What is the relationship between sex and gender? Beauvoir first raised the question. She made a distinction between what is and is not freely chosen or (at least partially) freely enacted, giving the term "sex" to one and "gender" to the other. But does "sex" thus conceived even exist? We examine the question through the work of Monique Wittig, who considers the distinction "anachronistic," and Foucault, who rejects the category of "natural sex."
I. Sartrian Bodies and Cartesian Ghosts.
The idea that we can choose our gender seems to imply that there is a gender-free standpoint we can occupy. But such a "Cartesian ego" is a widely frowned-upon notion. (Meaning: either it does not exist, or it is a very poor way to conceive of what really does exist.) It would be best not to saddle Beauvoir with a belief in Cartesian egos; we must find a way that one chooses to take on a gender which "does not presuppose that this agency is itself disembodied."
There follows some discussion of what it would mean for the one not merely to be what one is--in the Sartrean vein. At one point, "transcendence" is compared to reference (with the body itself referring):
"As a condition of access to the world, the body is a being comported beyond itself, referring to the world and thereby revealing its own ontological status as a referential entity." (cit., italics mine)
This seems like it could fruitfully be compared to belief's aim at truth, and desire's aim at the good. Since belief is answerable to a norm, "...because I believe p" is not (usually) a good justification for believing p. [Being very Moran-ian here.]
II. Gender as Choice
How to understand choice of gender, if it is not [Cartesian] choice "from a distance"? Beauvoir's view is like Sartre's account of "pre-reflective choice": he says our awareness of such choices constitutes (mere) "quasi-knowledge." It is something we are always doing, and it is "strategic and covert."
There seem to be two thoughts here. One is (following Sartre) that choosing our gender is something which we are only dimly aware of doing; we could try to exercise more conscious control over these things by first increasing that awareness (like, for example, trying to be more conscious of whether we are being rude to others.) Going further, it is something we are always doing and by increasing awareness of what we are doing, we take appropriate responsibility for it.
The second idea seems to be that there is something necessarily covert about choosing one's gender. This might be related to ideas about how, although gender norms are e.g. bad for women, we must be strategic in choosing what to protest against because of the nature of the threat. Beauvoir, Butler says, is trying to show how women's choices can contribute to the oppression of themselves and others. Butler also reiterates that deviating from gender norms is very difficult in our society and terrifying to anyone that does it.
III. Embodiment and Autonomy
"Beauvoir's analysis of the body takes its bearings within the cultural situation in which men have traditionally been associated with the disembodied or transcendent feature of human existence and women with the bodily and immanent feature of human existence." This dualism is bad for everyone but bad for women in particular, and Beauvoir attempts a fusion. Part of the task of clearing the ground for such a fusion is criticizing the notion of a Cartesian disembodied self; Beauvoir "criticizes implicitly the model of autonomy upheld by these masculine gender norms."
IV. The Body as Situation
The synthesis of the "gender polarity" (or "antinomy"?) presented above is, for Beauvoir, the notion of the body as situation. There are two meanings: the body is "located and defined within a social context", and it is a "locus of the dialectical process" of interpreting a set of historical interpretations.
To reinterpret the preexisting (bodily?) norms with the body is "a very concrete and accessible way of politicizing personal life."
If we accept the body as a "cultural situation" (and not just a situation?), then the idea that there is a natural body is suspect, as is the idea that there is a natural sex. The real constraints on interpretation are social, not biological. So, although Beauvoir does not go this far, we should be skeptical about whether gender is connected with sex at all.
V. The Body Politic
If sex is not natural--ie, it doesn't antedate the social construction of gender, then "Beauvoir's theory seems implicitly to ask whether sex was not gender all along." Wittig says "yes" in her article "One is not Born a Woman." For example, it is presupposed that sex is dyadic. "Binary opposition always serves the purposes of hierarchy."
(A bit hard to follow here. It seems that Wittig wants us to consider why we chose to use certain physical characteristics--those related to reproduction--and not others to make such an important social distinction. This is the question we should be asking, and since the answer is social and not biological, sex is (more of?) a social distinction than a biological or natural one.)
Does Wittig mean that the manifest anatomical differences between men and women are an illusion? No.
One upshot, for Wittig, of this way of characterizing the big binary distinction amongst members of the human race is to make heterosexuality mandatory (why?). [from further on in section: "because the category of 'sex' only make sense in terms of a binary discourse on sex in which 'men' and 'women' exhaust the possibilities...and relate to each other as complementary opposites."]
We can see Wittig use the same strategy--questioning the "isolation and valorization" of certain distinctions amongst others--in her Lesbian Body. There, the distinction she challenges is between erogenous and non-erogenous body parts. But what are we to make of this "utopian" work? Surely not that lesbianism is the new "natural" sexual orientation.
Where Wittig takes a stand on this issue, her claim is rather that a sex-less society would be best. This could be established by abolishing sex or by a "proliferation of genders" (but I thought sex and gender were distinct?)
Wittig alleges that lesbians are not women, because they are not in relationships with men. But then they are "caught up in another binary opposition, ie, the opposition to heterosexuality itself" (sigh!) The solution to this (problem?) is to make lesbianism "a multiple cultural phenomenon, a gender with no univocal essence." "If binary restrictions are to be overcome in experience, they must meet their dissolution in the creation of new cultural forms."
Wittig's theory finds support in Foucault's The History of Sexuality (vol 1.) In seeking to "subvert" the model of oppressor and oppressed, Foucault "offers some strategies for the subversion of gender hierarchy."
Foucault is less utopian than Wittig in that he doesn't believe power can be "dissipated." however, he is "concerned with subverting and dissipating the existing terms of juridical power." (What does this mean? Does "term" mean "word"? Is the point of this to play word games?)
Once again, however, 'proliferation' is the key: "The subversion of binary opposites does not result in their transcendence for Foucault, but in their proliferation to a point where binary oppositions become meaningless in a context where multiple differences...abound."
VI. Conclusion: Embodying Dissonance
Beauvoir, and Wittig and Foucault after her, represent a strain of feminism which holds (i) that sex and gender are contingent and (ii) social progress is best achieved by proliferation, which undermines traditional sex and gender distinctions because those distinctions are necessarily binary. These writers are therefore to be contrasted with to another strain of feminism, whichaccepts the fundamental distinction between the sexes and seeks to give expression to "the distinctively feminine side of the binary opposition."
Yet this approach falls vicim to "existential pitfalls of Sartreanism"? (= the myth of radical and unconstrained choice?) It ignores the role of others in constituting us; we cannot constitute ourselves alone.
Consider (in addition?) a Freudian critique, according to the Freudian notions of sexual identity. Feudians would hold that proliferation is itself a utopian fantasy. It is not clear to what extent the Beauvoir-Wittig-Foucault position that sexual and gender identity are "contingent" is incompatible with Freudianism.
Is it wrong to pursue the other feminist project, that of elaborating and exploring "what women want, how that specific pleasure makes itself known" etc.? (Why would it be?) The category of woman is useful "regardless of the descriptive emptiness of the term." (I'm not sure why these considerations, of the usefulness though emptiness of 'woman' etc., don't apply equally to 'man').
The problem that this approach has to face, and that the Beauvoir-Wittig-Foucault tradition can rectify, is that individual women may not "recognize themselves" in such accounts (and this is more likely to happen as time goes by?) For that, it seems that Beauvoir's position, that there is not essence of woman, is the right one.
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