Cultural Constructs and Discourse(s). (Non)being

In the Monday lecture, Jeremy confidently gave two positive answers to the questions I asked: “Is Woman a cultural construct?”; “Is Man a cultural construct?”. Yes… I completely agree! In fact, I realized shortly after posing these questions that they are, in a way, tautological: the concept of “gender” has reconfigured the notions of “Woman”-“Man” (or, more specifically, female-male) to mean precisely cultural constructs that stand in a – rather ambiguous – relation of correspondence to “sex”. However, Jeremy’s answers made me acknowledge an already known (to me) fact as well as become aware of another issue: the vast majority of the texts we have dealt with in this course lately are concerned with denouncing/deconstructing “Woman” as a cultural construct. But what about “Man”? Why is the concept of “Man” as cultural construct not addressed or, at most, addressed only by implication?

In my view, the feminists’ (which is, I know, a very broad category) centering of their discourses on the denunciation/deconstruction of “Woman” as cultural construct created by men at the expense of that of “Man” as a cultural construct is not a very inspired choice. That is because an approach of this kind undermines women’s identity (however culturally constructed that might be) – and it does so at once (“in one go”). The result is disempowerment, for a “subject” without identity is, I believe, a non-subject incapable of engaging in action of any type (and, especially, political). Instead of a gradual deconstruction of the “Woman” cultural category accompanied by a simultaneous rebuilding of the category from a feminist perspective, feminist discourse(s) destroy the patriarchal “Woman” cultural construct, leaving the “Man” construct virtually intact.

In her essay The Desire to Desire, Mary Ann Doane discusses a lack of female autonomous symbolic representation – particularly regarding female spectatorship – as characteristic of the pre-deconstruction (feminist) age. In the light of the points made above, I would argue, however, that the feminist denunciatory/deconstructing discourses of the past decades have by no means solved the problem, but converted the mentioned lack into incapacity. The “liberated” (non-)subjects cannot produce the autonomous symbolic representation that Doane hopes for either.

My conclusion: feminist approaches might have “unintended” consequences detrimental to the very goals of the feminist discourse(s).