Luce Irigaray studied the female subject since it was something most theories of subjectivity neglected to address properly. She opposes psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan, which represented the female as the by-product of the male. Irigaray used the idea that males were stable, unified and fixed to uphold her theory that the female was diverse and complex. Butler believes that gender came first and then sex. If we are going to look at the idea of nature vs. biology, we cannot do that without influences, since we are already apart of our society. Everything in our culture is a result of gender.
I feel that Butler’s theory is more “essentialist” because she believes that “Gender is a regulated system of performances”. Our society is based on norms of what it means to be a gendered subject and we follow and repeat this system as best as we can. I think that Irigaray’s argument is more “anti-essentialist”. Irigaray believes that women are not uniform like men are. They are all different and are not fixed subjects.
No comments:
Post a Comment