Gender in Real Time

Power and Transience in a Visual Age

Kath Weston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780415934534
• eBook ISBN: 9781317958406
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

After decades of innovative scholarship that galvanized a field and shattered a world of preconceptions, the study of gender now appears to languish. It has been a long while since the publication of a provocative and influential text like Judith Butler's Gender Trouble . Kath Weston argues that the problem is one of time. For too long gender studies has been preoccupied with the visual, with ample attention given to issues of performativity and embodiment, all at the expense of time. Gender in Real Time makes a provocative and important new argument that will revolutionize the field of gender studies. Introducing temporality into the equation and examining the ways gender exists, Weston uses the tools of political economy, the history of mathematics, Darwinian evolution, and a bit of physics to propel gender studies toward the future. Startling new concepts like zero gender and the meaning of time claims are introduced. Moreover, the impact of our time-sensitive society, with its ever-increasing need for speed and accelerated development, is explored for its effect on the production of gender. With chapter titles including, Unsexed, The Ghosts of Gender Past, and The Global Economy Next Time, this book offers a pioneering addition to the field that will forever change our notion of gender.

Chapter One
What the Cat Dragged in: Gender Studies Today—An Elegy and Introduction

© Judi Weston, reprinted by permission

Do the time, don’t let it do you.

—Prisoner at Black Mountain Correctional Center for Women, North Carolina

What an impossibly beautiful dream: to live in a genderless world, or if that’s not your cup of tea, to live in a world untrammeled by the inequalities historically associated with gender. This was the apparently timeless vision conjured up by women’s movements in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Somewhere in the course of the changes leading up to the present century the dream died, and with it went a certain critical edge for gender studies.

To study gender relations today is to work in the shadow of paradox. On the one hand, publications on gender are flourishing. Never before has so much been written about masculinities and femininities, variously construed; raced and gendered bodies; international feminisms; honor killings; anorexia; women, sovereignty, and citizenship; the disproportionate numbers of female refugees; transgender movements; reservation of electoral seats for women; the gendering of music; the gendering of architecture; the gendered consequences of inheritance and divorce law. And that is just a start. On the other hand, a certain lassitude now seems to afflict the study of gender, a sense that feminist scholarship, in the North American academy at least, has passed its glory days, no longer offering quite as much in terms of activism or insight.¹ For people working hard to change conditions that bear down harder on women, a women’s studies department in a university and the gender studies section in a bookstore may no longer be the first stops, or even the last, when they need to research their subjects.

The unnamed paradoxes that shadow contemporary discussions of gender contribute mightily to this sense of intellectual exhaustion. Yet these paradoxes are hardly recognized, much less debated, as such. They say that bad luck comes in threes, but paradoxes? Perhaps only when untenable. Call the first the paradox of liberation simultaneously achieved and denied. Call the second the paradox of spacetime, in which gender theory exalts the visual at the expense of the temporal. Call the third the paradox that pits survival against representation in an economy with an increasingly global reach.² All three paradoxes intertwine. Each incorporates problematic assumptions about time.

The purpose of this introduction is to dissolve or displace these paradoxes in order to prepare the ground for an inquiry into some of the ways that time travels through the study of gender. Nothing of the sort can be accomplished in an era of globalization without locating political economy at the heart of the analysis. It is my premise throughout that a closer examination of the temporalities embedded in the making and marketing of gender (and its theories) will help get gender studies moving again. As the field has been all along. Paradoxically enough.

Liberation When?: The First Paradox

An unexpected thing happened on the way to women’s liberation: Great hopes for improving women’s lives gave way to a strange mix of complacency and despair. Scarcely a decade had passed since the 1970s hunt for ancient matriarchies (on the part of cultural feminists) and heroic women workers (on the part of socialist feminists) before a new generation of scholars began to criticize such quests for their naïveté. As it turned out, women could hunt, join armies, operate bulldozers, and lead groups to political consensus without gender equity necessarily following. The celebrated egalitarianism of certain precapitalist societies looked more and more like a romanticized figment of an overheated twentieth-century imagination.³ In the guise of history, early feminist researchers had described their yearning for what they found lacking in the now.

Their successors concluded that while contemporary measures of inequality might show some “improvement” for women, the gap that separated women from men would not be closing any time soon. Gender and its attendant inequalities had proved impressively malleable, adapting to new circumstances rather than withering away in response to demands for change. In a rare instance of agreement, feminist and antifeminist critics concurred that gender was probably here to stay. Equality between men and women never had and perhaps never would prevail.⁴ Activist groups modified their political goals accordingly. This political volte-face marked the passing of another of what literary critic Susan Buck-Morss has called “mass dreamworlds,” utopian hopes for a future, in this case shored up with fantasies of what had once been possible in the past.⁵

Yet this newfound skepticism coincided historically with a growing popular belief that gender oppression, at least in North America, had already been laid to rest.⁶ Using the language of progress, many people across the political spectrum argued (and continue to argue) that the lives of women today are better than ever. Women were said to operate on a virtually equal footing with men, their lives positioned at the end of a long timeline called modernization. One look at the gender and color composition of most corporate boardrooms, not to mention the first-class cabin of any plane, should have given these commentators pause. Preposterous claims about women’s unlimited opportunities issued not only from the pens of critics such as Camille Paglia, but also from the mouths of coworkers, mothers, and religious advisers. Polemics by writers such as Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell made similarly inflated (and related) claims about the end of racism. All this, despite ample indications that the rhetoric of inequality’s passing has represented nothing so much as a premature burial.

