Theorizing the Body: Questioning Sex and Gender

"[I]n order to understand reality, and hence eventually have the power to change it, we must be prepared to abandon our certainties and to accept the (temporary) pain of an increased uncertainty about the world. Having the courage to confront the unknown is a precondition for imagination, and the capacity to imagine another world is an essential element in scientific progress. It is certainly indispensable to my analysis." -- French philosopher Christine Delphy in "Rethinking Sex and Gender" (1993)

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Theorizing the Gendered Body
It may seem as if our reading this week and next on “redefining sex and gender” (as Christine Delphy puts it) is a bit of a non sequitur from the most recent stuff we’ve been reading and discussing about how and why feminists of colour, especially Black, Chicana, non-western, and Third World feminists, have critiqued mainstream Anglo-American feminisms for not taking racial, ethnic and other sorts of differences into account in their theorizing and political activism.

But, actually, it’s not. Rather, you should think of QUEER THEORY’s attempts to undermine conventional (and widely-held) notions of and assumptions about SEX and GENDER as yet another attempt to create a feminist politics that is more inclusive and attentive to differences of all sorts – including those that are gender-based.

The “invention” (for lack of a better word) and subsequent intervention of QUEER THEORY has rocked feminism at its core – much as the critiques of women of colour did throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. While feminist theorists as far back as the 1930s (when feminism was allegedly dormant) have challenged the social construction of “femininity” and taken issue with the fact that women’s bodies have been objectified by men. As you’ll read in Jenainti and Groves, feminists in the 1990s took issue with representations of the female body in the popular media, because their argument was that the media both relies on and sustains gender stereotypes, and, thus, women and men learn how to be “feminine” and “masculine” via the messages of the media.

But then a new mode of intellectual inquiry emerged from feminist academic circles called GENDER STUDIES, which “implies a type of thinking about the dynamics of female and male experiences” and relied on the Anglo-American feminist assumption that SEX is a purely biological category, while GENDER (i.e., masculinity and femininity) is socially constructed (J&G 162).

This tends to be the way Women’s Studies students nowadays are initially taught to understand these concepts; however, as I’ve alluded to, and as you’ll read in Delphy and Wilchins, it’s not as simple as that. And this has caused great controversy among and between feminists, between feminist theorists and queer theorists, and, in the world of the academy, between Women’s Studies and LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer) Studies.

Epistemological Conflicts, Political Consequences
Nasty arguments have occurred. Here in Canada, for example, those arguments have, in quite troubling ways, actually threatened the existence of Women’s Studies in the academy. And this conversation is, in large part, why MRU will not likely create a WMST major anytime soon.

This is the link to the original National Post article that began the most recent controversy in January 2010: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2480860

To learn how the Canadian Women’s Studies Association responded, click on these links:

http://www.yorku.ca/cwsaacef/NationalPost.doc
http://www.yorku.ca/cwsaacef/CBCCurrentWSletters.doc

Now, obviously, much of this anti-WMST DISCOURSE (see Wilchins for a definition and discussion of this Foucauldian (i.e., using the theories of Michel Foucault) concept) is largely informed by anti-feminist sentiment emerging more generally from the conservatism of Canada at this historical moment. But the “bad guys” (to put it simply) are using a productive and necessary debate within and between Women’s Studies and Gender Studies, between feminist theories and queer theories, to wage a political war against the existence of Women’s Studies programs throughout Canada.

This is only one of the ways these seemingly esoteric and abstract theoretical conversations matter in the “Real” world (although, as you’ll read in Chapter 4 of Wilchins, Derrida argues that there’s no such thing – even the “Real” is socially constructed!).

Another way is that, as I said the first time that we engaged with Delphy, people have died because they can’t, or choose not to, conform to the FASCISM OF MEANING that is the BINARY sex/gender system. They are either murdered (think of Brandon Teena, whose life story was fictionalized in the movie Boys Don’t Cry) or, as we’ve seen in the news most recently, they commit suicide because they can’t handle the relentless bullying. The good news is that this recent wave of suicides by LGBTQ youth has resulted in the It Gets Better Project, from which the video above was taken.

Wilchins says that all good theory should begin with politics (5), and the political causes and consequences of gendering bodies is why we’re reading about and discussing the relationship between feminist and queer theories in this course on feminist theories. Right now, much (but not all) feminist theorizing and activism incorporates the interventions made by queer theories, and vice versa. This is how theories develop and evolve. And this is how the world gets changed.