scholarly journals ADOLESCÊNCIA, SUBJETIVIDADE E QUESTÕES DE GÊNERO NO TEATRO DE MARK RAVENHILL

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-39
Author(s):  
Fabiano Fleury Souza Campos

A partir da análise estrutural, focada, sobretudo, nos personagens da peça Shopping and Fucking (1996), escrita pelo dramaturgo britânico Mark Ravenhill, evidenciamos uma relação incomum entre os elementos formadores desse trabalho teatral e as discussões sobre subjetividade, gênero e sexualidade voltadas para os adolescentes, nos dias atuais. Os contornos dos personagens dessa peça desestabilizam certas noções pré-concebidas sobre a individualidade e a corporeidade, por exemplo. Para a nossa análise, apoiamo-nos sobre os apontamentos de teóricos dedicados tanto ao teatro, como Pierre Sarrazac e Elinor Fuchs, quanto à sociologia e política, como Judith Butler. A peça por meio do discurso agressivo e a violência direcionadas ao corpo dos personagens é capaz de abalar as certezas e a moralidade previamente determinadas de seus espectadores.YOUTH, SUBJECTIVITY AND GENDER IN MARK RAVENHILL’S THEATER Abstract: from the structural analysis, focused mainly on the characters of the play Shopping and Fucking (1996), written by British playwright Mark Ravenhill, our study shows an unusual relationship between the elements of theatre and the contemporary discussions about subjectivity, gender, and sexuality among adolescents presented in this play. The contours of the characters destabilize certain preconceived notions to individuality and embodiment, for example. Our analysis are supported, for instance, by theater theories developed by Pierre Sarrazac and Elinor Fuchs, and sociology concepts implemented by Judith Butler.  Through aggressive discourse and violence directed to the body of the characters, the play is able to shake the certainties and moralities previously found in Ravenhill’s viewers.Keywords: Ravenhill. Contemporary British Theater. Adolescence. Subjectivity. Gender. 

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Cenk Özbay ◽  
Kerem Öktem

Today Turkey is one of the few Muslim-majority countries in which same-sex sexual acts, counternormative sexual identities, and expressions of gender nonconformism are not illegal, yet are heavily constrained and controlled by state institutions, police forces, and public prosecutors. For more than a decade Turkey has been experiencing a “queer turn”—an unprecedented push in the visibility and empowerment of queerness, the proliferation of sexual rights organizations and forms of sociabilities, and the dissemination of elements of queer culture—that has engendered both scholarly and public attention for sexual dissidents and gender non-conforming individuals and their lifeworlds, while it has also created new spaces and venues for their self-organization and mobilization. At the point of knowledge production and writing, this visibility and the possible avenues of empowerment that it might provide have been in jeopardy: not only do they appear far from challenging the dominant norms of the body, gender, and sexuality, but queerness, in all its dimensions, has become a preferred target for Islamist politics, conservative revanchism, and populist politicians.


Author(s):  
Suparna Roy

Stevie Jackson and Jackie Jones regarded in her article- Contemporary Feminist Theory that “The concepts of gender and sexuality as a highly ambiguous term, as a point of reference” (Jackson, 131, ch-10). Gender and Sexuality are two most complexly designed, culturally constructed and ambiguously interrelated terms used within the spectrum of Feminism that considers “sex” as an operative term to theorize its deconstructive cultural perspectives. Helene Cixous notes in Laugh of Medusa that men and women enter the symbolic order in a different way and the subject position open to either sex is different. Cixious’s understanding that the centre of the symbolic order is ‘phallus’ and everybody surrounding it stands in the periphery makes women (without intersectionality) as the victim of this phallocentric society. One needs to stop thinking Gender as inherently linked to one’s sex and that it is natural. To say, nothing is natural. The body is just a word (as Judith Butler said in her book Gender Trouble [1990]) that is strategically used under artificial rules for the convenience of ‘power’ to operate. It has been a “norm” to connect one’s sexuality with their Gender and establish that as “naturally built”. The dichotomy of ‘penis/vagina’ over years has linked itself to make/female understanding of bodies. Therefore my main argument in this paper is to draw few instances from some literary works which over time reflected how the gender- female/women characters are made to couple up with a male/man presenting the inherent, coherent compulsory relation between one’s gender and sexuality obliterating any possibility of ‘queer’ relationships, includes- Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Bombay Brides (2018) by Esther David, Paulo Coelho’s Winner Stands Alone (2008) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall apart (1958).


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rahilly

In a world that is responding to ever-changing ideas and expressions of gender, this book adds new insights on transgender children and the parents who support them. Drawing on in-depth interview data with more than fifty parents, the book examines parents’ shifting understandings of their children’s gender and how they come to help their children make sense of their identities and their bodies. Throughout these processes, the book shows that parents’ meaning-making and decision-making often challenge LGBT rights discourses, as well as queer political tenets, in unexpected ways. These dynamics surface in three key areas: (1) gender and sexuality, (2) the gender binary, and (3) the body. Throughout parents’ understandings, gender identity and sexual orientation do not always present as radically separate aspects of the self, but are more fluid and open to reconsideration, given new cultural contexts, opportunities, and phases of the life course. And despite increasing cultural visibility around nonbinary identities, “gender-expansive” child-rearing often looks, fundamentally, very binary and gender-stereotypical, per the children’s own assertions and expressions. Lastly, parents often utilize highly medicalized understandings of transgender embodiment, which nevertheless resonate with some children’s sensibilities. Altogether, these families depart from conventional understandings of gender, sexuality, and the binary, but in ways that prioritize child-centered shifts, meanings, and parenting models, not necessarily LGBTQ politics or paradigms. This marks new ground for understanding the mechanisms and parameters of the (trans)gender change afoot.


1996 ◽  
Vol 12 (45) ◽  
pp. 43-49
Author(s):  
Peta Tait

Circus artists, especially aerial performers and wire-walkers, transgress and reconstruct the boundaries of racial and gender identity as part of their routine. In the following article, Peta Tait analyzes the careers of two twentieth-century Australian aerialists of Aboriginal descent who had to assume alternative racial identities to facilitate and enhance their careers. Both Con Colleano, who became a world-famous wire-walker in the 1920s, and Dawn de Ramirez, a side-show and circus aerialist who worked in Europe in the 1960s, undermined the social separation of masculine and feminine behaviours in their acts. Theories of the body and identity, including those of Foucault and Judith Butler, inform this critique of the performing body in circus. The author, Peta Tait, is a playwright and drama lecturer at the University of New South Wales. She is author of Original Women's Theatre (1993) and Converging Realities: Feminism in Australian Theatre (1994).


Author(s):  
Olga A. Voronina ◽  

The purpose of this article is to analyze the evolution of the concept of gender in social knowledge and the humanities. The term «gender» encompasses biological (sexual), psychological, social, cultural, symbolic aspects of human life. Even before the introduction of this term into scientific publications in the 1960s, the phenomenon itself was discovered in three types of knowledge: in psychology and psychiatry when studying various forms of sexuality and sexual identity, in anthropological and ethnographic studies, and in the feminist philosophy of culture. This largely determined the main directions in the study and understanding of gender for several decades. The theory of socio-cultural construction of gender played the main role. It developed in parallel with other critical and constructivist scientific concepts, which in no small part led to its adoption by «academics» and the inclusion of the gender perspective in the body of scientific research. However, along with the development of postmodern feminist philosophy, the concept of gender undergoes redefinition. The constructivist model of gender is displaced by the performative concept of Judith Butler. She argues that not only gender but the biological sex does not exist outside the cultural framework and power discourse. The binary matrix of gender, gender identity and heterosexuality is approved within the framework of the dominant discourse with the help of various regulatory actions (performatives). Butler rejects this model because she claims that bodies, sex and gender identity have different configurations. The performative concept of sex was actively used in the queer project, as it provided justification for rejecting the normative binary concept of femininity and masculinity and the corresponding heterosexuality. Today, queer includes political movement, research, art, and discursive deconstruction of normative heterosexuality. The variant of mosaic nature, hybridity and relativism of identity proposed in the queer project destroys the possibility of social and political transformations in the sphere of gender equality. Instead, queer activists advocate an elusive equality of opportunity to try on different identities at one’s own discretion. At the present stage, the theoretical radicalism of queer makes the development of new social programs unlikely, while they appear to be necessary. In contrast, gender theory (in its feminist, constructivist, and cultural-symbolic modes) has had a significant scientific and social impact. The use of the gender perspective in social knowledge and the humanities has provided better understanding of the individual and society. The principle of achieving gender equality has been accepted by the world community and has become part of many programs at the international and national levels. However, the problems in the understanding of the relation between sex and gender, discovered in performative and queer theory, become significant against a background of spreading biotechnologies (from sex reassignment surgeries to assisted reproduction). This requires wider research and further discussion among different schools.


Sociology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Conte

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a conceptual distinction between “sex” and “gender” arose in the clinical literature on human psychosexual development. Sex came to signify the biological or bodily component of difference, that is, male and female. Gender, on the other hand, came to signify the social or cultural component of difference, that is, masculine and feminine. This sex/gender distinction, as it is often called, was heartily embraced by many feminists of the day who sought to account for differences between the sexes as well as explain and remediate women’s second-class status in society. The establishment of gender as a distinctly “social” concept appealed to feminists because it opened up an intellectual and political space—a space beyond biological determinism—for inquiry into the causes of “male domination” and “female subordination” that were not essential, universal, or fixed. In this space, social change was possible; gender relations could be reconfigured. To that end, the sex/gender distinction became, by and large, paradigmatic in feminist thought and social science, and from it grew a burgeoning body of gender theory loosely characterized as the social construction of gender. Intersectional, post-structural, postmodern, and queer schools of thought produced new insights and advanced theory in ways that posed challenges to the viability and utility of gender as a concept as well as to the sex/gender paradigm. The ensuing debates were highly productive, ushering in a new era of social theory on the body that centered corporeality and embodiment and that sought to deconstruct binary thinking. As thinking on sex/gender evolved, the conceptual split was no longer understood as a simple separation between the biological and the social. Feminist and queer scholars problematized the distinction, reformulating it as an interlocking set of relationships: the sex/gender/sexuality system. Interdisciplinary gender scholars, including prominent feminist scientists, began theorizing the complex interrelationship between sex and gender with greater sophistication in an attempt to more firmly discredit biological determinist approaches to the study of difference based on sex, gender, or sexuality. Advancing theory, research, and praxis has not only deepened understanding about a wider variety of identities, experiences, and practices around sex, gender, and sexuality but has also won greater recognition in the early 21st century for them. This multiplicity of sexes, genders, and sexualities has brought with it unique methodological concerns in the social sciences, which represent a new frontier of research and activism in gender and sexuality studies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-102
Author(s):  
Aslı Zengin

Family and sexual/gender difference play significant roles in the organization of Sunni Muslim rituals of death, practices of mourning, and discourses of grief in Turkey. In these ritual practices, family members hold obligations and rights to the deceased, including washing, shrouding, burying, and praying for the body. These funeral practices represent the dead body in strictly gendered ways. However, when the deceased is a transgender person, his/her/their body can open a social field for negotiation and contestation of sexual and gender difference among religious, medico-legal, familial, and LGBTQ actors. Addressing the multiplicity of such struggles and claims over the deceased body of transgender persons, this article presents a mortuary ethnography that is formed through entanglements between Islamic notions of embodiment, familial order, gender and sexuality regimes, and legal regulations around death in Turkey. Rather than taking sex, gender, and sexual difference as given categories, I address them as a social field of constant and emergent contestation, which in turn marks the gendered and sexual limits of belonging in regimes of belief, family, kinship, and citizenship, and in practices of mourning and grief. I argue that death at the thresholds of sexual and gender regimes presents a space to discover novel connections between sovereignty and intimacy and to examine their coconstitution through the registers of violence endured by the gendered/sexed body. Özet Aile ve (toplumsal) cinsiyet farklılığı Türkiye’deki Sünni Müslüman cenaze gelenek ve adetlerinde, yas tutma pratiklerinde ve acı söylemlerinde önemli rol oynar. Cenazeyi yıkamak, kefenlemek, toprağa vermek ve cenaze için dua etmek gibi pratikler ailenin ölen mensubuna karşı sahip olduğu sorumluluk ve haklardan bazılarıdır. Bu pratikler ölen kişiyi katı bir cinsiyet ikiliği içerisinde temsil eder. Fakat ölen kişi bir trans birey ise, ölü bedenin cinsiyeti din, tıp, hukuk, aile ve LGBTQ çevreleri arasında çatışma ve müzakere alanına dönüşebilmektedir. Bu makale ölü trans bedenlerin açtığı bu çoklu hak ve mücadele alanına değinerek, Türkiye’deki İslami beden tasavvuru, aile düzeni, cinsellik ve toplumsal cinsiyet nizamı ve ölümle ilgili hukuki düzenlenmeler sarmalında oluşan bir ölüm etnografisi sunmaktadır. Toplumsal cinsiyet ve cinsellik kategorilerini sorgusuz sualsiz kabul etmek yerine, onların sürekli müzakereye tabi olan ve yeni müzakerelere yol açan toplumsal bir alan olduğunu ve böylece kişilerin din, aile, akrabalık ve vatandaşlık ilişkileri, yas ve acı pratikleri içerisindeki aidiyetliklerinin sınırlarını devamlı çizdiklerini tartışıyorum. Cinsellik ve (toplumsal) cinsiyet düzeninin çeperlerinde gerçekleşen ölümün egemenlik ve mahremiyet/yakınlık arasında kurulan ilişkiyi bizlere yeni şekillerde görme imkanı açtığını ve şiddetin cinsiyetlendirilmiş beden üzerindeki kaydına bakarak ikisinin birbirini karşılıklı olarak nasıl kurduğunu anlayacağımızı iddia ediyorum.


