Radical Feminism, Gender and

Sexuality
 Recap of last week:
• Liberal feminism
• the inferiority of women is solely a function of her political and legal status.
• rests on the presupposition that equal participation and equality before the
law are sufficient to secure freedom from certain oppressive structures that
kept women in their place.
• Socialist feminism
• Explored the societal rather than the strictly political or legal roots of
women’s subordination.
• Capitalism ensures that power in society is limited to those who control the
means of production, so women should, like the proletariats, work towards
the overthrow of capitalism.
• Patriarchy:
• government by men.
• internalisation of the law of the father
• The actual exercise of power and also to the ideological system used to justify
and protect this power.
 Radical Feminism
• Radical feminists looked beyond economic, political and legal
structures of society to the deeper levels of meaning production to
explain and rectify the inferior status of women.
• The cultural creation of the concept ‘woman’, and not biological or
structural forces (like political, legal or economic structures), that
define her subordination.
• Liberal and Marxist or socialist feminism focused on the objective
structures of society, law, politics and economics as the cause of
women’s oppression, radical feminism shifted focus to the production
of meaning.
“Radical feminism finds that the inadequacies within Marxist analyses
of a comprehension of women’s oppression, are due not to its chronic
underdevelopment in this sphere (as Marxist women believe) but to
the limitations of the theory itself. The failure is not failure of
attention, but limitation of scope. […] Amoeba-like, radical feminism,
would ingest Marxism. The historical basis is not the economic
determinism of the classes but the natural division of the sexes which
precedes this. […] there is no doubt that the male and female of the
species are distinct; the distinction that counts is the ability to bear
children. This is not just because it has been socially exploited to
oppress women, but because in itself it is a brutal, painful experience.
Hence the revolution is not just against a specific historical form of
society (e.g. capitalism), but against Nature (and its untranscended
manifestaions in all human culture).” (Juliet Mitchell, Women’s Estate,
88)
• have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organisation
of culture itself, and further, even the very organisation of nature […]
For we are dealing with a larger problem, with an oppression that
goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself.”
(Firestone, cited in Mitchell, 88)

Departure from socialist feminism:

- Marxism and socialism’s limitation of scope
- Marxists felt that women’s oppression could be studied and resolved
through addressing class conflict.
- Radical feminists felt that women needed to be studied as a separate
group, first and foremost.
• Radical feminism identifies the one biological difference between
men and women: the ability of women to reproduce, a natural ability
that has been exploited.
• Some Radical feminists reject this role  birth control pill was made
readily available.
• Gender theorists, like Butler refuse the “natural” argument for gender
identity: that there is a natural link between gender, sex and sexuality.
That women are, because of their NATURAL ability to reproduce,
must also, NATURALLY be heterosexual.
• Radical feminists question the way we are categorised and organised
as a species, rooted first and foremost in the reproductive capacities
of the male and the female, and what those capacities come to mean.
“The first dichotomous division of this mass is said to have
been on the grounds of sex: male and female. But the genitals
per se would be no more grounds for the human race to be
divided in two than skin colour or height or hair colour. The
genitals, in connection with a particular activity, have the
capacity for the initiation of the reproductive process. […]
Because one half of humanity was and still is forced to bear
the burden of reproduction at the will of the other half, the
first political class is defined not by its sex – sexuality was only
relevant originally as means to reproduction – but by the
function of being the container of the reproductive process.”
(Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey, 54)
Charles says to Sarah: “But you cannot reject the purpose for which
woman was brought into creation. [...] You cannot place serving them
above the natural law.” (chapter 60)
Charles sees the cause of Sarah’s rejection as an “unwomanly hatred of
my sex” (chapter 60).

Charles assumes that being a woman naturally means:

(1) wanting to bear children
(2) being heterosexual.

