Imaginary Bodies

Ethics, Power and Corporeality

Moira Gatens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134891627
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Moira Gatens investigates the ways in which differently sexed bodies can occupy the same social or political space. Representations of sexual difference have unacknowledged philosophical roots which cannot be dismissed as a superficial bias on the part of the philosopher, nor removed without destroying the coherence of the philosophical system concerned. The deep structural bias against women extends beyond metaphysics and its effects are felt in epistemology, moral, social and political theory.
The idea of sexual difference is contextualised in Imaginary Bodies and traced through the history of philosophy. Using her work on Spinoza, Gatens develops alternative conceptions of power, new ways of conceiving women's embodiment and their legal, political and ethical status.

Part I

1 A critique of the sex/gender distinction^*

In recent years the sex/gender distinction has gained ever greater currency in texts and papers concerned with sexual politics. This distinction is used in both confused and confusing ways and it is the purpose of this essay first to clarify what the theoretical basis of this distinction is, second, to ascertain whether or not it is a valid or coherent distinction and finally to consider the political effects of its use by various political groups. This tripartite task will involve overlapping considerations of feminism's relation to socialist and homosexual politics. The tale of the uncomfortable alliance between feminist and socialist politics¹ and feminist and homosexual politics² has recently surfaced in a way that is potentially productive for all parties. A critical appraisal of past and continuing alliances is the least one expects from radical theorists who value dialectical and historical analysis. It is in this spirit that the question of the viability of analyses located at the intersection of ‘sex’ and ‘class’ can be addressed. The difficulty of reconciling sex and class, or feminism and Marxism, despite the intervention of a third party, psychoanalysis,³ has been well demonstrated.⁴

In this context, the introduction or ‘spot-lighting’ of gender, as an analytical tool which purportedly yields high explanatory returns (as opposed to the barren category of ‘sex’) offers occasion for comment. Over the past five years or so, feminist theory of an Anglo-American orientation has taken up the notion of ‘gender’ with considerable interest and mixed intent.

Influential journals and texts such as m/f, Ideology and Consciousness, Feminist Studies, The Reproduction of Mothering, The Mermaid and the Minotaur and Women's Oppression Today share, if nothing else, this enthusiasm for the notion of ‘gender’ as a central explanatory and organizing category of their accounts of the social, familial and discursive construction of subjectivity.⁵ In general, the favouring of the category ‘gender’ over the category ‘sex’ is defended in terms of the ‘dangers of biological reductionism’. Theorists who favour analyses based on gender argue that it is indispensable to see ‘sex as a biological category and gender as a social one’.⁶ Additionally, it would appear that the role of prior or current political commitment to any one of a variety of ‘left’ politics played a decisive role in this preference for ‘gender’.⁷ Given that the category ‘gender’ commands considerable theoretical centrality in contemporary feminist and socialist-feminist theorizing as compared with its peripheral employment in the early 1970s,⁸ it is appropriate, at this time, to critically reassess its credentials.

It is in the area of political analysis and practice that the recent proliferation of the sex/gender distinction becomes most worrying. The distinction has been used by groups as diverse as Marxists, (usually male) homosexual groups and feminists of equality.

Clearly, these three groups display distinct political and theoretical motivations, yet the effect of their use of the sex/gender distinction is to encourage or engender a neutralization of sexual difference and sexual politics. This neutralizing process is not novel; it can be traced to nineteenth-century liberal environmentalism where ‘re-education’ is the catchcry of radical social transformation. Much of contemporary radical politics is, perhaps unwittingly, enmeshed in this liberal tradition. A feminism based on difference rather than on an a priori equality is representative of a decisive break with this tradition.

What I wish to take to task in these uses of gender theory is the unreasoned, unargued assumption that both the body and the psyche are postnatally passive tabulae rasae. I will challenge the notion that the mind, of either sex, is initially a neutral, passive entity, a blank slate on which are inscribed various social ‘lessons’. In addition, I will question the role of the body—understood as the passive mediator of these inscriptions—in these accounts. These views on mind and body result in a simplistic solution to female oppression: a programme of re-education which involves the unlearning of patriarchy's arbitrary and oppressive codes and the relearning of politically correct and equitable behaviours and traits which will, in turn, lead to the whole person: the androgyn. It is precisely this alleged neutrality of the body, the postulated arbitrary connection between femininity and the female body, masculinity and the male body, and the apparent simplicity of the ahistorical and theoretically naive solution of resocialization that this chapter proposes to challenge.

