When gender found its place deep inside the self
Susan Matthews at the Times Higher on Sally Hines’s Is Gender Fluid?: A Primer for the 21st Century:
Hines is interested in two different questions. Can an individual change their gender identity? And is the categorisation of biological sex really fluid?
Her key idea (drawn from Thomas Laqueur) is that binary sex difference is a cultural construction, cemented in the Enlightenment to underpin gender differences. From Anne Fausto-Sterling, Hines takes the claim that the existence of intersex people undermines the concept of binary sex differences. Cordelia Fine’s work allows her to argue that most claims for binary sex differences in the brain derive from cultural bias. What’s new is not the idea of gender fluidity but the claim that biological sex is a spectrum.
Most 20th-century feminists thought of gender as a social construction that lay outside the self, a kind of false consciousness that the individual could reject. Everything changed when gender found its place deep inside the self as, in Hines’ words, the “core part of who people know themselves to be”.
So is the anti-feminism plain enough yet? If gender finds its place deep inside the self then why bother with feminism at all? Why not just let everyone choose to be either dominant or subordinate and let it go at that?
In the new model, gender paradoxically becomes less fluid. Transgender is “an umbrella term describing people whose innate gender identity or gender expression is different to the sex they were assigned at birth”. Borrowing the language of intersex, sex is “assigned” whereas gender is “innate”.
Sex is mere superstructure, mere dross, while gender is the soul.
Every time I hear this—the “sex binary” is a product of Enlightenment-era Europe—I figure I must be misunderstanding something. Is there some deeper idea here? Because on the surface it seems so dumb. People in other parts of the world—in all parts of the world—haven’t always classified people as male or female? And assigned all kinds of significance to that classification?
What am I missing?
I keep wondering the same thing. I haven’t read Laquer, but going by this
I’m guessing that it’s something to do with hardening or reifying or whatever you want to call it “binary sex difference” into the silly pink/blue social rules we can’t seem to get rid of to this day.
It’s still not believable though, even in that form. If it were, how could literary misogyny have been a thing? But it was a thing.
So, yeah. I don’t know what we’re missing but I suspect whatever it is is bullshit.
Little known linguistic fact: before the Enlightenment, no language had a word for “woman” or “man”. In the rare occasion when it was necessary, a person might be referred to as a “uterus bearer” or “penis haver”, but for the most part they were called “hey you” or “that one”.
I just finished a book about gender in antiquity where the author reviews these ideas. The book itself is too wishy washy to be of use, but one thing that was clear to me was how much they stretch the meaning of words beyond the breaking point to conclude that the ancients (in this case, mostly classic era Greeks and Romans) had no concept of gender.
Totally overlooking the fact that women had identified roles, and men had identified roles, they managed to claim that gender was not a thing, because men sometimes filled “feminine” roles and women sometimes filled “masculine” roles, so it wasn’t like anything gender (or sex – these two terms continued to shift in meaning) related, it was just “masculine” and “feminine” identification. Interestingly, the author was able to give examples of men in that period that appeared to embody that, but had to go to fiction (myth) to find any women to discuss at all.
So, yes, they do argue that…
She was constantly quoting Foucault. He showed up in one of Opehlia’s recent posts, here: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2019/the-reframing-of-child-sexual-abuse-is-a-dominant-idea-within-queer-theory/
Sure, but . . . When those ancient Greeks and Romans saw a man fulfilling a “feminine” role, can’t we assume that they noticed it? “Look at that Demetrios, always baking bread and holding his hand the way women commonly do.” Maybe they didn’t care. (I have no idea.) Maybe they didn’t police these things the way we do now. (No clue.) But they had assumptions and expectations about the kinds of things men do and the kinds of things women do, didn’t they? If they had assumptions and expectations like that, they had ideas about which kinds of people to apply those assumptions and expectations to.
I feel like I’m going crazy.
