Gender Studies

In general, gender studies includes feminist studies of gender, gay and lesbian criticism, and queer
theory. These fields are by no means distinct from one another and often overlap considerably. Gender
studies is interdisciplinary in both its roots and its methods, having arisen in literary and cultural
theory, sociology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. It examines the oppressive history of gays,
lesbians, and other erotic groups, the formation and representation of gender, as well as gender as a
category of analysis of literature and culture, and the intersection of gender with divisions of race,
class, and color. Feminist anthropologists such as Gayle Rubin and thinkers such as Michel Foucault
had highlighted the constructed nature of gender: indeed, in his History of Sexuality (1978), Foucault
had shown that homosexuality was itself an invented category, formulated by the medical
establishment in conjunction with ideologies of normative sexuality.

The birth of the Gay Rights Movement in America is often traced to the “Stonewall Riots” of 1969 in
New York City, a prolonged conflict over several days in which gays, transvestites, and other
oppressed groups (of various color and nationality) offered resistance against police raiding of the
Stonewall Inn. Prior to this, especially just after the Second World War (in which young men found
the opportunity to experiment sexually), a number of gay and other erotic communities had taken root
in the margins of big cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. This led to a series of
repressions in the 1950s. But during the 1960s, even before Stonewall, policies toward gays had
relaxed somewhat, and as gays assumed a certain solidarity and political identity, further liberalization
followed during the early 1970s, after which further backlashes erupted, in terms of both legal
enactments and popular feeling. The effect of such repression was partly to solidify the alternative
erotic communities, who self-consciously struggled in the political sphere to achieve a voice, and to
achieve self-definition in theoretical terms. Even prior to the Stonewall Riots, gay self-consciousness
emerged in many aspects of culture: in the history of literature, where figures such as Walt Whitman,
Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and the Bloomsbury Group with its ethic of androgyny, and the 1930s poets
W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender had variously articulated their sexuality
and were revived as figures of interest, in the novels of James Baldwin and Gore Vidal which
portrayed homosexual relations and encounters, in leading personalities of pop art such as Andy
Warhol and Jasper Johns, and in pornography.

By the early 1970s, gay studies and gay theory were beginning to proliferate and to achieve a
theoretical self-consciousness. In 1974 an issue of College English was devoted to the questions of gay
identity and formulating a gay literary tradition. Just as women’s studies established the importance of
gender as a fundamental category of analysis, so lesbian/gay studies aims to establish the analytic
centrality of sex and sexuality in several fields. The overlap between gay/lesbian studies and women’s
studies is a matter of continuing debate. As the editors of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader state,
these studies focus on the “cultural production, dissemination, and vicissitudes of sexual meanings.”
Like women’s studies, lesbian/gay studies are informed by the “social struggle for ... sexual liberation”
and personal freedom, as well as by resistance to homophobia and heterosexism or the “ideological
and institutional practices of heterosexual privilege.” Like feminism, they aim to break down the
barriers between scholarship and politics.13 Some of the important early gay and lesbian scholars
include: Guy Hocquengham, who analyzed the psychological motivations of homophobia; the gay
historian Jeffrey Weeks, who has analyzed the history of homosexuality in Britain in relation to
nineteenth-century sexual ideologies; the scholar K. J. Dover, who published his celebrated study
Greek Homosexuality in 1978; Lillian Faderman, who studied lesbianism in the Renaissance; and
Terry Castle, who conducted wide-ranging studies of the lesbian presence in Western literary history.
Gender studies has its roots partly in feminist theory, and indeed, was until the 1980s associated with
the feminist enterprise, until lesbian critics such as Bonnie Zimmerman attacked the implicit feminist
assumption that there was some essential female identity underlying differences of race, class, and
sexuality. Some critics, such as those associated with the Radi- calesbian collective, whose manifesto
was “The Woman-Identified Woman” (1970), urged the need for a field of inquiry distinct from
mainstream feminism, which had marginalized lesbianism. They saw lesbianism as the purest
feminism since it asserted female autonomy and refused complicity with all forms of masculinist
exploitation. Jill Johnston’s Lesbian Nation (1973) saw lesbianism as the “solution” for feminism. The
lesbian feminist poet and theorist Adrienne Rich also affirmed lesbianism as a kind of archetypal
image of the broad feminist endeavor, and urged a dissociation of lesbian from male gay allegiances.
In an influential and controversial essay entitled “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”
(1980), she introduced the idea of a “lesbian continuum” to denote a range of experiences between
women, including mutual practical and political support, bonding against male tyranny, and sharing a
rich inner life. Separatist lesbianism was also advocated by the Chicana lesbian poet and critic Gloria
Anzaldua in Borderlands — La Frontera: The New Mestizo (1987), and by Monique Wittig in her
essay “The Straight Mind” (1980), as well as by Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which is Not One (1977),
which urged the autonomous existence of lesbians. During the 1970s the separatist modes of lesbian
theory grew, helped by the development of women’s studies programs. This era saw the beginnings of
an attempt to integrate issues of sexuality, gender, and race. In her powerful essay “Toward a Black
Feminist Criticism” (1977), Barbara Smith offered a controversial lesbian interpretation of Toni
Morrison’s Sula. Much of this earlier work aimed to deconstruct stereotypes of lesbians as unnatural
or sexless, and to redeem a hitherto neglected tradition of lesbian thought and writing, as well as
reinterpreting “conventional” figures such as Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. It was underlain
by certain assumptions: that there was a definable lesbian identity, and that there was an analyzable
category of lesbian experience.