How can such apparently contradictory beliefs coexist? What does it mean for inequality to proclaim itself vanquished even as it demands to be sustained? It is worth taking a moment to consider these narratives of self-congratulation and dashed expectations in relation to one another. The paradox of liberation simultaneously achieved and denied is not a case of some people believing one thing, and some another, when the topic turns to gender. Indeed, it is not uncommon in the United States for a single individual to voice sentiments derived from each of these logically opposed narratives of change. In politics, logic can offer poor refuge.

The narrative of disillusionment begins with a vision—I use the word advisedly—of a world without gender. Many feminists of the 1970s endorsed the humanist position that gender (like war, the state, racism, and poverty) could, perhaps would, but certainly should go away. With a new body of gender theory at their disposal, they appealed to sophisticated (if contentious) explanations for the mechanisms that produce and reproduce gendered differences.⁷ Organizers formulated their goals with reference not only to theory but also to an idealized future. In practice the static vision of a world without gender enlisted a thoroughly temporal orientation.

Lisa Rofel, an anthropologist who has done extensive research in China, recounts how European and North American feminists created Chinese women in the image of their politics and their dreams by casting them as living, breathing exemplars of liberation.⁸ The Chinese state, for its part, bound gender equity ideologically ever closer to nationalism, holding up women’s liberation as a definitive proof of successful modernization. Discrepancies in the official story eventually provided ammunition to opponents of socialism and fostered despondency among minority world (that is, “Western”) feminists.⁹ Rofel chronicles her own attempts, as a North American scholar, to take seriously the assertions of factory women in China that they were liberated. Women in this sector of the economy worked longer hours than men, yet men complained about getting stuck with “dirty work” such as washing bicycles. What feels like inequality, and to whom? What calibrates oppression? Discussions of equity quickly lead to matters of measurement and interpretation.¹⁰

It is one thing to understand the conceptual problems with the evolutionary and utopian threads woven into concepts such as “improvement,” “advancement,” or “liberation.” It is something else again to understand how a political goal such as liberation begs for application of disciplines associated with measurement to determine what will count as better, if not best. To take gender studies in this direction is to ask whether colonial histories and national ideologies do not ride gender theory still, carried belowdecks in the hold of very specific assumptions about time and space, counting and accounting.

Over time the rough-hewn notion that “women’s status” lends itself to measurement, much less serves as a barometer of progress, became patently insupportable. Subaltern studies scholars pointed out that attempts to use “women’s condition” as a marker of “civilization” had a long and undistinguished history in the annals of colonization, where it often served as an excuse for incursions by colonial powers.¹¹ National liberation movements, which often fought colonial rule with a promise to bring about a lasting improvement in gender relations, fared no better under feminist scrutiny. Legal scholars developed sophisticated critiques of the ways in which postcolonial law codes saddled women with demands to represent the newly liberated nation.¹² Women, more than men, experienced pressure to embody historically constructed but ideologically timeless national/cultural/communal “traditions.” Middle-class Indian men were expected to abandon their lungis to close business deals in Western suits while women were supposed to cling to their salvar kameez and saris, regardless. Gender remained in the aftermath of more than one sort of revolution, and multiple were the wellsprings of disillusionment.

Gender had reasserted itself not only in practice, but in theory as well. Disputes ensued about whether a world without gender would be ideal in any case, even if it were possible to achieve. If gender is here to stay, some reasoned, why not treat it as a resource for play and for pleasure, rather than fighting it as a deadly opponent? Why not value some of the ways that gender can come together with race, class, religion, nation, and other aspects of latter-day identity to give texture to everyday encounters? What is a world without color, dalliance, difference? Debate over such questions intensified within late-twentieth-century women’s movements against a backdrop of renewed globalization.¹³

Might there be a way to retain gender without perpetuating inequality? Why not reconfigure gender relations so that they need not entail hierarchy and oppression? Why not reconceive power as a positive capacity instead of a resource to be seized or a weapon used to strike somebody down? Shouldn’t it be possible to have your gender and eat well, too? Easier said than done, perhaps. Memories of what “separate but equal” meant in pre–Civil Rights America were still fresh. But as women’s groups began to claim gender and scholars began to investigate masculinities and femininities, rather than rush to discard them, the genderless world became a lost world, navigable only by the light of nostalgia, betrayal, and good riddance.¹⁴

