Gender Trouble
''Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity'' is a 1990 book by the post-structuralist gender theorist and philosopher Judith Butler in which the author argues that gender is performative, meaning that it is maintained, created or perpetuated by iterative repetitions when speaking and interacting with each other. Summary Butler criticizes one of the central assumptions of feminist theory, that there exists an identity and a subject that requires representation in politics and language. For Butler, "men" and "women" are categories complicated by factors such as class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Moreover, the universality presumed by these terms parallels the assumed universality of the patriarchy and erases the particularity of oppression in distinct times and places. Butler thus eschews identity politics in favor of a new, coalitional feminism that critiques the basis of identity and gender. They challenge assumptions about the distinction often made between sex ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Judith Butler
Judith Pamela Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American feminist philosopher and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. In 1993, Butler joined the faculty in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, where they became the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in Critical Theory in 1998. They also hold the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School (EGS). Butler is best known for their books ''Gender Trouble, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity'' (1990) and ''Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex'' (1993), in which they challenge conventional, heteronormative notions of gender and develop their theory of gender performativity. This theory has had a major influence on feminist and queer scholarship. Their work is often studied and debated in film ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Singular They
Singular ''they'', along with its inflected or derivative forms, ''them'', ''their'', ''theirs'', and ''themselves'' (also ''themself'' and ''theirself''), is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun derived from plural they. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, to refer to an unknown person, or to refer to every person of some group, in sentences such as: This use of singular ''they'' had emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural ''they''. Singular ''they'' has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error. Its continued use in modern standard English has become more common and formally accepted with the move toward gender-neutral language. Some early-21st-century style guides described it as colloquial and less appropriate in formal writing. However, by 2020, most style guides accepted the singular ''they'' as a personal pronoun. In the early 21st century, use of singular ''the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Joan Riviere
Joan Hodgson Riviere ( Verrall; 28 June 1883 – 20 May 1962) was a British psychoanalyst, who was both an early translator of Freud into English and an influential writer on her own account. Life and career Riviere was born Joan Hodgson Verrall in Brighton, the daughter of Hugh John Verrall and his wife Ann Hodgson. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a vicar's daughter. She was educated in Brighton and then at Wycombe Abbey. At the age of seventeen, she went to Gotha, Germany, where she spent a year and became proficient in the German language. Her interests were primarily artistic and she was for a time a court dressmaker. Riviere married Evelyn Riviere in 1907 and had a child, but suffered a breakdown on the death of her father around that time. She took an interest in divorce reform and the suffragette movement. Her uncle, Arthur Woollgar Verrall organised meetings of the Society for Psychical Research where she discovered the work of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Incest Taboo
Incest ( ) is sex between close relatives, for example a brother, sister, or parent. This typically includes sexual activity between people in consanguinity (blood relations), and sometimes those related by lineage. It is condemned and considered immoral in many societies. It can lead to an increased risk of genetic disorders in children in case of pregnancy from incestuous sex. The incest taboo is one of the most widespread of all cultural taboos, both in present and in past societies. Most modern societies have laws regarding incest or social restrictions on closely consanguineous marriages. In societies where it is illegal, consensual adult incest is seen by some as a victimless crime. Some cultures extend the incest taboo to relatives with no consanguinity, such as milk-siblings, stepsiblings, and adoptive siblings, albeit sometimes with less intensity. Third-degree relatives (such as half-aunt, half-nephew, first cousin) on average have 12.5% common genetic herita ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Structuralism
Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel. Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn, structuralism is: Blackburn, Simon, ed. 2008. "Structuralism." In '' Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy'' (2nd rev. ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. . p. 353."The belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract structure." History and background The term ''structuralism'' is ambiguous, referring to different schools of thought in different contexts. As such, the movement in humanities and social sciences called structuralism r ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss ( ; ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a Belgian-born French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982, was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973 and was a member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world. Lévi-Strauss argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book ''Tristes Tropiques'' (1955) which established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as sociology, his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, including philosophy. Structuralism has been def ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Performative Utterance
