SEX AND GENDER: A CRITICAL REALIST APPROACH
Caroline New
Much gender theorising, I shall argue, is in an impasse from which critical realism
indicates a way out. In the heyday of second wave feminism, structural inequalities
such as women’s under-representation in political and economic leadership, their
lower pay, sexual objectification, and widespread violence by men against women,
were seen as in need of explanation, the better to transform them. ‘Radical’ or
‘revolutionary’ feminists saw these inequalities as symptoms of the enduring
differences between women and men, while liberal, Marxist and socialist feminists
understood them as resulting from a motivated refusal to acknowledge the similarities.
All saw womanhood as a basis for grounded solidarity – at least while the oppression
of women persisted. To end it, different sources of power had to be mobilised. For
radical feminism, the power of women, united across all differences to refuse cooperation with the patriarchy, could bring about a cultural revalorisation of the
subordinate terms in the repeated dualisms of Western thought: man, woman; culture,
nature; human, animal; reason, emotion. For liberal feminism, women united had to
harness the power of the state to render its laws and practices consistent and genderequal. For Marxists and socialists, women had to unite with men to seize the state, and
at the same time use female solidarity to ensure that the interests of half of the
working class did not get forgotten.
Similarities, differences. From the 1980s, feminist critics of second stage feminism
argued that the call to ‘sisterhood’ obscured the differences between women, making
middle-class white Western womanhood the default position, and membership of
other oppressed groups mere ‘add-ons’ (Spelman, 1988, Mohanty, 1992). ‘Woman’
was a fragmented identity, not a unitary one. It was doubtful whether it was a usable
basis for political solidarity, since so many oppressive relationships took place
between women themselves. Feminist politics became increasingly fragmented, with
single issue campaigns and coalitions replacing the broad sweep of a movement –
corresponding to the ‘anti-foundationalist’ epistemological theory that allows an
ontology of parts but forbids one of wholes, and views abstraction as a dangerous
betrayal of concrete particularities. The politics of ‘recognition’ (of subordinated
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identities) became increasingly important, and with it the idea of struggle as situated
primarily in the discursive realm (Fraser and Honneth, 1998). But how could
subordinated identities be revalorised while leaving hegemonic identities intact?
‘Woman’ was first deconstructed into fragmentary identities, and then, as we know,
postmodern thinking transcended and rejected identities altogether. The very gender
categories ‘woman’ and ‘man’ were themselves challenged. As irrealism (strong
social constructivism) become increasingly fashionable, the social world was
identified with the cultural realm, with discourse or ‘text’. Postmodern forgetting of
the material has always been an uneven tendency. Sometimes material differences,
including the inequalities I mentioned, are seen as the products of certain discursive
regimes, sometimes as expressive of them (the former, but not the latter, is an
unacknowledged causal thesis). In either case, while institutionalised inequalities
between women and men persist, and much academic feminist work continues to
underlabour for feminist activism, most gender theorising pays less attention to
material forms of gender oppression and more to the categories in terms of which
gender relations are described.
In a poststructuralist classic, Weedon remarks that the discursive is the source of
power, ‘exercised through the constitution of subjectivity within discourse and the
production of social agents’ (Weedon, 1997: 163), and therefore assumes it is the
effective locus for action. In contrast, feminism has historically used ‘explanatory
critiques’(Collier, 1994), identifying false beliefs or unmet needs, explaining the
mechanisms through which these are reproduced, criticising the states of affairs which
allow the exercise of these mechanisms, and recommending action to end them.
Where the ‘discursive turn’ has been influential, such critiques have been undermined
and feminist activism weakened (New, 2003). The deconstructive politics of
‘disidentification’ of gender categories, for example through parody or mimesis
(Braidotti, 1997) lack any strategy for structural change. We are not told how
disidentification influences subjectivity, and thus agency. Unsurprisingly, the aspects
of the gender order which receive most attention are the socio-cultural ones where
such means of struggle have most chance of success (Butler, 1995).
