Queers, Gals, Chaps, Chicks, and Lads

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Parker
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Masculinity And Femininity ◽  
Queer Fiction

This chapter examines queer fiction. Although various in form, these stories share common concerns. They question the naturalness of binaries such as masculinity and femininity, maleness and femaleness, and heterosexuality and homosexuality. By emphasizing that identity has no essence or stable ground, and by presenting subjectivity as unfixed, multiple, and in process, queer fiction reflects the view that gender and sex are discursive constructs and that identity is performative — a matter of ‘doing’ rather than ‘being’, and an endless state of becoming. Further, queer fiction stresses discontinuities between sex, gender, and desire, and disputes heterosexual models of gender polarity and sexual difference. It privileges ambiguity, contradiction, illegibility, and incoherence.

Darwin's Orchids

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 525-550
Author(s):  
Donovan O. Schaefer
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Masculinity And Femininity ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Single Moment ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Life On Earth

Abstract Is there a queer Darwin? It is often assumed that Darwinian biology is an ally of conservative approaches to sexuality and gender. The Christian legal framework known as natural law philosophy, for instance, reads Darwin as a champion of heterosexual coupling, proving the biological imperative of straight sex. Some feminist readings of Darwin (such as that of Elizabeth Grosz) find in Darwin a confirmation of the necessity of sexual difference organized around masculinity and femininity—an approach Myra Hird has called the “ontology of heterosexuality.” But these interpretations are incorrect. Schaefer argues that far from being an advocate for the ontology of heterosexuality, Darwin provides tools to demolish it. Turning to his research on barnacles and orchids and his speculation on the sources of organic variation, this essay highlights the irreducible importance of diversity and change for Darwin's framework. The ongoing ferment of variation that is the guideline of all life on earth extends not only to the morphology of sex organs but to desire itself. Darwin shows that the ontology of heterosexuality is an arbitrary snapshot, a single moment in the fluid trajectory of life, rather than a law that can be arbitrarily cast over the whole arc. In this, Darwin supports Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's first axiom for queer theory: “People are different from each other.” The essay concludes by connecting a Darwinian approach to sex with José Esteban Muñoz's call for a queer ecstasy that anticipates the futurity of desire.

The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War I and the Demise of British Feminism

1988 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 232-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Kingsley Kent
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Mass Movement ◽  
Adult Women ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Perceptions ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Masculinity And Femininity ◽  
War Effort ◽  
The Impact

The outbreak of war in August 1914 brought to a halt the activities of both militant and constitutional suffragists in their efforts to gain votes for women. By that time, the suffrage campaign had attained the size and status of a mass movement, commanding the time, energies, and resources of thousands of men and women and riveting the attention of the British public. In early 1918, in what it defined as a gesture of recognition for women's contribution to the war effort, Parliament granted the vote to women over the age of thirty. This measure, while welcome to feminists as a symbol of the fall of the sex barrier, failed to enfranchise some five million out of eleven million adult women. When war ended, feminists continued to agitate for votes for women on the same terms as they had been granted to men, but organized feminism, despite the fact that almost half of the potential female electorate remained disenfranchised, never regained its prewar status as a mass movement. By the end of the 1920s, feminism as a distinct political and social movement no longer existed. This was due to the impact of the war on cultural perceptions of gender. Feminists' understandings of masculinity and femininity became transformed during the war and in the immediate postwar period, until they were virtually indistinguishable from those of antifeminists.As I have argued elsewhere, prewar British feminists regarded their movement as an attack on separate-sphere ideology and its constructions of masculinity and femininity.

The Succession of Orthodoxies About Sexual Difference

2004 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-329
Author(s):  
Howard S. Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference

Gender characteristic attribution; masculinity and femininity in men and women

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua K. Digerness ◽  
Benjamin Berlin ◽  
Todd Baird ◽  
Azenett Garza
Keyword(s):  
Men And Women ◽  
Masculinity And Femininity ◽  
Gender Characteristic

After Alice After Cats in Derrida's L'animal que donc je suis

Derrida Today ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Polish
Keyword(s):  
Human Development ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Human World ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
The Sacrifice

In this essay, I argue that Derrida cannot pursue the question of being/following unless he thinks through the question of sexual difference posed by figures of little girls in philosophical texts and in literature, specifically as posed by Lewis Carroll's Alice whom Derrida references in L'animal que donc je suis. At stake in thinking being after animals after Alice is the thought of an other than fraternal following, a way of being-with and inheriting from (other than human) others that calls for an account of development that is not dictated by a normative autotelic and sacrificial logic. I argue that Derrida's dissociation of himself and his cat from Alice and her cat(s) in L'animal que donc je suis causes him to risk repeating the closed, teleological gestures philosophers like Kant and Hegel perpetuate in their accounts of human development. The more sweeping conclusion towards which this essay points is the claim that the domestication of girls and their subjection to familial fates in narratives and the reduction of development to teleology more generally, require the sacrifice and forgetting of ‘nature’, including animals, so that the fates of girls and ‘nature’ are intertwined in the context of projects of human world-building and home-making.

Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Individuation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Hengehold
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The Other ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World

Most studies of Simone de Beauvoir situate her with respect to Hegel and the tradition of 20th-century phenomenology begun by Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. This book analyzes The Second Sex in light of the concepts of becoming, problematization, and the Other found in Gilles Deleuze. Reading Beauvoir through a Deleuzian lens allows more emphasis to be placed on Beauvoir's early interest in Bergson and Leibniz, and on the individuation of consciousness, a puzzle of continuing interest to both phenomenologists and Deleuzians. By engaging with the philosophical issues in her novels and student diaries, this book rethinks Beauvoir’s focus on recognition in The Second Sex in terms of women’s struggle to individuate themselves despite sexist forms of representation. It shows how specific forms of women’s “lived experience” can be understood as the result of habits conforming to and resisting this sexist “sense.” Later feminists put forward important criticisms regarding Beauvoir’s claims not to be a philosopher, as well as the value of sexual difference and the supposedly Eurocentric universalism of her thought. Deleuzians, on the other hand, might well object to her ideas about recognition. This book attempts to address those criticisms, while challenging the historicist assumptions behind many efforts to establish Beauvoir’s significance as a philosopher and feminist thinker. As a result, readers can establish a productive relationship between Beauvoir’s “problems” and those of women around the world who read her work under very different circumstances.

‘Family Romance’ and the Oedipalization of Freudian Psychoanalysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-187
Author(s):  
Herman Westerink ◽  
Philippe Van Haute
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Oedipus Complex ◽  
Difference Family ◽  
Radical Theory ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Family Romance ◽  
Short Essay ◽  
Informative Text

Although Freud's ‘Family Romances’ from 1909 is hardly ever discussed at length in secondary literature, this article highlights this short essay as an important and informative text about Freud's changing perspectives on sexuality in the period in which the text was written. Given the fact that Freud, in his 1905 Three Essays, develops a radical theory of infantile sexuality as polymorphously perverse and as autoerotic pleasure, we argue that ‘Family Romances’, together with the closely related essay on infantile sexual theories (1908), paves the way for new theories of sexuality defined in terms of object relations informed by knowledge of sexual difference. ‘Family Romances’, in other words, preludes the introduction of the Oedipus complex, but also – interestingly – gives room for a Jungian view of sexuality and sexual phantasy. ‘Family Romances’ is thus a good illustration of the complex way in which Freud's theories of sexuality developed through time.

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