A more radical kind of approach, known as queer theory (a derisive term subversively adopted as a
positive designation), emerged in the 1990s, grounded in a Conference on Queer Theory at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. Queer theory was imbrued with many of the anti-essentialist
assumptions of poststructuralism, especially the undermining of any fixed sexual identity, viewing
identity as a subject position created by cultural and ideological codes. It more clearly emphasized
sexuality rather than gender in the formation of identity. Indeed, the lines of allegiance were also
shifted from gender to sexual orientation: lesbian theorists now identified with the theorizing of gay
men rather than with straight women. But much of this theory, as in work by Diana Fuss, Judith
Butler, and Eve Sedgwick, attempts to deconstruct any absolute distinction between hetero- and homo-
sexuality. Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work Gender Trouble (1990) saw all gender as a cultural
performance; similarly, Lee Edelman’s Homographesis (1994) deconstructed the notion of gay
identity; while Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990) exhibited the operation of homophobia
in the supposedly normal system of gender. Her earlier, vastly influential work Between Men (1985)
saw a continuum between male sexual and non-sexual relationships. Much queer theory, such as
Simon Watney’s Policing Desire (1987) and Donna Haraway’s “The Biopolitics of Postmodern
Bodies” (1989), attempted to analyze the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s and its presentation in the
media. Other queer theorists such as Michael Moon drew attention to the “queer” attributes of what
presumed to be sexual normality. The American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe stirred public
controversy, related to government funding for art, with his homoerotic, sadistic, and masochistic
photographs which aimed to exhibit gay sexuality. Later gay and lesbian theory also attempted to cast
attention on writers from other cultural backgrounds such as Garcia Lorca and Yukio Mishima.14
Gender theory continues to debate issues of sexuality, its relation to power structures, and to a
radically democratic agenda. The following section will briefly analyze the work of three of the
pioneers in this field, Gayle Rubin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler.

Gayle Rubin (b. 1949)

A feminist anthropologist, Gayle Rubin has produced influential studies of gender, her work
embracing anthropological theory, lesbian literature, sadomasochism, and feminism. In her early essay
“The Traffic in Women” (1975), she originated the expression “sex/gender system,” which she
defined as the arrangements whereby society transforms biological sexuality into products of human
activity. In other words, she saw sex - spanning gender identity, fantasy, and notions of childhood - as
itself a social product. In a later essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of
Sexuality” (1984), she made an influential new distinction between gender and sexuality which
highlighted the limitations of feminism: she acknowledged that feminism was a potent theory of
gender oppression. But this must be incorporated into a radical theory of sex which explains sexual
oppression (by way of example, she points out that lesbians are persecuted not just on account of their
gender but also because of their sexual orientation).15 In general, she argues in this essay that, like
gender, sexuality is political, and that the modern sexual system has been the object of political
struggle. Industrialization and urbanization have led to a reorganization of family relations and gender
roles, enabling the formation of new identities and new erotic communities (for example, gays, and
subsequently other groups such as transsexuals and transvestites in enclaves of cities such as New
York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles) (LGR, 16, 34).

