完整综述版文学理论之性别与性文论（英语）GenderandSexuality.docVIP

Gender and Sexuality Since the late 1980s, theories of Gender and Sexuality have redefined how we think about culture and society. They have raised new questions about the construction of the gendered and sexualized subject and put forward radical new ideas about PERFORMANCE and PERFORMATIVITY as the means by which the body becomes a SIGNIFYING SYSTEM within SOCIAL FORMATIONS. At the foundation of most theories of Gender and Sexuality is a thoroughgoing critique of the SUBJECT and SUBJECTIVITY. As a social and political category, the subject cuts across all disciplinary and theoretical boundaries. Being a subject can mean many things – a citizen of a particular community, an AUTONOMOUS being in possession of a sense of personal wholeness and unity, the subject of an oppressive ruler or of a discourse. Being a subject and possessing subjectivity are not the birthrights of all human beings, however; they are specialized attributes, more or less unique to Western or Westernized cultures. This notion of the modern subject begins in the Enlightenment, with the reflections of John Locke, who regarded personal identity as unique, sovereign, and autonomous. Subjectivity, the consciousness of one’s his- torical and social agency, was the prerogative of the Western individual who defined himself in opposition to the OTHER, to that which was not a subject and did not possess subjectivity. The classic philosophical expression of this relationship of the subject to what is not the subject is Hegel’s dialectic of the master and slave. As is so often the case in Enlightenment thought, the potential for subversion and AMBIVALENCE is contained in what appears to be a universal concept. For Hegel’s dia- lectic also suggests the possibility of the disenfranchised slave or non- subject acquiring subjectivity by overpowering the master. By the end of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche could speak of the “subject as multiplicity,” and by the 1920s, Freud would call into question