gender and womens stduies umich

Spectacular Display & Class

From the 14th century to the mid-18th century in Western Europe, ornate dress was a class prerogative and a visible expression of aristocratic power. Masculinity was performed publicly, while femininity was more confined. Religious and political power intersected with class; northern Protestant elites often preferred subtler displays than southern Catholic opulence.

Display culture

A culture where outward displays of honor, magnificence, and wealth are vital to social prestige and identity.

Louis XIV and fashion

Louis XIV used fashion to display France's growing power. Fashion's center shifted from Madrid to Paris; he mandated new textiles twice yearly, and distinctive shoes and court dress formed a 'vestimentary package' that displayed power and helped suppress nobles at Versailles.

Sumptuary Laws

Laws dictating proper clothing, décor, and decorum according to class, rank, status, or profession, intended to prevent people from disguising their supposedly fixed status. They restricted fabrics, colors, accessories, jewelry, garment details, and foreign fashion; penalties ranged from fines to death in rare cases.

Vestimentary Package

The idea that a person has no visual status apart from dress and adornment: what others see is at least partly a 'vestimentary package' (Silverman, p. 145).

Inheritance Laws and Masculine Honor (Old Regime France)

Noble status was inherited through ties to nobility, the King, and God, understood as natural honor in blood ties. Primogeniture generally gave the eldest son land and wealth; controlling wealth and lineage was essential.

Primogeniture

A system of inheritance in which the eldest son inherits the family's land and liquid assets; it helped preserve nobles' social, political, and economic power.

Bourgeois Masculine Honor

With industrialization, urbanization, and capitalism, honor shifted from inherited rank toward the individual, who had to prove status through physical sex, manly character, normative behavior, and dress. Honor required constant reaffirmation and could be challenged; it was linked to the male body, sexual hygiene, and public sociability such as clothes, clubs, and sports.

Great Male Renunciation (Flügel)

From the mid-18th century to the present, men increasingly renounced lavish, ornamental dress. Industrial work could signal wealth and importance, so sober, often black clothing became the masculine norm; conspicuous consumption shifted onto women, while the masculine body disavowed exhibitionism as bodily pleasure.

Great Male Disavowal (Silverman)

The redirection of narcissistic and exhibitionist desires once expressed through sumptuous clothing into other routes: (1) sublimation into professional showing-off (musculature or wealth), (2) scopophilia—projecting desire onto another, and (3) identifying with woman as spectacle, risking fetishization or over-identification.

Sublimation

Redirecting exhibitionist or narcissistic desires into socially acceptable displays, such as professional achievement, musculature, or wealth.

Scopophilia

Pleasure associated with looking; in the notes' account of the Great Male Disavowal, desire is projected onto an 'other.'

Gaze as 'unlocalizable' / 'inside out structure' (Lacan and Silverman)

The subject can know itself only from the vantage point of the 'other'; no subject can see itself as fully whole or complete. The determining gaze is outside, and is an effect of the Symbolic order (ideology), not simply a function of masculinity.

Judith Butler's Gender Performativity (1988)

Gender is not a stable inner identity or innate essence. It is constituted over time through stylized repetition of acts and bodily gestures, movements, and enactments, creating the illusion of an abiding gendered self. Social sanctions and taboos compel this performance, but different or subversive repetitions can make transformation possible.

Gender performativity

The repeated, stylized acts and bodily practices through which gender is produced and comes to appear like a stable identity; it is not simply a performance freely chosen by an already-formed self.

Compulsory heterosexuality (Butler notes)

A system reproduced and concealed by cultivating bodies into discrete sexes with supposedly 'natural' appearances and heterosexual dispositions.

Julia Serano's Intrinsic Inclination Model of Sex/Gender

Sex, gender expression, and sexual orientation are separate inclinations that vary independently. They are intrinsic (also called subconscious sex), not conscious choices or merely social constructions. The notes stress this is not biological reductionism: each inclination results from complex genetic, hormonal, environmental, cultural, and psychological factors.

Subconscious sex

Another name used in the notes for the intrinsic inclination model's account of an individual's deeply rooted sense of sex/gender.

Essentialism / Biological Reductionism

The view that gender is an essential characteristic of biological sex, with distinct innate qualities for women and men. It treats men and women as the only two genders, intrinsically linked to male/female sex, and gender as immutable across histories and cultures.

Drag as Subculture

Drag as a site of protest, carnival, and family: a counterhegemonic subculture challenging heteronormativity. It can form an oppositional counterpublic, express marginalization, and resist assimilation, while facing pressure to become palatable to mainstream audiences.

Counterpublic

An oppositional public or community formed outside dominant cultural norms; drag subculture can function as a counterpublic.

LGBTQ+ Tropes in Mainstream Media

Recurring plots or roles for LGBTQ+ people in TV and film. The notes list: Bad Old Days; Gay Best Friend; 'Confused' Gay character; gay/straight friendship-or-lovers confusion; Tragic Gay character; straight men cross-dressing; exotic foreigner is gay or gay man is especially 'camp'; psychotic lesbian; pedophiliac gay man; lesbian kiss for ratings/controversy; gay men who never kiss/have sex; and gay-and-parents coming-out story.

Bad Old Days trope

A narrative that lets contemporary viewers feel righteous because they supposedly solved past failures, portraying earlier decades as unenlightened compared with today.

Gay Best Friend trope

An out gay character who serves as a helper to the main character and facilitates the more prominent character's narrative.

Tragic Gay character trope

A recurring media trope in which a gay character must die by the end of the story.

Misogynoir

A particular form of hatred directed at Black women in U.S. visual and popular culture, involving the intersection of sexism, racism, and heteronormativity. It often relies on caricature archetypes such as Sapphire, Jezebel, and Mammy rather than representing Black women as full subjects.

Sapphire, Jezebel, and Mammy

Caricature archetypes of Black women in American popular culture identified in the notes as examples of tropes that can reproduce misogynoir.

Heteronormativity

The alignment of biological sex, sexuality, gender identity, and gender roles; the notes associate it with compulsory heterosexuality.

Compulsory Heterosexuality (Adrienne Rich, 1980)

A system of oppression denying sexual self-determination by presenting heterosexuality as the only acceptable model for sexual and romantic relationships. It is reinforced by political, religious, economic, legal, medical, familial, and educational institutions that maintain the privilege of man/woman pairings.

Adrienne Rich, 'Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence' (1980)

The work named in the notes in connection with compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence.