Presentation Gender and the Body

HISTORICAL OVERVIEWBody :

4th century BC: a generic term that excites critical approaches

1405: The Book of the City of Ladies , Christine de Pizan

Late 19th- beginning of 20th century: Suffrage movement, emergence of

‘New Woman’

Gender:

1949 : Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex

1960’s : Gay liberation movements, Out of the Closet : Voices of Gay

1970’s: Terms masculinity, femininity are used.

1990s: Judith Butler, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution

BODY

According to Alphonso Lingis a body is :

• Relieved and wounded, is gratified and excites pleasure,

troubles and torments.

• As painful and voluptuous substance as a muscular and

nervous circuitry that attracts forces and gets coded with

blazons, signs, fictional identities.

• The cartography that maps out the distances and directions

across which we identify and constrain one another and maps

out the ways we torment and gratify one another. (287)

GENDER

• Simone de Beauvoir: "one is not born, but, rather, becomes

a woman’’

• Butler : performativity of gender

Theatre (metaphor)

CONCLUSIONS:

BODY :

• Something that someone ‘has’

• Embodiment as a signifier for the actual body and metaphorical uses

• Spatial significance

GENDER:

• Process of becoming

• Fluidity

BACHELARD POETICS OF SPACE

Topo-analysis

• Dwelling - sense of belonging

• Warmth – intimacy

• ‘We read a house’ = ‘ we read a room’

• ‘Physic state’

NORA - ROBIN

‘She kept repeating… her wish for home’ (50)

‘…we all go down in battle but we all return home’ (116)

‘In the passage of their lives together …every item in the house, every word

they spoke attested to their mutual love, the combining of their humours’.

(50)

‘There were circus chairs, wooden horses bought from a ring of an old

merry-go-round, Venetian chandeliers from the Flea Fair, stage-drops from

Munich, cherubim from Vienna, ecclesiastic hangings from Rome, a spinet

from England, and a miscellaneous collection of music boxes from many

countries; ’ (50)

NORA’S - ROBIN’S HOUSE

ROOM TABOO

Nora

love rape

taboo

Robin

security escapism

fluidity

ROOM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. London : Faber and Faber, 1936. Print

Bachelard,Gaston. The poetics of space. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press,

1994. Print

Donn Welton. The Body. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Print