a pre-eminent one. Every great historic religion has given rise, on its margins or at its very heart, to sects, movements, rites and liturgies in which the flesh and sex are paths to divinity. It could not be otherwise: eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. (Paz, Loc. 226)
The Sacred and Sex • Collective ritual copulation was practised by the Tantric sects of India, by the Taoists in China. • To be initiated into the Gnostics, one had to ingest semen and menstrual blood in order to be reintegrated into the Great Whole, for the Gnostics believed that this world was the creation of a perverse demiurge. • For Tantrists and Taoists, for opposite reasons, the retention of semen was de rigueur. In Hindu Tantrism, semen was offered as a libation. Coitus interruptus almost always formed part of those rituals. […] In short, in religious eroticism, the sexual process is reversed; there is appropriation of the immense powers of sex to further ends different from or contrary to reproduction. (Paz, loc. 236)
The Sacred and Sex: moving on to Freud • You can see then how Freud came up with his theories. These religious ‘corruptions’ of ‘natural’ sexual functions in early societies allowed him to conceive of myths in modern societies that would also enable him to read into ‘corruptions’ or displacements in regard to what Freud often regards as the normal course of desire and the drives.
Is Gender Constructed? • Constructing Gender Roles • DESIRE INDUSTRY: Lad-Mags, Chick-lit and Pornography • The Desire Community or a consumerism of desire also exists most powerfully in the shape of “porn industry”. David Foster Wallace informs us in his lengthy study of pornography that the porn film industry is twice as big as the regular movie industry, taking in 4 billion $ in the US alone annually. However, the literature we will read must represent desire without becoming pornographic, for then it would not pass the University Censors. • “Marriage industry” is another exponent of ideals of gender conditioning. It is one of the largest service industries. And yet the statistics tell us that people are also perhaps sometimes unconsciously professing a belief in an ideal of ‘romantic love’ that fails to adequately provide for gender differences. In the US 43% of first-time marriages fail within the first 15 years.
Gender and Literature • Gender and World Poverty • Gender Equality: • The prospects for achieving the Millennium Development Goals are both directly and indirectly improved by enhancing gender equity. Thus, there are close links between the reduction of both gender inequalities and multidimensional poverty. • The empirical evidence suggests that developing countries with less gender inequality tend to have lower poverty rates.
Gender and Literature • How should we approach Gender difference? • We can limit our analysis to 3 broad approaches • The idea ofnatural difference which treats the body as a machine - the “body-as-machine model” –Essentialist • The idea of separate realms of gender and sexuality - the “two realms model” (1970s breakthrough - “sex was the biological fact, the difference between the male and the female human animal. Gender was the social fact, the conditioning of masculine and feminine roles, or men’s and women’s personalities”) • “The body-as-canvas” model - the idea of gender as a discursive or symbolic system which treats bodies as a canvas on which society paints (Foucault - society’s institutions control and police the rules and regulations for bodies especially such institutions as medicine, psychology and criminology - people then interiorize these initially external rules of categorization) - Constructivist • In Literature we find the potential to look beyond these approaches.
Gender and Language • Is Language Gendered? • The Androcentric Rule: • “Men will be seen to behave lingustically in a way that fits the writer’s view of what is desirable or admirable; women on the other hand will be blamed for any linguistic state or development which is regarded by the writer as negative or reprehensible” (10) • Chinese characters • English words • History etc. • Virile • Feminine rhymes and masculine rhymes in poetry • In French and many other languages nouns are masculine and feminine (la chair (flesh), sens (meaning or sense is masculine)) • Japanese critics have recently made much of the fact that Japanese women are perceived as having a unique language of their own.
Gender and Literature • The jargon of gender studies • Heterosexual • Homosexual • Lesbian - from Lesbos the Island home of Sappho • Metrosexual - retrosexual and heteropolis (modern day “dandy” - Oscar Wilde - David Beckham) • Transgendered - transvestites, cross-dressers and camp, ‘butch dyke’, effeminate man • Transexual - transman or transwoman • Bisexual
Gender and Language • Gendered stereotypes • The “career woman” - why is there no equivalent phrase “career man”? (same applies to housewife and house husband) • We have the word ‘emasculation’ to describe the taking away of a man’s masculinity (something many men fear). Why is there no equivalent term for a woman? Does it imply that masculinity is generally considered a more important attribute? • In most of the established Churches women are denied access to the higher echelons of practice. • Even though the US is generally regarded as one of the most progressive places in terms of gender, 95-97% of top manager positions are held by men.
