Critical Terms for the Study of Gender

Catharine R. Stimpson, Gilbert Herdt, Catharine R. Stimpson, Gilbert Herdt

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226010212
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

"Gender systems pervade and regulate human lives—in law courts and operating rooms, ballparks and poker clubs, hair-dressing salons and kitchens, classrooms and playgroups.... Exactly how gender works varies from culture to culture, and from historical period to historical period, but gender is very rarely not at work. Nor does gender operate in isolation. It is linked to other social structures and sources of identity."So write women's studies pioneer Catharine R. Stimpson and anthropologist Gilbert Herdt in their introduction to Critical Terms for the Study of Gender, laying out the wide-ranging nature of this interdisciplinary and rapidly changing field. The sixth in the series of "Critical Terms" books, this volume provides an indispensable introduction to the study of gender through an exploration of key terms that are a part of everyday discourse in this vital subject.Following Stimpson and Herdt's careful account of the evolution of gender studies and its relation to women's and sexuality studies, the twenty-one essays here cast an appropriately broad net, spanning the study of gender and sexuality across the humanities and social sciences. Written by a distinguished group of scholars, each essay presents students with a history of a given term—from bodies to utopia —and explains the conceptual baggage it carries and the kinds of critical work it can be made to do. The contributors offer incisive discussions of topics ranging from desire, identity, justice, and kinship to love, race, and religion that suggest new directions for the understanding of gender studies. The result is an essential reference addressed to students studying gender in very different disciplinary contexts.

1 : : BODIES

CARROLL SMITH-ROSENBERG

Bodies take form, move, are experienced, assume meanings at specific points in time, within particular material, economic, and demographic settings, in interaction with the cultural forces of their time and place in relation to other temporally located physical bodies, bodies of knowledge, fields of power—in short, in history.

Bodies fill history, marking its transformative crises and quotidian rhythms. The millions of bodies raped and killed during the Spanish “Conquest of the Indies,” the millions more transported from Africa to take their places on the sugar, coffee, and tobacco plantations of North and South America. Bodies stacked like cords of wood in Nazi death camps signaled world-changing moments in the construction of knowledge and the deployment of power. More recently, the bodies of raped and murdered women figured the partition of India, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, the ethnic conflicts in Rwanda and Darfur. On a more mundane level, images of bodies make the Industrial Revolution real to us: the bodies of half-naked women dragging carts in British mines; the stooped, pallid bodies of child laborers; the begrimed bodies of the British working-class women, photographed by Arthur Munby scrubbing the marble stoops of the bourgeoisie (Munby 2000). Today the bodies of malnourished children proffered to us in solicitations from UNICEF and Doctors without Borders embody current disparities between the global North and South. Of course, these swollen and deformed bodies constitute but one part of complex and multilayered class and regional portraits. Behind the lenses that make them real to us are the well-scrubbed bodies of bourgeois reformers intent on observing and “knowing,” their bodies at home with the comforts and luxuries industrialization and imperialism make possible.

But still more bodies crowd the pages of history—resisting and protesting bodies, the bodies of maroon warriors in Saint-Domingue and Jamaica, of Native Americans at Wounded Knee, suffragists’ bodies refusing forced feeding, black and white bodies marching to Selma or “occupying” Wall Street, gay bodies at Act Up rallies, defying violent reprisals. And history incorporates still other bodies, metaphoric and discursive—social bodies and bodies politic, bodies of knowledge, of law, of ideology.

Intimate connections bind these bodies to one another. Individuals’ bodily experiences depend on the bodies of language that inform those experiences, just as languages and discourses acquire their meanings through exchanges among embodied speakers at specific times and places. Ideological fictions, metaphoric abstractions, bodies politic, especially national bodies politic, are particularly dependent on actual biological bodies, for they come alive only when literal bodies, embedded in particular times and spaces, embrace them as their own true selves. But for this to happen, for the body politic to assume an integrity it has not, it must cloak itself in the rhetoric, the languages, of corporeality, must assume the characteristics of the biological body, its internal cohesion, its “naturalness.” In all these varied ways, corporeal and political bodies, the bodies of the empowered and the disempowered, of women and men, of blacks and whites, browns and reds, are locked in a decentering, protean dance of constitutive interdependencies and interactions.

