A Passion for Difference

Essays in Anthropology and Gender

Henrietta L. Moore

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745613086, 9780745613079
• eBook ISBN: 9780745668055
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this new book Henrietta Moore examines the nature and limitations of the theoretical languages used by anthropologists and others to write about sex, gender and sexuality.

Moore begins by discussing recent feminist debates on the body and the notion of the non-universal human subject. She then considers why anthropologists have contributed relatively little to these debates, and suggests that this has much to do with the history of anthropological thought with regard to the conceptualization of "persons" and "selves" cross-culturally. Moore develops a specific anthropological approach to feminist post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theory.

In subsequent chapters Moore pursues a series of related themes including the links between gender, identity and violence; questions of gender and identity in the context of intra-household resource allocation; the construction of domestic space and its relationship to bodily practices and the internationalization of relations of difference; and the links between the gender of the anthropologist and the writing of anthropology.

This volume demonstrates anthropology's contribution to current debates in feminist theory.

1

THE DIVISIONS WITHIN: SEX, GENDER AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE

This essay was originally presented as a paper, and since much of what it discusses turns on problems of position, location, self-representation and representativity, I have decided to leave it, as far as is possible, in its original form. Extensive use of the first-person pronoun is frowned on in the contexts in which I am used to working, but I have deliberately retained it in this text to try to convey a sense of particularity, of myself speaking in a specific context(s). The use of ‘we’ is a highly politicized act both in anthropology and in feminist contexts. Its use here is intended to convey a sense of audience, that is, of myself speaking to others. But, and much more importantly, it also operates as a mark of interrogation, a fictive unity that reveals the lines of fragmentation at the very moment when it claims affinity.¹

The original impetus for this paper was a question concerning the way in which feminism had influenced or affected my own work. This perfectly reasonable request engendered in me a feeling of intense panic. My first thought was ‘Oh God, how has feminism influenced my work?’ The root of the anxiety, of course, is one about being found out, being exposed as ‘not the real thing’, ‘not a proper feminist’. The anxiety of failure and lack is not entirely confined to feminists. In fact, it is probably rather a common paranoia among academics. However, what this anxiety raises for me as a feminist is the question of positionality. Feminist politics and feminist practice have always required a clear sense of position and of the politics of location. For one thing, there has been the necessity of speaking out, declaring one’s feminist politics within the workplace or the home or the political party or wherever. In addition, the powerful, sometimes acrimonious debates within the feminist community itself have demanded that one own up as to where one locates oneself in terms of a variety of carefully drawn and demarcated internal divisions: radical feminist or socialist feminist, for example? These divisions are important because they have guided the political programmes proposed by different groups of feminists, and because they bring already politicized identities into play. They raise, therefore, what I am going to call, after Nancy Miller (1991: 20), the problem of representativity. Who and what do we represent when we speak out, and how do we negotiate the inevitable problem in the social sciences of having to speak about people whilst trying not to speak for them? The question of who speaks for whom and on what basis has given rise in feminist debate to a number of very significant divisions, one of which is the split between theory and practice. The main issue here is how to link theoretical work with political activism. Those who have not seen themselves as theorists have demanded to know what purpose theory serves for them and how readily, if at all, theory takes account of their experiences, concerns and struggles. Feminist theory has seemed to many not only arcane, but elitist, racist and/or patriarchal.

Thus, the politics of location make two things abundantly clear. First, that there is no single, homogenous body of feminist theory; and secondly, that the divisions between different groups of women, as well as between practising feminists, make it impossible to assert a commonality based on shared membership in a universal category ‘woman’. Such divisions have a particular resonance for me because I work as a social anthropologist. As it happens, I work with and across divisions of race, class, sexuality, ethnicity and religion. I question the purpose of my work, especially my theoretical writing, for the people I work with because I do not find it easy to know of what immediate use it could be to them. I frequently try to deal with this problem, at least in part, by grounding my theoretical thinking in the details of daily life and in the realities of post-colonial political economies. I do not succeed in this as often as I should like, and I tenaciously hold on to what I try to convince myself is an acceptable political position by giving as much space and time to working on issues of agricultural change, women’s labour and nutrition as I do to writing on theoretical questions. The gross imbalances of power involved in my research situation mean that at every turn the very fact of writing and talking about other people’s lives can never be clearly separated from the question of whether or not one is speaking for them. This is a perennial problem for all feminist social scientists, in spite of a commitment to feminist methodologies and participatory research. Many of my feminist colleagues are very critical of my involvement in anthropology, often projecting on to me their own anxieties about how to deal with issues of race and class, and about how to manage the increasing gap between feminist activism and the academy. I inevitably do the same to them. The most significant impact that feminism has had on my work has been to create a space in which I must continually engage with these issues of positionality and representativity. I want to take up a very small part of this theme in this essay and discuss the way in which theoretical treatments of sex, gender and sexual difference are connected to what it is that unites and what it is that divides us as women and as feminists.