The emergence of these erotic communities provoked various periods of sexual panic or repression in
the 1880s, 1950s, and again in the 1980s. This persecution from right-wing groups was both
psychological, urging the damage resulting from illicit sex (blindness, stunted growth, socialist views),
and institutionalized in legislation such as the 1885 Act, which outlawed “indecent acts” between
consenting adults, or the Family Protection Act (introduced in 1979 but never actually passed), which
was a broad assault on feminism, homosexuals, and non-traditional families (LGR, 5- 8). It was during
the early decades of the twentieth century that new erotic communities were formed, mass-produced
erotica became available, and the possibilities for “sexual commerce” expanded (LGR, 34). By the
1970s relatively large-scale sexual migrations had occurred, large enough to affect certain political
landscapes. Though they were subjected to legal persecution based on the ideology that they were
dangerous, inferior, and undesirable, these new communities - gays, for example - enjoyed a new
solidarity, possessed a literature and a press, and were engaged in collective political activity. In other
words, they had a social and political identity (LGR, 17). Rubin urges that a radical theory of sex must
explain and denounce erotic injustice and oppression. Some of the obstacles to its formation include:
sexual essentialism, the idea - fostered by medicine and psychoanalysis - that sexuality is somehow
natural, standing above time, context, and history; sexual negativity, the idea that sexuality is a
dangerous and destructive force; and the notion of a sexual hierarchy which distinguishes between acts
that are permissible, ranging through questionable acts to those considered with extreme contempt.
Underlying this hierarchy is the notion of a single, ideal sexuality. Rubin urges all those who consider
themselves progressive to rethink these fundamental issues of sexuality and gender (LGR, 35).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (b. 1950)

An American critic and poet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has produced pioneering work in the field of
gender studies, especially in queer theory. Her major works include Between Men: English Literature
and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Tendencies (1993), A
Dialogue on Love (1999), and Touching Feeling (2003). In general, Sedgwick aims to show that the
discourses of gender and sexuality, usually confined to a narrow-ghettoized mode of analysis, are not
marginal but integral to Western culture, and to the operations of power, race, and class. Indeed, in
Between Men, she states her view, influenced by Lacan, French feminism, and deconstruction, that all
human culture is structured by the “drama of gender difference.”16 This book’s focus is on male
homosocial desire, as expressed especially in a series of English novels. She defines the term
“homosocial” as denoting “social bonds between persons of the same sex” (BM, 1). Though this term
is meant to be distinguished from “homosexual” and often denotes a kind of male bonding which is
indeed homophobic and marked by a hatred of homosexuality, she hypothesizes - through the notion
of desire - a continuum between the two terms, which has been disrupted in our society but was intact
in certain periods, as for example in ancient Greek culture (BM, 2-4). The brutal homophobia of our
own society is tightly knit into the structure of our family, gender, age, class, and race relations. This
situation contrasts with the relatively continuous connection between female homosocial and
homosexual bonds: there is a much more congruent connection between women loving women and
women promoting the interests of women (BM, 3). Sedgwick’s basic purpose is to analyze male
homosocial bonds “through the heterosexual European erotic ethos,” and to reconcile historicist
Marxist approaches, using ideology as an analytic category, with structuralist feminist perspectives in
the analysis of sexuality (BM, 16). Her focus on male homosocial desire places it in the structural
context of triangular heterosexual desire: the rivalry between two men for a woman’s love entails a
stronger bond between the two men than that of either with the woman; this bond is mediated by what
Gayle Rubin calls the “male traffic in women,” the use of the woman as an exchangeable “symbolic
property” (BM, 26). She also shows how homophobia has been a tool for manipulating male bonds
and the entire gender system, and how it interacts with divisions of class and race. She insists that the
distinction between the sexual and non-sexual is fluid, given that sexual relations affect the
distribution of non-sexual forms of power, including “control over the means of production and
reproduction of goods, persons, and meanings” (BM, 22). She argues that there is a special
relationship between male homosocial desire and the structures of patriarchal power; the status of
women and gender definitions and relations is deeply inscribed in structures, such as male homosocial
relationships, that seem to exclude women (BM, 25). Sedgwick sees the erotic triangle not as an
ahistorical, Platonic form but as a construct informed by gender, language, and class, as a register of
relationships of power and meaning (BM, 27). In general, Sedgwick’s work shows the sheer fluidity of
the distinctions between homosexuality and heterosexuality, as well as the contextual and
indeterminate and contingent nature of both gender and sexuality. What counts as “sexual” or
“homosexual” can vary.
Judith Butler (b. 1956)

