Re: gender

On Sat, 18 Mar 2000, Doug Henwood wrote:

> 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


Good one.  It might drive me crazy if I could read it, but it doesn't make
a bit of sense.  Has it won one of those awards for bad academic writing?

RH



> 
> ----
> 
> [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.
> 
>