Abstract
What we hope you will have gained from Chapter 1 is a healthy caution concerning the naturalness of what it is to be human. Time and again analysts remind us that gender is constructed, or not natural, but produced. How it is produced is the question that this chapter will address. We will look at several thinkers and analysts who try to understand how the subject is produced, and how gender is constructed. We will also examine some of the political and theoretical implications of the constructedness of the subject. If there are no natural categories of man or woman, how do we begin to talk about our experience, or make plans for political action? These are important questions, and we will trace out some of the lines of thought that have been followed in looking for answers to them. The final sections of this chapter will look at some of the work which has followed the questioning of the category woman, such as queer theory and the idea of embodiment.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Recommended Reading
Brod, Harry and Michael Kaufman (eds) (c. 1994) Theorizing Masculinities, Sage, Thousand Oaks, California.
Bullough, Vern L. and Bonnie Bullough (c. 1993) Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
Case, Sue-Ellen, Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster (eds) (1995) Cruising the Performative: Interventions into the Representation of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Sexuality, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Cranny-Francis, Anne (1995) The Body in the Text, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
Creed, Barbara (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Routledge, London.
Flax, Jane (1993) Disputed Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Philosophy, Routledge, New York.
Foucault, Michel (1980) Power/Knowledge, (Colin Gordon, ed.) Pantheon, New York.
Foucault, Michel (1981) The History of Sexuality: Vol. I (trans. Robert Hurley) Pelican, Harmondsworth.
Garber, Marjorie (1992) Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Penguin, London.
Grosz, Elizabeth (1989) Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Hall, Stuart (1992) ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’ in Stuart Hall, Daniel Held and Tony McGrew (eds) Modernity and its Futures, Cambridge, Polity.
Jagose, Annamarie (1996) Queer Theory, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
Kristeva, Julia (1982) The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (trans. Leon Roudiez) Columbia University Press, New York.
Mauss, Marcel (1992) ‘Techniques of the Body’ in Jonathan Crary and Stanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations, Zone Books, New York, pp. 455–77.
Pfeil, Fred (1995) White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference, Verso, London.
Sandoval, Chela (1991) ‘U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World’, Genders, 10: 1–24.
Sandoval, Chela (1995) ‘New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed’ in Charles Hables Gray (ed.) The Cyborg Handbook, Routledge, New York, pp. 407–22.
Stoller, Robert J. (1968–75) Sex and Gender, Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, London. (A classic text that has been critiqued often but bears reading.)
Woodhouse, Annie (1989) Fantastic Women: Sex, Gender and Transvestism, Macmillan–now Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Copyright information
© 2003 A. Cranny-Francis, W. Waring, P. Stavropoulos, J. Kirkby
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cranny-Francis, A., Waring, W., Stavropoulos, P., Kirkby, J. (2003). Ways of Thinking. In: Gender Studies. Red Globe Press, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-62916-5_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-62916-5_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Red Globe Press, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-77612-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-62916-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)