123252 AR Literature Course - Literature & Cultural Studies 1/2 (MA) British/Irish/New English (2016S)

What is meant by a ‘sex-gender system’? The term, coined by anthropologist Gayle Rubin in her seminal 1975 essay ‘The Traffic in Women’, has proven particularly useful in debates around what constitutes sex and what gender, and around the extent to which gendered behaviours and gender relations are culturally determined and enmeshed within political and economic systems and practices. Rubin’s text and its reception manifest the lively awareness of Marxist theory that characterises various feminisms and perspectives in gender studies. But this awareness is far from being reciprocated. Feminists have long taken issue with the ‘gender blindness’ of much critical theory and leftist critique; while, conversely, a perceived ‘mainstreaming’ of gender equality claims has left many radical thinkers with the disillusioned suspicion that the equality agenda of advanced capitalist societies is merely a bid for a slice of the same pie ‘bei unveränderter Bäckerei’, in Ernst Bloch’s phrase.

Approaching the ‘sex-gender system’ concept from a variety of perspectives, we will revisit, and re-invigorate, the – often fraught, often frustrated – dialogue between radical critical theory and key texts of feminist and gender theory. Moving beyond the conceptual deadlocks of ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’ and ‘essentialism’ versus ‘constructivism’ that have dominated discussions of gender, we will trace debates on performativity, embodiment, labour, and reproduction, through various texts from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. In a series of close readings, class presentations, and precirculated questions followed by responses and round-table discussion, we will investigate the ways in which key concepts of gender theory are mobilised and contested across this textual repertory. We will also ask whether – and how – the contemporary theorisation of these concepts was anticipated in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Synthesising key insights from ‘Anglo-American’ and French feminisms, queer theory, perspectives from gay, lesbian, and transgender studies, and Marxist feminism, we will seek common ground among these various positions, while always remaining conscious of their irreducible differences and of the productive tensions between them. Finally, we will explore contemporary feminist and Marxist perspectives on evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience, establishing the renewed urgency of a radically transformative agenda for critical gender studies at the very moment in which an explanatory-acquiescent model of ‘human nature’ is once again in the ascendent.