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From: bloch@thor.ucsd.EDU (Steve Bloch)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: gender roles (SORTA LONG)
Message-ID: <15414@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>
Date: 14 Jan 91 15:41:25 GMT
References: <1991Jan2.155342.1414@arris.com> <15207@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> <1991Jan5.142726.5081@arris.com>
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"You" in this post refers to Richard Shapiro.  I've posted this rather
than emailing because I think it may be of interest to others than the
two of us.  If I'm wrong, tell me :-)

rshapiro@arris.COM (Richard Shapiro) writes (in response to some of my
comments):
>You're assuming here (I think) that oppression is a necessary
>by-product of the mere existence of gendered subjectivity. That is,
>the there's some pre-existing subject which is oppressed by the
>limitations inherent in gender roles, and which needs to be liberated
>from such limitations. I think this is a mistaken notion. Gendered
>subject positions are not chosen by a pre-existing subject; they
>*form* that subject.

I certainly didn't mean to say there's a Platonic ideal subject out
there, developed independently of gender roles and merely oppressed by
them a posteriori.  (I DO believe in some inherent tendencies: to take
an oversimple example, a male who's genetically small and weak does
not belong in physically aggressive roles, although he can over- come
some of the tendency through hard work.)

But I question what you call "the limitations inherent in gender
roles" on two counts.  First, the mere fact that Behavior A is
"feminine" and Behavior B "masculine" shouldn't prevent me from
practicing BOTH, either choosing between them as circumstances
warrant, or even making both of them primary modes of operation.
Second, as long as these "subject positions" are called "gender" and
named "feminine" and "masculine", females will be steered toward the
former and males toward the latter.  Without claiming the "self" is
pristinely unaffected by socially accepted roles, I maintain
nonetheless that an individual has a wide range of preferences and
whims from time to time, and that constantly-present, gender-labelled
roles will tend to encourage some of them and discourage others for no
particularly good reason.

We've got two clusters of behaviors, attitudes, etc.; my second
objection is to their labelling, the first to the clusters themselves.

>Freedom from such positions means the end of
>subjectivity itself.

Subjectivity depends for its very existence on gender-labelled roles?
I KNOW you didn't mean that... did you?

I think we're getting down to the substantial differences in
assumptions here...

>I don't agree that the existence of gender
>per se is a problem. I don't see any reason to believe that any and
>every gender system would priviledge one gender at the expense of the
>other.
>...
>No, oppression is something else -- a specific
>set of relations between the sexes in which one sex has less access to
>subjectivity than the other. In our society, women are oppressed in
>this way, and men are not.

OK, you're defining "oppressed" as "on the losing end of an
inequality", while I was using something more like "unnecessarily
restricted in freedom".  By your definition, certainly, it's
mathematically impossible for everybody to be oppressed simultaneously
(at least on the same dimension).  By mine, it's quite possible.

>"Role" is a somewhat unfortunate term; I only used it because I was
>pointing out the problems in another article which referred to roles.
>I would rather say something like "subject positions", so as to avoid
>the implication that we can wear such positions (or not) like
>costumes.

I have no idea what you're talking about.  My subject position is that
of Steve Bloch, who has a number of properties (physical sex, educa-
tional background, occupation, skin color, talents, interests...)
Each of these contributes significantly to my "self", no one a great
deal more than the rest.  I see no reason to classify all (or many)
behaviors, assumptions, and whatever else makes up a "subject
position" into two mutually exclusive categories and label them
"gender", nor to reify that label into a fundamental property of human
personality, much less to associate those categories with physical sex
(as Richard doesn't seem to want to do either).


Oh, yeah...
>...one sex has less access to
>subjectivity than the other. In our society, women are oppressed in
>this way, and men are not.

To willfully misread this by using the everyday definition of
subjectivity (introspection, emotion, empathy...) rather than the
philosophical one you intended, I would have thought WOMEN in our
society have more "access to subjectivity" than MEN do.  Thus men are
oppressed, and women are not.

--
"I'm nobody's savior, and nobody's mine either..." -- Ferron

Steve Bloch
bloch@cs.ucsd.edu