Gender and Sexuality. Stevi Jackson
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attitudes and were also reflected in laws, in social policies such as those on education, health and welfare, in politics and in everyday life. In short, the whole realm of the social, from social structures and culture to identities and everyday activities, was dominated by biological explanation of the differences and inequalities between men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals. Indeed, the term ‘gender’ did not even exist as common cultural currency, with the biological term ‘sex’ used to contain and signify men and women (hence Beauvoir’s characterization of women as the second ‘sex’).
This understanding of both the ‘natural’ division between men and women and the ‘unnatural’ deviance of homosexuals had become culturally dominant across the western world during the era of industrialization and urbanization, from around the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. For example, take this best- selling marriage manual advising men about sex with their wives:
Woman is a harp who only yields her secrets of melody to the master who knows how to handle her … what both man and woman, driven by obscure primitive urges, wish to feel in the sexual act, is the essential force of maleness, which expresses itself in a sort of violent and absolute possession of the woman. And so both of them can and do exult in a certain degree male aggression and dominance – whether actual or apparent – which proclaims this essential force. (T.H. Van de Velde, Ideal Marriage, 1930, quoted in Jackson, 1989: 62)
It is clear that the woman is regarded as completely passive when it comes to sex, and that she is seen as ‘naturally’ unknowing until stimulated by ‘the essential force of maleness’, which enables her to re- connect to her own ‘primitive’ biological urges. Using this example, we can begin to define two key terms in sexuality and gender studies: those of essentialism and gender. These concepts will be developed later in the book but for now we offer working definitions. Essentialism literally means any form of thinking that characterizes or explains aspects of human behaviour and identity as part of human ‘essence’: a biologically and/ or psychologically irreducible quality of the individual that is immutable and pre- social, as demonstrated above when sexual urges are identified as ‘essential’ to ‘maleness’. Woman’s sexuality is seen as naturally passive, but also buried deep in her essential biological being, awaiting arousal by a man. Biological explanations are thus essentialist as they rely on reducing behaviour and identity to a biological basis, whether genetic, hormonal or physiological. These explanations are often referred to as ‘naturalist’ and/or ‘nativist’, since biology is equated with ‘nature’.
The idea of ‘natural development’ indicates that human conduct and attributes follow evolutionary and/or genetically programmed patterns, which are impermeable to social influence and are thus what we are born with – the literal meaning of ‘native’. Human ‘nature’ is common cultural shorthand for the biological aspects of our character. In such naturalist explanations, it is perfectly reasonable to state that women are ‘naturally’ maternal, and that homosexuality is against ‘nature’ since it is not reproductive, that (heterosexual) men are naturally sexually aggressive and, ultimately, that heterosexuality is the only ‘natural’ sexual behaviour. Essentialism can be understood in terms of a determinist equation: biological sex equals male or female equals sexual desire directed towards the opposite sex. Anatomy is most definitely destiny in this equation, so child- bearing is taken to define the natural role of women, and non- reproductive sex does not fit within the equation’s parameters.
Biology, however, is not the only basis of essentialism; spiritual or psychological essentialism has also been a significant feature of western thought. In this form of essentialism, gender and sexuality are often conceptualized in religious terms, as God- given (as in discussions of abortion and child- care during the 1960s and 1970s and homosexuality today), or in psychological terms, for example in ideas of love, romance and sex as central to personal fulfilment and emotional well- being. In both psychological and spiritual essentialism, social influences on gender and sexuality are either downplayed or ignored. In such explanations, sexually active women have been described as either spiritually ‘fallen’ or psychologically disturbed, and, of course, homosexuals have been similarly characterized as either sinful or perverted.
The simple statement that ‘one is not born a woman’ thus represents a considerable challenge to the essentialism that is deeply entrenched in western culture.
TASK: Identifying essentialism.
In a small discussion group, ask your classmates to list the different ways in which they can safely say that they know that they are either a man or a woman, heterosexual or homosexual. It is best to do this as anonymously as you can.
Gather the written answers together and try to identify any essentialism in the explanations that people provide.
Think about the essentialist equation discussed above, and the combination of the biological/spiritual/psychological.
1.2 Identifying Gender: First Wave Feminism
As noted above, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949, well before the second wave feminist movement developed in the West in the USA, UK and France. Nonetheless, her work became one the most influential texts across all these countries during the emergence of the women’s movement and her statement that ‘one is not born but becomes a woman’ has come neatly to encapsulate feminists’ rejection of essentialism in favour of sociological understandings. Crucial in the development of such understandings has been the introduction of a term that Beauvoir did not use: ‘gender’. We have already used this term in the introduction and this first chapter, indicating that we can take for granted that, as students of sociology and as members of your specific culture, you will undoubtedly have a working understanding of what that term means, such has been the impact of feminist thinking on both sociology and everyday life. In non- academic contexts, however, ‘gender’ is now often used interchangeably with sex (most commonly on official forms which ask you to identify your ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ as male or female). Some clarification is therefore needed. In short, gender refers to the social division between men and women; masculinity and femininity are thus understood as social attributes rather than natural ones.
Historians of feminism in the West identify a first wave of feminist activism, located from around the 1840s to the 1920s, culminating in the achievement of women’s right to vote in many democracies in the 1920s (Banks, 1990). The first wave of feminists campaigned against social inequalities between women and men and the disadvantaged position of women in society, but they did not develop a specific sociological concept – gender – as an analytical device. However, in their focus on education, employment, equal rights and, above all, the status of women in relation to men, first wave feminism began to identify what we now understand as gender – a social division between women and men. Evangelical, equal rights and socialist feminisms, which developed from the 1840s, all shared an assumption that some form of public intervention could be used to achieve better conditions for women through changes in politics, laws or cultural values [4]. Let us sketch some brief examples, beginning with the equal rights tradition, which has perhaps remained the most durable strand of feminist activism.
In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a text that influenced both American and British first wave feminisms, Mary Wollstonecraft engaged with the emergent and urgent concern with rights brought about by the French and American revolutions. She deliberately echoes the classic statement of (male) human rights made by Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man (1792), arguing that women could equally fulfil the conditions of citizenship if given equal opportunity for education and employment. The implication of this is that access to employment and education affect the relative social positions of men and women and produce divisions between them, based not on biology, but on social exclusion and inequality. Such an analysis compels us to think of these groups as socially created rather than being defined solely or overwhelmingly by their biological or spiritual ‘essence’.