• We now enter into an anti-essentialist approach to the question of

female oppression.
• Shift informed by post-structuralism and post-modernism.
• Essentialist: “the mode of thinking which treats social phenomena like
gender and sexuality as if they exist prior to and outside of social and
cultural discourses, practices and structures which give rise to them.”
(Stevi Jackson, “Theorising Gender and Sexuality”, 133)
• Non-essentialist mode: what it means to be a man or a woman in a
particular society in a particular time, not simply that one is a man or
a woman.
• Sex: as the anatomical and physiological characteristics that signify
maleness and femaleness
• Gender: socially constructed masculinity and femininity.
• Sexuality: sexuality – sexual identity – is ideologically motivated.
 “The term gender has been used since the early 1970s to denote
culturally constructed femininity and masculinity as opposed to
biological sex difference. Sexuality – erotic identities, desires and
practices – is usually conceptualised as distinct from, but related to,
gender.” (Stevi Jackson, “Theorising Gender and Sexuality”, 131)

“This circular and deterministic reason has served to justify women’s

subordination and to define heterosexuality as the only fully ‘natural’
and legitimate form of sexuality. Hence it is politically important for
feminists to challenge this way of thinking, to break the patriarchal
chain which binds sex, gender and sexuality together as if they were
inseparable and unchangeable.” (Jackson, 131)
“Feminist theorists are now confronted with the problem of either
redefining and expanding the category of women itself to become
more inclusive (which requires also the political matter of settling who
gets to make the designation and in the name of whom) or to
challenge the place of the category [in this case the category of
gender] as a part of the feminist normative discourse.” (Butler,
“Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory and Psychoanalytic Discourse”, 325)

• Who does “woman” include? Does it currently exclude anyone? And

who decides?
• What does the category “gender” itself serve? Who does it serve?
And how does it serve? How did the category of gender, this notion
of social grouping into “man” and “woman”, come about?
• Monique Wittig argues that men and women are more appropriately
viewed as two classes of people (like the bourgeois and the
proletariats), where one dominates the other.
• They exist by virtue of the exploitative relationship that binds them
together, but also sets them apart as different classes.

“But what we believe to be physical and direct perception is only a

sophisticated and mythic construction, an “imaginary formation,”
which reinterprets physical features (in themselves as neutral as any
others but marked by the social system) through the network of
relationships in which they are perceived. (They are seen as black,
therefore they are black; they are seen as women, therefore, they are
women. But before being seen that way, they first had to be made that
way.)” (Wittig, “One is Not Born a Woman”, p. 546)
• Reject the category “woman”
• Dispose of the category gender altogether
• Attack the process of classification and categorisation
itself
• Incredulity towards metanarratives – gender as a
metanarrative cannot stand outside its own historical
specificity and explain “universal” truths about men and
women
• Gender is only one narrative amongst others  other
forms of identities emerge: class, race, nation
13
 Judith Butler
• Gender performance – which includes gender parody in the form of drag
• The performativity of gender – which is NOT the same as performance
• Roles or performances we take on or put on, to live up to our gender identity. So if I
identify as feminine, I perform my femininity.
• There is nothing NATURAL about my femininity; my femininity is indicated by my
performance.
• Performativity – means we are compelled to repeat certain acts or performances of
gender; what CONSTITUTES femininity or masculinity precedes my wilful
performances.
• Cisgender: a term for people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were
assigned at birth
• Also be defined as those who have a gender identity or perform a gender role
society considers appropriate for one's sex.
• Butler sees drag as having the potential to subvert essentialist notions of gender
identity.
15
RU PAUL
Drag “reveals one of the key fabricating mechanisms through which the
social construction of gender takes place. I would suggest that drag fully
subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and
effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of
a true gender identity.” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 174)

Drag enacts a “double inversion”: (1) my “outside” appearance is feminine,

but my “inside” appearance (the body beneath the costume) is
masculine. It also says that (2) my appearance “outside” (my body) is
masculine, by my “inside” is feminine.

“Both claims to truth contradict one another and so displace the entire
enactment of gender significations from the discourse of truth and
falsity.” (Butler, GT, 174)
17
• The usual assumption is that if you are born with a particular sex
organ, you have a particular gender identity.
• The logic: sex organ first, followed by gender identity.
• The way we imagine gender identity does not follow this logic: we
imagine gender identity to be something that is inside of me, my
essence: femininity or masculinity as my identity.
• How can something that supposedly follows, supposedly comes after
my sex organ, then become something stable?
• 2 premises:
• Gender identity follows sex, that gender identity comes after the appearance
of the sex organ  the anchor here is my sex organ.
• Gender identity (I feel feminine/ I feel masculine) is the anchor, the essence
of my being, the organising principle.
• So if we accept this first premise – that the sex organ comes first,
followed naturalistically by gender identity, then the second premise,
that identity is that stable core that can explain all my actions, well
then, that cannot hold true.
• Drag is a performance that exposes this logical flaw: it shows that sex
(biological anatomy) is not naturally followed by gender (feminine or
masculine).

“In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of

gender itself.” (GT 175)

Such gender parody “…does not assume that there is an original which
such parodic identities imitate. Indeed the parody is of the very
notion of an original.” (GT 175)
 Gender performativity
“Gender is performative insofar as it is the effect of a
regularity regime of gender differences in which genders are
divided and hierarchized under constraint. Social constraints,
taboos, prohibitions, threats of punishment operate in the
ritualized repetition of norms, and this repetition constitutes
the temporalised scene of gender construction and
destabilization. There is no subject which precedes or enacts
this repetition of norms.” (Butler, “Critically Queer”, 21)
“Performativity is a matter of reiterating or repeating the
norms by which one is constituted: it is not a radical
fabrication of a gendered self. It is a compulsory repetition of
prior and subjectivating norms, ones which cannot be thrown
off at will, but which work, animate, and constrain the
gendered subject, and which are also the resources from
which resistance, subversion, displacement are to be forged.”
(Butler, “Critically Queer”, 22)
“In no sense can it be concluded that the part of gender that it
performed is the truth of gender; performance as bounded ‘act’ is
distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists in a
reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the
performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the
performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice’… The reduction of performativity to
performance would be a mistake.” (Butler, “Critically Queer”, 24)
• “In what sense, then, is gender an act? As in other ritual social
dramas, the action of gender requires a performance that is
repeated. This repetition is at once a re-enactment and re-
experiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it
is the mundane and ritualised form of their legitimation. Although
there are individual bodies that enact these significations by
becoming stylized into gendered modes, this “action” is a public
action. There are temporal and collective dimensions to these
actions, and their public character is not inconsequential; indeed, the
performance is effected with the strategic aim of maintaining gender
within its binary frame – an aim that cannot be attributed to a
subject, but, rather, must be understood to found and consolidate
the subject.” (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 178)
 Gender identity in FLW
• How is gender identity constructed in FLW?
• Women were expected to play particular roles in society, roles that
constituted their gender identity.
• Class played an important part in the construction of gender identity.
• Male characters are likewise subjected to strict gendered
expectations.
• Charles feels marginalised as a man – about to be disinherited; does
not fit in with his gentlemanly friends. Feels more affinity with Sarah.
He is in a position to subvert societal norms?
• He remains a patriarch and a sexist at heart.
“‘Classic’ feminism, then, had marginalised or ignored lesbianism. This state of
affairs was countered by arguing that, on the contrary, lesbianism should be
regarded as the most complete form of feminism. […] since lesbianism turns away
from various forms of collusion with patriarchal exploitation and instead consists of
relationships among women which, by definition, constitute a form of resistance to,
and a radical reorganising of, existing forms of social relations.” (Barry, 136)

“…it is as a woman that women are oppressed and that in order to be free she
must shed what keeps her secure.” (Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey, 44-45)

“…what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man” (Wittig, 551), to

reject “woman” is to reject this social relation to man.

The “refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to

become a man or a woman, consciously or not. For a lesbian this goes further than
the refusal of the role “woman.” It is the refusal of the economic, ideological and
political power of man.” (Wittig, 547)
• Ultimately, only “the destruction of heterosexuality as a
social system which is based on the oppression of women by
men and which produces the doctrine of the difference
between the sexes to justify this oppression” (Wittig, 551)
• Adrienne Rich, another important lesbian feminist critic,
describes heterosexuality as an institution.
• Ware compelled to be with men.
• Rich is interested in examining heterosexuality as a political
institution that keeps women subordinated to men.
• In other words she is challenging our limited understanding
of sexuality.
• And recall Charles referring to Christina Rossetti as hysterical
spinster.
http://qspirit.net/christina-rossetti-writer-christmas-carols-lesbian-
poetry/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market
“…the ultimate formulation of a particular conception of the
relationship between sexuality and politics, explicitly marking off
lesbianism as an issue of gender identification and contrasting the
interests of gay men and lesbians. […] The ultimate formulation of a
politics of nostalgia, of a return to that state of innocence free of
conflict and violence, as all dreams of perfect union do. A number of
lesbian critics have remarked that Rich’s lesbian continuum effectively
erases sexuality and robs lesbianism of any specificity.” (Biddy Martin,
“Lesbian Identity/ Autobiographical Difference[s]”, 280)
• As Barry notes, lesbianism, as radical feminism understood it, or
appropriated it, was limited to it being a “form of female boding or
patriarchal resistance.” (Barry 138)
• Lesbianism became “feminism’s magical sign of liberation.” (King in
Martin, 280)
• Lesbianism as ideology, not conceived as a specific type of human
connection, sexual connection, emotional connection, between two
women.
• An alternative to the heterosexual relation; it becomes what the
heterosexual relation is not.
• In the 1970s, lesbianism became a force for political solidarity, in the
name of rejecting women’s relation with men, which was seen to be
the root of female oppression.
 Queer Theory
Queer theory “rejects female separatism and instead sees an identity
of political and social interests with gay men.” (Barry 138)

“One of the main points of post-sturucturalism was to ‘deconstruct’

binary opposition (like that between speech and writing, for instance),
showing, firstly, that the distinction between paired opposites is not
absolute, since each term in the pairing can only be understood and
defined in terms of the other, and, secondly, that it is possible to
reverse the hierarchy within such pairs, and so ‘privilege’ the second
term rather than the first. Hence, in lesbian/ gay studies the pair
heterosexual/ homosexual is deconstructed this way. The opposition
within this pair is seen, firstly, as inherently unstable.” (Barry 138)
Centre(anchor) Marginal
First Second
Master Slave
Self Other
Subject Object
Man Woman
Masculine Feminine
Inside (essence, internal stable core) Outside (performance)
Natural Unnatural
Heterosexuality Homosexuality
• This kind of “queering” or “deconstructing” applies to all kinds of
identities.
• This notion of “queering” as an act of deconstruction, or subversion
from within  reflected in the rhetoric Hans Kellner used to describe
the way we ought to read history: “crookedly” rather than “straight”.
• History, gender and sexuality are SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED, are SOCIAL
FICTIONS, are STORIES.
• The coherent sex – gender – sexuality narrative is precisely just that: a
NARRATIVE, with a TELLER who is ideologically informed.
• There are other ways to imagine and rewrite narratives of gender
• Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are not the Only Fruit, as a novel that “devalues
literary realism.” (Barry 142)
• “Is Oranges an autobiographical novel?”, “No not at all and yes of course,” (Barry
142) as indicative of the complicated narrative structure the novel takes.
• Winterson’s answer “no not at all” and “yes of course” are both equally true 
postmodern irony.
• Lyotard: our ability to “tolerate the incommensurable.”
• Indicative of the DECONSTRUCTIVE PRACTICE her novel takes, as well as her
sexual politics.

