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| ISBN-13: | 9781742199894 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Spinifex Press |
| Publication date: | 01/17/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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The End of Patriarchy
Radical Feminism for Men
By Robert Jensen, Renate Klein, Pauline Hopkins, Susan Hawthorne
Spinifex Press Pty Ltd
Copyright © 2017 Robert JensenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74219-989-4
CHAPTER 1
SEX AND GENDER
As much as any political discussion and debate, inquiries into patriarchy require considerable attention to definitions of terms and explication of concepts — the sociological and scientific, the cultural and biological. Some disagreements may result from using terms in different ways, or not coming to agreement about competing definitions of a term before proceeding. So, I begin with basics.
The most basic: Human beings are organisms living in ecosystems, part of a larger living world we call the ecosphere, our home planet. Although human cognitive and linguistic capacities are — to the best of our knowledge — far more advanced than those of any other species, those capacities do not allow us to transcend the biophysical limits of the eco-sphere. While there is much debate (and no plausible resolution anytime soon) about the existence of a non-material soul or mind, we should be able to agree that we are material beings and that our everyday activities are proscribed by those limits. We can use our creative capacities to imagine many alternative realities, but we live in the material reality of this world.
I take one corollary of this acceptance of our place in the ecosphere to be that there exists something we could call 'human nature', just as there is pigeon nature or barley nature or algae nature. That simply means that every organism has a genetic endowment that makes some things possible and some things impossible — there are parameters within which any organism, including the human, operates. Everyday experience demonstrates that human nature is widely variable, that any two humans who seem pretty much the same can act in dramatically different ways in the same situation, and that there's little we can predict with certainty about any specific human's behavior in a particular situation.
Take the example of whether violence is a part of human nature. There is no reason to believe that any human society has been 100% free of aggressive physical acts by one person against another. We are a species capable of violence, and it's likely that all humans — even those who may never have been violent in their lives, if such a human has ever existed — have the capacity for violence. The real questions are, under what social conditions is violence more or less likely, and what individual differences, interacting with those social conditions, might increase or decrease the likelihood of violent action? We never know as much as we would like to know about these kinds of questions and are usually left to act on informed hunches based on limited evidence.
For example, military organizations have learned that even when killing is socially supported in war, it is part of many individuals' human nature to avoid killing other people, which is counterproductive in battle situations where the military's goal is to eliminate opposing soldiers. Military officials have learned that training can be designed not only to teach soldiers to use killing tools effectively but also to reduce the psychological/spiritual impediments to taking another life, and the implementation of that kind of training has been successful. This does not mean every human being can be trained to kill on command — there is considerable individual variation within the human species — but socialization shapes the expression of that variation, and there are patterns in how people respond to that socialization.
This perception of patterns is the best we can hope for when trying to understand ourselves, our behavior, and the social norms that shape that behavior. We look to the parameters set by biology and do our best to discern the patterns within those parameters. Since anything that human beings do is, by definition, within our nature to do, the question "what is human nature?" should be replaced with questions about which aspects of our nature tend to dominate under various conditions.
Another example involving violence: Is it human nature to beat a child? At first glance, that seems like an awful question — we should love and nurture children, and decent people don't beat children. But children are beaten regularly enough that the capacity clearly is part of human nature. The important questions are, once again: Under what conditions is such violence more likely to occur, and what differences between individuals might influence the likelihood of the violence? Anyone who says, "I would never beat a child" might consider how one's rejection of such violence under ordinary conditions could change in extreme situations that produce inordinate stress.
This helps us navigate the meaning of 'essentialism', a term commonly used in discussions of sex/gender. In certain circles, the assertion that one has an essentialist position on sex/gender is a pejorative. Accusations of essentialism arise often in discussions about a question such as, "Are female humans by nature — that is, essentially — better at making emotional connections, especially with children, than male humans?" A strongly essentialist claim (all female humans are always more adept at emotional engagement than all male humans) is silly, easily refuted by experience. But is a strongly anti-essentialist claim (there are absolutely no differences in levels or styles of emotional connection between female and male humans) any less silly? A reasonable proposal is that the type and intensity of emotional connections are largely a product of how females and males are socialized, and that there will be considerable variation — between societies that have different ways of socializing females and males, and within a society between individuals, affected greatly by early experience. But that proposal is, in a sense, simply an admission that we don't know much about the answer.