Ben, it was assumed in this book that they did notice it, but at the same time, that it just meant that Demetrios fulfilled that role in society. There was no real evidence to support their contention that gender was merely about what role you fulfilled, and that you could slide around the scale (other than some goofball reports, apparently taken seriously, about women turning into men, with beards and all, if they were absent from their husband for too long – no similar stories were reported about men turning into women if denied access to their wife, I presume because of the fact that they could have sex with prostitutes or each other).
There was no indication of women filling similar men’s roles in society, and men who filled women’s roles were apparently often referred to as eunuchs, so I suspect a lot of word twisting happening in these sources. It all depends on what “is” is.
In the little anthropolgy that I took way back when the Earth was young, it seemed to me that most cultures excersized some sort of sexual division of labour; the tasks assigned/allowed to each would differ from culture to culture, ( the “cultural construction” part?) but the fact of a division itself seemed very, very common. (I hesitate to say “universal”, because there are always exceptions.) If nobody knew there were two sexes, how could these cultures determine who did what in the sexual division of tasks? The reification and “genderization” of these divisions, I would think, would follow the the establishment of the division itself. Sexes precede sex roles. Certainly as pre-human primates, as animals, our ancestors would have had to figure out “male” and “female” in order to mate and become ancestors at all. Somehow I doubt they would have thought of this (if thoughts they had) as a “cultural constuction,” given that they wouldn’t have had a lot of culture to constrct with.
Okay, I’m confused too.
I sometimes get the impression that large swaths of academia have simply given up on the idea of critically questioning claims that “X was invented in Enlightenment era Europe”.
It was one of Foucault’s signature moves, after all, and if Foucault said it then it must be right.
Other animals know (“know”?) what sexes are. Then I guess humans forgot. Then we rediscovered this arcane knowledge.
Here’s a difference: men were given all of the authority – domestic, political, military, business – and women were expected to be subservient to their husband, father, employer. We all know of Roman emperors, while virtually nobody knows of their wives (aside from historians and history hobbyists).
Seems like the Romans knew who was male and who was female… and treated them differently on that basis. I’m going to go ahead and say Roman society was gendered.
I so don’t understand.
If gender is innate and sex a social construct, then it should follow that there’s no such thing, not really, as a male or female body. And that renders incomprehensible the perspective that someone’s body could be in any way wrong vis a vis gender–sex. It is incumbent on society to re- or un-categorize sex.
It’s like people just throw words and concepts together in ways that are aesthetically pleasing, then assume that they make sense.
AcademicLurker wrote:
How the hell did continental philosophy become so ascendant? I feel like Bertrand Russell would be chewing through his pipe stem to read all this nonsense.
What a Maroon wrote:
I read the first sentence and was getting ready to type with great vengeance and furious anger. Then I read the second. Well played. Well played indeed.
iknklast wrote:
Your description brings unpleasant flashbacks to Karen Armstrong’s arguments in The Case for God that ancient religion never had any propositional content. *shudder* Why you do that?
No society could survive without being able to identify which sorts of pairings can produce offspring. Well, unless everyone fucks everyone else all the time, I guess. Seems like it would be something one would notice after a while, though.
Ach, god, Karen Armstrong. How batty she used to drive me.
Maybe this is why males can retain male bodies without any transitioning at all, or even changing their mode of dress or anything and be “obviously female”. So when a six-foot bearded man gets called “sir”, he is entitled to hit the person calling him that with his little pink handbag…or is that a cricket bat?
My father actually bought me The Case for God as a present about when it came out. There are pictures of me at a family reunion carrying that thing (and several pencils) around.
At least it made for good conversation.
Similarly, the existence of gray undermines the concepts of “black” and “white” and the existence of amphicars undermines the concepts of “car” and “boat”…
And the existence of mules undermines the concepts of horse and donkey.
Well, let’s blame everything on The Enlightenment.
You know, when people got all caught up in wondering whether statements were, like, true or not.