EN 2012 Study Guide - Final Guide: Justin Vivian Bond, Transnationalism, Julia Serano
5 Sep 2016
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One is not born a woman wittig. Argues that categorization of people into sexes is a class system. Women are not a natural group, rather a social, political class, as are men . Women"s bodies and minds are distorted by ideology to a politically motivated category of woman : their different physical attributes are only significant insofar as we impose meaning and categories upon them. Oppression then seems like the natural consequence of women"s nature . If one of these categories disappears, so will the other: you cannot have masters without slaves and vice versa. Task of feminism is to destroy these categories. Language shapes the real, with gender as with anything else: for there is a plasticity of the real to language: language has a plastic action upon the real. Language enforced the division whereby men have access to the general, while women are considered particular, or a special interest group .
