Lasalle University

Gender and subjectivity in the new order

What is the role of women in patriarchal societies in terms of power? Just a role of
submissive figures? Well, one would say that it depends on the historical moment
about which we talk. Anyway, there are some characters that represent
paradoxically a limit situation between the norms and the challenges inherent to
every epoch. Were talking about the queen Elizabeth and the film based on her life
Elizabeth, the Golden Age.
However, the purpose of this paper is not to do a critic about films, but trying to
contextualize how a new theoretical field called Feminist Post-Structuralist
Discourse Analysis (FPDA) is enriching the ways to interpret or analyze human
condition nowadays based on notions as gender and language study. The first
idea to keep in mind is that after Second World War something definitely changed
in the spectrum of culture. We talk about the fall of the great metanarratives
which promised a progressive realization at all levels for human beings. The reason
for that phenomenon lies in the certainty regarding human reason as something
that could also destroy the whole order of civilization. Lets say it was the lesson we
had to learn from the great violent conflagrations.
On the other hand, lets emphasize that FPDA is often compared with two great
fields: Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Conversation Analysis (CA), and
perhaps from that sources it has taken its tendency to consider how discourses
emerge in a given society and how language expresses relations in terms of power
and knowledge. However, what is different and characteristic of FPDA is that it
offers, according to Judith Baxter, a resistant value in challenging fashionable or
entrenched approaches, which tend to transform themselves into grand
narratives grounding truth and meaning in the presumption of a universal
subject and a predetermined goal of emancipation.
One important notion that has reached a great importance in this kind of studies is
that one of subjectivity. In other words, how individuals reach their own image and
place in the world as human beings through discursive constructions. In the
example of the film here proposed we can observe how this queen, Elizabeth,
assumes the challenge of leading the destiny of England. And she does it in the
middle of uncertain and really hard circumstances for her country. Well, until some
extent we could emphasize the way how people reach their own value as
individuals. But at the same time discourses about gender act as catalysts with
respect to the way these agents behave. But what is important here is how people
have to assume a role already determined by gender discourse or, by the contrary,
assume a position of resistance also prescribed in the hidden structures of the
system. What makes the difference is the discourse to which we ascribe, even if we
are not conscious about it.
Nothing in the universe even in the political, gender or cultural field escapes to
discourse. But discourses are continuously reshaped by individuals and events. In
fact, FPDA adopts an anti-materialist stance in its view that social realities are
always discursively produced. And in this point of discussion we could ask why is
given such a great emphasis to feminist perspectives, why it is so relevant in the
contemporaneous analysis of culture. I do not have a absolute response to that
question, but its true that the classical notion of patriarch society are evolving to
an scheme where is really difficult to keep assuming the traditional roles prescribed
in terms of sex, family, succeed, etc. And maybe thats why we perceive what we call
a crisis about the way people conceive their role and place in modern societies.