The Body Essay -- Sexuality

The social and cultural conditions in which we live in today continue to perpetuate and maintain the break culture that pervades our lives, curiously for the lives of individual women. As a feminist thinker, Ann Cahill whole kit to change this by challenging current definitions of round as assault, and addressing questions of why rape exists in the first place, and how we can begin the prevention process. In Cahills book, Rethinking profane, she approaches the subject of rape by analyzing the works of contemporary feminist theorists akin Judith Butler, who perceive the female body as a potential locate of resistance against gender-based squelchion and a larger system of sexual mastery (Cahill 32). Although each is addressing very different issues in feminist theory, Cahill does draw upon just about of Butlers ideas about the imitation and performance of gender in Butlers essay Imitation and Gender Insubordination. Cahill does this in collection to further articulate her critique of the body and the social occasion it plays in the phenomenon of rape as an embodied experience of women at the level of the individual (Cahill 109). at that place are certain concepts besides the performance of gender that both Authors pip on including the body, heterosexual norms as inhibitions to attaining liberation, the relationship between sexual activity and gender, and the problematic nature of social constructs. By comparing and contrasting the works of Cahill and Butler, this paper will explore the importance and complexities of the body, the pivotal role it plays in Cahills critique of the phenomenon of rape, and how Butlers critique of attack out of the closet values the imprint of gender performativity more than the notion ofthe body itself.Before de... ... feminine body so we internalize that exemplification and subject ourselves to the intrusive, expensive, and high maintenance practices in order to be rendered glorious (Cahill 155).There are a nu mber of factors that play into the perpetuation of rape culture, the hierarchy of gender, and gender performativity. The iodine thing they all have in common that is essential to understanding how men have been able to oppress us for so long and continue to oppress us. The body is the one thing that can maintain our inferiority and powerlessness, but it can too be the one thing that can free us from the alike system of oppression. Works CitedButler, Judith. Imitation and Gender Insubordination. The Second Wave A Reader in Feminist Theory. Ed. Linda Nicholson. New York Routledge, 1997. 300-15. Print.Cahill, Ann J. Rethinking Rape. Ithaca Cornell UP, 2001. Print.