Queer Post-Gender Ethics

The Shape of Selves to Come

Lucy Nicholas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137321619
• eBook ISBN: 9781137321626
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Can society operate without gender and even biological sex classifications? Queer Post-Gender Ethics argues that we could exist, formulate our relationships and be sexual in more androgynous ways. Outlining a political vision for how a post-gender sociality might be achieved, it presents queer social practices for a truly gender neutral world.

1

The Resilience of Bigenderism

This chapter will illustrate how resilient and compulsory dualistic gender is and how much it continues to be conceptually tied to and co-constitutive with notions of material sexual difference. I will present empirical examples of the personal and social difficulty of trans and intersex selfhood and how they offer evidence for the notion of bigendersm (Gilbert 2009). The ongoing omnirelevance of bigenderism in the virtual contexts of the internet – where assumptions about sex and gender and their relationship between each other continue to shape our sense of self and the ways that we interact, even though these contexts are ‘disembodied’ – helps to diagnose the problem of gender. I also demonstrate how ostensible challenges to binary sex/gender are persistently recuperated, for example in gender deconstructive theories and activism. I will go on to argue that these examples are demonstrative of the limits of attempting to challenge the persistence of gender without challenging oppositional modes of thought more widely, especially dualistic understandings of bodies.

The omnirelevance of sex/gender identity

It has been widely asserted in sociology that gender is a compulsory and ‘omnirelevant’ (Garfinkel 1967; West & Zimmerman 1987) aspect of selfhood and social life, ‘a precondition for the production and maintenance of legible humanity’ (Butler 2004: 11; see also West & Zimmerman 1987). This compulsorily binary understanding of selfhood, and its persistent relationship to notions of biological materiality, is made particularly apparent in the treatment of intersexuality in many countries. Despite proposed statistics that around 1.7% of births demonstrate some level of genital ‘anomaly’ (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Hird 2004a: 123), it is still the case that ‘The birth of a baby with ambiguous genitals constitutes a “social emergency” in the delivery room’ (Turner 1999: 467), to the extent that an attribution of singular sex, and thus gender, and physical reconstruction is still routinely undertaken as soon as possible (Hird 2004a). This compulsory and non-consensual gendering of the biology of intersexed infants has led to an ‘intersex rights’ social movement that advocates for the freedom of people to choose their own physical attributes and social identifications (Chase 1998), for example Organisation Intersex International (Bock 2013) and the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), which advocated for intersex rights between 1993 and 2008 (Chase 1993).

ISNA founder Cheryl Chase suggests that intersex is inherently disruptive of the sex/gender order: ‘I am forced to wonder whether our culture’s concept of sexual normalcy, which defines the sex organs of as many as 4 per cent of newborn infants as “defective,” is not itself defective’ (Chase 1993: 3). The prevalent medical practice of gender assignment for intersex infants, usually judged according to the ability to engage in penetrative sex (Chase 1993: 3; Feinberg 1998: 8), illustrates not only the social imperative to label babies as either boys or girls and the discourse of complementarity between these oppositions (Hird 2004a: 17), but also the inextricability of gender, sex and sexual orientation. It indicates that these notions make sense, and are definable, only in terms of the others. This ‘gender assignment’ is actually a matter of physically assigning biological sex, from which gender is supposed to follow, categories which themselves allow for stable sexuality categories (hetero/homo require fixed gender), but which are also defined by heteronormativity, as demonstrated by the justifications for choices made regarding the sex category to assign. Intersexuality and gender assignment has gained public attention in recent years (Bock 2013; Fausto-Sterling 2012; Nandi 2013), but the extent to which there is slippage in medical and popular accounts between biological sex and gender identity demonstrates the limits of feminist attempts to separate sex and gender, which I will discuss in greater depth in the next chapter. This slippage has been illustrated in public discourse around ‘intersex’ athletes (Fausto-Sterling 2012: 1–2; Kenney & Akita 2013), wherein sporting government bodies have been discussing ‘gender tests’ that pertain to biological signifiers of ‘sex’.

Transgender is understood in different ways. Kessler & McKenna (2000) taxonomise these as first an incongruence between physical ‘sex’ and gender, which leads to permanent physical transition into the opposite ‘gender’, which retains adherence to binary understandings of sex and gender. Second is a less final or permanent crossing wherein bodily sex is incongruent with gender identity, which again adheres to the binaries. And finally, gender ambiguity or variance that transcends the binaries, such that no clear gender attribution can be made. However, the social or interactional difficulty of all of these different trans identities also demonstrates this ‘omnirelevance’ of polarised gendered modes of perception in understandings of the self and others that rely on correlation between sex, gender and sexuality. The interactional problems that this presents further illustrate the negative impacts of sex/gender.

Feinberg argues that violence against transgender people – which ze defines as people who present a gender display at odds with their biological sex, or whose sex or gender are not clear – is prevalent enough to conclude that ‘Trans people are still literally social outlaws’ (Feinberg 1998: 10). Indeed, research by Lombardi, Wilchins, Priesing & Malouf (2001) found that at some time 59.9% of the transgender respondents from the USA who participated in the research had ‘experienced either violence or harassment’ (Lombardi et al. 2001: 95) on account of being transgendered. An overview of US research into violence against transgender people found that ‘43–60% of participants report past experiences of physical violence … and 43–46% report they had been victims of sexual assault’ (Testa et al. 2012: 453). These statistics only take into account certain types of violence – the Lombardi research only counted ‘assault with a weapon, assault without a weapon, rape, sexual assault, or attempted assault’ (Lombardi et al. 2001: 92) – and there are many qualitative accounts of the extent to which gender-ambiguous or gender-variant people more generally find themselves informally policed and under scrutiny, what Bourdieu (2004) would characterise as more ‘symbolic violence’. For example, Wyss’s empirical research in US high schools supports the prevalent position in previous research that ‘trans and genderqueer youth who refuse to conform to the gender pressures that they face are likely to experience isolation and are at very high risk for assault’ (2004: 715). As well as being social outlaws, trans and intersex folk often experience difficult relations with state and legal institutions, for example the case of Norrie, whose registration with the registry of births, deaths and marriages in New South Wales, Australia was changed to ‘sex not specified’ but then reversed in a high-profile case (Bibby 2013).