Feminist scholars have long explored these complex patterns of interaction and interdependency. Scholars as disparate as Mary Douglas and Joan Scott insist that there is no “natural” or timeless way to experience our selves, our identities, our bodies. They see both identities and the body as socially and discursively informed. “The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived,” Douglas argues:

The forms it [the biological body] adopts in movement and repose express social pressures in manifold ways. The care that is given to it, in grooming, feeding and therapy, the theories about what it needs in the way of sleep and exercise, about the stages it should go through, the pains it can stand . . . all the cultural categories in which it is perceived . . . correlate closely with the categories in which society is seen. . . . Every kind of action carries the imprint of learning. (Douglas 1970, 93)

But the complex interaction of social and biological bodies is not that easily captured. Transformed by the human mind into a cultural construct, the biological body metamorphoses, becoming a reservoir of affective rhetoric that members of the social body can draw upon to express conflicted and cathected social tensions. Theories of sexuality, purification rituals, pollution fears, the valorization and degradation of body parts—all can be read as symbolic languages in which the physical body is used to speak of social anxieties and conflicts. Social, political, and biological bodies fuse, refusing separation.

A cacophony of social dialects spoken by different classes, ethnicities, generations, professions, and genders characterizes every heterogeneous society, a cacophony reproduced differently within the consciousness of different social speakers (Bakhtin 1981, 259–422). Power colors these discourses. The languages of the economically and politically dominant struggle to deny the legitimacy of more marginal social discourses. During periods of social transformation, when social forms crack open, social dialects proliferate among both the powerful and the powerless at the heart of the metropole and along its colonized margins. Blending and conflicting with one another, these varied discourses challenge the dominant discourses. At such times, ideological conflict fractures discourse. At such times, as well, sexuality and the physical body emerge as particularly evocative political symbols. Those aspects of human sexuality considered most disorderly are evoked to represent social atomization, the overthrow of hierarchies, the uncontrollability of change. Within this discursive field, those fearful of change define the socially disorderly as sexually deviant, dangerous infections within the body politic. In this way, the fearful project onto the bodies of those they have named social misfits their own desires for social control.

A few examples may be in order. In the turbulent years following the US Civil War, with northern radicals seeking to impose a new racial and political order and thousands, black and white, homeless and on the road, southern whites, fearful of these changes, constituted a metonymic figure to stand for all the social disruptions they could not control. That figure was the savage black male rapist. Disgust and desire, projection and displacement, radiated through his imagined construction, a process graphically depicted in James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” (Baldwin 1995, 227–49). Raging against that figure (and the literal bodies “he” represented), the fearful protested against a world out of their control. Today members of America’s white middle class who again feel the world beyond their understanding deploy other bodies to figure current fears—black inner-city adolescents, lesbians and gays, aborting women, Muslim terrorists. Effigies of fear, these bodies are anything but simple metaphors. Fetishes, they are simultaneously sentient bodies, whose flesh is literally scarred, whose genitals are literally mutilated, whose lives are literally destroyed by the metaphor-makers.

Conversations, by their nature, are dialogic. Defiantly displaying their own sexuality as symbols of social resistance, the marginal and the scarred also fuse sexual and social disorder, defiantly displaying their own sexuality as symbols of social resistance. Social disarray, discursive discord, and warring bodies merge, reinforce one another; the dismemberment of the symbolic body speaks of the dismemberment of the body politic—and of conventional meaning.

But having positioned the physical body within a field of discourses, we must be careful not to bury it under the avalanche of words, ideologies, and metaphors that bombard it. The physical body possesses its own organic integrity. Bodily experiences can at times transcend discourse, Elaine Scarry argues, pointing to the ways pain explodes beyond the expressive ability of words to represent it (Scarry 1985). While symbolic anthropologists and poststructural theorists argue that language constitutes desire, many feminists still insist that desire can also appear within discourses that have not named it. Despite all our focus on the ideological and discursive nature of our bodies and desires, the physical body refuses to disappear from feminist discourse. Feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti, for example, while marking the ways feminism interrogates the corporeal, insists on women’s need to reconnect with their physical bodies, to entertain a “transmobile, materialist theory of feminist subjectivity.” Insisting on “rethinking the bodily roots of subjectivity,” she continues:

The starting point for most feminist redefinitions of subjectivity is a new form of materialism, one that develops the notion of corporeal materiality by emphasizing the embodied and therefore sexually differentiated structure of the speaking subject. (Braidotti 1994, 2–4)

How, embodied in time, are we to map the interplay of these swirling bodies when we ourselves are caught in the vortex, see and feel only as parts of those social bodies, speak only in already existing discourses? How can we position ourselves so that we gain the perspective from which to chart the dynamic processes that give us form and meaning—in time?