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When social structures and their effects are misleadingly reduced to discourse, or
situated within it, causal explanation is rendered impossible. This is the impasse of
postmodern gender theorising. It is not seen as an impasse, because of a deep
suspicion of causal argument, of abstraction, and of generalisation. Flax, for instance,
rejects all ideas of human nature, since lest they be used as ‘the basis for causal,
deterministic (as opposed to interpretative) explanations of human behaviour or
culture’ (Flax, 2002: 1042). No distinction is made between causation, where the
causal powers of A, when exercised, result in a tendency for B to happen in certain
contexts (while if counter tendencies are operating B may not happen), and
determinism, where an instance of A is inevitably followed by B. Yet beneath much
postmodern gender theorising (even by those who most fête contingency, such as
Butler) lie post-Lacanian narratives of sexual difference as a basic (determining)
organising principle of discourse – at least so far in human history. Unless subjectivity
is treated as a mere epiphenomenon of discourse (which would rule out resistance to
the ‘phallogocentric order’), these must be causal narratives. Whatever brings about
change is a cause, and in such accounts enduring discursive mechanisms produce and
form gendered subjectivity.
So much for the cul-de-sac into which postmodern feminism has led us. I now go on
to argue that critical realism offers a way forward which is neither foundationalist nor
determinist. A missing concept in postmodern feminism is ‘ontological stratification’.
Critical realism and the ontology of sex and gender
Not only is the world differentiated in itself, independent of human thinking: its
properties and powers are also stratified. The levels in question, I will go on to show,
are not neat and static like the layers in a sandwich cake, but co-present and
interpenetrating (New, 1996, Dyke, 1988). The upshot is openness and complexity.
My argument in the rest of this essay will be that sexual difference is real, and salient
in all imaginable human societies; and that it is a causal condition for social gender
orders, though it is compatible with many and various forms of these. This position is
not unique to critical realism (see, for instance, Connell, 2002), but it is rendered far
more compelling by the use of critical realist concepts of stratification and emergence.
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If this case is so compelling, why has it failed to compel? I can hazard an informed
guess at a part of the answer. It would be hard to exaggerate the harm that biological
determinism, as a legitimating ideology, has done and continues to do to women.
Without any concept of ontological stratification, the admission that sexual difference
has causal powers to enable and constrain, seems akin to nineteenth century
arguments that women in higher education would lose their breasts and shrivel their
wombs (Sayers 1982). If traumatic historical events have determinate effects on
national consciousnesses decades or even centuries later, small wonder that many
feminists still prefer to work on representations, eschewing their referents as
imaginary or as wholly docile hangers on.
Transitive and intransitive dimensions
A key distinction in critical realism is between the transitive and intransitive
dimensions. Things and processes exist in the world, ‘active independently of their
identification by human beings’ (Bhaskar, 1989:11). If we exemplify this with
reference to sex, we can say that human beings are (almost all) sexually dimorphic,
female and male, whether and however they conceptualise this difference, and this
dimorphic structuring is active, causally powerful, enabling different reproductive
roles and certain sexual possibilities and pleasures, and ruling out others. The
(fallible) claim I have just made exists in the transitive dimension, but it refers to the
intransitive dimension. The effects of the properties of bodies to which I am referring
are distinct from the effects of the concepts I am using to do so.
The transitive dimension is that of knowledge, of explanation, and of the conceptual
and cognitive raw materials which enable these. Its contents – ideas, taxonomies,
theories, ways of seeing the world - are themselves real and causally powerful, and
can become objects of knowledge. Although our conceptual work takes place within
and may reproduce or modify the transitive dimension, the structured contents of that
dimension are also external to human subjects and constrain and enable what we can
do. As such the transitive dimension has an intransitive aspect, as do the practices and
institutions of particular ‘discursive regimes’.
The power of discourse to bring the natural world into line is well exemplified by
Judith Butler’s discussion of how babies with ambiguous genitalia are surgically
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adjusted to fit the social requirement that all citizens be readily identifiable as either
male or female (Butler, 1993, Preves, 2001). But such practices do not justify Butler’s
further conclusion that sexual difference is merely conceptual, for if bodies were did
not have particular characteristics (in the intransitive dimension) such surgical
alteration would not be possible. Butler collapses the intransitive into the transitive
dimension. For her, although bodies may in some sense exist outside of discourse,
attempts to discover or describe their characteristics are constructing what they claim
to represent.
