1. Sex Bodies Spaces
Gender and Pop Culture
Lecture 2
Stories into Discourse
2. Stories about Gender
• Enlightenment philosophy
• Theories of sex and gender
• Language/discourse
• Visual languages
3. ‘Sex is a theory
about human beings which divides
them into two biologically based
categories – male or female’
Gender Studies: Terms & Debates, Anne Cranny-Francis, Wendy
Waring, Pam Stavropoulos, Joan Kirkby. 2003. P.7.
4. Enlightenment
• Age of Reason
• 1650-1790
• Voltaire, Newton, Rousseau, Locke,
Spinoza
• Printing Press
• democracy
5. Descartes (1596-1650)
Cogito ergo sum
I think therefore I am
Cartesian dualisms:
• Mind • Body
• Rational • Emotion
• Culture • Nature
• Reason • Passion
• Transcendence • Immanence
• Public • Private
• Man • Woman
6. ‘the distinction between the sexes is
taken to be a fundamental feature of
nature that could only be represented in
culture in this dichotomous way’ (Moira
Gatens Imaginary Bodies Routledge. 1996. 51).
7. Common Sense
Common sense appears to be an obvious and natural set of
values and beliefs, whose authority is based on the collective
and timeless wisdom whose unquestioned presence seems to
be the source and guarantee of everything we take for granted.
Common sense appears obvious because it is inscribed in the
language we speak…
10. Gendered spaces themselves shape,
and are shaped by, daily activities.
Once in place, they become
taken for granted,
unexamined, and
seemingly immutable’
Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces 1992. P.29.
11. …what seems obvious and natural is not
necessarily so, but on the contrary, ‘the
obvious’ and ‘the natural’ are not given but
produced by the ways in which the society
talks and thinks about itself and its
experience.
(Catherine Belsey Critical Practice p.3)
= ideology
12. ‘Sex is a theory
about human beings which divides
them into two biologically based
categories – male or female’
Gender Studies: Terms & Debates, Anne Cranny-Francis, Wendy
Waring, Pam Stavropoulos, Joan Kirkby. 2003. P.7.
15. Simone De
Beauvoir:
‘One is not born but
rather becomes a
woman.’
(The Second Sex 1949)
16. Robert Stoller
• Sex and Gender 1968: gender is a learned
set of behaviours unrelated to biology
• Sex/Gender distinction: sex=biological,
gender= social
contested in 1990s as much more ambiguous
17. Moira Gatens
The Sex/gender distinction
•is culturally and linguistically mediated
•Changes over time and place
•Where does the social end and the body
begin?
•How are sex and gender implicated?
Imaginary bodies: ethics, power and
corporeality. Routledge 1996.
18. Elizabeth Grosz
‘human subjects give meaning to their
biologies … their bodies always mean
something, to themselves and to others’.
‘the body can be seen as the primary object of social
production and inscription, and can thus be located
within a network of socio-historical relations instead
of being tied to a fixed essence.’
‘sexual differences are purely relational’
Volatile Bodies (Allen & Unwin 1994)
19. Judith Butler
•gender as performance
• as an act that one does, and repeats, over time, either
consciously or subconsciously, so that it becomes
naturalised.
• Socially coded and constructed
• Shifts over time and place
• Punishments for performing out of turn
Gender Trouble 1999
23. Stories into discourse
Discourse – ways of structuring knowledge
and social practice
Subjects/subjectivities – the idea of the self/process of
identity
24. Graeme Turner
Film as Social Practice
1988
Film’s function in our culture goes beyond
that of being, simply, an exhibited aesthetic
object … Film is a social practice for its
makers and its audience; in its narratives and
meanings we can locate evidence of the ways
in which our culture makes sense of itself. (3)
25. Workshop 1
Disney Tales
Mickey Mouse Monopoly
http://www.veoh.com/watch/v15800022cezMt3D6
