Lecture 13

Grimms’ Fairy Tales

Gender Trouble, Judith Butler

  • How we represent women using a language that oppresses women?
  • There isn’t necessarily a thing in the world that’s exactly “woman”.
    • We produce what we pretend to represent.
  • Butler: maybe we should just get rid of this essentialist idea of “woman”.
  • These is a cultural norm and alignment between sex, gender, and desire. (cis het normativity, and a sex & gender binary)
    • When things don’t follow this, society “skips a beat”
    • But we don’t realize that these things are made up by society, just because they feel like they’ve always been this way doesn’t mean they’re natural and real
  • Butler: The thing being oppressed is a series of cultural actions that goes by the name of “woman”. To be a woman is to act feminine, it’s a continuous doing of womanhood.
    • To be a women is a continuous act of things that are culturally coded as feminine.
      • Because people are always judging a person’s expression of gender.