ABSTRACT
In his book A Lover's Discourse, a useful compendium of received ideas, Roland Barthes associates man with presence and woman with absence: 'Woman is faithful (she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises). It is Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction ... in any man who utters the other's absence something feminine is declared' (1978, 14). Here it would be possible to assemble a collection of passages from literary and philosophical texts in order to show what the scholars of gender studies mean by gender constructions. Barthes's text represents a male subject whose symbolic position and identity within a cultural order is defined by the female as the determining 'other'. The difference between masculine and feminine is thus grounded on ideology and on semiotics rather than on biology. Concepts of gender refer to relationships based on power and meaning which, although they may include the physical body, are not directly determined by sex. Accordingly, masculinity and femininity and their bodily representations can be regarded as results of historical processes, as psychological and social constructs. In gender studies, scholars seek to revise the discourses of gender by deconstructing texts centred on male or female ideals and stereotypes as represented by male or female bodies, and by analysing gendered bodies as culturally specific and constantly shifting forms of discourse.
