Gender

Claire Colebrook

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9781137611956
• eBook ISBN: 9781350309494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Why has Western thought been so persistent in its organisation of human bodies, and other categories, in terms of the binary opposition male and female? Is gender nothing more than an ideology, or does it have its basis in sexual difference? This invaluable introductory guide offers a clear overview of the concept, and problem, of gender. Claire Colebrook places the term in its historical contexts and traces its development from the Enlightenment to the present, before moving on to the evolution of the concept of gender from within the various stances of feminist criticism, and exploring recent developments in queer theory and post-feminism. Close analysis of key literary texts, including Frankenstein, Paradise Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream, shows how specific styles of literature enable reflection on gender.

1 Gender before Modernity

We might think that a concern with gender is a peculiarly modern and Western phenomenon – that it is only with the advent of feminism and the demand for equal rights that we start to think about gender, sexual difference or the relation between male and female. Popular books such as Men are from Mars Women are from Venus (Gray 1992) seem to announce gender difference as a revolutionary discovery: unified humanism is declared to be a myth, for there are basically two kinds of humans. But nothing could be further from the truth than the idea that gender is a new and revolutionary preoccupation. The earliest myths of Western and other cultures usually concern the interaction of male and female genders (Bourdieu 2001). We say gender here and not ‘sex’ because the primary contrary in mythic accounts is not that between a male and female body, but between two polarities, tendencies or principles – two kinds or modes. The interaction and dynamism from which creation emerges is figured in terms of male and female (King 1994), with men’s and women’s bodies being the outcome of an original relation of contraries. From the pre-Socratics and Plato to Freud and New Age philosophy the concept of gender has been inextricably intertwined with questions regarding the generation or genesis of the universe. The opposition between masculine and feminine extends far beyond the relation between men and women. Life, in general, is frequently explained through the interaction of two principles – male and female – with actual men and women being expressions of an underlying, universal and cosmic harmony.

Gender is, therefore, one of the most common figures for thinking the basic differences or difference from which all life emerges. In both contemporary and ancient cultures the image of marriage or copulation is often used to describe processes of creation and social harmony. The English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, described the writing of poetry as ‘spousal’; the poet’s mind marries nature in order to create verse as a form of divine offspring or ‘great consummation’ (Wordsworth [1814] 1969, 590). Many generation stories present a formless female matter impregnated by an active male power. In the Christian creation myth it is God as word, light and form who is male, giving life to darkness and chaos. In most creation stories this passive darkness and chaos is presented as feminine and is clearly opposed to the masculine power of light and form. Even when the metaphor of marriage is not used, or is not explicit, social, political and cosmic harmonies are frequently depicted as a relation between male and female. William Blake ended his great prophecy Jerusalem with the reunification of the male spirit with his female emanation (Blake 1988, 258), while twentieth-century feminists frequently argued that the retrieval of female qualities would be crucial for the salvation of humanity. Gender, or the very notion of distinct male and female kinds has a long and complicated history, ranging well beyond relations between men and women. In fact, it is the modern understanding of two biological sexes which tends to reduce the complexity of the concept of gender to the relation between men and women.

The concept of maleness and femaleness as primarily sexual and biological is a relatively modern notion. Indeed, the very concept of ‘biology,’ as a body of brute matter without form or spirit only occurred with the development of science and medicine. According to Jean-Pierre Vernant, the ancient Greeks did not have a distinct word for ‘body’ as we know it today; the word ‘soma’ could only refer to a corpse, not a living body (Vernant 1990). Not only was there no sense of a separate body or sexuality before culture, the image of gender was charged with a cosmological significance. Male and female principles were used to explain the ultimate forces of the cosmos, with the very generation of the universe often being explained as a result of the encounter between masculine and feminine forces. Today, we think of male and female as qualities determined by physical aspects, such as genes, whereas pre-moderns thought of gender as two opposing principles or modes. Gender was not so much physical and material, as formal – to do with the way something interacts, relates and positions itself. Masculinity, in general was active and life-giving, while femininity was passive and receptive. Gender could, therefore, be used to explain and describe creative processes well beyond human bodies – everything from the interaction of life forces, to nature and politics. Before modern science defined the genetic and anatomical differences between sexes, Western thought had defined some of its most basic notions – including being and non-being – through the image of gender.

