In order to distinguish biological differences from social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter, feminists appropriated the term ‘gender’. Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was used solely to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French (Nicholson 1994, 80; see also Nicholson 1998). However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although a person's sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals' sex and gender simply don't match. Along with psychologists, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore, changeable. Gayle Rubin (for instance) uses the phrase ‘sex/gender system’ in order to describe “a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention”(Rubin; 1975). Rubin employed this system to articulate that “part of social life which is the locus of the oppression of women” describing gender as the “socially imposed division of the sexes”. Rubin's thought was that although biological differences are fixed, gender differences are the oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how women and men should behave. Women are oppressed as women and by having to be women. However, since gender is social, it is thought to be mutable and alterable by political and social reform.
In some earlier interpretations, like Rubin's, sex and gender were thought to complement one another. ‘Gender is the social interpretation of sex’ captures this view. That is, according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby creating feminine and masculine persons. Distinguishing sex and gender, however, also enables the two to come apart: they are separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman, or vice versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995). So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism suggested that gender differences result from cultural practices and social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by saying that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product of a social practice” (Haslanger; 1995).
One way to interpret Beauvoir's claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman is to take it as a claim about gender socialization: females become women through a process whereby they acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour. Masculinity and femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how individuals are brought up. They are casually constructed: social forces either have a causal role in bringing gendered individuals into existence or (to some substantial sense) shape the way we are women and men. And the mechanism of construction is social learning. For instance, Kate Millett takes gender differences to have “essentially cultural, rather than biological bases” that result from differential treatment. Social learning theorists hold that huge arrays of different influences socialize us as women and men. This being the case, it is extremely difficult to counter gender socialization. For instance, parents often unconsciously treat their female and male children differently. Some socialization is more overt: children are often dressed in gender stereotypical clothes and colours (boys are dressed in blue, girls in pink) and parents tend to buy their children gender stereotypical toys. They are also intentionally or not tend to reinforce certain appropriate behaviours. ( Renzetti and Curran ; 1992). According to social learning theorists children are also influenced by what they observe in the world around them. Also the books and television play a vital role. Socializing influence like these are still thought to send implicit message regarding how females and males act and are expected to act shaping us into feminine and masculine person.
Nancy Chodorow has criticized social learning theory as too simplistic to explain gender differences. Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices. In particular, gendered personalities develop because women tend to be the primary caretakers of small children. Chodorow holds that because mothers (or other prominent females) tend to care for infants, infant male and female psychic development differs. Crudely put: the mother-daughter relationship differs from the mother-son relationship because mothers are more likely to identify with their daughters than their sons. This unconsciously prompts the mother to encourage her son to psychologically individuate himself from her thereby prompting him to develop well defined and rigid ego boundaries. However, the mother unconsciously discourages the daughter from individuating herself thereby prompting the daughter to develop flexible and blurry ego boundaries. Childhood gender socialization further builds on and reinforces these unconsciously developed ego boundaries finally producing feminine and masculine person. Gendered personalities are supposedly manifested in common gender stereotypical behaviour. Chodorow thinks that these gender differences should and can be changed. This can be done through both male and female parents should be equally involved in parenting. (Chodorow 1995)
Catherine MacKinnon develops her theory of gender as a theory of sexuality. Very roughly: the social meaning of sex (gender) is created by sexual objectification of women whereby women are viewed and treated as objects for satisfying men's desires. Masculinity is defined as sexual dominance, femininity as sexual submissiveness: genders are “created through the eroticization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex”. For MacKinnon, gender is constitutively constructed: in defining genders (or masculinity and femininity) we must make reference to social factors. In particular, we must make reference to the position one occupies in the sexualized dominance/submission dynamic: men occupy the sexually dominant position, women the sexually submissive one. As a result, genders are by definition hierarchical and this hierarchy is fundamentally tied to sexualized power relations. So, gender difference for MacKinnon is not a matter of having a particular psychological orientation or behavioural pattern; rather, it is a function of sexuality that is hierarchal in patriarchal societies. This is not to say that men are naturally disposed to sexually objectify women or that women are naturally submissive. Instead, male and female sexualities are socially conditioned: men have been conditioned to find women's subordination sexy and women have been conditioned to find a particular male version of female sexuality as erotic – one in which it is erotic to be sexually submissive. For MacKinnon, both female and male sexual desires are defined from a male point of view that is conditioned by pornography. Bluntly put: pornography portrays a false picture of ‘what women want’ suggesting that women in actual fact are and want to be submissive. (Mackinnon ; 1989)
The crux of Butler’s argument in Gender trouble is that coherence of the categories of sex, gender and sexuality- the natural seeming coherence for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in male bodies is cultural construction through repition of stylized acts. These stylized bodily acts in their repition establish the appearance of essential ontogical “core” gender. This is the sense in which bulter famously theorized gender along with sex and sexuality.
