Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!aero!rshapiro@bbn.com From: rshapiro@bbn.com (Richard Shapiro) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: gender/sex (was feminist spirituality) -- LONG Message-ID: <42272@bbn.COM> Date: 5 Jul 89 15:58:03 GMT References: <1336@cattell.psych.upenn.edu> <42102@bbn.COM> <6740@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu> <12411@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <6752@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu> Sender: nadel@aerospace.aero.org Reply-To: rshapiro@BBN.COM (Richard Shapiro) Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA Lines: 65 Approved: nadel@aerospace.aero.org Status: R In article <6752@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu> Steve Bloch writes: >Just to make sure I've got this... at first glance, this looks as >though you're DEFINING "gender" to be whatever isn't natural and >eternal, and then making a big deal about the fact that gender isn't >natural and eternal New definitions are *always* a crucial first step in constructing new problems (i.e. demonstrating the existance of previously unrecognized problems) or new ways of imagining solutions. This is how one goes about learning to think differently (one way, at least). And in my experience, the greatest single advance offered by theoretical feminism is its new way of thinking: its new set of questions and problems and its new way of imagining solutions. You talk as if the ideology of gender was old hat, but in fact it was precisely feminism which brought this to the fore. So in fact I am merely reminding you what "gender" has come to mean and suggesting that slipping back into the confusion between sex and gender implicitly undoes a major theoretical advance which we owe to feminism. The idea of "gender" is a new way of looking at the sexuality, one which is at odds with the more straightforward logic of physical sex. The important point is not that the word "gender" implies "non-natural" by definition, which is what you seem to be suggesting. The important point is that "natural" sexual identity has been shown (by feminism) to be problematic, and that the set of concepts centered around "gender" are a useful way to deal with those problems. >Can you give >me a clearer picture of where this sex/gender distinction lies? We can designate a person with ovaries and a uterus "female" and a person with testicles "male" and by this means completely partition the human species into two exclusive groups. There is no analagous way in which a person, or a behavior, can be designated "feminine" or "masculine". These notions are specific to a social group, an economic class, a nation, a time etc and are in a continuous process of change and redefinition. There are no universals whatsoever that can be called "feminine" or "masculine"; further: the two define, not a polarity like "male" and "female", but a continuum. So the two sets of concepts are quite different from one another. As sexed creatures, we each have a determinate sex (forgetting for now the complications of physically unclear or altered sex); as gendered subjects, we each find or make a place for ourselves somewhere in the continuum. The problem comes when the contingent continuum of gender is mapped onto the unchanging polarity of sex. For reasons which I can't explain, this mapping seems to happen by default: "common sense" tells us that "feminine" is as determinate as "female", that the physical attributes of femalenss will lead, "naturally", to feminine behavior (however that happens to be constituted), that a female who finds herself in the masculine side of the continuum is "perverted" etc etc. It's easy to see how a society which marks the feminine as inferior can use a supposedly natural mapping like this to oppress women (i.e., it's easy to see *now*, in the aftermath of the theoretical work already done by feminists). So here we have a conceptual mapping which would seem to be both unjustified and anti-feminist, a mapping which only appears within the analysis suggested by the notion of gender. Getting back down to earth: the starting point of all of this was "feminist spirituality", which seemed to me to imply a continuity between the "feminine" of some ancient society and that of our own ("eternal feminine principles", as someone else put it). The problem I was raising was how such a "feminine" could exist, except by assuming exactly the mapping I mention above between female and feminine; and how (or if) such a mapping can work effectively with feminism.