According to the twentieth-century French feminist, Simone de Beauvoir, the most basic category of human thought is the relation between self and other; without a notion of an otherness against which the self is defined, there could be no experience, no sense of distinct selfhood. And for Beauvoir and many other feminists, it is woman who has always been used to represent the Other (Beauvoir 1972, 29). While other historically formed categories also take on this function – Beauvoir cites anti-Semitism, racism and class antagonisms that produce various Others – woman is the exemplary Other: not a self so much as an inert being against which active selfhood is defined (19). Beauvoir’s criticism of the traditional understanding of woman as the Other raises a fundamental question in the consideration of gender: to what extent has the distinction between man and woman been used to explain fundamental and transcendental structures of thinking? Beauvoir draws attention to the ways in which the myth and ideal of femininity has been essential to a certain understanding of life. For Beauvoir, one can only begin to think about women’s rights and the political situation of women, once one has addressed the ideals of gender that underpin our thinking – the ways in which we think of the subject in opposition to Otherness. We will return to de Beauvoir’s radical form of feminism later. What needs to be noted here is the metaphysical status of gender. The opposition between male and female goes beyond the politics of women’s rights and concerns just how we understand what it is to be a self, and what it is to be.

Beauvoir argued that human beings, in contrast to animal life, were defined by their capacity to be self-creating and active. Whereas everything that is not human simply ‘is’ in itself, humans have the capacity to create what they are, or to exist for themselves. But if this is so, if this is what it means to be, then women have been deprived of being. For women, traditionally, are seen as physical objects of beauty, as bearers of children and as domestic labourers who live their lives not through their own self-created ideals, but through the man who represents active humanity for them. Women are therefore Other than human; they are associated with that fixed and bodily being against which male subjects define themselves. Beauvoir’s story of woman as the Other lies at the end of a long tradition that contrasts an active masculine creativity with a passive feminine receptivity. Beauvoir assumes the classic opposition between active male subjectivity and passive female materiality, and she accepts that men and women do, indeed, fall into this opposition. Unlike those before her, though, Beauvoir suggests that we challenge this myth of gender. What makes Beauvoir typically modern is her parcelling out of male activity and female passivity between the bodies of men and women. It is men, Beauvoir argues, who have the opportunity to exist for, and define, themselves; women’s biological conditions of childbirth, menstruation and physical subjection preclude them from active self-formation. Like most contemporary feminists, Beauvoir explains the relation of male and female – and our intuition of radical otherness – from men’s and women’s bodies. Beauvoir does not assume that there is something like maleness or femaleness prior to the existence and relation of concrete men and women.

Gender and polarity

Whereas contemporary feminists and political theorists explain sexual politics from the capacities of men’s and women’s bodies, in pre-modern cultures the distinction between active and passive masculine and feminine principles was understood in a far more general way: both as a way of understanding life in general and as a way of explaining the process of life within each human body. Plato’s Timaeus likened the active forming power of the world to the father and the formless passive receptacle to the mother (Plato 1963, 1177 [50d–f]). The Timaeus was a ‘poetic’ explanation of the universe, which made explicit its reliance on metaphors and figures. Plato insists that the abstract processes of creation and origination can only be understood by analogy, through concrete figures. But it was this very distinction – between pure intellect and the material figures or metaphors – that was itself made possible through the idea of gender. Only with the image or figure of male and female principles was it possible to describe or explain the opposition between mind and matter, or concept and figure. Mind was always thought of as the disembodied, universal, conceptual and intellectual side of a binary, with the contrary side of particularity, materiality, and embodiment being associated with a feminine and secondary dependency. In ancient Greek thought, it was the intellect that was associated with a pure, active, disembodied, masculine and form-giving power. Body or matter was the material and female stuff, which the intellectual power used in order to actualise or give form to itself. Plato’s dialogues frequently make a contrast between the creations of reason, which are disembodied, eternal and self-sufficient, and the creations of bodies, which are temporal, corruptible and dependent. Plato described the sensual world we experience as a secondary copy of the eternal world of forms, and he used the metaphor of gender to make this distinction. Forms are like the father – a principle that gives shape and existence – while matter is like the mother, a body that receives the power of creation from outside, and cannot produce without this infusion of life.

