It is, very simply, an account of how three primitive societies have grouped their social attitudes towards temperament about the very obvious facts of sex-difference. In comparing the way in which they have dramatized sex-difference, it is possible to gain a greater insight into what elements are social constructs, originally irrelevant to the biological facts of sex-gender.
This structure leans on the alibi of biological organs the reduction of sex as difference to the difference of the sexual organs ; and, above all, it is pegged to the grandiose cultural models whose function it is to separate the sexes in order to establish the absolute privilege of one over the other. Is the construction of the category of women as a coherent and stable subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations?
The first of a facing pair of prefatory pages to the Psalms in a book made for King Louis X "Le Hutin" places his first wife's patron saint, Margaret, on the dexter side of two female saints, with her family shield of Burgundy and allianced houses in the adjacent margins fig. Saint Catherine, the philosopher saint, stands next, magisterially crowned and with a book, her sword piercing the head of a vanquished king lying at her feet.
She resonates with the Old Testament Judith, who saved Judea from an invading army by beheading its general, Holofernes. Birthing and wisdom are seen to empower women so that they overcome dragons and tyrants. Men participate only as the heathen enemy, though the heraldry invokes them as feudal lords and procreators.
Did the sight of these women appropriating "male" power serve to empower women in the early fourteenth century? Or did they warn of the dangers of powerful women Catherine as castrating female , serving to fuel gynephobia? The facing recto page refers to Louis le Hutin through stationary representations of his patron saint, Louis IX, and St.
