Gender Theory in Troubled Times. Rachel Alsop
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what is meant is ‘Are you a man or a woman?’, with the occasional option of additional categories such as non-binary. And, to complicate matters further, the terms ‘being a man’ or ‘being a woman’ are generally used synonymously with ‘being male’ or ‘being female’, although, for some, these latter terms still carry something of their biological history.
Thirdly, the Gender Recognition Act in the UK (2004), and parallel legislation elsewhere, allows someone to change their initial assignment as man or woman, male or female, similarly without commitment to these categories being either social or biological.
What we are exploring, in this book, is the practice of differentiating people according to sexed categories, as men or women, or categories which reference this dominant binary. We could have used the terms ‘sexed difference’ or ‘sexual difference’ for this task. The latter, as we clarify in chapter 2, is associated with a particular psychoanalytically anchored theory and so was not suitable for us. We could, however, describe our enterprise as theorizing ‘sexed difference’, a term we regard as synonymous with gender. We are using ‘gender’ here, as is now widespread, to mean being positioned in relation to the categories ‘man’ or ‘woman’, a process of which we are attempting to make sense. Since the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in 1990 (discussed in chapter 6), work exploring this process has been referred to as ‘gender theory’. That is the topic of this book.
Doing gender theory
To do gender theory we need to explore what is meant by the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and other terms related to them, such as ‘male’ and ‘female’, or ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. We also need to consider those which reference our foundational terms, such as ‘gender fluid’ or ‘non-binary’ (discussed in chapter 7). What informs the assignment of people to these categories? And what are the consequences of such assignments? Each of these tasks is inter-implicated with the other, as Beauvoir made clear in her seminal text The Second Sex ([1949] 2010). What we mean by the terms is linked to what informs their assignment to people and the personal and social consequences of such an assignment. ‘But first, what is a woman?’ Beauvoir asks (ibid.: 5). And she recognized – and we follow her – that this question is not answered by looking in a dictionary. To answer this question, we need to look at a range of factors: the biological diversity of bodies; what is made of those bodies in familial and wider social contexts; the economic and wider social structural consequences of sexed positionality and its implications for divisions of labour and power differentials; the (variable) cultural meanings, myths and imaginaries attached to sexed difference; the practices into which we are initiated in order to reproduce differences; the intersection of gendered categories with other aspects of social positionality; and the internalization of these external factors to produce the lived experience of gender – a gendered subjectivity which gives us a sense of ourselves as female, or male, or non-binary.
In this book we explore each of these factors. While aiming to provide an account of some of the key debates within gender theory currently, we are also defending a position. We argue that there is no single truth about what it is to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’, though this does not make the meanings of these terms arbitrary or subjective. The meanings are locally, culturally, socially and historically specific. They are mutually constituted alongside other categories of social identity. Their meaning is also being continually renegotiated. To argue this position is to argue against gender essentialism. We argue that there is no single authoritative set of conditions which determines sexed identity. Most, but not all, gender essentialist positions anchor sexed identification in biology (see chapter 1). Some anchor it in the structure of language (see chapter 2). Others anchor it in a subjective sense of self (see chapter 7). In rejecting essentialism, we are not ignoring biological differences or the importance of symbolic structures or subjective feelings but, rather, placing all of these in the context of a more complex story. This is the story which we are unfolding in this book.
Attention to the processes by which we become gendered, and the mechanisms and meanings within society whereby structures of gender inequality are maintained, requires attention to the lives of women and men. It also requires that we pay attention to the lives of people who cross such categories or fit uneasily within them. It necessitates seeing the ways in which gender and sexuality are interrelated with class, race, culture and bodily abilities and how they are implicated in colonial histories. All this needs to be done while retaining a feminist sensibility. This feminist sensibility we would characterize as both attending to the workings of power and privilege in the individual and social articulations of difference and putting such knowledge to work to achieve positive change.
Theoretical shifts
When we wrote Theorizing Gender at the end of the twentieth century, gender theory had been transformed by the work of Judith Butler (1990a, 1990b, 1993). The alignment of gender theory with queer theory, the performative account of gender, and the destabilization of the sex/gender distinction provided a new orientation to the question of sexed difference, as well as new directions for intervention in oppressive practices. We were dazzled, and remain so. But in the intervening years it has been possible to place Butler’s work within a more multifaceted domain.
We have been able to see the way Butler’s work built on the ground-breaking feminist phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir ([1949] 2010). We have included a careful interrogation of her work here, reflecting an increasing body of feminist scholarship in recent years (Card 2003; Deutscher 2008; Kruks 2012; Moi 2008; Sandford 2006). Such re-engagement with Beauvoir has been accompanied by a more general recognition of the importance of phenomenological resources for gender theory, with particular attention to the work of Merleau-Ponty (Young 2005; Heinämaa 2003; Alcoff 2006; Ahmed 2006; Salamon 2010; Gonzalez-Arnal et al. 2012; Dolezal 2015; Weiss 1999, 2015; Lennon 2018).
Beauvoir also anticipated other aspects of feminist theory which have come to the fore since 2000. One is the emergence of what has been termed the new materialism, insisting that, although we have no unmediated access to the material, including the biological world, our accounts are answerable to it, and it plays an active role in the development of those accounts (Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Fausto-Sterling 2000). A key theorist here is Donna Haraway (1991, 1997, 2008, 2016), whose pioneering work we had acknowledged in our original book, and whose contribution has now been celebrated within the new materialist framework.
There has also been a revival of interest in historical materialism (Coole and Frost 2010a; Jackson 2001; Walby 2011), another aspect of Beauvoir’s account – an insistence on the way the economic and social world is structured by both capitalism and patriarchy. Such objective structures are both constituted by and constituting of gender difference. They work both locally and globally (Mohanty 2003; Parashar 2011).
The work of post-colonial writers has highlighted the way capitalist and patriarchal structures both require and constitute the workings of colonialism (McClintock 1995; Spivak 1988; Mohanty 2003). The emergence of decolonial feminism, which has become increasingly prominent in the last decade, provides ‘a way of understanding the oppression of women who have been subalternized through the combined processes of racialization, colonization, capitalist exploration, and heterosexualism’ (Lugones 2010; see also Ortega and Alcoff 2009; Alcoff and Mendieta 2003; Ortega 2016).
The work of decolonial feminists sits alongside that of writers giving an intersectional analysis of all aspects of social identity. Black feminist theory from the 1980s on (Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Collins 1990) insisted that we could not provide general accounts of gendered positionality and subjectivity, for they