The History of Gender • Early Descriptions of Gender and Sexuality • Ancient Greece – • Sex relations were structured hierarchically - for the person in the submissive role, at least, structural ‘femininity’ was the consequence of lower status, not sex (7). Therefore there were different taboos than today • Pederasty –Greek culture did not have terms to describe the sexual dichotomy we represent in terms of homosexuality and heterosexuality. • Pederasty refers to the desire felt by an adult male usually for a preadolescent boy. The “boys” were regarded as sexual objects but the relationship can also be described in terms of a protégé/mentor relationship. The Greeks used the term erastes (lover) for adult male and eromenos (beloved) for the youth. It was regarded as a rite of initiation or passage towards adulthood. This period lasted for boys from the ages of 15-18. After this age it was not considered right. • Plato generally advises that one should control the passions. There should be a “gradual purification of the soul, which at each step moves further from sexuality until, at the summit of its ascent, it relinquishes it altogether” (Paz, loc. 276)
The History of Gender • ANCIENT GREEK notions of sexuality • Pederasty (homoerotic) was not considered “abnormal” if the boy was too young, but rather inappropriate because the boy might not yet be matured mentally to make fully rational choices • SOCRATES writes of this desire of adult males for boys over what he felt for his wife Xanthippe (433 BC): • “Right then, my good man, I saw what was beneath his cloak and I burst into flame and was no longer in command of myself and thought the poet Cydias wisest in respect to erotic matters, who, speaking of a beautiful boy, advises someone: “Take care not to be seized as a ration of meat, a fawn coming before a lion” For I seemed to have been caught by such a creature”
The History of Gender BOY-LOVE IN ANCIENT GREECE Anacreon writes of boy-love: “Boy with the virginal glance, I court you, but you pay no heed, Unaware that you drive The chariot of my heart” The implication here is that the wise man should control such urges whereas for the common man it may not always be possible to control the strong desire that also objectifies the adult male. • “Governing oneself, managing one’s estate, and participating in the administration of the city were three practices of the same type” (14)
The History of Gender • Greek Sexuality – women in Greece • Women initially seen as the bane of the world in Greek Mythology • The first woman, Pandora, is created in spite by Zeus after Prometheus had stolen fire from the goods. She is given a storage jar containing all sufferings, illnesses and labours, which she opens and then scatters across the world. • Women are depicted as having an insatiable appetite for sex. Hesiod writes about 700 BC: “But when the thistle flowers and the shrill cicada, Sitting in a tree, pours down his clear song without pause From beneath his wings, in the season of toilsome heat, Then goats are fattest and wine tastes best, Women are horniest, but men are most debilitated, Because the Dog-star dries up head and knees And the flesh is parched by heat” The woman was regarded as consuming menos - a man’s vital fluid. Later described as a succubus
Gender and Literature • Greek sexuality • Riding a horse is a recurring metaphor for sexual intercourse: “Thracian filly, why do you, looking at me with suspicious eyes, Evade me pitilessly, and assume That I have no skills? Listen to me: I could easily throw A bridle upon you And working the reins bend you Around the limits of the course. As it is, you graze in the meadows and frisk, lightly prancing, For you don’t have an expert rider upon you, One who knows horses”
Gender and Literature • Sappho • From the island of Lesbos • Desire: “and Eros shook my heart like a wind in the mountains falling upon oaks” and “limb-loosening” and a “bittersweet uncontrollable crawling thing” • The speaker of her poems does not try to impose her will upon the lover but speaks of mutual rewards • “Ode to Aphrodite” – Sappho’s only wholly surviving poem: ..and you, blessed lady, With a smile on your immortal countenace, Asked what I suffered again and why I called on you again And what I most wished to happen to me In my maddened heart. “Whom do I persuade again […] into your friendhsip? Who, Sappho, wrongs you? For if she flees, soon she will pursue, If she does not receive gifts, she will give them, if she does not love, soon she will love, Even unwilling.
