Samenvatting
Summary Introducing Gender Theories
- Instelling
- Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen (RU)
Introducing Gender Theories Radboud Universiteit samenvatting van bijna alle literatuur
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Introducing Gender TheoriesTheorizing Genders Chapter 1 Natural Women and Men
Natural states of affairs
- The appeal of nature is commonly an appeal to a certain kind of givenness, an appeal to
which the world has a structure and order independent of our interactions with it, a
structure which we cannot modify and which conditions our lives and agency
- Philosopher John Locke claimed that there were to ways in which we could classify the world
1. Into natural kinds, categories which ‘carved nature and its joints’ and enabled us to see
the order and regularity which was simple given with the world.
a. If categories of men and women are natural categories in this sense, then there
will be a set of characteristics which are essential to men and which explain their
ways of interacting in the world and also for women.
2. There are also forms of classification which reflect, not nature in a direct way, but our
interest and purposes in dealing with it.
a. They are grouped together for convenience, with defining characteristics fixed by
our decisions over language use rather than discovered by an investigation of the
natural world.
- Are men and women natural kinds with real essences which explain their mode of interaction
with the rest of the world? Or are they constructed kinds, constructed for our purpose,
whose defining characteristics are an effort of our social practices?
Male and female in Western thought
- The essence of a thing is supposed to be what makes it the thing it is, what remains
unchanged while the thing exist.
- Division of people into female and male and of associated traits into masculine and feminine
as being natural, simply a reflection of the order of things.
- Natural knowledge has been construed as a transcending, transformation or control of
natural forces; and the feminine has been associated with what rational knowledge
transcends, dominates or simply leaves behind.
- Dichotomy between male as rational and capable of universally valid thought and female as
emotional and tethered to particularity of her body and situation is one that is still evident
today.
o Lot of men not capable of achieving this universal maleness slaves, non-EU and lower
class were also regarded as deficient in rationality
- Not only gender differences but also other social divisions by an appeal to the different
natures of those wo occupied different social positions justify social inequalities
- Being a male was defined in terms of aspirational ideal which characterized what men should
be. Being female was treated much more as a biological kind.
Sex differences as natural kinds
- Research on sex differences has been founded on a set of assumptions
o Division of bodies into male and female is a natural division, part of the order of the
world
o Visible body differences are fairly reliable markers, particularly the presence or absence
of a penis, these surface bodily differences are a manifestation of inner characteristics
which serve to fix us as male or female.
, - These underlying features which make us male or female are matters of dispute, but it has
most commonly been assumed that they fix not only the obvious bodily distinctions, but also
sets of associated psychological and behavioural dispositions which are regarded as
constituting masculinity and femininity
- First bodies were seen as the same, later they recognized some differences, by late
nineteenth century they were seen as opposites
o with women's bodies seen as particularly dominated by the balance or imbalance of
hormones, a 'fact' used to justify exclusion from important roles in public life
o People have also argued that men have a greater tendency to dominate than women do.
This is a result of male hormones, testosterone.
- Important parallels in way sexual difference and racial difference have been treated
o In 19th century racial categories were natural kinds, with distinct psychological and
physiological characteristics.
o Gilman (1985): scientific work in the nineteenth century interwove conceptions of both
women and colonized people as inherently primitive
o Unlike sexual difference, scientist no longer treat racial differences as a biological natural
kind, because of genetic theory.
Recent work
- Two current active research areas: selfish gens and
- Selfish genes: view found in work of socio-biologists that our genes programme our
behaviour. Genetic similarities are now viewed in a much more problematic way to be the
basis of complex behavioural traits such as shyness, alcoholism or criminality.
o Behaviour of men an women should be result of difference in genes: XY and XX
o Central to the framework of socio-biology is an adaptation of the argument from natural
selection. Assumed sexual difference have evolved through natural selection to maximal
advantage of both sexes.
o Conflict of interest between the sexes is genetically programmed
o Rose, Lewontin & Kamin (1984): male dominance is seen as evolving from dependency of
the human infant and human care.
o Stories attempting to ground social behaviour in a genetic determinism, are reinforced by
animal studies showing that male/female differences are found in non-human societies
in ways that supposedly parallel those found in human ones
This range of theories has been used to explain not only sexual differences but also
antagonistic behaviour between peoples who view themselves as different.
They argued that there is an innate tendency to form groups and to engage in
altruistic behaviour in relation to that group and aggressive behaviour to anything
perceived as different
This view was challenged by sociobiologist from whom living things behave in such a
way as to maximize their own fitness and from whom there is apparently no place
for altruism even within the limited scope of the group.
- Brains: hunt to discover differences in brain of men and women and between white and
other races began early 19th century when such supposed differences were linked to
psychological characteristics such as intelligence, maturity, rationality, sensuality etc
o Most of claims died early last century. However, two of them revived
Idea that brain size differs in males and females and in people of higher and lower
intelligence
, Idea that region connecting the two hemispheres is different form men and women
joined by suggestion that hypothalamus is sexually dimorphic, comes from view
about ways in which hormones work
More attention is currently concentrated on the nerve fibres connecting the right
and left hemispheres
When the direction of research moves into the area of sexuality the international
publicity becomes even more intense
LeVay (1996) He concluded that these changes affected their heterosexual
behaviour but not their sex drive. Assuming that the hypothalamus is sexually
dimorphic.
The sex/gender distinction
- One issue is the way the categories of distinction show such a large area of overlaps
- A second issue is that the attempts to find biological pathways, which are supposed to link
such traits to biological sex, have yielded only the most slender of results based on very few
cases.
- A third and crucial issue is that, where there is some correlation between dispositions and
apparent biological sex, there are available other explanations as to why such correlation
might exist, crucially to do with the individual and social life experiences of those who have
been assigned to the categories male and female
- Until we treat men and women the same socially then we have no way of telling what
natural differences there may be between them
- Sex differences, the division into male and female bodies, were seen as biological
differences, which it was the domain of the biological sciences to investigate and define.
- Gender differences, however, behavioural and psychological traits associated with
masculinity and femininity, were viewed as socially constructed.
- most important precursor of much of this work was the anthropologist Margaret Meads
investigation in non-Western societies in the 1930s and 1940s. she studied men and women
in three societies and concluded that: ‘If those temperamental attitudes which we have
traditionally regarded as feminine can so easily be set up as the masculine pattern in one
tribe and in another be outlawed for the majority of women as well as for the majority of
men, we no longer have any basis for regarding such aspects of behaviour as sex linked’.
- Later anthropological work has importantly brought to notice that not only can gender roles
vary across and within societies, but they are also not necessarily tied to biologically male
and female bodies.
- Men and women, or masculinity or femininity, as gender categories, came, then, to be seen
as socially created kinds, categories not given by nature but geared to our purpose.
Science as culture
- if best known response to scientific accounts of sex difference was the making of the
sex/gender distinction, it was followed by work which was challenged the supposed
objectivity of science itself.
- Recognition was given to fact that scientific theories reflect the culture from which they
emerge and subjectivity and positionality of those who produce them
- Science is seen as simply reflecting the world which it is describing.
- It has however been increasingly argued that science is a social product and reflects culture
from which it emerges. No brute facts, no unmediated access to the world.
, - It is important here not to view such mediated scientific knowledge simply as bad science,
examples where scientists have let their objectivity be compromised. It is not so. This is a
characteristic of all knowledge collecting.
- However, these frameworks cannot themselves be seen as a simply given with nature. This
conclusion is reinforced when we recognize the role that models and metaphors play int eh
construction of scientific theories.
o These metaphors draw on the resources and assumptions surrounding culture.
Gender construct sex
- General reflection on nature of scientific knowledge have a clear bearing on the history of
theories of sex differences.
- Sex differences are not simply given, the biological theories are the product of particular
historical and culturally specific moments of production.
o This raises the prospect that cultural assumptions about gender differences condition
biological theories about sex.
o Of key importance is the assumption that there are simply two sexes, male and female, a
model which has come increasingly under challenge in recent work,
o What the treatment of children classified as intersexed bodies signals is not that the
biological classification into two sexes is that which nature dictates. It reflects instead a
cultural need to reinforce and defend gendered binary, a clear classification into male
and female and modification of bodies which appears to cross the divide.
- The different markers of biological sex - genes (chromosomes), hormones, genitals,
reproductive function, secondary sexual characteristics - do not all line up neatly together in
the same way, even in cases where the label of intersex is not forced.
Politics of naturalising accounts
- more difficult to see how naturalising moves can be used in a progressive way in the case of
gender.
- If gendered identities are given, then the challenge to existing social inequalities appears to
be undermined, since these will be viewed simply as a reflection of the natural order.
- There are, however, theories within which naturalizing moves around gender can be
progressive.
o Some versions of radical feminism there is an appeal to what are regarded as natural
characteristics of women which would prevail if they were not subject to the domination
of the patriarchal order.
o These characteristics are viewed as a cause for celebration rather than denigration.
- Important to note, however, that the same political practices can be engaged in by women
with very different metaphysical views
- Danger of false universalism attaching even to the naturalism employed for progressive
purposes are linked to a further danger. To accept neutralising talks is to reinforce the
dichotomies of the conservative thought around sex differences.
- Most feminists oppose naturalising explanations of gender differences
Naturalising trick
- Our behaviour is mediated through the interpretive framework in terms of which we
experience our world.
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