Also paradigmatic of the institutional and social maintenance of sex/gender is the well-documented ‘toilet problem’ (Browne 2004; Feinberg 1993; Halberstam 1998; McLaughlin 2005; Truckface zine). The sex-segregated public toilet is a site of heightened sex and gender awareness and regulation: ‘In a 2002 survey conducted by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, nearly half of all transgender respondents reported having been harassed or assaulted in public restrooms’ (McLaughlin 2005: n.p.). The prevalence of this violence demonstrates that ‘the bathroom problem is much more than a glitch in the machinery of gender segregation and is better described in terms of the violent enforcement of our current gender system’ (Halberstam 1998: 25) or a form of discrimination that Browne calls ‘genderism’ (2004). The impacts of this problem are more than the immediate physical threat. The difficultly that this co-constitution of the spatial and social presents to trans and intersex folk in everyday life reflects and contributes to an increased subjective sense of exclusion. Vade goes as far as to say ‘Segregated public bathrooms threaten people’s safety, job security and access to education. They also tell us every day, several times a day, that the only viable gender options are female and male’ (Vade n.d.: n.p.). The violent enforcement of normative gender ‘can be highly detrimental to one’s bodily, emotional and mental health’ (Wyss 2004: 718) and be internalised, with most of the participants in Wyss’s study exhibiting responses consistent with ‘a belief that one’s oppression is justified’ (Wyss 2004: 718).

Additionally, trans people who are gender-variant or ambiguous, that is, who do not ‘pass’ as either a man or woman, face pressures not only from wider society, but also from within trans communities. Gagne & Tewkesbury’s research concluded that for most people in their study, pressure from within the transgender community meant that ‘the need to avoid social erasure compelled a complete (even if temporary) transformation’ (Gagne & Tewkesbury 1998: 86). This demonstrates that, even in communities where sex and gender and the relationship between the two are somewhat complicated, there remains a binary, difference-based understanding of self and others, derived from oppositional and complementary categories of male/female and masculine/feminine. Indeed, it has been emphasised how much presentations of ambiguity can be recuperated by those seeing it into familiar binary-based understandings: ‘Ambiguous gender, when and where it does appear, is inevitably transformed into deviance, thirdness, or a blurred vision of either male or female’ (Halberstam 1998: 20). Goffman (1956) and Garfinkel (1967) have effectively demonstrated this point by emphasising the extent to which social participants are willing, or in fact bound, to read the behaviour of others according to conventional categories and will ‘recuperate’ transgressions. Gilbert (2009), referring to Garfinkel and, later, Kate Bornstein’s development of a set of ‘generally accepted gender rules,’ states that

According to the rules there is no such thing as someone whose sex or gender diverges from their birth-designated sex, which means that trans folk cannot exist. However, a corollary says that if anyone does change sex it must be from one of the two sexes to the other. The one thing that is absolutely not allowed is a gender that does not fall neatly into one of the two categories. (Gilbert 2009: 95)

Ze characterises this simply as ‘bigenderism’. However, to further illustrate what this social formation of gender along these lines means for social life, the case of a self-identified gender-transcendent student senator Toby Hill-Meyer asked that, in an article about per, the University of Oregon newspaper use gender-neutral pronouns,¹ later explaining that ze uses these pronouns as ze perceives per gender to be neither male nor female (Abraham 2004: n.p.). The way that this act was received demonstrates that not only is gender ambiguity socially sanctioned, it is usually not even possible as it is understood by others on the basis of being a transgression of something else, such as sexuality norms. The way that ze was read by others demonstrates the reference back to (binary) sex as congruous with (binary) gender and the collapse of both of these with (binary) sexuality: ‘Unless we’re missing something dramatic here, he’s (oops) a gay man. Which is fine. More power to Toby Hill-Meyer’ (Olly 2004). This drives home the two related points that will be developed below: that sex, gender and sexuality are inextricably linked in the popular imagination, and thus the mechanism that underlies them and maintains their resilience – sexual difference – is the real problem; and that sex and gender are social problems, intersubjectively (i.e. in relations between people) or attributionally maintained or perpetuated.

The ‘disembodied’ nature of sex/gender

Following from this example of the recuperation of an attempt to expand gender, the conservative ways that gender plays out in the virtual space of the internet allows me to begin considering what the real ‘nature’ of gender is, and to diagnose why individual attempts to challenge it are destined to recuperation. It illustrates how much gender is a social category that is compulsorily attributed regardless of subjective identity, and how much these attributions are made with fairly flimsy, social cues, rather than biological ones, what Kessler and McKenna call ‘cultural genitals’ (Kessler & McKenna 1978: 154). This precedes my challenge to the usefulness of the sex/gender divide, when commonsense perpetually appeals back to presumptions about biological sexual difference and its relationship to gender in ