3. Applied Literature
Fereshteh Hadisi; Firouzeh Ameri
Abstract
The history of feminism and gender studies is fraught with constant struggles to find applicable definitions for sex, gender, and sexuality, and understand their relationships and differences. This paper attempts to go through various theories in this regard, tracing their variations and evolutions through ...
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The history of feminism and gender studies is fraught with constant struggles to find applicable definitions for sex, gender, and sexuality, and understand their relationships and differences. This paper attempts to go through various theories in this regard, tracing their variations and evolutions through time, with a particular focus on gender elimination and discrimination. Some important issues explored in this research include experimentation with language, scientific investigations, and sociological research in the hope of defining and combating gender. Moreover, some manifestation of gender-neutrality patterns in literary works throughout ages and among nations have been represented in various degrees. The survey at hand, drawing on Foucault and Butler’s theories on power and gender performativity, asserts the relative independence of sex, sexuality, and gender from each other as well as the nonessential role of them in the game of discrimination, relegating this role instead to power relations and personal perceptions. Literature, with its vast imaginative capacities and persuasive force, has been introduced as the site where all these intellectual endeavors of various fields about gender have converged, creating metaphors for a possible discrimination-free world, and effecting inevitable changes in the perceptions of their readers.
Moussa Pourya Asl
Abstract
Current feminisms have emphasized the systematic nature of women’s oppression. Feminist scholars like Luce Irigaray insist that woman’s difference and otherness is a matter of male-dominated institutional definition: because the woman is theoretically subordinated to the concept of masculinity, ...
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Current feminisms have emphasized the systematic nature of women’s oppression. Feminist scholars like Luce Irigaray insist that woman’s difference and otherness is a matter of male-dominated institutional definition: because the woman is theoretically subordinated to the concept of masculinity, she is seen and objectified by the man as his opposite, described as an absence, a lack, and, most notoriously, the other. The metaphor of vision, or the panoptic gaze, is thus faulted with a construction of “sexist norms”, and with the institutional definitions of gender and sexual difference. This paper examines the contention in the key theoretical writings of men—Freud, Lacan, and Sartre—who are engaged with the notion of femininity. Their conceptualizations on the notions of scopophilia, exhibitionism, and narcissism are specifically examined to explore the way the dichotomy of a male subject and a female object is formulated and perpetuated through heterocenteric assumptions about the gaze. It is concluded that within the masculine framework of Western metaphysics, a woman’s entry into a presiding scopic economy contributes to her ineluctable limitation to passivity and her socio-sexual victimization. In this regard, the panoptic gaze is endowed with a constitutive influence upon the subjectivity of the individuals—appropriating the woman into a definable being.