Since the transitive dimension is also intransitive, by studying the properties of its
contents we may come to understand their interrelationships, histories, powers and
effects. Among these properties are those of being good or bad abstractions, theories,
or representations in relation to their referents. ‘The intransitivity of both beliefs and
meanings’ co-exists with ‘their susceptibility to scientific explanation and hence
critique, in a spiral (which reflexively implicates social science as a moment in the
process that it explains’ (Bhaskar,1989: 22). The sociology of knowledge is a valid
field, but it does not entail ontological relativism.
The stratification of reality
The intransitive dimension is not flat: reality is stratified. It is the twin ideas of
‘levels’ and ‘emergent properties’ that give critical realism its ‘depth’. Most
frequently cited is Bhaskar’s distinction between the actual, the empirical and the real
(Collier, 1994: 44), although this is just a beginning way of characterising the
complexity of ontological stratification. The ‘actual’ refers to things and events in
their concrete historicity, only some of which will ever be known or experienced by
human beings. The empirical is a subset of the actual, consisting of those phenomena
which are experienced. Experience must here be understood not as given but as
socially produced from the actual: ‘in this sense it is the end, not the beginning of a
journey’ (Bhaskar 1998: 43).
The actual and the empirical are, of course, both real, and as such are contained
within the third domain. But the domain of the real also includes things which are real
in a different way. These are the structures of objects (e.g. the internal relations of
their constituent parts, such as the interrelationship of family members) and the
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emergent properties to which their structuring gives rise (e.g. the powers and
susceptibilities of a family, which are not the same as those of its members). Since
these powers of structures, when exercised, may bring about certain effects, we often
speak of ‘generative mechanisms’. This metaphor needs to be used with caution. The
relationship between cause and effect is not ‘mechanical’ in the sense of predictable
and automatic, since in an open world many things are always happening at once.
Mechanisms, we shall see, operate at many levels in the social world, and are
variously related. One may form the ground for the possibility of another, higher level
mechanism, which emerges in certain circumstances as a set of powers, which may
begin to be exercised only when yet another mechanism is triggered. Whether a
generative mechanism does generate the effects it could, may depend on the current
state of something else again.
In poststructuralist and deconstructionist feminist texts, we often come across a
warning against ‘universal causal claims’ (e.g. Hawkesworth, 1997: 654). According
to anti-foundationalist rhetoric, to strive to explain on too big a scale is itself
oppressive. This fear seems to rest on a philosophical error. Universal causal claims,
if worth their salt, are about the generative powers of mechanisms, not about any
(Humean) constant conjunction of cause and effect. The training of men in military
camps aims to mobilise certain human psychological powers – to split off feelings –
and liabilities – to lose access to split off feelings. If these mechanisms are exercised,
and if the context in which this happens allows their causal powers to be realised,
there will be certain outcomes at the level of events, which could include heroic
defence of comrades, massacres and rapes. But counteracting mechanisms can
certainly exist. We are talking about tendencies here, and claims about tendencies
cannot be falsified by counter instances, which are inevitable in an open system.
‘Actualism’ is the view that accepts the reality of things and events, but denies that
there are ‘underlying structures which determine how the things come to have their
events, and instead locates the succession of cause and effect at the level of events:
every time A happens, B happens’ (Collier, 1994: 7). Footbinding was experienced by
millions of women in China between the mid tenth and early twentieth centuries
(Feng, 1994). It is sometimes explained in terms of events: ‘The emperor Li Yu
ordered his concubine to bind her feet’ at one point in history, while at another ‘Mao
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Tse Tung forbade the practice’. No doubt the emperor’s original order (if it really
happened) was preceded by other happenings in his personal life which might shed
light on his sexual predilections, but even these cannot be explained by stringing
events on a Humean chain without reference to underlying mechanisms. For one
man’s demand to give rise to a fashion, and that fashion to become a widespread and
long lasting institution, many things had to be the case. The emperor’s authority and
symbolic role had to be such that he could set fashions. Women had to have feet with
certain powers and liabilities, such that if most of the toes were broken and bound
under when the child was about 3, the foot would remain small. Human sexuality, in
particular male sexuality, had to be culturally malleable, such that a small foot and a
mincing gait in females could become eroticised. Beliefs about sexual difference had
to legitimise such a practice. Power relations between men and women, and adults
and children, had to be such that the female relatives would carry out the initial act
and the girl child would permit it. The economy had to allow the disabling of most
middle and upper class women. These and many other structures (or mechanisms) at
different levels had to exercise their emergent powers in particular ways and
particular relationships to each other.
