ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 introduces the concept of gender, explicating its semantic richness and probing its epistemological diversity existing in feminist scholarship. I genealogically account for its adherence to the intellectual tradition of representation, and demonstrate its replication of the logical mechanisms, inherent in representation, that preclude effective social critique. Reverting to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical toolbox, I analyze gender in terms of mimetic and subjective representations, all the while exposing representational limits of gender and gender-fueled criticism. Sexual difference and its socio-cultural image emerge as inextricably likened to the representational order, thus symbolic and material domination of men in the patriarchal system.
