Eps 1075: Do women exist
— The too lazy to register an account podcast
In her imperfect masterpiece The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir observes, "If I want to define myself, I first have to say, 'I am a woman'; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth."
Whether or not American women are at a peculiar disadvantage we do now find ourselves in a bit of an existential predicament with regard to the being-ness of being a woman.
To take up female-ness as an endlessly changing, essentially malleable thing, in the hope that somehow this will be more satisfying, seems to me weirdly and wastefully contrarian.
Host
Ken Chavez
Podcast Content
The role of reproduction helps shape social positioning and promotes the construction of a gender-specific social identity. In particular, social identities generated by the nature of the biological body and its role in reproduction contribute to promoting and shaping the gender identity of the individual and his social positioning.
Butler argues against the identity politics of gender and performativity and considers the distinction between biological and social sex incomprehensible. In this passage, as above, he argues that sex is a social construction and not a distinction in itself. If the immutable nature of sex were called into question, the construct we call sex would be as culturally constructed as gender. But if the distinction between sex and gender turned out not to be a distinction, it would still be the gender as it is for all sexes.
First, for Butler, the idea that sex is a social construct boils down to the fact that a sexual body is also performative, and thus has various actions that constitute its reality. The gender nucleus, which supposedly encodes all the above-mentioned characteristics, is, however, an illusion created by ideal practices that seek to unify gender through heterosexuality: that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality deviates.
Gender nuclei are constructed to belong to both women and men, creating the illusion that there must be a male and a female male. Gender dimorphism serves the heterosexual social order by implying that it is natural to desire the opposite sex sexually, since woman and man are strongly opposed to each other. Being female and desired by a man, for example, is considered by default to be an expression of a woman's gender.
This means that there are no gender-specific traits, such as nurturing or ambitious traits, that are supposed to be part of a woman's biological sex and thus also a natural expression of her gender.
The question of whether gender is constructed through social practices, whether it is a social construction or whether belonging to a particular gender amounts to belonging to a being with certain genders, has been a major feminist controversy. Masculinity and femininity are seen as the result of the education of an individual rather than his biological sex. One way of interpreting the idea that one is not born or becomes a woman, in one way or another, is to think that one was not born but became a woman. A female does not "become" through a process in which she assumes feminine traits or learns feminine behavior.
The terms "sex" and "gender" mean different things to different feminist theorists, and neither is easy or easy to characterize.
Most people seem to think that sex and gender go together: men are human men, women are human women, and women behave as human women. Gender denotes a woman or man, depending on their physical characteristics, such as body shape and facial features, while gender denotes both a woman and a man, depending on their sexual orientation and gender identity. The social meaning of "sex" and "gender" is born of the sexual objectification of women, in which they are considered and treated as objects satisfying the desires of men.
Gender produces an eroticization of dominance and subjugation, and masculinity is defined as sexual dominance, femininity, or sexual subjugation.
For MacKinnon, sex is constitutive, and De Beauvoir's own definition of woman suggests this . In order to define gender, masculinity and femininity, reference must be made to social factors. The book is called "The Second Sex," not "The Second Sex," as it is called in her own definition of women.
It is not just a misinterpretation to turn the gender roles imposed on the female gender into a negation that is itself a form of oppression, because being female and being female are two very different kinds of beings. The final step in this transformation is to elevate the gender role itself from the political identity pantheon of identity politics to the forms of oppression it represents. Butler, who claims that it has become unclear whether gender has any consequence for what becomes of that gender, tears women apart as a result of the "great historical defeat" of their gender, which De Beauvoir laboriously sought to bring to light, and is torn apart by Butler's claim that "it becomes unclear whether a" gender "has any consequences for the" becoming "of a particular gender.