Sexual difference
Elizabeth Grosz
8 points * 2 hours per week * First semester * Clayton * Prerequisites: WMN2110 and WMN2120 or with permission of the deputy director of the centre
This subject provides an introduction to and an in-depth analysis of one of the major sites of feminist theory in the 1990s: the debates surrounding the question of sexual difference. The subject aims to introduce students to the terms and positions involved in the issues of sexual difference. Here we will discuss the question of how to define and socially position women: are women to be viewed as human subjects, fundamentally the same as men? Or as different kinds of subjects, subjects with their own specificity? This question is central to the ways in which political and social change is envisaged and to the ways in which questions of sexuality may be relevant to analyses of the production of knowledge. The subject examines psychoanalytic theory and phenomenology, biology, essentialism, differences between women by class, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, and the ethical implications of sexual difference and specificity.
Assessment
Written (6000 words): 100%
Recommended texts
Butler J Gender trouble Routledge, 1990
Freud S On sexuality vol. 7, Penguin, 1977
Frye M The politics of reality The Crossing Press, 1984
Grosz E Sexual subversions Allen and Unwin, 1989
Spelman E The inessential woman Beacon, 1989
Spivak G In Other worlds Routledge, 1987
Young I M Throwing like a girl and other essays Indiana, 1990