Bodies and Power

Michel Foucault is the preeminent cartologist of the interplay of bodies, painstakingly tracing the ways the political and the social construct the biological and the sexual. While Foucault’s work is the subject of serious feminist criticism, he has made significant contributions to feminist thought, mapping the ways biological bodies and sexual subjects are political constructions, centrally implicated in the rise of the modern state, modern science, modern systems of power, and the arts of governance. In the process, he disclosed us all as physical subjects of and to those knowledge/power systems.

The physical body, its health, sexuality, and desires, are no more natural for Foucault than they are for Mary Douglas. Like Douglas, Foucault focuses on the discursive construction of the body. Like Douglas, he is concerned with the ways constituting the body (discursive representations, definitions and treatments of diseases, who should and who should not reproduce) forms a key component of ongoing social structures. Sexualized bodies, criminal bodies, and diseased bodies, Foucault insists, can only be understood as products of specific temporal and material settings. Universal patterns of causation tell us little about the political construction of bodies or the deployment of power, he argues. Rather, we must focus on the processes by which power, knowledge, and discourses develop and plot the historically specific conditions, the material bases of their production, the ways they then produce biological and sexual bodies, identities, and subjects. We must ask why particular bodies of knowledge, texts, institutions, and practices appear at particular moments in time, trace the ways they coincide with one another, how they overlap, interact, and multiply to produce the physical bodies and psychopolitical subjects of modernity.

But differences as well as parallels exist between Foucault’s and Douglas’s analyses. Douglas, working within the structuralist paradigm of the 1960s, focused on the harmonious interplay of social and symbolic systems. Foucault, writing during the intellectual, sexual, and political furor of the 1970s and 1980s, focuses on issues of social conflict and control, on the unstable aspects of the body politic, and on the proliferating, protean nature of power itself.

The relation of power to bodies, Foucault argues, began to change in fundamental ways in the eighteenth century when the focus of government shifted from securing a sovereign’s power over territory to the arts of policing populations. Surveillance and control of men in all “their relations, their links, their imbrications” became the object of governance that quickly assumed the form of power over life (Foucault 1991, 92). “Power gave itself the function of administering life,” Foucault argues, and “it is over life that power establishes its domination.” Power, in this new sense, took two interactive forms. One revolved around economic and disciplinary discourses and practices, producing an “anatomo-politics of the human body”; the other revolved around political and medical discourses and practices that produced a “bio-politics of the population.” The first “centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities . . . its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls” (Foucault 1978, 138–39). The biopolitics of population, on the other hand, focused on the organization of the body in relation to reproduction. It required the state and a host of public and private institutions and groups to study and concern themselves about its health, marriage, and fertility patterns and mortality rates. Together they made biological bodies social problems and the control of those problems the source of proliferating knowledge and power. Health, fertility, and mortality became not natural processes but occasions for “infinitesimal surveillance, permanent controls, extremely meticulous orderings of space, indeterminate medical and psychological examinations, . . . statistical assessments”—in short, “an entire micro-power concerned with the body” (Foucault 1978, 145–46). It is interesting to think of Foucault’s mapping of the operation of power over and through French bodies in relation to slave owners’ comparable power over the bodies of their slaves. Foucault does not note this parallel but it was certainly very present in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, a world in which France played a critical role.

Without doubt a host of French institutions arose to study and manage different aspects of this body—hospitals, specialized medical and scientific associations and journals, police departments and prisons, philanthropic and state welfare agencies, census bureaus, sociology and anthropology departments. Statistics were compiled and disseminated. Case studies accumulated, were analyzed, and transformed into policies that proliferated more studies, more institutions accumulating more knowledge. Classes of experts developed: professional criminologists, medical specialists, sexologists, eugenicists. All became producers of knowledge—and wielders of power. Power both generated these bodies of knowledge and flowed through them as along a giant capillary system penetrating every point in the social body, the body politic. For bodies of knowledge produce power over the bodies they “know”—and equally over the bodies that “know.” For Foucault, bodies of knowledge are multidirectional, ensnaring the knowing body along with the body known. Ultimately, all became enmeshed in ever finer and more extensive systems of knowing until their self-knowledge, their bodies, their desires became parts of the body politic’s ever proliferating, ever more protean “will to know.” Power in its multiple forms became interconnected, inseparable, continuous (Foucault 1991, 91).