Events and things cannot be attributed to one particular level of reality, while
mechanisms may be. People, for instance, are themselves structures with emergent
properties. People cannot sensibly be characterised as ‘physical’ or ‘chemical’ or
‘biological’ or ‘psychological’ or ‘social’. Some of their emergent properties (not
necessarily instantiated in any one individual) could be characterised in this way – we
might call the capacity for empathy a psychological property, and the capacity to
produce eggs a biological property, and the causal powers emerging from membership
of a particular group social properties. All of these mechanisms exist simultaneously
and in non-additive interactions, enabling and constraining and otherwise affecting
each other. Thinking again of footbinding, we can see that the musculoskeletal
structure of the human foot and the diachronic processes of development are
ontologically prior to the practice. They in no way determine it, but they make it
possible. Determinate psychological structures of sexual development emerge, I
would argue, out of the structuring of human nervous systems (the possibilities they
allow) on the one hand, and the symbolic systems of human cultures on the other. If
this is right, such an emergence out of two co-existing structures which are
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themselves at very different levels shows that ontological stratification is not
straightforwardly hierarchical (cf Collier, 1994: 132). In other words, humans have
evolved as a species in which sexual feelings can become attached to symbols and
markers of gendered power relations (exactly how this comes about has been
variously theorised, with, for instance, psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology
proposing different sorts of mechanism).
The reality of sex
Having introduced and illustrated some critical realist concepts and distinctions, I can
now go on to sketch a critical realist theory of gender. Postmodern feminists
sometimes gesture at a favourite target, ‘the base/superstructure distinction’, the
invalidity of which is supposed to be patently obvious. For Rita Felski, much
poststructuralist thought itself ‘remains caught within a surface/depth opposition’
(1997:17). A critical realist theory of gender would indeed identify structures at lower
levels (the ‘base’ or ‘depth’), and in a non-reductionist way seek to explain how these
condition possibilities at higher levels (the ‘superstructure’ or ‘surface’). It would not
make the mistake of assuming that the second terms were mere expressions of the
first, or that the causal relationship was invariably one way. The much criticised
‘second stage’ feminist distinction between sex and gender is a good place to begin.
For some postmodern feminists, sexual difference is most certainly real, but must be
understood as discursive rather than material (Felski, 1997). Repetitive gender
practices give rise to ‘constitutive constructions’ of the body as material. Extradiscursive sexual difference is an illusion without which we could not live or think.
‘”Sex” is part of a regulatory practice which produces the bodies it governs’ (Butler,
1993: 1). Whence these surprisingly constant dualisms? We have to turn to the ‘law of
the father’ in Lacanian psychoanalysis to understand this ‘base’.
For other postmodern feminists (and Butler too is sometimes in this camp) bodies are,
indeed differentiated. They vary in the amount of subcutaneous fat, width of the
pelvis, distribution of hair, shape of internal and external genitalia, number of X and
Y chromosones and so on. Such differences are not stratified, nor otherwise theorised.
This is a realist conception, but an empiricist, actualist one. The categorisation of such
differences into ‘male’ and ‘female’ is seen as arbitrary, comparable to dividing
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humanity according to whether they had attached or unattached ear lobes, ignoring or
operating on ambiguous cases, and organising society around this distinction. The
distinction between ‘males’ and ‘females’ is entirely socially constructed, since there
is no dimension on which these two groups can be reliably distinguished. Women
have moustaches, men get breast cancer, and the plethora of supposed expressions
have no essence behind them. For instance, Hawkesworth asserts that gender
narratives (she would include accounts of sexual difference in these) are ‘totalising
fictions that create a false unity out of heterogenous elements…’ which have ‘little to
offer in a postmodern world that understands the body, sex and sexuality as socially
constructed’ (1997: 651-2).
Such thinkers are arguing that sex is like ‘race’, and should similarly be embellished
with scare quotes. ‘Race’ has been exposed as a series of constructions from disparate
elements with no intrinsic significance. In social realist terms, ‘race’ is a bad
abstraction, theoretically misleading (Sayer, 1992, Danermark et al. 2002).