The assertion of the non-universal status of the category ‘woman’ is by now almost a commonplace. Anthropology has had a particular historical role in the development of feminist theory because of its contribution to the critical reworking of the category ‘woman’. In the 1970s feminists outside anthropology drew readily on the cross-cultural data provided by anthropological research to establish variability in gender and gender roles, and thus provide substantive content for the feminist position that gender was socially constructed and not biologically determined. However, cross-cultural variability in the social construction of gender could not and did not account for women’s universal subordination, and in order to remedy this, anthropology developed two very important comparative theories.

The first asserted that women everywhere were associated with nature, partly as a result of their reproductive functions, while men were associated with culture. It was suggested that the devaluing of nature in relation to culture accounted for the hierarchical relations between women and men (see Ortner, 1974). The second theory emphasized that women were inferior to men because they were linked to the domestic sphere, once again in consequence of their role in reproduction and child care, whilst men were associated with the public sphere of social life (see Rosaldo, 1974). These comparative theories of women’s subordination were not long-lived. The categories of nature, culture, public and private were themselves found to be historically and culturally variable, and the homologies posited between these categories and the categories of gender difference were revealed to be far from universal (see Moore, 1988: 13–30; MacCormack and Strathern, 1980; Strathern, 1984; and Rosaldo, 1980). What is important about these two comparative theories of women’s subordination is that they attempted to provide socially, as opposed to biologically, based accounts of women’s position in society and of the origins of gender difference. The preconditions for this project were, of course, that the biological and the social had already been separated from each other as explanations for the origins of gender difference. Whatever role biology was playing, it was not determining gender.

The very fact that these comparative theories were social rather than biological in their determinations opened them to critical reinterpretation by feminists of colour, feminists from the developing world and lesbian feminists. They challenged the notion of the universal category ‘woman’ and the assumption of underlying commonalities of existence for all women. Trans-cultural and trans-historical patterns of female subordination were rejected, and theoretical concepts were reformulated.² In the social sciences, at least, this produced a crisis both about the political purpose and organization of a feminist politics which did not appear to have a coherent constituency and about the status of analytical models of gender. In general, it would probably be fair to say that many responded to the latter crisis by asserting the necessity for culturally and historically specific analyses. We could look for commonalities between well-specified situations, but we would never be able to state in advance what the consequences of the intersections of race, class and gender, for example, would be. What is interesting about this crisis is that it generated a simultaneous move towards pluralism and specificity. An enormous range of empirical outcomes and theoretical positions were produced as a result of having to reduce the scope of any model or analytical statement to a particular situation. We now recognize this development as part of a general critique of universalizing theories, metanarratives and totalizing typologies. The current debate is, of course, one about whether we locate the origins of this movement in post-structuralism and deconstructionism or in feminism.

However, as regards feminist theory in the social sciences, the shift in methods of gender analysis towards a specificity which would account for a plurality of experiences and contexts was not as radical as it seemed. One fixed position remained and that was the division between sex and gender. Gender was seen as socially constructed, but underlying that idea was a notion that although gender was not determined by biology, it was the social elaboration in specific contexts of the obvious facts of biological sex difference. It did not matter that almost everyone recognized that both biology and culture were historically and culturally variable concepts, as were the relations between them. The problem was that the elaboration of the social determinations and entailments of gender in all their specificity had effectively left the relationship between sex and gender very under-theorized.

