Gender & Sexuality as History
Three important “positions’ in the
academy on gender/sexuality as
history
• Origins of patriarchy
• Historical materialism and social organization
• The social production & social psychology of
“subject positions”
– Post-structuralism – practice theory
• Centrality of language
– Psychological – early childhood experiences (Freud &
Lacan)
• Early stages of child development & formation of gender
identity
– Both structure & agency approaches
universals versus particulars
• universal subordination of women is often
cited as one of the true cross-cultural
universals, a pan-cultural fact
– Engels called it the “world historical defeat of
women”
• even so the particulars of women’s roles,
statuses, power, and value differ
tremendously by culture
F. Engels
• theory of the origin of female subordination
• tied to the male control of wealth
• built on 19th cent. assumption of communal
societies as matrilineal
• men overthrew matrilineality & formed patriarchal
family leading to monogamous family
• differential ownership of wealth led to inequality
within the family & thus between the sexes
• gender differences arose from technological
developments that led to changes in relations of
production
Friedl and Leacock argument
• variation among foragers
• male dominance is based on exchange, public
exchange
• versus that exchanged privately by women
• Exchange of scarce resources in egalitarian
societies, gender stratification, and universal
subordination of women
E. Leacock - (expands on Engels)
• subjugation of women due to breakdown of
communal ownership of property & isolation of
individual family as economic unit
• transformation of relations of production
– Association of female labor with domestic unit or private
sphere
• male production directed towards distribution
outside the domestic group (public sphere)
• occurs with development of private property & class
society
K. Sacks
• political power that results from the ability to
give & receive goods in exchange
(redistribution)
• allows for sexual stratification in non-class
societies
Friedl and Leacock
• not rights & control over production but rights
of distribution & control over channels of
distribution critical for gender stratification
Sanday Reeves
• female status dependent on degree to which
men & women participate in activities of
reproduction, warfare, subsistence
Production, Reproduction and Social
Roles
• roles - those minimal institutions and modes
of activity that are organized immediately
around one or more mothers and their
children
• women everywhere lactate & give birth to
children
• likely to be associated with child rearing &
responsibilities of the home
a long running controversy in anthropology
• Sherry Ortner’s famous article “Is Female to
Male as Nature is to Culture”
• argument is that across cultures, women are
more often associated with nature and the
natural and are therefore denigrated
• Ortner - in reality women are no further nor
closer to nature than men - cultural valuations
make women appear closer to nature than
men
DOMESTIC - PUBLIC DICHOTOMY (M.
Rosaldo)
• opposition between domestic (reproduction) &
public (production) provides the basis of a
framework necessary to identify and explore the
place of male & female in psycho, cultural, social
and economic aspects of life
• degree to which the contrast between public
domestic (private) sphere is drawn promotes
gender stratification-rewards, prestige, power
persistence of dualisms in ideologies of
gender
• a particular view of men and women as
opposite kinds of creatures both biologically
and culturally
• nature/culture
• domestic/public
• reproduction/production
The “Third Gender”
• essentialism of western ideas of sexual dimorphism dichotomized into natural & then moral entities of
male & female that are given to all persons, one or
the other
• committed western view of sex and gender as
dichotomous, ascribed, unchanging
• other categories - every society including our own is
at some time or other faced with people who do not
fit into its sex & gender categories
The “Third Gender”
• a significant number of people are born with
genitalia that is neither clearly male or female
– Hermaphrodites
• persons who change their biological sex
• persons who exhibit behavior deemed
appropriate for the opposite sex
• persons who take on other gender roles other
than those indicated by their genitals
Third Genders
transsexual – gender/ sex incongruent, “trapped in
wrong body” but with the gender identity of their
organs/sex change operation
 transvestite – dressing as other gender, biological
sex (cross-dresser)
 homosexual
 bisexual
 eunuch – castrated male
 hermaphrodite – both sets of biological organs
Virgin?
Boy/Girl?
