Gender Trouble and Return of the Sexual in a Cisgender Research Collective Confronted With Trans∗ Femininity

The author analyzes a research study of trans∗ women and their surgeons, conducted before and after vaginoplasty in a French public hospital service. The essay is an examination of countertransference in three research frameworks: (1) working with a research team; (2) taking part in a peer group, facilitated by a psychologist, a surgeon, and a secretary, bringing together women who had already undergone surgery and those awaiting it; and (3) research interviews with Lara, a 64-year-old trans∗ woman. The author emphasizes the importance of taking into account gender countertransference—that is, the disruptive effects of the encounter with trans∗ people and their desires, paying specific attention to what the encounter with trans∗ femininities has stirred or revealed in terms of the author's own relationship to the body and to cisgender femininity.

Gender Trouble / Genre Trouble – Cecilie Løveids Østerrike

Although Cecilie Løveid is one of Norway’s most important contemporary dramatists, she is not generally considered part of mainstream theater. In fact, she has positioned herself against it by her writing of feminist and performative theater texts since her debut in the 1980s. In her play Østerrike, which is inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s Brand and by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s diary of his stay in Norway, the audience is introduced to a love triangle. Ludwig, his fiancée Agnes and his former boyfriend David are entangeled in a queer love drama causing constant gender trouble. In this article, I will analyze how Løveid combines this gender discourse with a metatextual genre discourse. The play ends with a “beautiful scene”, which disrupts all existing categories of gender and genre. This scene in particular illustrates that Østerrike can be interpreted as a critical commentary on the Ibsen-tradition that determines Løveid’s outsider position.

The Inherent Link between Gender and Sexuality: A Queer View to the Portrayal of Women in Herland, Things Fall Apart, Bombay Brides, and The Winner Stands Alone

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).

Bodies That Still Matter

Since the appearance of her early-career bestseller Gender Trouble in 1990, American philosopher Judith Butler is one of the most influential (and at times controversial) thinkers in academia. Her work addresses numerous socially pertinent topics such as gender normativity, political speech, media representations of war, and the democratic power of assembling bodies. The volume Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler brings together essays from scholars across academic disciplines who apply, reflect on, and further Butler's ideas to their own research. It includes a new essay by Butler herself, from which it takes its title. Organized around four key themes in Butler's scholarship - performativity, speech, precarity, and assembly - the volume offers an excellent introduction to the contemporary relevance of Butler's thinking, a multi-perspectival approach to key topics of contemporary critical theory, and a testimony to the vibrant interdisciplinary discourses characterizing much of today's humanities' research.