Differences in skin pigment are real enough, and so are the other markers of ‘race’ at
the level of the empirical. However, at a deeper, structural level, discrete races do not
exist. The genotypical differences between them are less significant than the
differences within these groups, counter to scientific racism. ‘Race categories have far
more to do with politics than they have to do with science’ (Carter, 2000:3).The
argument against the ontological validity of race classifications is that they do impose
a spurious unity on groups of humans who are actually diverse – and do so for the
worst of reasons.
Carter, a social realist, argues that because there are no such things as races, the
sociological use of the term to refer to beliefs in and discourse about races, and social
relations and practices understood in terms of race, is highly misleading; preventing
analysis and explanation of what is going on (Carter, 2003). Analogously,
poststructuralists argue that all talk about gender should be detached from ideas about
sex, or alternatively that sex should be seen as a creation of gender. ‘What is really
going on’ is entirely within discourse.
However, sex is not like ‘race’. Human beings have evolved as sexual creatures, and
the markers of sex are not unrelated, nor of equal weight.
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Approximately 99.6%… of all humans are born biologically male or female.
Because several processes are involved in the sexual development, the laws do
not operate with one hundred percent predictability… hypospadias, the
condition in which the male urethral opening extends along the underside of
the penis, is… made explicable when the common tissue origin of all genitalia
is acknowledged. The condition reflects a shortage of the hormones necessary
to convert the bipotential fetal genitalia into a male penis; in other words,
hypospadias is a penis with a female urethra… Thus, the phenomenon of
intersexuality is a reflection of the causal structure of sex, a real structure that
intimately links male and female bodies while explaining differences. It is not
the effect of a “resistance” to discourse or a lawless chaos or even a
continuum…
(Hull, forthcoming, my emphasis).
Genetic sex, Hull points out, cannot (at this time) be altered. It is at a lower level,
ontologically speaking, than its phenotypical effects (to which environmental factors
also contribute). Postmodern writers massively exaggerate intersexuality and
misrepresent sexual attributes as continuous rather than as distributed dimorphically,
despite the variations and overlaps on any one dimension.
Do these variations mean that sexual difference is not real? Once again postmodern
feminists have higher standards than anyone else for categorisation. Hawkesworth
maintains that females and males are not ‘natural kinds’ because there is no set of
properties possessed by every member of each of these groups (1997). From a realist
point of view, ‘natural kinds’ are so called because they tell us something about the
causal structures of the world. Causally important properties are contingently
clustered, but in such a way that the presence of some properties renders the presence
of others more likely – because there are common underlying properties that tend to
maintain the clusters of features (Keil, 1989:43). Biological kinds can never meet the
essentialist criteria postmodern thinkers implicitly require (Boyd, 1992). Biology is
messy and complex, and its regularities take the form of tendencies rather than laws.
In the case of sexual difference, these tendencies are strong, ‘the genotypic and
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phenotypic division of bodies into two sexes crosses species and millenia’ (Hull,
forthcoming).
Sexual difference, then, is a ‘good’ abstraction. Pace deconstructionists, it brings
together characteristics that are internally connected, and the connections in question
are substantial, not merely formal (Danermark et al 2002). Sexual difference is also
socially significant. This significance is an emergent property of human societies,
given the sorts of (sexed, mortal) beings humans are. While ‘race’ could be exploded
and lose its credibility as a means of classification, this could not happen to sexual
difference. It is relatively easy to imagine a world without ‘races’ and racism. It is
hard to imagine a world where sex difference was socially so insignificant that there
was no sex-gender order. Means of reproduction will probably always be a salient
feature of human societies, variously institutionalised but always deeply meaningful
in their symbolic orders. Perhaps if humans lived to be two hundred, and their adult
sexual and reproductive life lasted for only one eighth of that life span, gender
arrangements might become far less significant and gender identity a temporary
phenomenon, to be shrugged off at the end of the reproductive period as some
workers seem to shrug off their occupational identities on retirement. It might even
happen that sexual difference remained important in the second hundred years
because it affected vulnerability to different illnesses, but otherwise had no effect on
social practices. But even such far fetched thought experiments do not make credible
a social world without sex (and therefore gender) as a partial basis for social
organisation.
