WMST 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Virginity, Bride Price, Sexology

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Women's Studies
• Course: WMST 1000
• Professor: Amy Butchart

Document Summary

Foucault didn"t write speci cally about women or feminism, his writing and ideas on power, knowledge and sexuality. He wrote on a new theoretical perspective: postmodernism. Postmodernism really started as a philosophical school in the 1970s, it was critical of the liberal and marxist views, particularly in social and political thought. Postmodernism usually deny that trajectory exists and challenge the idea of wars, economic failure etc. Contrary to liberal philosophy, there is no stable and rational individual. Individual identities: ways of thinking, speaking, and doing things within of system of meaningful signs: gender is a discursive, in that it is a framework for thinking about, speaking about and doing gendered identities. Discourse: regimented and institutional framework within which signs get their meaning. Scholars who studied postmodernism thought these signs were stable, we now know that the meaning of signs can shift.