Organizing never stopped, despite widely circulated claims about the demise of “the” women’s movement. As the twenty-first century beckoned, both local feminisms and transnational women’s movements continued to thrive, albeit in different forms and venues than in previous years. In place of a utopian politics, activists in the 1980s United States painstakingly built coalitions and alliances to accommodate multiple, crosscutting, sometimes conflicting identities. North American feminists more consistently specified which women they were discussing, rather than basing assessments of women’s needs on middle-class white women or generalizing too broadly about women versus men. By the 1990s Hawai’ian women had assumed key leadership positions in the Hawai’ian sovereignty movement. Sicangu Lakota and Ihanktonwan Dakota on the Yankton Sioux reservation revived a coming-of-age ritual for girls with the goal of fostering a living tradition that could offer young women advice on how to resist the pressures to join gangs as well as knowledge of medicinal plants. Groups such as the Portland, Maine–based Sisters in Action for Power introduced a new generation to direct action campaigns that demanded affordable public transportation and gender violence prevention programs in the schools.¹⁵

Organizing initiatives abroad during the last two decades of the century were, if anything, more pervasive. Brazilian women banded together to get running water in favelas (shantytowns). Urban Afghani women went underground during the years of Taliban rule to teach the next generation of girls how to read and write. With support from UNICEF, a coalition of eastern and southern African artists and researchers launched Sara, a comic-book series for young women that addressed problems such as getting an education, sexual assault, running a household with limited resources, and HIV prevention. Women across the globe worked hard to establish nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), then went on in the new century to reevaluate the dominance of NGOs in transnational feminism.¹⁶ Through it all, gendered divisions of labor did not go away, incarceration of poor women did not go away, domestic violence did not go away, restricted access to wealth and land did not go away. Women continued to starve.

How is it, then, that this narrative of great expectations giving way to great efforts but far from utopian results led, not just to disillusionment, not to renewed calls for activism or irrevocable gloom, but (in the United States) to an emergent narrative of triumph and self-congratulation? If you have happened to discuss gender with a group of twenty-year-old Americans lately, you may have learned, to your surprise, that women and men now receive the same pay. Not only that: A woman can do anything she wants as long as she tries, women can legally marry women in some state somewhere, and new technologies inevitably makes women’s lives easier. (Needless to say, evidence bears out none of these assertions.) You may not find everyone in accord on each point, but similar statements about women’s de facto state of liberation are bound to come up. The term “postfeminism,” which implies an equality long since achieved, gained currency to describe precisely these sorts of presumptions.¹⁷

What matters for an understanding of the first paradox—liberation simultaneously achieved and denied—is not whether various “improvements” to (some) women’s lot can be established. What matters is that many women and men alike credit as true changes that have not happened in gender relations. Their response to questions about gender differs markedly from the split dramatized in polls that ask about inequalities associated with race or wealth. When race is the headliner, for example, respondents who identify as white are much more likely to perceive a historical shift toward racial equality than respondents from less racially privileged groups.¹⁸

If logic lay at the heart of the matter, postfeminist claims would be easy enough to dispel. Counter-examples abound. In the United States, women working full-time year-round made seventy-three cents to the male dollar in 1998. Better than 1904, no doubt, but far from on par. In South Africa, rape had become sufficiently routine to make it profitable for companies to invent rape insurance, offering policies that guarantee medical assistance in the event of assault. In Thailand and Vietnam, women who could have been ordained as members of the Buddhist Sangha millennia ago still had no officially recognized standing as nuns; the Bhikkhuni (order of Buddhist nuns) in Sri Lanka was restored in 1998 after a thousand-year hiatus, in response to work by women’s groups. Literacy rates for women from Mongolia to Burkina Faso were going down, not up. And these examples hardly begin to examine class- and color-specific renditions of gender as they take shape through other vectors of inequality.¹⁹

Single women in the United States have a harder time securing home mortgages than single men across the board, but if the woman filing an application is Native American, her chances of securing a loan decrease dramatically. To understand why requires more than an analysis of gender per se. In this case, gender relations unfold in the context of a history of genocide, bureaucratic procedures for state certification of Indian identity, state-sponsored assimilation policies, struggles to preserve a land base, sovereignty claims, and land grabs that have continued from the colonial era up to the present day. Clearing title to Indian land has become a procedure so uncertain and complex that many banks wouldn’t touch it even if reservation incomes did not alre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PREFACE NOW BOARDING: THE STARSHIP GENDER
• CHAPTER ONE WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN: GENDER STUDIES TODAY—AN ELEGY AND INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER TWO UNSEXED: A ZERO CONCEPT FOR GENDER STUDIES
• CHAPTER THREE DO CLOTHES MAKE THE WOMAN?: PERFORMING IN AND OUT OF INDUSTRIAL TIME
• CHAPTER FOUR THE GHOSTS OF GENDER PAST: TIME CLAIMS, MEMORY, AND MODERNITY
• CHAPTER FIVE THE GLOBAL ECONOMY NEXT TIME: WHEN GENDERS ARE NOT ENOUGH
• Notes
• References
• Index