Butler holds that distinguishing biological sex from social gender is unintelligible. For her, both are socially constructed. If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. (Butler; 1990)
Butler is not alone in claiming that there are no tenable distinctions between nature/culture, biology/construction and sex/gender. Butler makes two different claims: that sex is a social construction, and that sex is gender. To unpack her view, consider the two claims in turn. First, the idea that sex is a social construct, for Butler, boils down to the view that our sexed bodies are also performative and, so, they have “no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute their reality. (Butler; 1990). This implausibly implies that female and male bodies do not have independent existence and that if gendering activities ceased, so would physical bodies. This is not Butler's claim; rather, her position is that bodies viewed as the material foundations on which gender is constructed, are themselves constructed as if they provide such material foundations (Butler; 1993). Cultural conceptions about gender figure in the very apparatus of production whereby sexes themselves are established. (Butler ;1990).
For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex (1990). Sexed bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed and sex categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of the world. Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves discursively constructed: they are the way they are, at least to a substantial extent, because of what is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are classified. Sex assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative (Butler 1993). When the doctor calls a newly born infant a girl or a boy, she/he is not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act. In effect, the doctor's utterance makes infants into girls or boys. We, then, engage in activities that make it seem as if sexes naturally come in two and that being female or male is an objective feature of the world, rather than being a consequence of certain constitutive acts (that is, rather than being performative). And this is what Butler means in saying that physical bodies never exist outside cultural and social meanings, and that sex is as socially constructed as gender. She does not deny that physical bodies exist. But, she takes our understanding of this existence to be a product of social conditioning: social conditioning makes the existence of physical bodies intelligible to us by discursively constructing sexed bodies through certain constitutive acts.
For Butler, sex assignment is always in some sense oppressive. Again, this appears to be because of Butler's general suspicion of classification: sex classification can never be merely descriptive but always has a normative element reflecting evaluative claims of those who are powerful. (Butler; 1993). Feminists should examine and uncover ways in which social construction and certain acts that constitute sex shape our understandings of sexed bodies, what kinds of meanings bodies acquire and which practices and illocutionary speech acts ‘make’ our bodies into sexes. Doing so enables feminists to identity how sexed bodies are socially constructed in order to resist such construction.
However, given what was said above, it is far from obvious what we should make of Butler's claim that sex was always already gender. (Butler;1999). Stone takes this to mean that sex is gender but goes on to question it arguing that the social construction of both sex and gender does not make sex identical to gender. According to Stone, it would be more accurate for Butler to say that claims about sex imply gender norms. That is, many claims about sex traits (like ‘females are physically weaker than males’) actually carry implications about how women and men are expected to behave. To some extent the claim describes certain facts. But, it also implies that females are not expected to do much heavy lifting and that they would probably not be good at it. So, claims about sex are not identical to claims about gender; rather, they imply claims about gender norms (Stone; 2007).
Some feminists hold that the sex/gender distinction is useful and other as it not useful.
