Download Gender Frequently still used as a synonym for `sex`, as in: `she is of

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,