Recent work in anthropology has returned to this question of the relationship between sex and gender. Sylvia Yanagisako and Jane Collier (1987) have suggested that the radical separation of sex and gender characteristic of feminist anthropology is a specific and rather pervasive ethnocentrism. They argue that it is part of a western folk model which dominates anthropological theorizing and, like so many of the other binary categorizations in anthropology – nature/culture, public/private – it does not stand up to cross-cultural examination. In many ways this simply marks the impact of neo-Foucauldian thinking in anthropology. It is worth recalling here Foucault’s argument in The History of Sexuality (vol. i) that ‘sex’ is an effect rather than an origin and that, far from being a given and essential unity, it is, as a category, the product of specific discursive practices:

the notion of ‘sex’ made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning; sex was thus able to function as a unique signifier and as a universal signified. (1978: 154)

Foucault’s basic argument is that the notion of ‘sex’ does not exist prior to its determination within a discourse in which its constellations of meanings are specified, and that therefore bodies have no ‘sex’ outside discourses in which they are designated as sexed. Consequently, the construction of fixed binary sexes, with fixed categorical differences, is the effect of a specific discourse. What is more, if binary sex is an effect of discourse, then it cannot be considered as a unitary essentialism and, more importantly, it cannot be recognized as invariant or natural. This is, in essence, the argument Thomas Laqueur makes so elegantly in his recent book (1990) and two quite radical positions follow from this point.

First, in terms of anthropological discourse the distinction between sex and gender on which feminist anthropology has rested its case falls away. As Judith Butler (1990) points out in her reading of the above passage from Foucault, perhaps there is no distinction to be made between sex and gender after all. The second point, which follows from the first, is that, as Yanagisako and Collier (1987) assert, we cannot necessarily assume that binary biological sex everywhere provides the universal basis for the cultural categories ‘male’ and ‘female’. If gender constructs are culturally variable, then so are the categories of sexual difference. This is not the first time in anthropology or anywhere else that the fixed binary categories of sex have been interrogated; one only needs to point to the research that exists on ‘the third sex’, hermaphrodism and androgeny.³ But recent work in anthropology has a rather different purpose.

We know that the recognition of anatomical differences between women and men does not necessarily produce a discrete, fixed, binary categorization of sex in the manner of western discourse. Ethnographic material suggests that the differences between women and men which people in other cultures naturalize and locate in the human body and in features of the physical and cosmological environment are not necessarily those which correspond to the constellation of features on which western discourse bases its categorizations. For example, the social differences between women and men may be located in the body as natural differences, as in situations described by anthropologists working in Nepal, where the differences between the female and the male are conceived of as the difference between flesh and bone.⁴ However, these differences of gender are said to be located in all bodies, thus collapsing the distinction between sexed bodies and socially constructed genders usually maintained in anthropological discourse. The female and the male, as flesh and bone, are necessary features of bodily identity. This produces a discursive space where theories of social (gender) difference are grounded in the physiology of the body, and thus function as part of the biological facts of sex difference.

This is, of course, very close to Foucault’s own project, which is concerned with how it is that sexual differences and the category of sex are constructed within discourse as necessary features of bodily identity. In western discourse, it appears, it is not just that we need to have a body in order to have a sex, but that we need a sex so as to have a body. This rather strange way of thinking, of modelling the relationship between bodies and the categories of sexual difference, is precisely that which is most readily undermined by ethnographic material. Many of the differences which concern people around the world are internal to bodies, that is, within them rather than between them. The question is, are we to speak of these differences as differences of sex or of gender? This point is difficult to grasp for many of us because we have the gravest difficulty in understanding categories of sex and notions of sexual difference which do not correspond neatly to discrete physical bodies already designated as sexually differentiated. Sex, then, as far as we understand it within the terms of western discourse, is something which differentiates between bodies, while gender is the set of variable social constructions placed upon those differentiated bodies. It is precisely this formula which obscures rather than illuminates when it comes to the cross-cultural analysis of sex, sexual difference and gender. In many instances, as I have already suggested, gender differences are internal to all bodies and are part of the process through which bodies are sexed. In such situations it is far from apparent how we should distinguish sex from gender, and, even more problematic, it is unclear exactly what gender as a concept or a category refers to. This argument is quite different from those which have been made about the ‘third sex’, hermaphrodism and androgeny.