In the philosophy of language and speech acts theory, performative utterances are sentences which not only describe a given reality, but also change the social reality they are describing. In a 1955 lecture series, later published as ''How to Do Things with Words'', J. L. Austin argued against a positivist philosophical claim that the utterances always "describe" or "constate" something and are thus always true or false. After mentioning several examples of sentences which are not so used, and not truth-evaluable (among them nonsensical sentences, interrogatives, directives and "ethical" propositions), he introduces "performative" sentences or illocutionary act as another instance.Austin, J.L. ''How to Do Things with Words'' Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Austin's definition In order to define performatives, Austin refers to those sentences which conform to the old prejudice in that they ''are'' used to describe or constate something, and which thus ''are'' true or false; ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Speech Act
In the philosophy of language and linguistics, a speech act is something expressed by an individual that not only presents information but performs an action as well. For example, the phrase "I would like the mashed potatoes; could you please pass them to me?" is considered a speech act as it expresses the speaker's desire to acquire the mashed potatoes, as well as presenting a request that someone pass the potatoes to them. According to Kent Bach, "almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience". The contemporary use of the term "speech act" goes back to J. L. Austin's development of performative utterances and his theory of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. Speech acts serve their function once they are said or communica ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Phallocentrism
Phallocentrism is the ideology that the phallus, or male sexual organ, is the central element in the organization of the social world. Phallocentrism has been analyzed in literary criticism, psychoanalysis and psychology, linguistics, medicine and health care, and philosophy. First phase The term was coined in 1927 by Ernest Jones, as part of his debate with Freud over the role of the phallic stage in childhood development, when he argued that "men analysts have been led to adopt an unduly phallocentric view". Drawing on the earlier arguments of Karen Horney, Jones, in a series of articles, maintained the position that women were not disappointed creatures driven by penis envy. Instead, this belief was itself a theoretical defense against castration anxiety. Freud, however, remained unmoved in his opposition to the Horney/Jones thesis, and his was the predominant psychoanalytic position after that, though some like Janet Malcolm would modify his position to the effect that "Freu ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Dialectic
Dialectic (; ), also known as the dialectical method, refers originally to dialogue between people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to arrive at the truth through reasoned argument. Dialectic resembles debate, but the concept excludes subjective elements such as emotional appeal and rhetoric. It has its origins in ancient philosophy and continued to be developed in the Middle Ages. Hegelianism refigured "dialectic" to no longer refer to a literal dialogue. Instead, the term takes on the specialized meaning of development by way of overcoming internal contradictions. Dialectical materialism, a theory advanced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, adapted the Hegelian dialectic into a materialist theory of history. The legacy of Hegelian and Marxian dialectics has been criticized by philosophers, such as Karl Popper and Mario Bunge, who considered it unscientific. Dialectic implies a developmental process and so does not fit naturally within classical ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Luce Irigaray
Luce Irigaray (; born 3 May 1930) is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examines the uses and misuses of language in relation to women. Irigaray's first and most well known book, published in 1974, was ''Speculum of the Other Woman'' (1974), which analyzes the texts of Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant through the lens of phallocentrism. Irigaray is the author of works analyzing many thinkers, including ''This Sex Which Is Not One'' (1977), which discusses Lacan's work as well as political economy; ''Elemental Passions'' (1982) can be read as a response to Merleau‐Ponty's article “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in ''The Visible and the Invisible'', and in ''The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger'' (1999), Irigaray critiques Heidegger's emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech and his "oblivion" or forgetting of air. Irigaray employs three ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Simone De Beauvoir
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (, ; ; 9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986) was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, nor was she considered one at the time of her death, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory. Beauvoir wrote novels, essays, short stories, biographies, autobiographies, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She was best known for her "trailblazing work in feminist philosophy", '' The Second Sex'' (1949), a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. She was also known for her novels, the most famous of which were '' She Came to Stay'' (1943) and '' The Mandarins'' (1954). Her most enduring contribution to literature are her memoirs, notably the first volume, ''Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée'' (1958). She received the 1954 Prix Gonc ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |