Gender and Sexuality. Stevi Jackson
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emphasis from structural forms of explanation to language and culture (see Parts II and III). Foucault’s ideas have proved extremely influential in helping to challenge and historicize the culturally dominant forms of essentialist thinking that operate in society, but his characterization of identities as effectively created by discourse has been more controversial. Some feminists argue that he is largely insensitive to gender divisions, and others find his challenge to the authenticity of identities problematic for political action. Nonetheless, others have found it useful to think about identity from his rigorously anti- essentialist perspective, using it to challenge dominant or universal concepts of identities, showing, for example, how the category of ‘gender’ is produced by expert knowledges such as feminism which are, in fact, middle- class and white ‘knowledges’. Similarly, those seeking to challenge white and male- dominated gay cultures have used Foucauldian ideas to show how identities are potentially multiple and unstable, but are disciplined into dominant versions (white, middle- class and male) by the production of discourses through gay politics and gay symbolic and economic culture, which create the ‘norm’ for being gay. Foucauldian theory has therefore been a useful starting point for those concerned with illuminating difference and so has impacted significantly upon feminism and lesbian and gay sociology, particularly in a contemporary version called queer theory, which has largely focused on the cultural operation of power/knowledge and how it is manifested through specific binary and hierarchical identity categories such as homo/hetero, male/female, black/white.
2.10 Significant Absences in Second Wave Feminism and Gay Liberation
The theories that have been discussed throughout these introductory chapters have had very little to say directly about how racialization structures the concepts of gender and sexuality and the inequalities that derive from their social organization. This exclusion is partly a matter of ‘presence’: that it often takes those who inhabit socially significant categories and experience the inequalities and injustice associated with them to speak up and make visible their oppression in order to put it on the academic and political agenda (see Introduction). Just as this was the case for issues of gender, so it has been the case for issues of racialized gender.
When other social differences, such as sexual identity, race, ethnicity and class, are factored in, it becomes evident that many of the founding texts of second wave feminism failed to provide a conceptualization of gender that was attentive to the differences within the category ‘women’. Feminist characterizations of gender and sexuality, and some early sociology of homosexuality, often assumed a generalized sociological conceptualization of ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’, creating ‘universal’ concepts which were not sensitive to the differences of race, ethnicity and class, either within specific groups such as women or homosexuals, or in allowing an understanding of how these social hierarchies work in intersecting and complex ways. Whilst there was some work looking at race, with discussions of the ‘double jeopardy’ of race and gender from the African- American perspective during the early second wave feminist movement (Beal, 1970), there has been little consistent integration of these perspectives into mainstream feminism. In particular, feminists from different ethnic or racialized groups have criticized feminist theories as too often based on a white and middle- class perspective. Patricia Hill Collins (2000) has produced a key black feminist critique, arguing for what she calls an ‘intersectional’ analysis which does not reduce black women’s experience simply to gender or race, demonstrating in her work that many of the key targets of radical feminism, such as prostitution and pornography, are manifested in specifically racialized ways. Moreover, queer theory has challenged the notion of universal, unitary social categories, arguing that differences within such categories as ‘women’ or ‘gays’ undermine their legitimacy as the basis for all political action and theory (Seidman, 1996) (see Ch. 7.4).
Second wave feminism and theories of sexuality all position heterosexual masculinity at the apex of the hierarchies that oppress women and non- heterosexuals. However, more recent work has interrogated masculinity as a social construction and illuminated the complexities within this category – again, often of race and class but also in relation to sexual identity. Raewyn Connell (1987) developed the concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ both to describe the dominant ideal of masculinity in patriarchal structures, and to direct our attention to the many masculinities that do not conform to this dominant form.
As illustrated throughout this chapter, the overwhelming focus of sociological work has been to challenge the biological and psychological determinism that has dominated commonsense and ‘scientific’ thinking on gender and sexuality. This has inevitably meant a rejection of biological arguments based on how our bodies function and look: neither genital/reproductive organs nor other physical attributes such as breasts, body hair and musculature should determine our social positions. As a result, the role of the body as a site of femininity and masculinity has, on the whole, been characterized negatively, focusing on how bodily functions like child- bearing are represented ideologically, for example. However, we have seen a recent emphasis on how gender and sexuality are embodied. This takes two major forms: first, there has been a reconsideration of how we can theorize embodiment as social, effectively extending the sociological gaze on gender and sexuality to the processes of embodiment – how our bodies are understood by ourselves and what we do to them to fit in with gender/sexual categories (Witz, 2000; Jackson and Scott, 2007). Second, there has been a strand that questions whether we can reduce all embodiment to the cultural, or whether there is, in fact, a realm of bodily physicality that does constrain and structure our abilities, actions and identities (Grosz, 1994).
In conclusion to these introductory chapters we want to signpost these historical gaps in knowledge and highlight the fact that we discuss their more recent incorporation into sociological thought on gender and sexuality in the remainder of the book. The rest of the book builds on the introductory historical account presented in Part I, elaborating on current thinking and research, much of which addresses these significant absences.
Learning Outcomes
After reading the chapters in Part I you should:
understand that the culturally dominant ways of explaining gender and sexuality are ‘essentialist’, locating gender and sexuality as ‘innate’ and pre- social;
have an understanding of biological, psychological and religious variants of essentialism and how they have affected wider cultural beliefs and practices;
be able to identify the hierarchical ordering of gender and sexuality and how this has been legitimated and reinforced by essentialist ideas;
have knowledge of the ways in which first wave feminism contributed to the sociological understanding of men and women as social groups, paving the way for the second wave conceptualizations of gender;
understand how and why feminist, lesbian and gay scholars have challenged essentialism;
be aware of the variety of perspectives existing within second wave feminism and how they have influenced each other;
understand how the stigmatization of homosexuality is interdependent with the development and maintenance of binary gender divisions;
be aware of the neglect of race/ethnicity within second wave feminism and lesbian and gay theories.
Notes and Resources for Further Study
1 1. For statistics on women in politics look at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s