Précis 10. Gender as Seriality: A Précis. Literature & Language Essay

Running head: GENDER AS SERIALITY1
Gender as Seriality: A Précis
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GENDER AS SERIALITY

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Gender as Seriality: A Précis
In “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective,” Young (1994) proposes a different alternative approach to how “woman” – both a feminist, gendered, politicized designation and an identity-informed label potentially liable to exclusionary limitations – can be reconceptualized. By adopting Sartre's concept of “series,” a concept grounded in arguments about class and power structures and is meant to refer to individuals unified passively by a given practico-inert milieu (i.e., material structures which both enable and restrict actions of such loosely unified individuals), Young aims to resolve a dilemma Feminist Theory has increasingly faced. That is, by framing “woman” as a gendered (and politicized) conceptualization of struggles of “women” against male dominance, certain groups of “women” might be excluded from a privileged-, white-, middle-class-developed Feminist Theory. The proposition of “series” as opposed to “group” (i.e., consciously and actively involved individuals belonging to action-oriented groupings), is used, consequently, as a more appropriate, less restrictive and iden...