For Plato, and Aristotle after him, what has true reality are the forms or kinds, the distinct existences that allow each thing to have a specific identity; matter is merely the vehicle or passive recipient of form. While Plato and Aristotle privileged form over matter, they did so through a hierarchical relation between two kinds or genders: the distinction between active male form and receptive female matter. For Aristotle, matter strives towards the form it ought to have ‘as the female desires the male’ (Aristotle 1995, 328 [Physics 192a 23]). We could say then that the very theory of distinct forms and kinds – the theory of the true being of forms over against the mere matter in which they are instantiated – already relied on a distinction between male and female. For the very nature of the universe was explained according to a fundamental opposition and hierarchy: form gives being to matter, and form is the active and masculine fathering principle, which gives life to the inert material and maternal body. In the long history of science that stretches from ancient Greece to the twentieth century, the basic structure of the universe was defined according to abstract principles of attraction and repulsion, or positive and negative (Lloyd 1966, 38). Science has drawn upon a series of binary opposites that have, more often than not, been likened to the relation between male and female. Recent attempts to escape such a binary or dualist way of thinking in science have, today, often tried to do so through a reconfiguration of gender. How would science look if we abandoned the fundamental male–female binary that opposes form to matter, active to passive or solid to fluid (Hayles 1993; Shulman 1996, 442)? Whether such a project is desirable or possible is one of the key questions in the concept of gender: is thought necessarily structured by oppositions? And to what extent is the opposition of gender – the difference between male and female – an opposition that structures all other oppositions? By looking at the ways in which the male–female binary has underpinned some of the most fundamental arguments of metaphysics we can see both how historically persistent the gender binary is, and how the meaning of this binary has also shifted radically.

One of the main differences in the understanding of genders between our own biologically oriented understanding and that of the past lies in the primacy given to kinds or forms. For both Aristotle and Plato, the world we see and live in is one of change and generation, but the kinds or forms taken on by that world are unchanging. Kinds or identities neither evolve, nor do they pass away or come into being. The world just has the number of complete kinds that it has (Owen 1986, 159). Indeed, the cosmos is a balanced and unified whole, where each kind has its determined relation to other kinds. Sexual activity or generation was merely the way in which forms came into being. And every thing that is going through change is either achieving a form that it lacks but ought to have, or it is falling away from or corrupting the form that makes it what it is and ought to be (Aristotle 1995, 322 [Physics 188b 20]). Aristotle explained the world as a unity of forms achieved through production and privation, with the sexual difference of specific bodies – the distinction between male and female – as a means for maintaining permanent kinds (Bostock 1982, 183). We see a world of change and becoming, with bodies coming into being and dying. But the forms or kinds of the world remain the same, and remain harmoniously balanced (Cooper 1982, 202). Sexual reproduction allows the world to remain the same – to be populated with the same kinds despite the birth and death of particular bodies. Behind sexual difference, then, was a harmonious order of being. All becoming for Aristotle could be reduced to a relation between form and privation, between something positively taking on a quality and something not having that quality. Form and privation were, in turn, likened to maleness and femaleness: the male is that which gives form and allows something to be, the female is that which lacks form, must take on form, and must come to be. Maleness and femaleness could therefore be considered literally – as the sexual difference of bodies in generation – and figuratively – as two principles, principles that were metaphysical or capable of explaining the physical.

