Thinking about Sexed Bodies (in common sense terms)
Sex is often regarded as a natural fact, or a product of nature – and closely related to biological differences between male/female in a species.
The logical assumption is commonly made that one is born a male or female baby, possessing a determinate sex because one is born with particular sexual organs.
Most people regard the distinction between male and female as a result as determined by “ownership” of particular sexual organs which produce, as a stark choice, an absolute binary distinction between either belonging to the “male” or “female” variants of the human species.
In spite of the fact that variation (in biological features such as height, size, skin, hair colour, build, strength etc) is as great within the sexes as between the sexes, this biological view of sex difference as an absolute distinction between male and female is often reduced to one fact: only women bear children. If it is expressed more precisely, it is that biologically we define human beings as “women” who have ovaries and wombs and as “men” because they have a penis and testicles. Removal or “lack of function” in any of these sexual organs does not affect how this absolute distinction functions in determining who are men or women because the possession of these organs was pre-defined at birth.
That there exist hermaphrodites or people who are born with indeterminate sexual organs, does not undermine this binary way of thinking of an absolute distinction between men and women, because these people are understood only as “exceptions” to the general principle and a minority of the overall population of human beings. (LGBTQ theories, as well as feminisms, begin with a critique of this form of binarism and biological determinism of a gender).
This is why many people regard it as a “common sense” view to see nature or biology as “determining” identity and it is an absolute difference, either male or female, never both. Legal claims which require sex as a given identity rest on this absolute difference. Learning about or recognising “exceptions” – ie transgender people – does not alter many people’s “common sense” view of this biological definition of a sexed body.
The idea that “biology determines sex” is rejected in most feminist theory as well as the idea that sex is a “natural fact” or a pre-determined “nature” from which an identity as men or women automatically arises and is “determined”.
In feminist theory, however, there is no neutral category called “the body”, there are always and only sexed bodies: a male body and a female body or “the third sex/androgyne” and indeterminately-sexed body.
Thinking about Gendered Bodies (in common sense terms)
The alternative view highlights how gender determines a human being’s identity as either being male or female, again an absolute binary. These “gendered attributes” are acquired and regarded as “social” and/or “historically” learnt. They arise from social practices, ways of behaving, dressing and presenting oneself. People are “disciplined” into them by family, social and peer pressure – found in day-to-day interactions with other people – odd comments, strange looks – and which determine “appropriate” and “inappropriate” behaviour, speech and actions for “being/becoming/existing” as men or women.
Gender attributes contribute to and produce “norms” and “recognisable codes” which enable us to distinguish how we think of men as different from women and vice versa. Gendered attributes are regarded as the outcome, the end result, of social and historically-specific forms of conditioning within the culture and society in which we live. These attributes have changed over time and are different in different cultures, sub-cultures and communities around the world. They are acquired and, at the same time, “determine” expectations for how human beings should dress, speak, walk, act, gesture, behave in different settings. There are many different codes of behaviour for men and women. These distinctions are gendered across a male-female division (even when some people regard this as a spectrum from feminine-male to masculine-woman) because they place habits, manners and practices i.e. behaving in a certain way and looking a certain way as belonging to one or other gender.
In these complex cultural codes, many people “pass” for a gender which is not determined by biology alone: men can dress and act as women and women can dress and act as men. Claims for a “third sex” or “inter-sex” or “queer” identity are also determined by gendered attributes – manners of dress and behaviour which may borrow from recognisable stereotypes of femininity or masculinity or be hybrid and “indeterminate”. This has led many people to argue gender exists as an “ideology” which determines how we live because we conform to expectations of male or female in appearance and behaviour and that this is not related to the possession or absence of a particular sexual organ. The question of whether biology and sex remains a ground for a gendered culture or vice versa is still controversial.
For those who argue that gender is primary in determining how we acquire a subjectivity within a gendered form, “biology” has very little to do with gender acquisition: i.e. how a body comes to embody a particular subjectivity.
Gender does not determine individual’s subjective sexual preferences (gay/straight/bi-sexual) nor their sexuality (or sexual practices).
This idea of gender however often reproduces the notion of “consciousness” as free will or “choice” in an environment or in relation to a “neutral” or “non-determined” body.
The limitations of an actual physical body – as a sexed body – “interfering” or “limiting” the kind of gendered identity a person seeks to embrace is the result of everyone inhabiting a particular body – which may not be malleable to drastic change, even by dieting/substantial makeovers, hormone therapies or medical interventions in surgery.
Sexed / Gendered: Nature/ Culture (common sense assumptions)
Whether sex or gender determines who we are is closely allied to theories of whether it is nature or nurture, or more starkly, biology or culture/ social environment which determine who we become and whether this is a “sexed” identity or a “gendered” identity.
If sex is a determinate, then change or transformation of these boundaries in terms of gender would not be possible because human biology is seen as natural, pre-destined and even determined by our physical structure and genes.
If gender is determinate, then many kinds of social, political and cultural changes become possible, because we can change our society, our environment as well as our behaviour, manners, codes of dress, positions of power/powerlessness etc.
For example, the biological capacity of women to bear children is not always exercised, as many adult women do not have children. “Mothering” might be a gendered behaviour but it might have no relation to having had children.
