E 341 Lecture Notes - Jeremy Irons, Transvestism, Giacomo Puccini
Document Summary
The debate is between essentialist" and constructionist" notions of gender, as rivkin calls it. As barry says, what feminist critics do is raise the question of whether men and women are. Essentially" different because of biology, or are socially constructed as different. Cixous and kristeva to different extents seem to suggest there is something that is fixedly. Feminine" and is to a great extent located in female bodily processes, while theorists such as. Butler or halberstam seem to argue that there is no innate, fixed identity as masculine" or. Feminine" but they are merely performative and often unstable. One way of looking at the three versions of the butterfly story is to explore, using these different theories, if gender identity is fixed and/or fluid in each version. Think not only of the transformation of butterfly/song but also of other subsidiary characters such as renee, suzuki,