By making gender a metaphysical principle Plato and Aristotle were both reacting against and extending a tendency of early Greek thought. Most, if not all, cultures, as anthropologists have noted, explain the world through opposing principles of maleness and femaleness (Bourdieu 2001; Ortner 1974). Such principles are metaphysical because they do not refer to male and female physical bodies, but to opposing tendencies. Plato and Aristotle were themselves drawing on an earlier tradition of thinking that was mythic rather than logical. Rather than form and privation – abstract principles which were likened to male and female – earlier thinkers had defined the universe as the production of opposing natural forces, such as heat and cold, high and low, male and female, dry and moist. With Plato and Aristotle, however, there was an attempt to free thought from myth and explain categories logically, without relying on already existing images or bodies. By grounding the world on a logical order Plato established the priority of form and reason. The world was not a natural plane of competing forces, likened to or analogous to male and female, the world expressed a law or logic of pure principles which could be compared to male and female. As Martin Heidegger has noted, this primacy of logic allows actual bodies and experience to be grounded on some prior and always present order (Heidegger 1998, 213). Luce Irigaray, following Heidegger, extends this observation to note that the supposed primacy of form and logic and its elevation above actual bodies, itself reflects a gendered opposition (Irigaray 1985, 182). Western reason defines itself as other than any natural, physical or finite body, and in so doing devalues the process of natural and maternal birth. Maternal generation is seen as dependent upon and expressive of an eternal and rational order. Gender becomes a metaphor, figure or image to explain a purely logical process. Plato and Aristotle – in insisting that the forming of the world was only like the male creative body – sought to find a universal, disembodied and scientific position from which differences could be explained.

Like later scientists who tried to explain the makeup of the world through the attraction and repulsion of forces, the ancient Greek attempt to explain the genesis of the world through a pure and abstract opposition set itself against any understanding of the world as literally made up of male and female contraries. Indeed, Western philosophy begins with a rejection of mythic oppositions and tries to establish what is – the basic substance that exists and remains present before all opposition. All the oppositions and kinds that make up the world should not simply be accepted, but should be explained from some grounding principle (Solmsen 1950). On the one hand, then, Western metaphysics began with the refusal of a mythic story of generation and asked the question of being: what does it mean for something to be? What exists as the fundamental and self-sufficient presence before all difference and becoming? On the other hand, this rejection of myths of cosmic generation from male and female force itself had to use gender as a metaphor. Philosophy must be about what exists in itself; it must not rely on received figures distinctions, metaphors and borrowed images. Philosophy must be self-fathering, active, purely intellectual and disembodied (Derrida 1981, 76). It must reject the dependent, the changing, the material and all imposed or received ideas. In this process of self-justification or reason, philosophy must account for the genesis of the world, and it must do so by explaining – rather than just accepting – the differentiated world. Both Plato and Aristotle therefore set themselves a task that has dominated the history of gender: how does the difference of gender emerge? What is the basis or origin of difference? What is the substance or being that underlies the change and opposition of genders? Instead of accepting the myth or image of gender – the world as composed of oppositions and polarities – philosophers from Plato onwards have aimed to account for the emergence of gender. How is it that we see a world of different kinds? And why are these differences oppositional and frequently explained as male and female?

What Plato and Aristotle did not consider was a world that was formless, and that then received forms or differences by the acts of human language and culture. Until relatively recently – at least until the seventeenth century – our knowledge of the world was seen to lie in the grasping of distinct essences or forms. The world of change and difference was underpinned by essential distinctions and differences, which perception and knowledge could grasp with varying degrees of accuracy. The human knower was situated in a world with its own order, and it was the essence of human reason to be able to discern the forms or essences that structured the world (Foucault 1970, 37). All this changes in modernity with the separation of the subject. In the eighteenth century Bishop George Berkeley, for example, argued that colours we perceive are only real for our perception; the world itself is not coloured (Berkeley [1710] 1965). Much more recently, structuralists, pragmatists and social constructivists have insisted that the world itself has no truth or logic; meanings and differences are imposed upon the world by experience. The idea of the human self as a subject who, to use Beauvoir’s terminology, creates the meaning of their world by actively deciding their own existence, could have no place in a pre-modern world where forms or kinds were the only stable reality.

The idea that forms or differences are i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Gender before Modernity
• 2. Gender as Form and the Masculinity of Reason
• 3. Modernity and the Materiality of Gender
• 4. Sex without Gender
• 5. Beyond Sex and Gender
• 6. Sexual Difference and Embodiment
• 7. Sexuality and Queer Theory
• Conclusion: Reading Gender
• Annotated Bibliography
• Bibliography
• Index