This document discusses several key aspects of feminist theory and politics related to gender, representation, and subjectivity. It addresses how political and linguistic representation often only extends to what can be acknowledged as a subject. It also examines how identity is socially constructed and assured through stabilizing gender norms, and how those who fail to conform to these norms may not be considered subjects. Finally, it discusses how power produces regulatory discourses that impose artificial binaries between sexes and internal coherence.

1. Gender trouble
Chap 1 – Subjects of sex/ gender and
desire – Judith Buther
Presentation made by: Ronald G Simoes
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2. Feminist Theory
Politics and representation
Politics: Questionable relationship between political
and linguistics representation. In this sense
representation is extended only to what can be
acknowledged as a subject.
Is a monster a subject?
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3. Representation:
Operative process to extend visibility and legitimacy
( political subject).
It also serves as an instrument to maintain certain
distornted concepts about what is assumed to be true
about the category of women.
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4. Women subjects
No stable and or abiding terms
Juridical systems of power produces subjects they
subsequently come to represent. It regulates political
life in purely negative terms( limitation, prohibition,
regulation, control and 'protection'
Example: Transgenders( legally denied, but if it is a
mental disorder, thet are accepted), women, blacks in
the past in the USA.
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5. Women: Common identity
Structure of power
Law, language and
politics.
Women, feminism
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6. Gender
racial
Regional identities
Gender class
Sexual
ethnic
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7. Feminism
Universal patriarchy as a way to consolidate feminist
theories.
universal theory
Gross
universal women misrepresentation
universal men
Theory as an emancipatory strategy
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8. Sex and Gender
Sex – natural? Anatomical? Chromosomal?
Hormonal? Juridical concept? Sexed nature and
natural sex as pre-discursive, prior to culture.
Male
Female
Both - hermafrodite
None - castration - Eunuco
Gender
Culturally constructed , not directly connected to sex.
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Travestis

9. Is there a politics of sex?
Foucault
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10. Linguitic aspects: unrepresentable
Language is masculinist, phallogocentric
Linguistic abesence
Subject and the other are masculine – Irigaray
Sartre framework – Concepts represented falsely in
the entire structure
Sex is not ONE – Criticism on the hegemonic Western
representation and of the methaphysics of
substance that structures the notion of the subject.
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11. Women and male freedom
Women – Embodied existence, confined.
Men – desembodied universality
Gender asymmetry – Master-slave relation
Beauvoir maintained the mind/body dualism
Plato, Descartes, Husserl and Sartre –
Soul( consciousness, mind) and body
Mind = masculinity
Body = femininity
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12. Women and male freedom - cont
The female body is marked within masculinist
discourse
Masculine Body is part of the universal
High heels represents an attemp to reduce woman's
mobility in the male world.
Chinese concubines and Turkish odalisques wore high
shoes, prompting scholars to speculate if heels were
used not only for aesthetic reasons but also to
prevent women from escaping the harem (Kunzle
2004).
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13. Beauvoir and Irigaray
Beauvoir – no reciprocity of an asymmentrical
dialectic
Irigaray – Dialectic itself is monologic/masculinist
Universals: Normative, reducionistic, controling.
Is it necessary an unity in order to create a solidarity
and identity
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14. Identity
Coherence and continuity are not analytic features of
personhood – They are socially instituted.
Identity is assured by stabilizing concepts of gender, sex,
and sexuality.
The emergence of “incoherent” or “discontinous”
gendered being .
Are they subjects? Persons who fail to conform to the
gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which
persons are defined.
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15. Cultural Matrix of intelligibility
Defining Male - center
Defining Female – exist outside the male
Denying the other – cannot exist certain gender
identities. Their persistence and proliferation expose
the limits.
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16. The denial matrix
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17. Compulsary Sexuality - Adrienne Rich and beyond
Power produces the discourses
The binary regulation of sexuality supresses the subversive multiplicity of
a sexuality that disrupts heteresexual reproductive, and medicojuridical
hegemonies.
Irigaray – there is only one sex – The masculine
It is impossible for women to be represented within this system.
There is no essence, no difference. Women are masculine subjects.
Language supports the binary relation. Grammar marks these difference.
Foucault – Masculine and feminine – Produced by the regulatory
economy of sexuality
Grammar sex impose an artifical binary relation between sexes and an
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artificial internal coherence.

18. Wittig – Person has a pre-gendered presocial identity
Destruction of men – there is no femenine writing
Subsersive sexuality flourishes prior to the imposition
of law.
Freud, Lacan– bases his theory on the assumption of
an essence, ID, Ego, Universals.
Stoller – Gender Core
Buther – Identity is performatively constituted by the
very 'expressions' that aew said to be its results.
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You are not woman because you are born one. You are

19. Breanda/ David study case
What do you think about this case? In particular
discuss the medical discourse in the movie.
Simone de Beauvoir – The second sex “ one is not
born a woman, but rather, becomes one. Gender. Is
possible to compare this passage to this study
case?
There is an essence of being ( Sartre) . What kind of
problems this statement la Edad Media
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20. Thanks!
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