Title: Gender: Enabling Perspective or Politically Correct Term? An Analysis of how Gender and Material Culture are Viewed by 1990s Academia
Abstract: My work, which I see as primarily women’s studies, is set very explicitly in the present. The past is gone and I work with representations of it which are written in today’s masculinist academic culture. My theoretical perspective is post-structural feminism (Weedon, 1987; Cixous, 1991) and I locate my understandings there in the belief that the only way forward for analysis that acknowledges active women in the past is through the creation of other reference points for status, power and authority, than the phallus and penis of phallocentrism (Irigaray, 1985; Cixous, 1991) which informs our thoughts through a symbolic order with phallus/penis as signifier of access to power (Frye, 1989; Freud, 1965; Cocks, 1989). We must think differently. At present, oppositional dichotomies dominate interpretive frameworks. I believe that gender studies perspectives can make obvious the problems which are implicit in binary oppositions which are based on apparently natural dichotomies like male/female and have/have not. We can think instead of differences and possibilities.
Publication Year: 2000
Publication Date: 2000-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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