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Transcript
Childs, Peter, and Roger Fowler. 2006. The Routledge Dic<onary of Literary Terms. New York: Routledge. G Gender Frequently still used as a synonym for ‘sex’, as in: ‘she is of the female gender’. The difficulty here is that while gender and sex are most often – though not inevitably – seen as related they are not synonyms or substitutes for each other although, until the interrogations of ‘second wave’ feminism in the 1970s, they tended to be used as such. In 1974, anthropologist Sherry Ortner published a much-anthologized essay, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ which provided a framework with which to begin to disentangle ‘sex’ from ‘gender’. Ortner investigated the ways in which women’s bodies align them with nature (‘doomed to mere reproductive life’) whereas men, lacking ‘natural’ creative functions, assert their creativity ‘ “artificially,” through the medium of technology and symbols’. Ortner’s hypothesis suggested that gender is to culture as sex is to nature, and that gender is the social expression of, and the roles assigned to, gendered dichotomies of men and women. Thus, it could now be appreciated that the nineteenth-century doctrine of separate spheres for men and women, for instance, was built on constructs of gendered identity rather than any inherent predisposition on the basis of anatomy and capacity for childbearing. The debates relating to women’s liberation in the 1960s and 1970s (fuelled by the so-called sexual liberation afforded by the birth-control pill and other reproductive technologies) were also influenced by the work of sexologists, such as Masters and Johnson’s (William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson) Human Sexual Response (1966). Sexologists reported that, far from the female sexual passivity, frigidity or disinclination and inherent monogamy outlined by Freud, women were sexually active, initiatory and multiply orgasmic: ‘women’s inordinate orgasmic capacity did not evolve for monogamous, sedentary cultures’ wrote psychiatrist Mary Jane Sherfey in a 1966 essay on ‘The Theory of Female Sexuality’. Thus, the gender stereotype which had apparently been predicated on sexual determinants (the body and the activity of sex) was thoroughly dismantled and exposed for the vested (largely male) interests it protected and promoted. Now that sex did not necessarily lead to procreation, the notion that female gender identity is always in the thrall of the potential for motherhood (thus, nature not culture) was called into question. Gender was seen to be much more about the reproduction and maintenance of certain societal norms than related to safeguarding the requirements for the reproduction of the species. The rise of sex for pleasure for women has had a dramatic effect on gender, or rather, an effect on the dramatics of gender. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, published in 1990, introduced her now well-known theory of the PERFORMATIVITY of gender. Butler goes further than to say that gender is the performance or expression to which a particular identification gives rise; rather, for her, it is the performance itself that constructs the identification: ‘identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’. Further, Butler believes that, rather than the ‘cultural’ gender being Genre 97 predicated on the ‘natural’ sex, it is gender performativity that determines our very apprehension of sexed bodies. Thus, in Gender Trouble, Butler elaborates upon Ortner’s earlier equation: gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/ cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or a ‘natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive’, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. This [is the] construction of sex as the radically unconstructed. Of course, like other theorists who seek to disrupt the persistent dualism of gender as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’, Butler attempts to QUEER the binarism of a hegemonic ‘compulsory heterosexuality’. Adrienne Rich’s essay of 1987, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, which outlined the notion of a ‘continuum’ of modes of being in relation to gender – and thus to sex – is an important precursor to Butler’s work, as is Monique Wittig’s ‘One is Not Born a Woman’ (1981), in which she claims lesbians refuse not only the ‘role’ of woman but the whole heterosexual matrix – ‘the economic, ideological and political power of man’ – by which society operates. Lesbians are thus not women. See David Glover and Cora Kaplan, Genders (2000); Joseph Bristow, Sexuality (1997); Shelley Saguaro (ed.), Psychoanalysis and Woman: A Reader (2000). SS Generative poetics See POETICS. Genre There is no agreed equivalent for this word in the vocabulary of English criticism. ‘Kind’, ‘type’, ‘form’ and ‘genre’ are variously used, and this fact alone indicates some of the confusions that surround the development of the theory of genres. The attempt to classify or describe literary works in terms of shared characteristics was begun by Aristotle in the Poetics, and the first sentence of his treatise suggests the two main directions genre theory was to follow: Our subject being poetry, I propose to speak not only of the art in general, but also of its species and their respective capacities; of the structure of plot required for a good poem; of the number and nature of the constituent parts of a poem; and likewise of any other matters on the same line of enquiry. Classical genre theory is regulative and prescriptive, and is based on certain fixed assumptions about psychological and social differentiation. Modern genre theory, on the other hand, tends to be purely descriptive and to avoid any overt assumptions about generic hierarchies. In the last century, beginning with such Russian Formalists as Roman Jakobson, there has been a continuing effort to link literary kinds to linguistic structures. Vladimir Propp’s seminal study, Morphology of the Folktale, written in 1928, was strongly influenced by the Formalists, and he in turn laid some of the groundwork for the genre studies of the later Structuralists in both film and literary criticism. Tzvetan Todorov, however, in his book The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973), takes issue with Propp’s attempt to relate the concept of genre to that of ‘species’ in the natural sciences. Todorov points out that, unlike specimens in the natural world, every true literary work modifies the sum of all possible works, and that we only grant a text literary status insofar as it produces a change in our notion of the canon. If a work fails to achieve this,