The word is now redundant and should be replaced with ‘sex’. I mean the non-sexy kind of sex, biological sex, the division of species into reproductive classes. In humans that physical fact has deep social effects. The latter are called gender. Recently, gender has come to take on another meaning, that of a self-personal identity that may be different from one’s birth sex. It is argued that gender ought to supersede sex in order for people to live peaceful , truthful and authentic life. Not everyone has noticed that this is a very different concept, And it may be in opposition to some of the analysis coming from the first understanding of gender. I argue that this opposition is real and not artificial. I argue that replacing sex with gender means we lose understanding of our world and the reality and the bodies that we inhabit. Being an academic is a moral mission. You have a duty to give people tools to understand the world. Even when it really annoys them.
The top line is that we confuse is with am. The conversation around sex and gender has changed a lot. It started out with feminists pointing to how societies slip between observations of biology to claims of immutable cultural destiny, to the detriment of women and girls. It has evolved into something else: denying that biological sex has this special ability to influence some facts about society and social organisation, or has any independent existence that has social consequences. Power is physical. I am a man. That means I have (or had) on average greater physical strength than women. Am. I am these things … it doesn’t remain physical. Being a member of the male sex class gives me greater social power. Is. It is the case … It also means greater risk of early, sometimes violent, death.
It is not as if there is nothing to learn. There is plenty of insight from that way of thinking. Developing Goffman’s ideas on the performance of everyday life it is fair enough to think of heterosexuality as a performances/set of practices, but it is not just that. One would need to know where it comes from in the first place. How can sexuality or gender exist without a naturalistic understanding of sex and sexuality coming into play at some point? To compare, when we talk about capitalism we examine it as a historical set of economic and social relations. We can understand a lot about labour relations by reference to the labour theory of value, and this gives us a good handle on understanding why women might be more exploited in the workforce than men are. But with Butler, heterosexuality just seems to snap into existence. It’s a set of practices, performances, a total system with nothing outside of it. That lacks any interest in what is going on, what heterosexual practices are.
There’s a general weakness in the discussion which says ‘Women are oppressed within the hetersoexual hegemony … expect sometimes they aren’t. Women are pushed into compulsory heterosexual, expect sometimes they don’t.’ There’s always this voluntarist expection which doesn’t say much. There’s a difference between heterosexuality meaning sexual relations between men and women, or something more precise e.g monogamous, stable dyadic partnerships. There are implications there for theory as for example, capitalism as it is currently configured might put an emphasis on pleasure and the self and so could easily find a way of promoting polymorphous sexualities or gender fluidity as desirable and validated, so, good for capitalism. This sets up a challenge for you to explore why most don’t take any of these alternative paths and don’t consider them viable for some reason. that could allow you to address some of the absences in the literature.
In gender theory, sex becomes a mash up of attitudes, performances, identities, varied elements of material reality and all the rest. That would not matter if sex really was just a mash up of these elements, but it is not. The argument tends to say it is not reducible to one biological element, but nothing is really. Not reducible does not mean it is a social construct. Biological sex is an emergent property, just as e.g. time is. Emergent constructs are not social constructs. It loses any coherent grounding. It loses any understanding of natural hierarchy. Some things come before other things. It throws out any analysis deriving from biological difference and the fact that women are the class responsible for bearing children. It makes it impossible to talk about that and the consequences of that fact in a systematic way, especially when it comes to sexual violence. The whole issue is reduced to competing cultural claims, as if male power just happened to be better at getting its claims of female subordination accepted. Worse: that pushes the blame onto women for failing to get their claims of cultural equality accepted.
Saying that an entity like biological sex is just a grab bag of characteristics that happen to be arranged in that way because humans decided it would be so denies the existence of entities that are powerful independent of how we construct them. Which is what the disagreement boils down to. The reason I find it dangerous is that is used to imply that certain features of life just happen. But some features of life are essentialist. For example: we are told that sex work is work, and that the only features that make it difficult are stigma, exploitation and violence. Get rid of these and sex work is just work. But sex work is inherently vulnerable to these problems. It is inherently essentialist because of biological sex. Mainly it is young women, and a smaller number of young men, used by often older and always more powerful men. It is useless to pretend that it could be just like being a plumber. The argument itself relies on something essentialist: that sex work is both sex and also not really sex at the same time.
We lose a lot if we do not recognise that. If we say sex is a social construct we lose any sense of it as a historically situated entity. We lose the ability to understand how these different entities interact with each other – so we lose the ability to understand how other constructs have their power. Engels hypothesised that the family, private property and state power were fundamentally intertwined. If that is negelected we just get some flannel about discursive power.
There are a few different objects stuck in with social constructionism that aren’t quite the same. One is blank slatism, which is not social constructionism. Blank slatism does imply a strong bio/social distinction, but by doing that is not social constructionism. Neuroscience might challenge blank slate ideas but not necessarily social constructionist ones. Another problem with social constructionism is that it is never clear what it is defining itself against. Is it the claim that most human characteristics are grounded in biology? Is it that there is a natural order to things? Sociology once defined itself in terms of modernity and the constant flux that went with it, in opposition to the traditional god given hierarchies of the 3 estates. Biology seems to be picked as the opposition because it is there. Another trouble I have with gender is apparent in a term like gender based violence. It is not very clear what it is about. Violence by men against women and children, especially girl children and especially sexual violence is an identifiable phenomena. It also has a very clear direction of cause, and responsibility. We know primarily who is responsible and who is not.
