The (Phallic) Father of Femininity

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at how, in his essay ?Femininity,? the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, defines the early intellectual and emotional socialization of girls as a state of growing hostility towards the mother. It looks at how this initially hostile view of feminine consciousness and subconsciousness at the founding of psychoanalysis assumes that many feminist theorists would entirely disdain Freudian conceptualizations of the self, development, and the human psyche altogether, and how, indeed, many have. It also shows how other feminist theorists have attempted to reformulate Freud in a more creative and fertile fashion in terms of female subjectivity.

From the Paper:

"For instance, Judith Butler has suggested that rather than a given, gender is a ?performance,? in other words, an assumed body of characters, and a style of being that makes use of such symbolic tropes as the phallus, rather than something inherent to the self that transcends culture, as is suggested by Freud's essay on ?Femininity.? (Butler 121) Butler goes even father than creating a distinction between sex and gender, that is between social notions of female and male behavior and physical female and male bodies, and suggests that even the notion of two sexes is itself a linguistic and cultural construction and myth. To undercut the emphasis on anatomic representation in Freud, Butler stresses that gender and notions of femininity and masculinity can be performed with outer and totemic representations, representations and signs that can be assumed both by bodies traditionally gendered as male or female, or even bodies that are denied by the hegemonic text of our culture, such as hermaphrodites, that avoid gender distinction altogether."

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