The instability – potential instability – of the category ‘gender’ in cross-cultural analysis is an alarming prospect. When we talk in general terms about discourses on gender and on the relationship between sex and gender, even if by this we only really mean to say different ideas about sex and gender, we still have to ask ourselves, whose discourses are we referring to? At one time anthropology subscribed to the view that each culture had its own model of gender, its own definitions of the categories female and male. This view, which was much reinforced by a predominantly Durkheimian view of culture and by the kind of liberal cultural relativism still prevalent in the discipline, has changed in recent years as anthropologists have moved towards working with models of culture which stress conflict and indeterminacy, and as they concentrate more on the differences within cultures as opposed to simply between them.⁵ However, it does not solve the problem of how to link what we might call dominant cultural models of gender to the specific experiences and situations of particular groups or individuals within that social context. This is not, of course, a problem which is confined to anthropology, but it raises once again the problems of positionality and representativity.

One set of difficulties here is about how the experiences of race, sexuality and class, as well as other forms of salient difference, transform the experience of gender. But there are additional problems about how we are to conceptualize and analyse the overdetermined relationships between dominant and sub-dominant discourses on gender, the body, sexuality and sexual difference. These questions become particularly acute when we acknowledge that they are crucial not only in and for our work, but in and for our lives. What relationship do feminist understandings of gender have to dominant gender models and ideologies; can the former ever be entirely free of the latter; is this what we are striving for? This is a matter of subjectivity and self-identity, as well as a matter of politics. When we are busy discussing other people’s discourses on gender, their views about the body, their gender identities and subjectivities, how easy do we find it to produce the kind of analysis which we would like to see applied to ourselves?

As Adrienne Rich remarked:

Perhaps we need a moratorium on saying ‘the body’. For it’s also possible to abstract ‘the body’. When I write ‘the body’, I see nothing in particular. To write ‘my body’ plunges me into lived experience, particularity … To say ‘the body’ lifts me away from what has given me primary perspective. To say ‘my body’ reduces the temptation to grandiose assertions. (1986: 215)

By ‘grandiose assertions’ Rich means presumably universalizing, comparative theories. As a lesbian feminist, Rich is only too well aware that the dominant discourses on gender, the body and sexuality prevalent in her own cultural setting do not fit her personal understanding of these categories and/or processes very closely. Lesbians, like many other groups, have evolved their own discourses, what some have termed sub-dominant or alternative discourses, on these issues. It is on this basis that writers talk of different kinds of experience – ‘the lesbian experience’ or ‘the black experience’, for example – and seek in terms of feminist theory to establish the grounds for theoretical approaches based on positionality and representativity. However, the problem is not just how to recognize the existence of specific groups who may have alternative perspectives and may not subscribe to dominant discourses within any particular setting. The more pressing problem with regard to gender, the body and sexual difference is to work out what bearing social and cultural discourses have on individual experience.

This is, of course, simply a modern version of an old problem in sociology and anthropology about the relationship between the individual and society. In anthropology this problem has often been run in terms of the relationship between dominant cultural symbols and the individual’s understanding and interpretation of them. This is a key issue in feminist theory, where feminist standpoint theory invites us to take women’s experiences as a starting point for analysis (see, for example, Harding, 1987, and chapter 4 of this volume). Standpoint theory assumes that women have a different perspective from men, and that different groups of women will also differ in their standpoints. In this sense it privileges groups over individuals, but a more radical reading of its premises would suggest that we all of us have different experiences and understandings of cultural discourses, symbols and institutions. The question is how much any of us share with each other.

The specific and the universal, the particular and the comparative – how are these two polarities to be brought into conjunction with each other? I have always been a supporter of the specific and the particular over the universal and the comparative, and I have always assumed that this is the result of my experience of research in Africa. However, I was listening to Catherine MacKinnon lecturing recently on women and human rights.⁶ MacKinnon holds to a radical feminist version of standpoint theory; in her work she constantly emphasizes what it is that women, in the global sense, share, and her work has been extensively criticized on precisely this point. She was talking about the mass rape and enforced impregnation of women in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. She argued simply that these crimes have been and continue to be practised on women in many different times and pl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Passion for Difference
• 1 The Divisions Within: Sex, Gender and Sexual Difference
• 2 Embodied Selves: Dialogues between Anthropology and Psychoanalysis
• 3 Fantasies of Power and Fantasies of Identity: Gender, Race and Violence
• 4 Bodies on the Move: Gender, Power and Material Culture
• 5 Social Identities and the Politics of Reproduction
• 6 Master Narratives: Anthropology and Writing
• 7 The Feminist Anthropologist and the Passion(s) of New Eve
• Notes
• References
• Index