Before presenting a critique of the sex/gender distinction I should clarify what I take to be the central issue at stake. It would appear that one of the most burning issues in the contemporary women's movement is that of sexual equality versus sexual difference. It is arguable that this debate brings to a crisis both feminism's association with socialism and feminism's association with (male) homosexual groups. Both associations are often predicated upon an assumed ‘essential’ or possible equality, in the sense of ‘sameness’ between the sexes. It is against the backdrop of this question that this essay is situated. I would maintain that the proponents of sexual equality consistently mischaracterize and distort the position of those feminists who favour a politics of sexual difference. The fault may well lie with those feminists who have not made clear what they mean by a ‘politics of difference’. This essay is an attempt to amend this situation and, in addition, to quell once and for all the tired (and tiring, if not tiresome) charges of essentialism and biologism so often levelled at theories of sexual difference.⁹ Critics of feminists of difference tend to divide the entire theoretical field of social enquiry into an exclusive disjunction: social theory is either environmentalist or it is essentialist.¹⁰ Therefore, and it follows quite logically from this premise, if feminist theories of difference are not environmentalist then they must be essentialist. The task remains, then, to reopen the field of social theory from its forced containment in this disjunction and to demonstrate the practical and theoretical viability of a politics of difference. The latter task shall be effected indirectly, by way of a critique of ‘degendering’ proposals.

The degendering proposal

The problem of the relationship between sex and gender is, of course, not a new one. Freud grappled with the problem of finding a suitable definition of masculinity and femininity and their relation to men and women in the ‘Three Essays’ published in 1905.¹¹ However, the authoritative source for the recent prominence of writings which focus on gender is not Freud but Robert J. Stoller, a contemporary psychoanalyst. Stoller published a book titled Sex and Gender¹² in 1968, where he reported the findings and theses arising out of his research and involvement with the Gender Identity Research Clinic at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Stoller first studied various biological anomalies (for example, neuters and hermaphrodites) in order to ascertain the relationship between sex and gender, and he then considered the biologically normal but psychologically disturbed individual (for example, the transsexual). He claimed, on completion of his research, to be able to account for the etiology of both the transvestite and the transsexual—although his account was avowedly more complete in the case of male transvestites and transsexuals than in the (much rarer) cases of female transvestites and transsexuals.¹³ Stoller accounted for these psychological anomalies largely in terms of the distinction which he developed and systematized between sex and gender.

The explanation he offered was that the biological sex of a person has a tendency to augment, though not determine, the appropriate gender identity for that sex, (that is, masculinity in the case of the male sex, femininity in the case of the female sex). However, a person's gender identity is primarily a result of postnatal psychological influences. These psychological influences on gender identity, Stoller claimed, can completely override the biological fact of a person's sex and result in, for example, the situation of the transsexual.¹⁴

Stoller took the genesis of transsexualism to be wholly social, that is, not biologically or physically determined. He posited the cause of male transsexualism to be the mother's attitude to the child from birth. He reported that in all normal infants there is an initial period of symbiosis with the mother but that this symbiosis must be broken, particularly in the case of the boy, if normal masculinity or femininity as a separate (and in the case of the boy, a different) and independent identity is to develop.

In the case of the male transsexual, Stoller claimed to find a marked unwillingness on the part of the mother to allow her infant to separate himself from her and develop as an individual.¹⁵ Stoller stressed that it is not only a matter of how long the child is held close to the mother's body but also in what manner.¹⁶ If the mother sees the child as a part of, or extension to, her own body, then the child will respond by failing to develop an identity separate from the mother's (or developing it at a critically late stage) and so, in the case of a male child, will feel himself to be a woman trapped in a male body.