Sex and gender
A strength of the sex-gender distinction is that it recognises the stratification of
reality. Sexual difference is real, and partly extra-discursive. Its material effects are
relatively (though not entirely) constant between cultures and over time. Our
differently sexed bodies enable different reproductive roles for females and for males,
different sexual possibilities (famously, multiple orgasms for females), and by the
same token limit what we can do. Little boys discover that they have no wombs in
which to grow babies, that they will never have breasts with which to feed them.
Little girls discover they cannot urinate standing up without getting wet legs.
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However, we need to distinguish between the causal powers of sexed bodies on the
one hand and sexual dimorphism on the other.
Sexual dimorphism is a feature of the world facing all human societies. Recently,
sociologists have distinguished between that material difference in bodies (sex) and
cultural understandings of it and social organisation around it (gender). One broadly
realist writer on gender expresses it in this way: ‘Gender is the structure of social
relations that centres on the reproductive arena, and the set of practices (governed by
this structure) that bring reproductive distinctions between bodies into social
processes’ (Connell, 2002:10, emphasis in the original). Or, as he puts it informally,
gender is about how human societies deal with human bodies – specifically
reproductive difference. Yet, influenced in many ways by poststructuralism, he rejects
ontological stratification.
Gender refers to the bodily structures and processes of human reproduction.
These structures and processes do not constitute a ‘biological base’, a natural
mechanism that has social effects. Rather, they constitute an arena, a bodily
site where something social happens. Among the things that happen is the
creation of the cultural categories ‘women’ and ‘men’ (and any other gender
categories that a particular society marks out) (op. cit. 48).
I find it hard to understand categorisation as taking place in or at ‘a bodily site’ rather
than referring to it. I suspect that, like poststructuralists, Connell is wary of stratified
accounts because he (rightly) fears biological determinism. In fact, recognising sexual
difference as a ‘natural mechanism’ need not be determinist or reductionist. Accounts
which see gender as an expression or reflection of sexual dimorphism are obviously
wrong, for the reasons Connell and many others have given. Gender arrangements are
eminently culturally variable. But what they retain (and Connell himself insists on
this, against the radical contingency asserted by poststructuralists such as
Hawkesworth and Butler) is that they refer to sexual difference. ‘What makes a
symbolic structure a gender structure, rather than some other kind, is the fact that its
signs refer, directly or indirectly, to the reproductive relationship between women and
men’ (Connell, 2002:38). It seems that Connell does not want to see the symbolic
system as a ‘social effect’ of its referent, presumably because reproductive difference
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and sexual dimorphism are compatible with many different forms of the gender order.
And yet, I shall argue, sexual dimorphism is a causal condition of the gender orders
we know.
Sexual difference is, indeed, a natural mechanism, in that the different but related
causal powers of female and male sexed bodies, when brought into interaction in
specific ways have emergent powers – to reproduce. If impregnated through
penetrative sex with male humans, female humans may give birth to children and feed
them from their bodies (and in technologically advanced societies may have children
in other ways too, which are also related to sexual difference and its properties). The
meanings and implications of this, as much gender research has shown, depend on
social and cultural context (where ‘context’ refers to other co-acting mechanisms). In
a highly technological society with safe artificial feeding and readily available
contraception, reproductive difference will be differently understood from one in
which formula and condoms are not available, or in which they are not affordable or
are culturally forbidden.
Gender orders involve social representations of sexual difference. They cannot be
read off from the real causal powers of differently sexed bodies (powers which are of
course affected by gendered practices) (Sayer, 2000). Sexual difference is just one
among many mechanisms co-acting to produce the many varied gender orders, and
probably best seen as a kind of ‘background mechanism’ or causal condition. In the
Humean ‘constant conjunction’ sense of cause, sexual difference does not ‘cause’ the
institution of marriage or any particular historical form of it, nor does it ‘cause’ sexual
regulations forbidding or permitting homosexuality. But in a critical realist sense,
sexual difference is a mechanism contributing to the development of such institutions
and such rules. Just because it is a ‘basic’, lower level mechanism, its workings are
compatible with many different ways of regulating reproduction and sexuality. To call
it a ‘base’ is not, as Connell and others seem to fear, to attribute a greater,
overwhelming determining power to sexual difference, or to claim that it cannot be
affected by mechanisms at a higher level. It is simply to situate it at a lower level – at
the bottom of the enormous culturally elaborated superstructure. In sum, sex is
ontologically prior to gender, and is one of the many mechanisms the workings of
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which shape gender orders. It does not determine gender, nor is gender reducible to
sex.
