Gender is power in situated practices: Notes on entanglements

Abstract

These notes offer some speculations on the impacts of gender and feminist theory on activisms and politics, including public policies. Speculation seems to be almost inappropriate in this era of evidence-based knowledge, a new name for positivism. Since we are dealing with theoretical and political subjects, our inquiry here will take the shape of speculation on the limits of gender and sex in situated practices and knowledges. How is it possible to consider gender and not recognize in the analysis the shapes that race has given to gender? Or the materiality that class relations impose on considering gender? But also how can we understand race without using gender as a possible locus of intersected racialization? Or class, for that matter? Here, I am considering ideas on gender theories and how they impact upon activism and social policies, revealing the pitfalls and traps of liberal state feminism. The first section maps and signals some proposals focusing on the idea that gender is constituted as materiality and not as a social construction. Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993) theory of gender performativity is employed to show how matter and signification are used in this process of creating gendered subjects, who perform, repeat and thus generate the effects of gender that are naturalized as sex