The details of Stoller's work are not important for the purposes of this essay. What is important is that his work was generally heralded as a breakthrough in the area of sexuality and socialization. As such it was quickly taken up by feminist theorists who saw it as offering theoretical justification for the right to equality for all independently of sex. His work has been used by Greer, Millett, Oakley, and more recently by Chodorow, Dinnerstein and Barrett, to name a few.¹⁷

Millett, writing in 1971 and acknowledging Stoller as support or ‘proof of her view, speciously reasons that ‘[p]sychosexually (e.g., in terms of masculine and feminine, and in contradistinction to male and female) there is no differentiation between the sexes at birth. Psychosexual personality is therefore postnatal and learned.’¹⁸ Millett's contention that ’patriarchal ascriptions of temperament and role’ to the sexes are arbitrary¹⁹ leads to the inevitable and naive feminist tactic of the resocialization of society. She argued that

[s]ince patriarchy's biological foundations appear to be so very insecure, one has some cause to admire the strength of ‘socialization’ which can continue a universal condition ‘on faith alone’, as it were, or through an acquired value system exclusively. What does seem decisive in assuring the maintenance of the temperamental differences between the sexes is the conditioning of early childhood.²⁰

Greer and Oakley pursued a similar line of reasoning.

The initial appeal of the implications of Stoller's research, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is consistent with the social context of liberal humanism. Education or re-education, at that time, seemed a particularly viable programme for radical social change. Ten years later, however, both the context and the sentiment has altered considerably. Previous demands and strategies of the women's movement have backfired or proved to be cooptable.²¹ It is in this context that we need to examine both the ‘politics of equality’ and sentiments originating with the liberal humanists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.²² The adoption of Stoller's research by writers such as Chodorow and Barrett warrants careful scrutiny.

In order for a programme of ‘degendering’ to be successful or even theoretically tenable, one would have to allow the validity of at least two unargued assumptions central to the thesis put forward by Stoller and assumed by the ‘degendering feminists’. These are:

1. the body is neutral and passive with regard to the formation of consciousness, which is implicitly a rationalist view; and
2. one can definitively alter the important effects of the historical and cultural specificity of one's ‘lived experience’ by consciously changing the material practices of the culture in question.

If the validity of these assumptions is allowed then one could claim that cultural and historical significances or meanings receive their expression in or are made manifest by an (initially or essentially) neutral consciousness which, in turn, acts upon an (initially) neutral body. One could claim, in addition, that masculine and feminine behaviours are arbitrary forms of behaviour, socially inscribed on an indifferent consciousness that is joined to an indifferent body. However, the above-mentioned assumptions warrant no such validity. To clarify the problem in other words, socialization theory, which posits the social acquisition of a particular gender by a particular sex is implicitly a rationalist account, an ahistorical account and an account which posits a spurious neutrality of both body and consciousness. In order to substantiate this position vis-à-vis the resocialization feminists who uncritically adopted Stoller's account, the two assumptions outlined above will be treated in detail. Although they are obviously interrelated, they will be treated separately for the sake of clarity.

Sex/gender and the rationalist conception of the subject

It is in the area of the heredity versus environment debate that the difficulty of avoiding conceptualizing the person as a split body/consciousness is most apparent. The sex/gender distinction is situated in such a debate and is deeply entrenched in the conceptual problematic that characterizes that debate. The sex/gender distinction was understood, by socialization theorists, to be a body/consciousness distinction. Of course, this understanding does have an immediate, commonsense appeal. Nevertheless, such an understanding commits its user to a set of assumptions that have proved to be untenable.²³ Theorists who uncritically use the mind/body distinction consistently characterize the human subject as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I
• 1 A critique of the sex/gender distinction
• 2 Corporeal representation in/and the body politic
• 3 Woman and her double(s) Sex, gender and ethics
• Part II
• 4 Towards a feminist philosophy of the body
• 5 Power, bodies and difference
• 6 Contracting sex Essence, genealogy, desire
• Part III
• 7 Embodiment, ethics and difference
• 8 Spinoza, law and responsibility
• 9 Power, ethics and sexual imaginaries
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index