These new knowledges and mechanisms of management sexually saturated entire populations. Women’s bodies—their health, their minds, their reproductive systems—became sites of disease and perversion. Childhood was similarly sexualized. From being a time of sexual innocence, childhood became a site of proliferating and perverse sexual instincts, requiring active surveillance by parents, physicians, and teachers. Parents were, themselves, sexually suspect figures. Required by the biopolitics of population to reproduce successive generations of healthy and productive worker-citizens, parents repeatedly threatened to betray their social responsibilities, engage in perverse, nonproductive sexual acts, restrict their birthrate, abort. By the mid-nineteenth century, the family had emerged as a veritable factory of perverse sexualities, “the crystal in the deployment of sexualities,” a font of hysterias, venereal diseases, neuroses, sterility, frigidity, incest, and adultery (Foucault 1978, 111). Avoidance of marriage offered no escape. Proliferating sexual discourses snared the single body as well, making the refusal of heterosexuality a physiological and psychological pathology. In these ways, the “institutionalized” modern subject became his or her sexuality. Sexualities became personified as subjects—and all were embedded in specific times and places. For Foucault, the timeless, the universal, did not exist.

Bodies Diverse and Expressive

But for all Foucault’s emphasis on the protean and decentered nature of sexualized discourses and bodies of knowledge, in the end he presents us with only one overarching discourse, a single “uniform truth of sex”—that initiated by the brokers of power. The multiple physical and sexual bodies he discusses are fragmented parts of one body of knowledge, one system of power. Foucault neither explored the role the marginal and the disempowered played in the multiplication of sexual discourses—nor did he read their discourses as examples of diversity or as sites of agency and resistance. Feminist, race, and postcolonial scholars have done both, seeking in proliferating sexual discourses evidence of social diversity, listening for the voices of the marginal and the disempowered, reading back from the actions of the oppressed to their theories of power (Dubois 2006).

Theories advanced by British and American symbolic anthropologists who, during the 1960s and 1970s, explored the ways divergent groups within the same society used the biological and sexual body as a reservoir of symbols and metaphors expressive of social tensions and conflicts, prove helpful in these endeavors. We have already considered Mary Douglas’s trope of two bodies, her proposal that the physical body can be transformed into a symbolic representation of the social forces that created it. Symbolic anthropologist Victor Turner was equally fascinated with the ways in which the imagination, through metaphor and myth, links physical and social bodies. All symbols are bipolar, Turner argues. At one pole, we find the physical body, sensuous, gross, and timeless; at the other, we find time-specific social structures and relationships, conflicts and anxieties. Individuals and social groups, located at different points in the social body, draw upon the carnality of the physical body to form affective vocabularies expressive of their social experiences and concerns. The physical body assumes its full meaning, Turner insists, only when seen as a culturally specific construct used by specific speakers at specific times to express, reinforce, or protest their social experiences (Turner 1974, 1967).

Heterogeneous societies, especially societies in the process of rapid social transformation, Turner continues, produce a host of divergent symbolic systems in which the physical body and sexuality mark points of social contestation or dis-ease. Different social and economic groups, experiencing economic and demographic change differently, having different degrees of power with which to respond to the changes that transform their world, create differing sexual discourses, images, and fantasies, debate with and condemn one another, and depict a future of perfection or of degradation—all in graphic physical and sexual imagery. At least some of those caught in the vortex of massive and unremitting social transformations respond by attempting to capture and encapsulate such change within a new and ordered symbolic universe. When the social fabric is rent in fundamental ways, bodily and familial imagery assume ascendancy, for when the world spins out of control, the last intuitive resource of any individual is her or his own body and especially its sexual impulses. That, at least, many feel they can and must control. Others in the same society embrace change and glory in disorder, making the explosive force of the male orgasm a symbol of social disorder that they experience as liberating and empowering. Still others, battling for social power or self-expression, represent their social and political rivals as sexually violent and dangerous, sexual subjects who must be controlled. These discourses interact with one another and refuse the discourses of the socially dominant, those empowered by Foucault’s proliferating bodies of sexual knowledge.

America in the first half of the nineteenth century was a world in flux. Political, social, and economic revolutions transformed modes of production, institutional arrangements, and demographic patterns. Expectations of time and space altered, as did the functions, structures, and internal dynamics of the family, gender, and generational relations. Some Americans’ obsession with categorizing the physical—especially the sexual—with describing the abnormal, and with defining the legitimate, can be read as...