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Chapter 3, Subversive Bodily Acts, Section II, Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity Summary and Analysis
Foucault's genealogy of gender helps to criticize Lacanian and neo-Lacanian theories that see unusual sexual practices and identities as unintelligible. Many of his best insights concern his publication of the journals of Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite. He argues that the univocal idea o sex serves social regulation and control and only artificially binds different sexual functions together which makes sex as such look causal. Sex is an effect not a cause. Liberation views of sex are problematic as well, for Foucault. The intersexed body refutes sexual categorization.
Butler transitions to discuss the development of Foucault's views between his works and she describes Herculine's journal entries and analyze them. Not only does the hermaphrodite help tear down the walls of oppression but homosexuality itself undermines the trappings of traditional sexual morality. Sexual nonidentity can be achieved through homosexual sex.
Butler argues that the distinction between Same and Other...
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This section contains 246 words (approx. 1 page at 300 words per page) |
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