Title: Introductory note. On the one and many : the aporias of our restlessness
Abstract: The present volume of the journal Comunicacao e Sociedade (Communication and Society) is dedicated to the theme of Gender and heterosexuality: discourses and images in advertising and the media. It stems from a research project with an identical naming, within the scope of which the editors of this volume have explored the themes in the context of women’s magazines and general print media news discourse over the last 5 years. This is the first volume dedicated to this theme on the research strand of “Language and Social Interaction” and the CECS’ collection. It was encouraged by the desired contribution to questioning the continuing (re) production of the link between gender and heterosexuality that establishes a causal relationship between sex, gender and desire (Butler, 1990). This task is ever more urgent than the isms that are articulated about these issues are unnecessary, obsolete and regressive. Given the emphasis that we place on discourse and the image, it is relevant to question how gender and sexuality can be intertwined with this type of communicative events and social practices. Although we agree with Rubin’s claim (Rubin, [1984]1999) that sex and gender are not the same thing, and that analytically sexuality and gender should be distinguished, we also think, like many other feminist theorists, including Rubin (who had claimed this same position in her seminal 1975 essay (Rubin, 1975)) that sex and gender are separated systems which are interwoven at several points. They have a particular kind of mutual dependence, which no study of either can overlook (Cameron & Kulick, 2003; Bucholtz & Hall, 2004). It is by now a familiar finding – reported by several researchers working in Anglo-American cultures – that the discursive construction of heterosexuality is often bound to the discursive construction of femininity and of masculinity (Hollway, 1984; Rich, 1999; Sunderland, 2004). In this discursive chaining between gender and heterosexuality, heterosexual identities are represented as natural, the product of the anatomically sexed body (whether female or male), while gender identities are seen as signifying the meanings attributed to the sexed body (whether feminine or masculine). This distinction between sex and gender entails the understanding that male bodies are the basis of masculinity and female bodies the basis of femininity and the construction of an established binary heterosexual order upon which normative gender is built. In the domain of sexuality, this is visible in the naturalness of the two-sex idea, and in the notion that the two must be inherently contrasting. This contrast is read in most cultures, according to Cameron and Kulick (2003), as complementary (i.e., matching what the ‘opposite sex’ is not), and is rendered desirable, awarding heterosexuality with validity and authority as the only natural and normal sexuality. The coherence of the articulation between ‘gender differences discourse’ (Hollway, 1984) and the dominant heterosexuality discourse, where the binary structure of gender finds its complement in opposite-sex attraction, is insured by the dominant ideology of gender. According to this ideology:
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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