WMST427A.1001--Essay: Of Phlogiston and Feminism--UNIV NEVADA, RENO, SPRING 2021

 

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ENG.WMST427A.1001

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James L’Angelle

University of Nevada, Reno

Dr. J. Nelson, Professor

11 February 2021

Assignment: J. Butler, Gender Trouble

     “Every science has passed through a phase in which it considered its basic subject matter to be some sort of substance or structure. Fire was identified with phlogiston; heat with caloric; and life with vital fluid. Every science has passed beyond that phase, recognizing its subject matter as being some sort of process:” (Brickhard, MH) 

Can the concept be extended to the study of feminism? In Butler’s opening paragraph, the author notes “representation is the normative function of a language which is said either to reveal or to distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women.” (Butler, 3) To what degree the concept of gender is linked to the classical terms of feminine, woman, opposite sex and similar is grounded in language itself. 

Butler makes an argument in relation to the French in section v. where gender and sex appear to have a connection embedded in linguistics. In fact, there is a distinct relationship between the two related to the endings of the words and how the subject affects other components of the sentence. Nouns ending in -e normally are considered feminine by gender, with the possible exception of l’homme (man) and similar words. Butler then alludes to the opening paragraph of Monique Wittig’s The Mark of Gender, but omits on page 28 an important observation, replaced by three dots, an ellipsis;

     “It is thus that English when compared to French has the reputation of being almost genderless while French passes for a very gendered language. It is true that, strictly speaking, English does not apply the mark of gender to inanimate objects, to things or nonhuman beings.” (Wittig, 76)

  Going back to the trial by fire analogy that phlogiston was the inherent component that caused the element to burn, it then becomes necessary to reinvent language itself from the basics of phonemes and morphemes instead of the rather immediate convenience of redefinition and recategorization by syntax and semantics. Wittig adds yet another interesting sentence that further describes the very nature of gender, “takes place in a category of language that is totally unlike any other and which is called the personal pronoun.” (78) Wittig distinguishes between the first and third person with the latter being the enabler of gender, as “I” alone leaves a “suspension of the grammatical form.” Wittig’s solution was to substitute the neuter pronoun “one.” In fact, neuter by definition, is;

     “of, relating to, or constituting the gender that ordinarily includes most words or grammatical forms referring to things classed as neither masculine nor feminine.” (Merriam-Webster)

Of course in a few short paragraphs the effort to unravel the complexity that involves gender and sex is quixotic, especially when that effort spans different languages with dissimilar syntaxes. Butler may have intentionally cited French as where not to go to find an answer but found Wittig’s arguments useful, even in abbreviated form. At least they both can agree it isn’t phlogiston that makes fire burn.

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Namebase: (by page)

(4) Foucault,

(6) Denise Riley, Am I That Name?

(8) Marx,

(11) Lévi-Strauss,

(12) Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

(14) Luce Irigary,

(17) Plato, Cartesian, Husserl, Sartre, 

(24) Wittig,

(27) Nietzsche, Haar

(29) Aretha Franklin,

(31) Herculine Barbin,

(32) Robert Stoller,

(36) Lacan, Freud,

(37) Jacqueline Rose, Jane Gallop,

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By Section:

i. “Women” as the Subject of Feminism  (3)

ii. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire (9)

iii. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate (11)

iv. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary, and Beyond (18)

v. Identity, Sex, and the Metaphysics of Substance (22)

vi. Language, Power, and the Strategies of Displacement (33)

Definitions:

(4) juridical (adj)-of or relating to the administration of justice or the office of a judge

(5) ontological (adj)- relating to or based upon being or existence

(6) hegemonic (adj)-the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group

(11) structuralism (n)-a method of analysis (as of a literary text or a political system) that is related to cultural anthropology and that focuses on recurring patterns of thought and behavior.

(11) prediscursive (not in dictionary)-discursive (adj)-moving from topic to topic without order, proceeding coherently from topic to topic, method of resolving complex expressions into simpler or more basic ones : marked by analytical reasoning,

(14) phallogocentric-not in dictionary-

(16) existential (adj)-having being in time and space

(26) conflation(n)-a composite reading or text

(33) “gender is not a noun”--subclass within a grammatical class (such as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (such as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms

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Cited;

Brickhard, M.H., Process and Emergence: Normative Function and Representation | SpringerLink

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble : Tenth Anniversary Edition, Routledge, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/knowledgecenter/detail.action?docID=180211.

Wittig, M., wittig_-_the_mark_of_gender.pdf (unito.it)

neuter, Neuter | Definition of Neuter by Merriam-Webster (merriam-webster.com)

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