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Document Details : Title: Die ekwivalente waardering van seksuele spesifisiteite Subtitle: Perkament vir die inskripsie van 'n geslagsgeregtigheid wat nog moet kom Author(s): DU TOIT, Louise Journal: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie Volume: 77 Issue: 1 Date: 2015 Pages: 27-54 DOI: 10.2143/TVF.77.1.3078131 Abstract : In this article, the author argues that the road to gender justice must proceed through a renewed appreciation of the specifics of sexed embodiment. The problem is that there is no simple or pre-discursive material body to (re-)turn to. The lived, sexed body-subject confronts us with an infinite ethico-hermeneutical task, rather than a set of neatly contained and stable scientific facts. Drawing on insights from the feminist reception of the landmark 2001 ruling of the Hague ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), this article describes three key aspects of the critical-creative task of equally valuing sexual specificities: (i) we need to expose the idealised and phantasmagoric male body of the dominant western symbolic order, (ii) equally value female sexed embodiment and (iii) equivalently value male sexed embodiment in an on-going dialectical movement or hermeneutic spiral. In brief, we must dismantle deeply ingrained and sedimented sexual symbols and work to radically reconfigure possible meanings of sexed embodiment. Not only is the problem of the use of rape as a weapon of war at stake here, but also the symbolic encoding of sexual specificities which arguably underlies the violence of both rape and war and their employment as useful and meaningful cultural strategies. |
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