As a friend of mine recently reminded me that Judith Butler, one of the pioneers of gender and queer theory, believes that gender is performative. That is to say, gender is a role one assumes, not a biologically pre-determined outcome.
The notion that gender roles (as opposed to physical sex) are biologically pre-determined is called "gender essentialism". Gender/queer theory believes that gender essentialism is a self-reifying force: By framing gender as a biological imperative, it causes women and men to simply accept the gender roles they are given, thus "proving" its own theory by becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Like many feminists, I believe that gender roles can change, and that they must change in order to provide us with a more egalitarian society. Furthermore, I believe that the status of current gender roles negatively affects not only the lives of women, but also the lives of men - even straight men who feel comfortable in their current role - albeit, to different degrees and in different ways.
I do however, believe in what I shall term the "soft" theory of gender essentialism: I believe that women are born biologically prone to certain (but not all) types of roles/actions often associated by society with the term "feminine", and men are born biologically prone to certain (but not all) types of roles/actions often associated with the term "male".
Being biologically prone to something however, does not make it one's destiny. Thus, a person may be born biologically prone to alcoholism, but still not become an alcoholic. Similarly, a person may be biologically prone to obesity, but if they are aware of their genetic pre-disposition and work hard to combat it, they may maintain a healthy weight.
The problem is not that our society has set up gender roles, but a) that a vast power differential exists between those roles b) that it is considered unacceptable for a person of a certain sex to not adhere to the gender role associated with that sex.
I have no hard evidence for this, but somehow I connect Kinsey's groundbreaking work about homosexuality/heretosexuality being a scale, as opposed to a strict dichotomy, with the beginning of the acceptance of homosexuals. It is harder to classify someone as Other if their Otherness stems not from them having a trait completely alien to you, but rather, from their having the same trait as you, but to a completely different degree - you are both on the same scale, just at different points.
I think gender, like sexuality, should be scalar. There can be a feminine pole and a masculine pole, with all sorts of shades in between. This scale should be dissociated from sex. Thus, a male sexed person should have the freedom to take on the role on the ultra-feminine side of the scale, and vice versa. I suspect most people would fall somewhere in between, taking qualities they like from each gender. This dissociation would make life substantially easier for gender queer and transgender people, without completely getting rid of gender, since many people out there enjoy taking on gender roles.
This gender-sex dissociation however, must not be taken on at the expense of changing the discourse about gender roles to begin with, and of getting rid of the power differential between the female and male roles.
So if sex should be decoupled from gender, it would seem to me (at least in the abstract) that sharing terminology for this (masculine/feminine) is going to make that decoupling kinda difficult. If a "male" person chooses to take on primarily "feminine" characteristics, that language already suggests discord and mismatch.
ReplyDeleteI suppose the avenue taken in a lot of respects is really to more dissociate the qualities/actions from the masculine/feminine terminology (make wearing pants not davka masculine, make being a nurse not davka feminine, make showing/not showing emotion not feminine/masculine).
First of all, I agree that masculine/feminine dose make de-coupling difficult...maybe I was wrong, it should be Pole A/Pole B, but I wonder how possible it will be to dissociate gender from sex completely, since I do think that gender is due partially to biology, though mostly to society.
ReplyDeleteSecond of all, I am in favor of making it acceptable for men to cry and women to wrestle, but I also wonder what the boundary is between getting rid of rigid gender roles and between erasing gender completely, I don't think we are anywhere near erasing gender, and still need to be working on getting rid of gender roles, but some feminists beleive in the paradigm of a genderless society. I do not, because I think that a) somehow, people are programmed to have gender - while different socieites have had different gender roles, the concept of gender has existed in most societies from time immemorial b) given that gender already exists, getting rid of it completely would create an identity vaacum. Thus, while getting rid of gender would solve some social ills, it would create new ones we can't imagine - and better the devil you know than the one you don't.
Also, some (but not all) of the feminists who want to get rid of gender, seem to beleive in assimilating the typical female gender role into the male one (as opposed to vice versa) ie to essentially get rid of women, as a gender, though not as a sex. I beleive this is in it and of itself a type of mysogyny.