Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!usc!orion.cf.uci.edu!uci-ics!tittle From: rshapiro@bbn.COM (Richard Shapiro) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: gender/sex (was feminist spirituality) Message-ID: <42640@bbn.COM> Date: 13 Jul 89 00:24:57 GMT References: <1336@cattell.psych.upenn.edu> <42102@bbn.COM> <6740@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu> <12411@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <6752@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu> <42272@bbn.COM> <12602@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu Reply-To: Richard Shapiro Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA Lines: 37 Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu In article <12602@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> bloch%mandrill.UUCP@ucsd.edu (Steve Bloch) writes: >OK, I'll grant that, but if there's no absolute, exclusive distinction, >why do we have to categorize things into "feminine" and "masculine" in >the first place? Why not call the ends of the continuum "snark" and >"boojum" instead? Why not have three, or fifteen, categories rather >than two? How solid is the rock on which this "gender theory" is >built? Or does gender theory include what I just said ? We're getting at the crux of things here. I can't tell you why any of this is as it is, I can only say ("descriptively", as it were) that this is the situation we seem to be in. Our episteme of behaviors has one its axes, the gender axis, aligned with the male/female polarity. There's no intrinsic reason why this should be so, and there's certainly no reason why any particular distribution of behaviors along the gender axis is more correct than any other. But given that there is such an axis, and that there is particular distribution along that axis (with local variations according to class, ethnicity etc), given, that is, that we look at the world through gendered eyes, it's not surprising that there are tendencies for women to be "feminine" and men to be "masculine" (not surprising, but not tautological either). There's no point in looking for materialist explanations for this -- that's the wrong level of analysis. Psycho-analytic explanations might be more helpful, which is presumably why many feminists are appropriating Freud and Lacan for feminism (there's an interesting new topic: feminist psychoanalysis). But the important first step, I think, is simply to recognize where we are, and then perhaps to figure out how we got here (a genealogy of gender, as Foucault might put it). The reproduction of gender is a hard problem, too hard for me to offer any convincing explanations. This would make for another interesting topic. How is it that gender continues to exist as a social (nb: NOT individual) phenomenon, even as its particular contents change? How can we push those changes that do occur in a feminist direction? What *is* a feminist direction? Can we consider the possibility of undoing gender altogether? How might we do this? Do we want to do this? These are the questions that seem like the important ones to me (some of them, anyway).