Page 165 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Links Cultural studies, episteme, epistemology, semiotics, truth

Patriarchy The idea of patriarchy refers to a social order in which there is recurrent and
142 systematic domination of men over subordinated women across a wide range of
social institutions and practices. The term, which is connected to feminist theory
and gained currency during the second wave of the women’s movement dating
from the 1960s, clearly carries the connotations of the male-headed family, mastery
and superiority. As such, the concept of patriarchy asserts that sex is a central
organizing principle of social life where gender relations are thoroughly saturated
with power.
Many feminists have argued that contemporary sexed subjectivities are not
universals but rather the consequence of the relations between men and women
that are formed in the context of patriarchal family arrangements which, if
challenged, could be changed. From a psychoanalytic point of view, patriarchy
provides the context in which through identification with the father and symbolic
Phallus as the domain of social status, power and independence boys take on a form
of externally oriented masculinity achieved at the price of emotional dependence
on women. In contrast, while girls acquire a greater surety with the
communicative skills of intimacy through introjection of, and identification with,
aspects of their mothers’ own narratives, they have greater difficulty with externally
oriented autonomy.
A criticism of the concept of patriarchy is its treatment of the category of woman
as an undifferentiated one. That is, all women are taken to share something
fundamental in common in contrast to all men. Thus it can be argued that the
concept obscures the differences between individual women and their
particularities in favour of an all-embracing universal form of oppression. Not only
do all women appear to be oppressed in the same way but also there is a tendency
to represent them as helpless and powerless. This stress on difference is shared by
feminists influenced by poststructuralism and postmodernism whose anti-
essentialist stance suggests that femininity and masculinity are not essential
universal categories of either biology or culture but discursive constructions.
Links Anti-essentialism, feminism, gender, identification, psychoanalysis, subjectivity,
women’s movement

Performativity A ‘performative’ is a linguistic statement that puts into effect (brings
into being) the relation that it names, for example, within a marriage ceremony ‘I
pronounce you . . .’ is a performative statement. Similarly, performativity is a
discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names through citation and
reiteration of the norms or conventions of the ‘law’. Thus, the discursive production
of identities through repetition and recitation of regulated ways of speaking about
identity categories (for example, masculinity).
Performativity is not a singular act but rather is always a citation and reiteration
of a set of existent norms and conventions. For example, judges in criminal and
civil law do not originate the law or its authority but cite the conventions of the law