 Lacan: entry into the Symbolic Order, the structure of language, is different for boys and girls.  Gender then, determines subject position.  Examines how gender is socially constructed, rather than natural, innate, or essential; they also see gender as a product of or an illusion, created by the same structures of language that create the illusion of the sexual self.

 all societies mark gender distinctions in some way, though of course all societies make those marking differently.  Feminists since the Middle Ages have been asking whether gender is  biological or cultural.  Innate, natural, God-given  Socially constructed

 Freud suggested that genetics, biology, morphology, physiology, and brain chemistry determine social roles for men and women.

 Gender is a set of signifiers to work to divide social practices and relations into the binary oppositions of male/female and masculine/feminine.  Eg. High heals as a signifier.

 The political dimension consists, at the very least, of an awareness of the power imbalances enforced and upheld by the inequalities in the binary oppositions which structure how we think about and act in our world.

 Masculine imagery has completely dominated Western thinking about authors and texts. Gilbert and Gubar ask ‘Is the pen a metaphorical [male genitalia]?’  Their exhaustive documentation on how men have dominated Western literary history since the Middle Ages.

 They argue that the predominance of this metaphor relies on the idea that women’s bodies give birth to babies, which are mortal and limited, and men’s bodies ‘give birth’ to immortal things, like books and art.

 Gilbert and Gubar examine how women constructed their practices of writing, both metaphorically and literally.  Did they use milk, or blood, instead of ink, and write on bark or cloth instead of paper? In other words, what was made invisible by patriarchal tradition.

 This branch of theory asks questions about how woman writers were discouraged or prevented from publishing their writings, or writing at all; it seeks to explain why there are so few women writers in the Western canon of literature in English. Finding answers to these questions sparked a vitally important historical search for ‘forgotten’ women writers, and prompted feminist literary critics to challenge the aesthetic and political standards on which the Western canon was based.

 Poststructuralist feminist theory isn’t about women.  it’s about ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as subject positions within the structure of language  part of a binary opposition, ‘man/woman,’ in which ‘man’ is the favoured term  other binaries reinforce and maintain it, including masculine/feminine, good/evil, light/dark, positive/negative, culture/nature

 Poststructuralist feminist theory investigates how, and with what consequences, ‘woman’ is constructed  subjects who are further away from the controlling influence of the centre have more play  a discourse outside of the male centre

 Lacan suggests that the center of Symbolic Order is the patriarchal system of language.  Is it possible, Hélène Cixous asks, for a woman to write or speak at all?  Does the woman who writes or speaks, do so from a masculine position?

This goes out to all the women getting it in, you’re on your grind/To other men that respect what I do, please accept my shine/Boy you know you love it how we’re smart enough to make these millions/Strong enough to bear the children, then get back to business