Author(s):  
Penny Griffin

Feminist and gendered interventions in the discipline of international political economy (IPE) traces the constitutive and causal role that gender plays in the diverse forms, functions, and impacts of the global political economy (GPE). There are subtle distinctions between “feminist” and “gendered” political economy. The term “feminist IPE” is assigned only to those scholars who identify directly with feminism and label themselves feminist. “Gendered IPE” includes feminist IPE, but also incorporates those analyses not necessarily centered on women’s work, their practices, and their experiences. Whether understood empirically or analytically, increased references to “gender” in IPE invariably resulted from the extensive, varied, and challenging feminist theorizing that had made visible the neglect of sex and gender in IPE. Indeed, gendered IPE scholarship is dedicated to transforming knowledge through committed gender analysis of the global political economy, deploying “gender” as a central organizing principle in social, cultural, political, and economic life. A relatively recent theoretical turn in gendered political economy thoroughly highlights the problems involved when gender is entirely associated with the body as a mark of human identity. Contemporary gendered IPE covers the variety of ways in which analysis of a person’s sex is simply not enough to describe their experiences. Indeed, ongoing feminist and gendered IPE concerns generally focus on the marginalization of gender analysis in IPE. Meanwhile, promising avenues in gendered IPE include gender and sexuality in IPE, as well as gender and the “Illicit International Political Economy” (IIPE).


Author(s):  
Christel Stormhøj

This article introduces the work of Judith Butler, whose theory of gender performativity has become highly influential in contemporary studies of gender and sexuality. Her main thesis is that both gender and sex are produced by discourse. In order to deal with the discursive construction of bodies, it is necessary to move beyond the opposition between sex and gender long upheld in feminist theory. Butler's theory is intended as an improvement on constructionism. Understanding construction as involving the materialization of determinate types of bodies through the iteration of gender-constituting performatives, she argues that both sex and gender are co-original effects of this process. The function of performatives is to create heterosexually structured bodies and subjects, and these performatives operate by prescribing other identifications. Because there is never any easy fit between the stream of identifications and desires and the performativity of prescribtions and proscribtions, identities are always phantasmatic. The constitution of a heterosexually organized, gender differentiated identity rests on that which has been excluded and abjection figures as a critical resource on the struggle to rearticulate the terms of symbolic intelligibility and legitimacy in Butler's political vision.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 56-62
Author(s):  
Emma Kauffman

Increasingly, there is a view that the recent emergence of sexual and gender diversity has helped to move mainstream society towards the eradication of the normative privileging of particular genders and sexualities. However, when we look beneath the surface it is more likely to be a reconfiguration of the heterosexual matrix, a term defined by Judith Butler as that grid of cultural intelligibility through which norms are created and maintained in bodies, genders, and desires and how they appear natural (Butler, 24). Using Judith Butler’s heterosexual matrix as my foundation, this paper will demonstrate the ways in which gender and sexuality become naturalized in order to explore the normalization process of both heterosexual desire, or orientation, and the gender binary. It will argue that although we are in the midst of a historic mobilization of diverse and complex (trans)gender movements, the sphere of intelligibility continues to be subject to hegemonic interpretations. These interpretations privilege a binary model of genders and sexual behaviors, thus resulting in a continuation of normative identities and desires. Further, as this essay will explicate, the heterosexual matrix, in accordance with neoliberalism, work as a mechanism of power that designates what is an intelligible life. As such, without first locating these functions of power, the push for a more fluid and open understanding of gender, sexuality and desire will continue to fail, and the space for widespread change will dissolve.


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