Re: gender

Kristin L. Marsh wrote:

>Not quite.  Gender refers to "feminine" vs. "masculine" behaviors,
>roles, preferences, etc., that are associated with sex only as a social
>construct: that is, we impose these associations.  Gender roles do not
>naturally develop from sex differences.  And I would adamantly disagree
>with you re: sex differences.  These are also socially constructed to
>the extent that the dichotomous categorization of sex into either
>all-female or all-male is, likewise, socially imposed.

Here's an argument that often drives people crazy. Enjoy!

Doug

----

[from the introduction to Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter]

What I would propose in place of these conceptions of construction is 
a return to the notion of matter, not as site or surface, but as a 
process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the 
effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter. That matter 
is always materialized has, I think, to be thought in relation to the 
productive and, indeed, materializing effects of regulatory power in 
the Foucaultian sense. Thus, the question is no longer, How is gender 
constituted as and through a certain interpretation of sex? (a 
question that leaves the "matter" of sex untheorized), but rather, 
Through what regulatory norms is sex itself materialized? And how is 
it that treating the materiality of sex as a given presupposes and 
consolidates the normative conditions of its own emergence?

Crucially, then, construction is neither a single act nor a causal 
process initiated by a subject and culminating in a set of fixed 
effects. Construction not only takes place in time, but is itself a 
temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms; sex 
is both produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration. 
As a sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice, sex 
acquires its naturalized effect, and, yet, it is also by virtue of 
this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up as the 
constitutive instabilities in such constructions, as that which 
escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined 
or fixed by the repetitive labor of that norm. This instability is 
the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition, the 
power that undoes the very effects by which "sex" is stabilized, the 
possibility to put the consolidation of the norms of "sex" into a 
potentially productive crisis.

Certain formulations of the radical constructivist position appear 
almost compulsively to produce a moment of recurrent exasperation, 
for it seems that when the constructivist is construed as a 
linguistic idealist, the constructivist refutes the reality of 
bodies, the relevance of science, the alleged facts of birth, aging, 
illness, and death. The critic might also suspect the constructivist 
of a certain somatophobia and seek assurances that this abstracted 
theorist will admit that there are, minimally, sexually 
differentiated parts, activities, capacities, hormonal and 
chromosomal differences that can be conceded without reference to 
"construction." Although at this moment I want to offer an absolute 
reassurance to my interlocutor, some anxiety prevails. To "concede" 
the undeniability of "sex" or its "materiality" is always to concede 
some version of "sex," some formation of "materiality." Is the 
discourse in and through which that concession occurs-and, yes, that 
concession invariably does occur-not itself formative of the very 
phenomenon that it concedes? To claim that discourse is formative is 
not to claim that it originates, causes, or exhaustively composes 
that which it concedes; rather, it is to claim that there is no 
reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further 
formation of that body. In this sense, the linguistic capacity to 
refer to sexed bodies is not denied, but the very meaning of 
"referentiality" is altered. In philosophical terms, the constative 
claim is always to some degree performative.

In relation to sex, then, if one concedes the materiality of sex or 
of the body, does that very conceding operate - performatively - to 
materialize that sex? And further, how is it that the reiterated 
concession of that sex - one which need not take place in speech or 
writing but might be "signaled" in a much more inchoate way - 
constitutes the sedimentation and production of that material effect?

The moderate critic might concede that some part of "sex" is 
constructed, but some other is certainly not, and then, of course, 
find him or herself not only under some obligation to draw the line 
between what is and is not constructed, but to explain how it is that 
"sex" comes in parts whose differentiation is not a matter of 
construction. But as that line of demarcation between such ostensible 
parts gets drawn, the "unconstructed" becomes bounded once again 
through a signifying practice, and the very boundary which is meant 
to protect some part of sex from the taint of constructivism is now 
defined by the anti-constructivist's own construction. Is 
construction something which happens to a ready-made object, a 
pregiven thing, and does it happen in degrees? Or are we perhaps 
referring on both sides of the debate to an inevitable practice of 
signification, of demarcating and delimiting that to which we then 
"refer," such that our "references" always presuppose-and often 
conceal-this prior delimitation? Indeed, to "refer" naively or 
directly to such an extra-discursive object will always require the 
prior delimitation of the extra-discursive. And insofar as the 
extra-discursive is delimited, it is formed by the very discourse 
from which it seeks to free itself. This delimitation, which often is 
enacted as an untheorized presupposition in any act of description, 
marks a boundary that includes and excludes, that decides, as it 
were, what will and will not be the stuff of the object to which we 
then refer. This marking off will have some normative force and, 
indeed, some violence, for it can construct only through erasing; it 
can bound a thing only through enforcing a certain criterion, a 
principle of selectivity.

What will and will not be included within the boundaries of "sex" 
will be set by a more or less tacit operation of exclusion. If we 
call into question the fixity of the structuralist law that divides 
and bounds the "sexes" by virtue of their dyadic differentiation 
within the heterosexual matrix, it will be from the exterior regions 
of that boundary (not from a "Position," but from the discursive 
possibilities opened up by the constitutive outside of hegemonic 
positions), and it will constitute the disruptive return of the 
excluded from within the very logic of the heterosexual symbolic.

The trajectory of this text, then, will pursue the possibility of 
such disruption, but proceed indirectly by responding to two 
interrelated questions that have been posed to constructivist 
accounts of gender, not to defend constructivism per se, but to 
interrogate the erasures and exclusions that constitute its limits. 
These criticisms presuppose a set of metaphysical oppositions between 
materialism and idealism embedded in received grammar which, I will 
argue, are critically redefined by a poststructuralist rewriting of 
discursive performativity as it operates in the materialization of 
sex.