“What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find
the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place
(our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an
unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt).” (Oranges 45)
What “lesbian/ gay” critics do:
• Identify and establish a canon of “classic” lesbian/ gay writers whose
work constitutes a distinct tradition.
• Identify lesbian/ gay episodes in mainstream work and discuss them
as such, rather than reading them as symbolising something else.
• Set up an extended, metaphorical sense of “lesbian/ gay” so that it
connotes transgression and boundary-crossing  challenge neat and
tidy ways in which we separate gay and straight.
• Expose homophobia of mainstream literature and criticism.
• Foreground literary genres which significantly influenced ideals of
masculinity or femininity.

(Barry 143)
 Gender identity and queering in SH5
• War is generally a masculine preoccupation – but the novel is
subtitled, the “children’s crusade”.
• What does the novel say about masculinity in the context of war?
• Different kinds of masculine identities?
• During WWII, the roles of women shifted from domestic to masculine
and dangerous jobs in the workforce. The percentage of women in
industrial jobs went from 19.75 per cent to 27 per cent from 1938-
1945.
• Gender identity is not essentially tied to one’s sex  context bound,
and can change depending on circumstances.
 “Rosie the Riveter”
Symbol of feminism and women’s economic
power
http://www.businesspundit.com/10-most-sexist-print-ads-from-the-
1950s/6/
• The theatrical elements in the English camp.
• Decentering of the relationship between what is theatrical and what is real:

“They had never had guests before, and they went to work like darling elves,
sweeping, mopping, cooking, baking – making mattresses of straw and burlap bags,
setting tables, putting party favors at each place.” (SH5 120)

“The words were written with the same pink paint which had brightened the set for
Cinderella. Billy’s perceptions were so unrealiable that he saw the words as
hanging in air, painted on a transparent curtain, perhaps. And there were lovely
silver dots on the curtain, too. These were really nailheads holding the tarpaper to
the shed. Billy could not imagine how the curtain was supported in nothingness,
and he supposed that the magic curtain and the theatrical grief were part of some
religious ceremony he knew nothing about.” (SH5 160)
“An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his
brains. Moments later he said, ‘There they go, there they go.’ He
meant his brains.

That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.” (SH5 160)

Boundary crossings and destabilisation that is characteristic of

queering.
We can say the novel queers history; asks us to read the story
“crooked” rather than “straight”.
“There are five sexes on Tralfamadore, each of them performing a step necessary in
the creation of a new individual. They looked identical to Billy – because their sex
difference were all in the fourth dimension.” (SH5 145)

“They said their flying-saucer crews had identified no fewer than seven sexes on
Earth, each essential to reproduction. Again: Billy couldn’t possibly imagine what
five of those seven sexes had to do with the making of a baby, since they were
sexually active only in the fourth dimension. The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy
clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimension. They told him
that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals. There could be
babies without female homosexuals. There couldn’t be babies without women
over sixty-five years old. There could be babies without men over sixty-five. There
couldn’t be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth.
And so on. It was gibberish to Billy.” (SH5 146)
 Tutorial TGOST

• How do different characters perform their gender? What

does it mean to be a “woman” or a “man” in the novel?
• Consider also the significance of Velutha’s immasculation, or
efeminisation  tied to power.
• The Kathakali performance:
• What story does the performance tell?
• Relationship to the main narrative?
• Gender identity
• Queering of Rahel and Estha’s relationship, see chapter “The Madras
Mail”, p. 327:

“And yet, if those performances are not immediately or obviously

subversive, it may be that it is rather in the reformulation of kinship, in
particular, the redefining of the “house” and its forms of collectivity […]
that the appropriation and redeployment of the categories of dominant
culture enable the formation of kinship relations that function quite
supportively as oppositional discourse within that culture.” (Butler,
“Critically Queer”, 28)

- How does this episode serve as “oppositional discourse” in the novel?

“If the term ‘queer’ is to be a site of collective contestations, the point
of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it
will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but
always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in
the direction of urgent and expanding political purposeses…” (Butler,
ibid., 19)

- How might TGOST be characterised as a ‘queer’ text in the way Butler

characterises it in the above quotation?