Regarding body and gender:
Butler, Judith. “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions” and “Conclusion: From Parody to Politics” Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1999. 163-190.
The body has been accepted as prima facie (taken for granted, at face value) without problematizing it as a construction itself. The body is a sexed body, charged with meaning, receiver of the inscriptions of culture (values, ideologies, taboos). In this sense, the body is not just material, but the multiple significations it acquires. Acts, gestures and desire produce an effect of internal core, but they are produced in the surface of the body through signifying absences. This is the body as performative, where it does not have an essence apart from the acts that constitute its reality . Gender is then a collective act as it reenacts and re-experiences a set of meanings already socially established, thus gender is a social temporality and a norm that can never be truly internalized. A true gender identity would only be a regulatory fiction (genders cannot be true or false, real or apparent).Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discoures” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation & Postcolonial Perspectives.
Mohanty cautions about the assumption of a universal patriarchal framework. Women have been constituted as a group with same interests, desires, without talking into account class, ethnicity… This implies a notion of gender, sexual difference and patriarchy that can be universally applied. When patriarchy is also made universal, a homogenous notion of the oppression of women as a group is assumed which produces the average third world woman (leads a truncated life: sexually constrained, poor, ignorant and uneducated) which in turn contrasts to the western women (sexually free, educated, modern). The homogenizing of the experiences of different groups of women erases the possibility of marginal and resistant modes and experiences.