Third Gender: Western Bias
• multiple cultural & historical worlds in which people of
divergent gender & sexual desire exist
– margins or borders of society
• may pass as normal to remain hidden in the official
ideology & everyday commerce of social life
• when discovered - iconic matter out of place - "monsters
of the cultural imagination“
• third gender as sexual deviance a common theme in US
– evolution & religious doctrine
– heterosexuality the highest form, the most moral way of life, its
natural
Third Gender Cross-Culturally
• provokes us to reexamine our own assumptions
regarding our gender system
• emphasizes gender role alternatives as
adaptations to economic and political conditions
rather than as "deviant" and idiosyncratic
behavior
• rigid dichotomozation of genders is a means of
perpetuating the domination of females by
males and patriarchal institutions.
RETHINKING SUBORDINATION
• Ardener - muted models that underlie male
discourse
• diversity of one life or many lives
• gender roles, stereotypes, stratification
– changes over time
– changes with position in lifecycle
– status of men & women i.e. in male dominant
societies
• decision making roles belong to men but as women
reach menopause; change with marriage status, virgins,
wives, widows (and men)
RETHINKING SUBORDINATION
• women, like men, are social actors who work in
structured ways to achieve desired ends
• formal authority structure of a society may declare
that women are impotent & irrelevant
• but attention to women's strategies & motives, sorts
of choices, relationships established, ends achieved
indicates women have good deal of power
• strategies appear deviant & disruptive
– actual components of how social life proceeds
LANGUAGE-DISCOURSE-SUBJECT
POSITIONS (subjectivity)
• Language is intro of child to symbolic order
• Through language gendered identity is
constructed/learned/disciplined
• Words (rules) of social interaction are
gendered
• Conflict exists – from repression to oppression
Discourse, Subjectivity, Power
• Discourses
–
–
–
–
Ways of talking about the world
a system of representation
Codes and conventions
rules and practices that produced meaningful statements and
regulated discourse in different historical periods
• about language and practice
• Discourse is "a group of statements which provide a
language for talking about ...a particular topic at a
particular historical moment."
• "Discourse, Foucault argues, “constructs the topic. It
defines and produces the objects of our knowledge. It
governs the way that a topic can be meaningfully talked
about and reasoned about.”
Discourse, Subjectivity, Power
• Discourse -- the bearer of various subject positions
• Subject positions -- specific positions of agency and
identity in relation to particular forms of knowledge and
practice
• Subjectivity --produced within discourse, subjected to
discourse.
• subject position--[for us to become the subject of a
particular discourse, and thus the bearers of its
power/knowledge] we must locate ourselves in the
position from which the discourse makes most sense, and
thus become its 'subjects' by subjecting' ourselves to its
meanings, power and regulation.
Discourse, Subjectivity, Power
• power follows from our casual acceptance of the
"reality with which we are presented"
• Power: a field of possibilities in which several ways
of behaving, several reactions and diverse
comportments may be realized
• the totality of practices, by which one can
constitute, define, organize, instrumentalize the
strategies which individuals in their liberty can have
in regard to each other
Discourse, Gender, Power
• sexuality and the body -- sites of power and
politics
• socially imposed structures that objectified
sexual identity and gender differences
• socially imposed structures that shape gender
relations and behavior
The “Four Bodies”
•
•
•
•
Individual body
The social body
The body politic
The mindful body
The Individual Body
• lived experience of the body-self, body, mind,
matter, psyche, soul
The Social Body
• representational uses of the body as a natural
symbol with which to think about nature,
society, culture
The Body Politic
• regulation, surveillance, & control of bodies
(individual & collective) in reproduction &
sexuality, in work & leisure, in sickness & other
forms of deviance
The Mindful Body
• the most immediate, the proximate terrain
where social truths and social contradictions
are played out
• a locus of personal and social resistance,
creativity, and struggle
• emotions form the mediatrix between the
individual, social and political body, unified
through the concept of the 'mindful body.'
Michelle Rosaldo
• “It now appears to me that women’s (and
men’s, and any other gender identity that
exists; my addition) place in social life is not in
any direct sense the product of the things she
does, but the meaning (culture) her activities
acquire through social interaction (society).”
• A structure-agency issue – deal with the
individual subject in the context of social
organization
Joan Scott’s approach
• Gender is a constitutive element of social
relationships based on perceived differences
between the sexes
• Gender is a primary way of signifying relations
of power
– The patriarchy question answered in part
• “It is not sexuality which haunts society, but
society which haunts the body’s sexuality” (M.
Godelier)