The question we want to answer is more vexing: Even acknowledging that socialization will have considerable influence, is there something about the biological differences between female and male humans that make females more likely on average to be better at making emotional connections than males? Is the fact that males do not give birth to children relevant to the discussion? Given the centrality of reproduction to all organisms, and the long period of care that human infants require, this material difference between male and female humans certainly could be relevant, but just as certainly there is no simple or obvious answer. To make a strongly essentialist claim seems unwarranted, as does making a strongly anti-essentialist claim. We lack reliable evidence for either of those positions.
The answer is potentially important, and not merely to satisfy intellectual curiosity. Imagine that by some research method currently far beyond the capacity of existing science, we could determine that females are 'naturally' 18% better at emotional connections than males, and that extra efforts to teach males to be more emotionally connected can only slightly reduce that difference. If we knew that to be accurate, should we shape social arrangements to put females in roles that require more emotional intelligence and put males into other roles? Is the benefit to society in achieving the maximal level of collective emotional connection most important? Or does society benefit when males' abilities are improved, even if only slightly? Or perhaps all this concern about emotional connection makes people insufficiently tough-minded and is detrimental to developing economic efficiency, and therefore males should be in charge of emotional matters so that there's less fussing about it.
My point is simple: Arguments about public policy that are based on simplistic, speculative claims about human nature should be met with considerable skepticism. Whatever one's view, it's difficult to imagine answering the question by asserting a strong essentialist claim that we need not consider anything beyond our genetic endowments as male and female. It seems equally difficult to imagine defending the claim that the physical differences between male and female could not possibly have any bearing on the question. If we jam this into the common 'nature versus nurture' framework, we might conclude — as we almost always do — that there is a complex interplay between genetic endowment and epigenetic factors, which set the parameters for human behavior, and socialization, which not only shapes individuals' behavior but affects the material reality under which the process goes forward.
Definitions of Sex and Gender
These observations are background to the important distinction between sex and gender, the biological and the cultural, what one historian describes as "the single most important feminist theoretical contribution to social theory ... the social structures and meanings attributed to sex difference." Examining that distinction helps identify points of agreement and disagreement, both in the larger society and within feminism.
Borrowing from historian Joan Scott, gender is "the social organization of sexual difference." This sex/gender framework emerged in the 1970s, with perhaps the first clear articulation in sociologist Ann Oakley's 1972 book:
'Sex' is a word that refers to the biological differences between male and female: the visible difference in genitalia, the related difference in procreative function. 'Gender' however is a matter of culture: it refers to the social classification into 'masculine' and 'feminine'.
Let's start with the biology. There are three categories of biological human sex: male, female, and intersex. The vast majority of humans are born with male or female reproductive systems, secondary sexual characteristics, and a chromosomal structure that includes two sex chromosomes that are either XX (female) or XY (male). There are some people (the size of this category would depend on what degree of ambiguity is used to mark it; the common figure is 1 in 2000) born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn't fit the definitions of female or male — anomalies in sex chromosomes, gonads, and/or anatomical sex. One researcher reports that using the expansive definition "intersexual in some form," 1.7% of people are born intersex, and the estimate for those receiving some kind of 'corrective' genital surgery is between 0.1 and 0.2%. The existence of people born intersex does not negate the sexually dimorphic character of the species. As philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper has pointed out, the fact that there are humans born without two functional legs or with problems that preclude them from walking upright does not mean that humans are not bipedal.
These categories are biological — based on the material reality of who can potentially reproduce with whom. They are called 'sex'. Beyond the category of 'sex' (the biological differences between males and females), there is 'gender' (the non-biological meaning societies create out of sex differences). Gender plays out in a variety of ways, including gender roles (assigning males and females to different social, political, or economic roles); gender norms (expecting males and females to comply with different norms of behavior and appearance); gendered traits and virtues (assuming that males and females will be intellectually, emotionally, or morally different from each other); and gender symbolism (using gender in the description of animals, inanimate objects, or ideas).
In contemporary society, we routinely talk about sex in terms of 'males' and 'females' (a biological distinction that exists independent of any particular culture's understanding), and gender in terms of 'masculinity' and 'femininity' (cultural distinctions that depend on how humans in a particular society understand the meaning of the biological distinction). The terms 'men' and 'women', or 'boys' and 'girls', are used by different people in different contexts to mean either sex or gender, which can be a source of confusion in political debate. (I use male/female when referring to sex differences rooted in biology and man/woman or boy/girl when referring to gender roles rooted in cultural constructions of masculinity/femininity.) For someone in the sex category intersex, we have no commonly used terminology, and traditionally this culture has attempted to force such people into male or female categories, often with negative consequences.
