Gender Identities

BIDASECA KARINA; JULIA ROTH

InterAmerican Key Topic. Series ?Rethinking the Americas

Center for InterAmerican Studies (CIAS) at Bielefeld University

Lugar: Oxon, Reino Unido & Nueva York, Estados Unidos; Año: 2019; p. 291 - 297

During the nineties, in line with postmodern perspective of gender studies in American academia, both sex and gender were themed as discursive constructions equipped with renewed meanings through practices such as performance or surgery. At the same time, the notion of "sexual difference" integrated set of provisions considered deviant sexual respect of normative heterosexuality. In this context, Judith Butler wrote an emblematic book: Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). She showed that gender identity was unstable and unfinished: an infinite performance in process. Butler´s thinking was influenced by the ?New Gender Politics?, which includes the transgendered, transsexual, intersex, and their complex relationship with the feminist and queer theories. For Butler, the gender as a binary concept is held in the social construct of masculinity. In Undoing Gender, Butler (2004) mentioned the crisis of the concept of gender to be understood as a mere discursive differentiation of masculine and feminine, and as a devaluation of the symbolic status of ?sexual difference?. Gender is described as a form of des-activation of the political dimension of feminism. Thus, it called "Queering" to the mode in which queer theory describes the process of reviewing the stories to research and document the history of LGBT people in this history.Queer theory has highlighted heterosexuality / no heterosexuality axis. As Judith Butler pointed out, these pairs have complex relationships with each other: "sexual difference obscures or denies the asymmetry of the hetero / homo division. And that dynamic is, of course, the power to operate in reverse, so that the exclusive emphasis on the hetero / homo division serves to obscure the asymmetry of sexual difference? (2004: 94). In ?Biopolitics of gender?, the spanish feminist philosopher Beatriz Preciado takes a negative view of the criticism of the concept proposed by John Money. For her, this vision "is the instrument of rationalization of life in which the body is merely a parameter. Gender is primarily a concept necessary for the emergence and development of a set of technical standards / transformation of life ?. She also re-defines the concept of gender performance as: ?Gender is not just a performative effect, is primarily a prosthetic incorporation process.?, designing a scenographic and topographical consideration of the construction of sex (Butler) and taking Lauretis concept of "gender technology" as a complex circuit bodies, technical and signs include not only the performing techniques but also techniques biotech, film, cyber, etc.In Latin America, more than a decade ago, the discussion on the categories of gender, sexuality and race is part of recent de(s)colonial feminism (Lugones, Segato, Hernández, Lima Costa, community feminism of ?Mujeres Creando? in Bolivia; Giuseppe Campuzano in Perú and, the performance language of Pedro Lemembel in Chile).