The 0/o ther a postmodern birth

• Main Author: Perez, Melanie H.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 1998
• Subjects: Sex differences; Feminism; Homosexuality; Male; Lesbianism; Men > Sexual behavior; Gay men; Gender identity disorders; Identity (Psychology)
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/1625
• Institution: De La Salle University

The O/other: A Postmodern Birth is a study that locates a connecting nerve between modernity and postmodernity through the marginal subject position of an other along the strands of gender, sexuality, and race. It offers a unique interpretation of Modernity as an obsessive quest for Order, for constancy and certainty, for precise and unambiguous definitional categories and boundaries, thereby resulting in a hierarchised worldview of existence, an archetypal structure of dichotomous opposition where an inherent asymmetrical axial power subsists. Here, the Other is born, who is absolutely pure negativity against the Master Center of pure positivity. Woman, the Homosexual, and the Native/Savage become the discredited Others of Man, the Heterosexual, and the Civilized White Savior. They are the bastard children of Modernity, the unwanted shadow-twins of its legitimate children located at the Center. However, in contrast to many authors who date Modernity from the Enlightenment period, this thesis shows that it can be dated way back to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, in Classical Athens, where many of the natural sciences and the polis or a state actually begun. And to prove just how real and deeply imbedded this modernist quest for Order is, this thesis depicts the Nazi genocide project as the climax of such obsession where millions of Others were annihilated to fill the world with only the true superior race . This thesis then traces two new voices that have survived and remain up to now almost invisible, those of the lesbians and the prostitutes, two sexual deviants of the category Woman , the postmodern O/others or the Others further othered within the counter-hegemonic discourse and movement. These voices are shown to be strongly postmodern since their multivocality and multifarious positionality ineluctably dissolves any dichotomously opposed identity and peripheral location into notorious ambivalence and indeterminacy, thereby marking existence as self-consciously contingent and reflexive. They remind us of the power of the powerless to redefine themselves, their freedom to reconstitute and reinvent their identities, to reclaim their integrity and so to no longer be predeterminedly defined and categorized by either those claimed to be their oppressors or those who self-proclaim to be their saviors.