The claim of some theorists such as Judith Butler that not only gender but sex itself is a social construction is difficult to understand. Since we organize our world through language, any human naming of the world is, in some sense, a social construction — understanding is shared socially through language. But that's a trivial use of the term, and the question is, to what degree is an assertion about the material world rooted in a reality that we can trust as being accurate independent of human perception and practices? I confess that I find postmodern claims that we should understand "the construal of 'sex' no longer as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies" to be unhelpful.
If a concept is a 'social construction', that means it can be deconstructed, and we could live without it. As Marilyn Frye puts it: To deconstruct a concept is to analyze it in a way which reveals its construction — both in the temporal sense of its birth and development over time and in a certain cultural and political matrix, and in the sense of its own present structure, its meaning, and its relation to other concepts. One of the most impressive aspects of such an analysis is the revelation of the 'contingency' of the concept, i.e. the fact that it is only the accidental collaboration of various historical events and circumstances that brought that concept into being, and the fact that there could be a world of sense without that concept in it (emphasis added).
In Frye's terms, there cannot be a world of sense without an understanding of male and female. No matter what understanding any human society has of sex differences, human reproduction doesn't take place without a male and a female human (even high-tech medical interventions start with sperm and egg, male and female). I don't understand how the claim that sexed bodies are 'discursively constructed' could possibly change that, and so the claim that the sex categories of male and female are a social construction remains incoherent to me. When a colleague challenged my position, she suggested that the science of biology is just one story about sex differences. If that's true, I said, is there a story that anyone could tell, scientific or otherwise, in which I, as a male human, could carry, give birth to, and breastfeed a child?
Sex/Gender and Race
A comparison to racial categories helps make this point. Unlike sex categories, racial categories are biologically arbitrary, a social construction in the deep sense. Racial categories are attached to observable physical differences (such as skin color and hair texture), and there are some characteristics (such as reactions to a specific drug or susceptibility to a specific disease) in which there are some patterns based on ancestors' region-of-origin. But unlike sex categories, the division of people into racial categories is not tied to any biological difference or characteristic that is important to human survival.
Borrowing from Frye, there could be a world of sense without the concept of 'race' in it. We could easily imagine living in human societies with no concept of racial distinctions; observable physical differences would remain, but skin color would be no more relevant for creating categories than the size of one's ears, for example. People have different sized ears, and we could arbitrarily divide the world into the large-eared versus small-eared, but we don't. The genetic differences between humans that are rooted in ancestors' region-of-origin are extremely small and are not the basis for a meaningful biological concept of race. Race, then, is a deeply social construct, using real physical differences to categorize, but differences that have meaning only because of a social process. The modern idea of race, emerging from Europe during its era of conquest and colonization, is the result of history.
But, to restate the obvious, sex categories are different. Human reproduction depends on the physical difference between males and females. This is not an argument that sexuality has no function other than reproduction, which often leads to heterosexist assumptions and anti-lesbian/gay politics, but rather a simple observation about material realities. For humans to mark reproductive differences — to see male and female as distinctively different — is inevitable; the process is not arbitrary.
We can imagine a world with no race categories, but it would be impossible — outside of science fiction — to construct a world without sex categories. Our eventual goal, then, should be to eliminate the concept of race, though in the short term we must retain the categories to deal honestly with the pernicious effects of the social/political realities of white supremacy and racism.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The End of Patriarchy by Robert Jensen, Renate Klein, Pauline Hopkins, Susan Hawthorne. Copyright © 2017 Robert Jensen. Excerpted by permission of Spinifex Press Pty Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Preface: Begin in the Body,
Introduction: Follow Your Fear,
Sex and Gender,
Patriarchy and Feminism,
Pressing Arguments,
Rape and Rape Culture: 'Normal' Violence,
Prostitution and Pornography: Sex Work or Sexual Exploitation?,
Transgenderism: Biology, Politics, Ecology,
Conclusion,
Afterword: On Fear and Resistance by Rebecca Whisnant,
Further Reading,
Index,