Feminisms - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

FeminismsSlide2

First

Wave

– 19th

century

to 1950 (

basic

rights

)

Second

Wave

– 1960-1980 (

further

rights

)

Third

Wave

– 1980-2008 (

queer

, race)

Fourth

Wave

– 2008-? (

technology

)Slide3

Judith

Butler

,

Gender Trouble (1990)

“If

Lacan

presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?” 

“If there is something right in Beauvoir's claim that one is born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and

resignification

.”

 Slide4

Gender

Trouble

(1990)

If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are

performative

, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory

fiction.That

gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s

performative

character and the

performative

possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of

masculinist

domination and compulsory heterosexuality.Slide5

Hélène Cixous, "

La

– Feminine" (1976)

As dreamer and fantastic with double libido, voyager of several existences, she renounces none of her primitive liberties or those to come, all her sources of pleasure and all her means of acquiring pleasure persist in all forms which put them out of reach of the rivalry principle.

As linguist the freedom with which she crosses several unconsciouses to transmit the secrets and powers of a soul in another tongue and of a body in another in which to grow and transform without restraint.

And as artist of love, her knwoing-pleasure overflows her individual activities (psychical, cultural, historical) in the direction of the other: she has an unconquerable propensity to unite, join, connet together desires, languages, unconsciouses which the exigencies of Truthverility, communications and indwarfstry threaten to transform into sickness, and shelter them at the height of life.Slide6

Kate Millet,

Sexual Politics

(1969)

The word "politics" is enlisted here when speaking of the sexes primarily because such a word is eminently useful in outlining the real nature of their relative status, historically and at the present. It is opportune, perhaps today even mandatory, that we develop a more relevant psychology and philosophy of power relationships beyond the simple conceptual framework provided by our traditional formal politics. Indeed, it may be imperative that we give some attention to defining a theory of politics which treats of power relationships on grounds less conventional than those to which we are accustomed. I have therefore found it pertinent to define them on grounds of personal contact and interaction between members of well-defined and coherent groups: races, castes, classes, and sexes. For it is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of recognised political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so continuous.Slide7

Valerie Solanas,

S.C.U.M. Manifesto

(1967)

Niceness, Politeness, and `Dignity'

: Every man, deep down, knows he's a worthless piece of shit. Overwhelmed by a sense of animalism and deeply ashamed of it; wanting, not to express himself, but to hide from others his total physicality, total egocentricity, the hate and contempt he feels for other men, and to hide from himself the hate and contempt he suspects other men feel for him; having a crudely constructed nervous system that is easily upset by the least display of emotion or feeling, the male tries to enforce a `social' code that ensures perfect blandness, unsullied by the slightest trace or feeling or upsetting opinion. He uses terms like `copulate', `sexual congress', `have relations with' (to men

sexual

relations is a redundancy), overlaid with stilted manners; the suit on the chimpSlide8

Camille Paglia,

Sexual Personae

(1990)

In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man.

Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements... Civilized man conceals from himself the extent of his subordination to nature... But let nature shrug, and all is in ruin.

Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it to a matter of social convention: readjust society, eleminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Here feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau.Slide9

Donna

Haraway

, ‘

Cyborg Manifesto’ (1984)

“The

cyborg

is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis,

unalienated

labour

, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.” 

‘I

would

rather

be

a

cyborg

than

a

goddess

’Slide10

Xenofeminst

Manifesto

(2005)

XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all alienated – but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. Freedom is not a given–and it’s certainly not given by anything ‘natural’. The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the

labour

of freedom’s construction. Nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or ‘given’–neither material conditions nor social forms. XF mutates, navigates and probes every horizon. Anyone who’s been deemed ‘unnatural’ in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone who’s experienced injustices wrought in the name of natural order, will realize that the glorification of ‘nature’ has nothing to offer us–the queer and trans among us, the differently-

abled

, as well as those who have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child-rearing. XF is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology–the sooner it is exorcised, the better.Slide11

Paul (Beatriz) Preciado

,

Testo

Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and

Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic

Era

(2008)

Contemporary society is inhabited by toxic-pornographic subjectivities: subjectivities defined by the substance (or substances) that supply their metabolism, by the cybernetic prostheses and various types of

pharmacopornographic

desires that feed the subject’s actions and through which they turn into agents. So we will speak of Prozac subjects, cannabis subjects, cocaine subjects, alcohol subjects, Ritalin subjects, cortisone subjects, silicone subjects,

heterovaginal

subjects, double-penetration subjects, Viagra subjects, $ subjects…Slide12

Paul (Beatriz) Preciado

,

Testo

Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and

Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic

Era

(2008)

There is nothing to discover in nature; there is no hidden secret. We live in a punk hypermodernity: it is no longer about discovering the hidden truth in nature; it is about the necessity to specify the cultural, political, and technological processes through which the body as artifact acquires natural status. Slide13

Virginie

Despentes

,

King Kong

Theory (2006)

As a girl, I am more King Kong than Kate Moss. I'm the kind of girl you don't get married to, the kind you don't have babies with. I am writing as a woman who is always too much of everything-too aggressive, too noisy, too fat, too rough, too hairy, always too masculine, I am told. And yet it's my virile, masculine qualities that make me more than just any old social misfit. I owe to my very masculinity everything I like about my life, everything that has saved me. I am writing therefore as a woman incapable of attracting male attention, satisfying male desire, or being satisfied with a place in the shade. It's from here that I write, as an unattractive but ambitious woman, drawn to money I make myself, drawn to power, the power to do and to say no, drawn to the city rather than the home, excited by experience and not content with just hearing about it from others.Slide14

Virginie

Despentes

,

King Kong

Theory (2006)

The special treatment until now reserved for women, with shame as the primary tool for ensuring their isolation, passivity, and lack of protest, could now be extended to all. To understand the mechanics of how women have been made to feel inferior, and induced to willingly maintain themselves in this state, is to understand how the entire population is kept under control. Capitalism is an egalitarian religion in the sense that it demands general submission, making everyone feel trapped-as all women are. Slide15

Angellica’s Lament, Aphra Behn

Had I remained in innocent security, 

I should have thought all men were born my slaves, 

And worn my power like lightning in my eyes, 

To have destroyed at pleasure when offended. 

—But when love held the mirror, the undeceiving glass 

Reflected all the weakness of my soul, and made me know 

My richest treasure being lost, my honour, 

All the remaining spoil could not be worth 

The conqueror’s care or value. 

—Oh how I fell like a long worshipped idol 

Discovering all the cheat. Slide16

Alison Fell

,

Pushing forty

Just before winter

we see the trees show

their true

colours

:

the mad yellow of chestnuts

two maples like blood sisters

the orange beech

braver than lipstick

Pushing forty, we vow

that when the time comes

rather than wither

ladylike and white

we will henna our hair

like Colette, we too

will be gold and red

and go out

in a last wild blaze