According to plumwood, the distinction has made it possible to do a number of useful things such as the following-: just as the word ‘mother’ takes it for granted that the women who give birth to a child (sex) also subsequently exclusively nurture and rears it (gender) and makes separation of these functions difficult both to do and describe, so the description of all the relevant difference as simply sexual differences take it for granted that all these differences criteria go tighter, that a person with a given set of sex difference will have corresponding characteristic of gender. But these from the point of view of the distinction are both more variable over social arrangements and more changeable or reconstructible than sex difference. A distinction between the class of females and the set of characteristic associated with them is essential to explaining how it is that philosophy has been andocentric. Unless we make such a distinction, we cannot hope to explain the complex and variable operation of andocentric, how both women and feminine have been systematically devalued and excluded in ways that are related but not identical. The distinction has been a major tool in the battle against biological reductionism, which treats all difference between men and women as simply uniformly ‘natural’. Distinction has several important political functions. The especially important one is that it has made it possible to recognize that people of the same sex vary greatly in the degree to which they approximate to their gender ideal or norm, in the extent to which they exhibit masculinity and femininity. Thus it has made it possible to claim that in rejecting or criticizing masculinity, one is not necessarily rejecting or aiming to eliminate maleness as such or all of the male sex; that in rejecting femininity one is not necessarily rejecting femaleness or women etc. a further important function is that it has made it possible to see the system as open to change of certain kind. The distinction should enable explication of the relation between sex and gender as at least partly an intentional one, one where gender is closely bound up with what people conceive the significance of biological sex to be. This is implicit in the stollerian account of gender as produced by what people involved in key socialization processes believe a child’s sex to be not what is actually is. Thus parents and others believing a child to be female will help produce an appropriately gendered child and similarly for those believing, Child to be male.Social conception clearly plays a highly significant role.(Plumwood;1989)
Further a critique to sex/gender distinction is found in Moira Gaten’s paper. The paper contains quite a number of theses on sex and gender but the main one appear to the following-: the sex/gender distinction assume that the connection between the body (sex) and gender is arbitrary. It assumes that gender is a matter of consciousness and that the body is neutral and passive with respect to the formation of consciousness. Masculine and feminine behaviour are taken to be arbitrary. The distinction implicitly involves a body/ consciousness distinction of a rationalist or Cartesian type with body assumed to be neutral and passive. The consciousness assumed is neutral or implicitly male. In contrast to this, it is claimed that the subject is always a situational body. There is no neutral or passive body which underlies gender. As a result the attempt to treat gender as somehow eliminable to see gender as problem is basically mistaken. (Plumwood;1989)
Moi has further argued that the sex/gender distinction is useless given certain theoretical goals. This is not to say that it is utterly worthless; according to Moi, the sex/gender distinction worked well to show that the historically prevalent biological determinism was false. However, for her, the distinction does no useful work when it comes to producing a good theory of subjectivity and a concrete, historical understanding of what it means to be a woman (or a man) in a given society. That is, the 1960s distinction understood sex as fixed by biology without any cultural or historical dimensions. This understanding, however, ignores lived experiences and embodiment as aspects of womanhood (and manhood) by separating sex from gender and insisting that womanhood is to do with the latter. Rather, embodiment must be included in one's theory that tries to figure out what it is to be a woman (or a man). (Moi; 1999). The focus on women arises from an explicit effort to speak about social from the perspective and experience of women.( Thapan; 2009)
The various critiques of the sex/gender distinction have called into question the viability of the category women. Feminism is the movement to end the oppression women as a group face. But, how should the category of women be understood if feminists accept the above arguments that gender construction is not uniform, that a sharp distinction between biological sex and social gender is false or (at least) not useful, and that various features associated with women play a role in what it is to be a woman, none of which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient, like a variety of social roles, positions, behaviours, traits, bodily features and experiences.
Thus one cannot have a clear cut understanding of the distinction, with different opinions flowing in. The feminist arguments against biological determinism and the claim that gender is socially constructed , that gender — or what it is to be a woman or a man — is still very much a live issue. Feminists have not entirely given up the view that gender is about social factors and that it is distinct from biological sex. The jury is still out on what the best, the most useful or the correct definition of gender is.
Reference:
- Liz Stanley , Should ‘Sex’ really be ‘Gender’-or ‘Gender’ really be ‘Sex’?, In R. Anderson and W. Sharrock (eds) Applied Sociology. London, Allen and Unwin; 1984.
- C. West and D.H. Zimmerman,” Doing Gender”, Gender and Society; 1987.
- Judith Butler; Gender Trouble, New York: Rutledge; 1990
- Alex Hughes and Anne Witz ; “feminism and the Matter of bodies: from De Beauvoir to Butler”, Body and Society; 1997.
- V. Plumwood; Do We Need Sex/Gender Distinction? , Radical Philosophy; 1989.
- Gary Goertz and Amy G. Mazur; Politics, Gender and Concepts, Cambridge University Press; 2008.
- Nancy Chodorow , Reproducing Mother; 1995
- Troil Moi, What is a Women, Basil Blackwell; 1999.
- Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott; Gender: A Sociological Reader, Routledge; 2002.
- Meenakshi Thapan; living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and identity in Contemporary India; 2009.