Levels of sex and gender
To conclude, sexual difference – the differentiation of most humans into males and
females, and of a minority into intelligible intersexed forms of human beings is basic
in two senses. Firstly, there are real differences between the emergent properties of
male and female bodies, their physical capacities and vulnerabilities. For fear of being
misunderstood, let me repeat that we are talking about tendencies here, not
inevitabilities – the tendency of males to be more muscular, of females to menstruate
and lactate in certain circumstances, the greater average vulnerability of the male
foetus and so on. Other mechanisms, such as gendered differences in the distribution
of nourishment, or amounts of physical exercise, can stop these tendencies resulting in
the outcomes mentioned. Secondly, sexual difference is the referent for the many
ways of conceptualising sexed bodies, representations which legitimise various
gender orders. Sexual difference can be understood in many different ways. Women’s
bodies can be seen as similar to men’s bodies (but with inverted genitals), or as
completely different (Helliwell, 2000). Rape can be seen as the inevitable result of
sexual difference, or as unthinkable (New, 2003). These different representations are
social constructions, but
…we should take the metaphor of construction seriously: attempts at
construction are only successful if they take adequate account of the properties
of the materials that they use... these properties are at any particular time
relatively independent of the constructors: they are not merely a product of
wishful thinking… Social constructions may fail or be only partially
successful (Sayer, 2004: 18).
The ‘relatively independent’ properties in this case are those of differently sexed
bodies, and the relationship between them. Bodies are malleable, but only up to a
point.
Just because sexual difference is basic, it does not constitute automatic grounds for
solidarity between males or between females. At a higher level are the social and
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cultural structures of the gender order, which are both emergent from the biological
features of human populations, and (in their concrete forms) historically determined
(Connell 1987). Within gender orders, across time and across the many cultures of
the world, women are normatively assigned the bulk of the work of ‘producing
people’. What that means for (the various sorts of) women, for men, for children
varies tremendously, as do the beliefs which explain, legitimise and govern such
norms. Sexual difference is among the causal conditions for every form of the sexual
division of labour, whether egalitarian or oppressive, segregated or gender-flexible, so
to explain the particular forms it takes we have to look to the many other mechanisms
involved – but that does not mean that sexual difference just drops out, as a ‘tedious
universal’.
Emerging out of both human physiological and social structures, is human
psychology. Our selfhood emerges from the possibilities implicit in our central
nervous systems, realised in our practical engagement, as embodied beings, with the
physical and social world (Archer, 2000). As beings with certain capacities and needs,
we respond to what we find in our lives, by conceptualising (as well as by feeling and
acting). We draw on the various resources around us to make sense of gender (among
other things) when it is offered to us as an explanatory category. Our responses, and
others’ responses to our responses, create new situations requiring further responses.
In this iterative process we gradually conceptualise and experience ourselves as
gendered: gender becomes part of what Archer calls our ‘inner conversation’ (ibid).
How this happens in our personal biographies influences our desire, or lack of it, for
change in the gender order.
Feminists, like all activists, want change. And some changes are possible (while
others are not) at each of the levels I have discussed, including the relatively enduring
one of biological sexual difference. For activists, two crucial questions are: ‘What is
possible?’ And ‘What do we want?’ Whatever changes are wanted, to bring them
about requires strategy and tactics, since political activity is itself stratified. To have a
chance of formulating effective strategy, we need to know as much as possible about
the relevant causal mechanisms at work at all levels, and the relationships between
them. Causal claims are, indeed, bids for power: the power to make possible and
wanted changes, which comes from an adequate understanding of real causal
15
relationships. Since they are fallible, such claims are inevitably risky, but if we refuse
to make them we give up a key dimension of agency. To restrict feminist activism to
one level of social reality, or to rely on actualist ideas of causation, is rather like
trying to impose the rules of ludo on your game of chess.
16
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