Children develop slowly into men and women, they are not born as adults. They go through many stages of growth and development – not least “the teenage years” – before they become adults and/or sexually active. Experimenting with gendered identities – appearance and behaviour – is a part of “growing up” and contributes to what kind of adult, any human being may become.
The difficulty of the relationship between sex/gender is summed up in Simone de Beauvoir’s often quoted statement “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” which forms the opening line to ‘Part IV: The Formative Years’ in The Second Sex (1949).
The language used to describe how sex/gender operates has changed considerably in recent years, largely due to Queer theory. These debates about whether identity is determined by sex or gender are not specific to feminism. Many arguments raised in queer theory are not specifically feminist: these two forms of thinking have developed distinct differences.
In the majority of feminist work exploring…. social relations and identity, it has been assumed that gender and sexuality have to be examined together, with gender taking precedence over sexuality. This notion remained relatively unchallenged (and led some lesbian writers and feminists to associate with lesbian feminism rather than lesbian and gay liberation in the late 1970s) until the advent of queer ideas on the theoretical scene.
Janice McLaughlin, Mark E. Casey and Diane Richardson ‘At the Intersections of Feminist and Queer Debates‘ (2006)
Feminism has raised many challenges in these debates because of the inadequate theorisation of “women” (lesbian and straight or homosexual and heterosexual) and the representation of “women” as a variant or “deviation” from a model of the human species in which men (homosexual and heterosexual) are the assumed “norm”. Feminism has introduced an important distinction between “woman” as a figure/metaphor/ideal in language/culture and “women” – real, actual, historical human beings.
These ideas about gender acquisition (often developed from psychology, sexology, natural sciences, history and sociology) became useful as the starting points for feminists as a way to explore what it means to be women in society. While this argument so far has stressed sex/gender, this is not the only axis for thinking about what it means to be “women” (ie. plural, varied, diverse, different: not “woman”): race, class, ethnicity, sexual preference, religion all play a part in constructing identities as “women” (plural).
There is a very long history stretching over 150 years, predating Freud and Marx (as two explorations of psychoanalytic and political subjects), in which feminist writers have explored what it means to be “women” in society by considering the situation and condition of “women” – politically, socially, economically – and as human beings possessing consciousness, subjectivity, desires, imagination and wishes and against the projections, fantasies, idealisations, distorted ideals, metaphors and imaginaries of “woman” – as a (male-defined) figure in language and culture.
Starting Points for Feminist Theory
Analysing the distinction between sex and gender has been and remains a key part of feminist theory, but in the visual arts, this analysis takes place in relation to the acknowledgement that the majority of art, culture and society has been and still is patriarchal – that is structured by an asymmetrical difference between men and women and it is one in which men possess more economic and cultural power than women and produce more representations of “woman” than women. This relationship between power/knowledge has been central to feminist theories of sexual difference.
The question of challenging cultural norms and stereotyped perceptions of “woman” as opposed to real “women” as well as seeking a change which will transform the current asymmetry between men and women is a fundamental part of how feminists envisage any transformation of society, art and politics.
Feminists have looked at how arguments about sex as determining women’s lives have been fuelled by prejudice against women and were based on different gendered claims and cultural norms which actually have little to do with biology. This refutation of “biology as destiny” is central to most feminist claims.
Sex was initially used in feminist theory to discuss how assumptions about the differences between men and women determined their social role. The use of the term “sex role” – particularly prevalent in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s – was a means to point to how sex determined the role or activities that the different sexes (men and women) were engaged in. Sex-role theories were seen to determine the labour market and expectations of employers and employees that men and women were suited to different jobs and had the capacity to develop different skills. Biology had been used as a primary argument by “non-feminists” to justify keeping women out of particular jobs and was combined with a refusal to recognise their skills. Feminists to counter this focused on questioning how and why stereotyping in “sex-roles” determined women’s opportunities in the job market or education and constructed very limited expectations for women’s role in society or governance.
The feminist idea of introducing a distinction between sex and gender was a means to acknowledge that the relationships between sex and gender were more complex than this. The relationships between sex and gender have never been fixed: there have always been “masculine-women” and “feminine-men” characterised in many societies and cultures around the world. Literature, music, art and theatre have been creating and playing with these different forms of masculine/feminine identities for hundreds of years.
It has been the contribution of feminist theory to “unfix” or “render fluid” the understanding of the relationships between different kinds of “masculinities” and men and different kinds of “femininities” and women: precisely to look at how culture constructs, imagines or creates human identity. The reason for highlighting the complexity of the relationships between masculinity and femininity and its fluidity in relation to any sexed body has been to unsettle and disturb all fixed, limited and stereotyped perceptions of men and women.
The arguments about the actual relationship between sex and gender are much more complex than this very condensed summary.
Some of these analyses have been built through looking at how sex/gender form a system of relations: the sex/gender system.
Other analyses have argued about roles and behaviour determined by both sex and gender: sex-role and gendered-behaviour theories.
It is the arguments about language, representation and social relations across public/private distinctions which are at the centre of key theories of sexual difference amongst feminists and these are informed by developments in post-structuralist thought and pyschoanalysis.
Part 2 of the lesson will look further at these binary oppositions.
