Critical Theory of Gender

2005

2017

Author: Heinz-Jürgen Voss, www.heinzjuergenvoss.de Short description: Judith Butler once critiqued binary approaches to biological sex on the level of the interpretation of signs, thus avoiding a discussion of actually existing organic structures and their possible binarity. By contrast, the following contribution is concerned with historical and contemporary biological theories about such structures. Tracing theories of preformation and epigenetics, “Making Sex Revisited” demonstrates that a focus on processes of evolution and differentiation leads to pluri-sexual approaches to biological sex. Organic structures develop individually and vary when various individuals are compared. The predominance of binary interpretations results from the distinction between two sexes and their unequal treatment, still prevalent in society.

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature."(Beauvoir 1989, 267) This talk will introduce some of the recent philosophical work concerning sex, gender, and the relations between these two concepts. Not only is this work interesting, it also provides a good example of what exactly contemporary philosophers do, and how this differs from the way that scholars in other disciplines (sociology, medicine, history, economics, etc.) might study these same topics. To begin with, it will help to get a rough idea of what idea we will be talking about.

2018

Gender, Work & Organization, 2019

This article offers a reflection around the question of 'do we need 'gender' any longer?' In taking up this problem and inspired by the way in which postqualitative inquiry has opened a conversation with Deleuzian philosophy and formulated a 'concept as/instead of method' line of thought, I wonder whether new images of thought might give the concept of gender 'the forces it needs to return to life' or the forces to abandon it. I propose four different images that might provoke the desire to experiment with a new image of thought in relation to the problem: a vegetal mode of thought, a musical mode, a fleshy mode as labiaplasty, a nonliving mode. This choice is connected to the dualities they target: the human/vegetal living world, the rational/ artistic production of knowledge, the dis-embodied/corporeal being in the world, the life/nonlife hierarchization. Each way of thinking of 'gender' stages, enacts, performs a different material reality of the concept that shifts the focus from linguistic representations to discursive practices. Hence, if gender has become a dominant discourse, it may be that positive repetition of this discourse might become a way of opening a new site inside it, by de-territorializing it and re-territorializing it otherwise. KEYWORDS concept-as-method, groping experimentation, mode of thought, post-qualitative methodologies Feminism has always been a question of what concepts do, how they work and the forces any act of thinking enables.

Feminist Theory, 2017

This paper aims to challenge the assumption of the law's impartiality to gender. Gendered identity is constructed and confined by social discourse, and is expressed through homogenizing binary gender norms which prescribe the ‘appropriate’ means of gender performance. The definition of the ‘feminine’ role expected of women is given by men, who in a patriarchal modern society are the dominant gender. I will examine what ‘performativity’ means in terms of gender discourse, and analyse how exclusionary this can be for the gender dysphoric and the transsexual. I will look at the relevant legislation for allowing them legal acknowledgement of their acquired gender, and provide commentary on its ineffectiveness because it perpetuates the gender binary dichotomy. Pursuant to this, I will deconstruct how girls become ‘feminine’; a learning process which crystallizes in childhood rather than any innately biological attributes they may have. I will consider how society responds to deviance from these gender-appropriate norms with condemnation and pathology; none more demonstrably so than in the case of women who kill.

Psychoanalytic Review, The, 2008

I start this difficult paper on the accident of gender with a novel, because sexuality and gender unfold in novel ways, resisting and revealing assumed origins as fragile attempts to settle desire. Like a novel, in which pages are read to capture essences that words cannot grasp, gender hints at trauma that has no origin but is rather the result of the struggle to capture this very unknown, which one can only brush against through terms such as drive and desire. One cannot enter the novel's narrative armed with the right knowledge to grasp its meaning, but one is affected by the novel's aftershock, its meanings constructed retroactively. One cannot prepare for sexuality's novelty, and its meanings can be made retroactively only after desire surprises, strays off familiar course, and forces an engagement with the open question of identity.