gender – Page 2 – Little Bristling Soul

Sexual difference is the site where a question concerning the relation of the biological to the cultural is posed and reposed, where it must and can be posed, but where it cannot, strictly speaking, be answered. Understood as a border concept, sexual difference has psychic, somatic, and social dimensions that are never quite collapsible into one another but are not for that reason ultimately distinct. Does sexual difference vacillate there, as a vacillating border, demanding a rearticulation of those terms without any sense of finality? Is it, therefore, not a thing, not a fact, not a presupposition but rather a demand for rearticulation that never quite vanishes – but also never quite appears?

Judith Butler, from Undoing Gender

What is a Woman?
And Other Essays by Toril Moi

Jeff Irwin, Male and Female Sticks, undated, 20 x 25 x 3 cm

Alexis Hunter, Approach to Fear: XVII: Masculinisation of Society – exorcise, 1977, Signed, 10 vintage colour photographs, mounted on 2 panels, Each: 25 x 101 cm

Source: richardsaltoun.com

Feminist accountability requires a knowledge tuned to resonance, not to dichotomy. Gender is a field of structured and structuring difference, where the tones of extreme localization, of the intimately personal and individualized body, vibrate in the same field with global high tension emissions. Feminist embodiment, then, is not about fixed location in a reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations,and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning.

“The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” by Donna J. Haraway (full text here)

To understand gender as a historical category … is to accept that gender, understood as one way of culturally configuring the body, is open to a continual remaking, and that ‘anatomy’ and ‘sex’ are not without cultural framing. […] Terms such as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are notoriously changeable; there are social histories for each term; their meanings change radically depending upon geopolitical boundaries and cultural constraints on who is imagining whom, and for what purpose.

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (9-10)

Source: coocoolah

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

Louise Bourgeois, Maternal Man, 2008, Carolina Nitsch Contemporary Art

Source: artsy.net

But there should be no misunderstanding: men and women are caught up in a network of millennial cultural determinations of a complexity that is practically unanalyzable: we can no more talk about ‘woman’ than about ‘man’ without getting caught up in an ideological theatre

Helene Cixous