The American philosopher Judith Butler has contributed influentially to the study of gender, feminism,
and political and ethical theory. Her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)
is arguably the most important book produced in the field of gender studies. Her central argument
(extending through this and many of her other works) is that what we call gender is not an inherent
fact or attribute of human nature but a performance, a cultural performance. Her other works include
Bodies that Matter (1993), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), and Giving an
Account of Oneself (2005). In Gender Trouble she takes the title of her book from the John Waters
film Female Trouble, which starred the drag queen Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead) acting the part of
the heroine. This kind of impersonation of women, says Butler, dramatizes the signifying gestures
through which gender is produced.17 Butler sees herself as conducting what Foucault calls a
genealogical inquiry, one that investigates the political motivations behind assigning origins and fixed
identities to the categories of gender and sexuality, which are actually the effects of defining
institutions, in this case, phallogocentrism (the grounding of masculinist domination in absolute terms
beyond debate or discourse) and compulsory heterosexuality (GT, xi). Her approach draws upon
feminist, lesbian, and gay perspectives as well as on the work of poststructuralist thinkers such as
Foucault (GT, xiii). But the effect of her work, in deconstructing the category of woman, has been to
distinguish lesbian studies from feminism. She argues that the very category of woman, the starting
point of much feminist inquiry and activism, is no longer stable; it is a category produced by power
structures and intersects intimately with race, class, politics, and culture (GT, 1-3, 128).

In the most brilliant section of her book, she argues that the body itself is shaped by political forces.
Both the distinction between sex and gender and the category of sex itself presuppose that there exists
a somehow neutral body prior to its sexual signification. Indeed, the tradition of Christianity saw the
body as a non-entity, as a “profane void,” signifying a fallen state. Equally, Cartesian dualism
(between mind and matter) saw the body as so much inert matter, attached to the thinking essence of
the human. Even the existentialism of Sartre and de Beauvoir viewed the body as “mute facticity.”
Nietzsche and Foucault, too, saw the body as a surface or blank page on which cultural values were
inscribed. In all these cases, materiality and the body are assumed to exist prior to signification: not
only is the body indifferent to signification, but signification (as in Descartes’ dualism) is the act of a
disembodied consciousness. The body is simply regarded as external to the signifying process, which
is the province of the thinking mind (GT, 129-130).

Drawing on Mary Douglas and Kristeva, Butler argues that it is cultural norms that maintain the
boundaries of the body, its permeability sanctioned by the hegemonic order. For example,
homosexuality violates the kinds of permeability permitted. Part of Butler’s argument is that taboos on
incest and homosexuality have been generative moments of the formation of gender identity along a
grid of compulsory heterosexuality (GT, 132-135). Foucault helps us to see that regulation and the law
are not somehow externally imposed upon bodies that are already there, but are internal to the bodies
they subjectivate, whose subjectivities they form and motivate along given orientations. This
disciplinary production effects a false stability and coherence of gender, as a natural and fixed identity.
But in fact, there is no organizing principle or identity underlying the acts, words, and gestures
occurring at the body’s surface: these gestures are performative and the identity they express is a
fabrication through the discourse of corporeal signs. The “regulatory fiction of heterosexual
coherence” actually produces the gendered bodies that it purports to describe objectively (GT, 136).

This fabrication produces the illusion of an interior core of gender, which conceals its political and
discursive origin. In fact, the gendered body is performative, and “has no ontological status apart from
the various acts which constitute its reality” (GT, 136). Butler observes that the practices of drag
artists parody this notion of an original gender identity, revealing the distinctness of anatomical sex,
gender identity, and gender performance, dramatizing the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity.
They do not parody any original identity but the very notion of an original (GT, 138).

So, the body is not a being but a surface, a signifying practice within a field of gender hierarchy and
compulsory heterosexuality (GT, 139). There is no essence of gender: it is repeated acts that create the
notion of gender, which is a stylized repetition of acts. This performative character of gender opens up
performative possibilities for gender configurations “outside the restricting frames of masculinist
domination and compulsory heterosexuality” (GT, 140-141). In a conclusion entitled “From Parody to
Politics,” Butler suggests that the instability of the “subject” in the category of women highlights the
foundational restrictions of feminist political theory. She argues that it is wrong either to see agency as
a prediscursive “I” (prior to the networks of language, discourse, and signs) or to view the
determination of the “I” by discourse as somehow foreclosing agency. She reformulates agency as
related to how signification and resignification work: if gender is created by signification, by “a
regulated process of repetition,” we can define agency as a variation on that repetition. It is only
within signifying practices that we can subvert the notion of identity, signifying body surfaces as a site
of “dissonant and denaturalized performance” (GT, 145-146). Hence the critical task is to engage in
local strategies of “subversive repetition” to displace gender norms, recognizing that there is no
agency or reality beyond discursive practices (GT, 147— 148). Then, “a new configuration of politics
would surely emerge from the ruins of the old” (GT, 149). Butler’s powerful critique of the notions of
identity and body on which gender is constructed is an important step toward reconfiguring the
performative potential of gender. But the connection between performance or parody and politics
remains abstract.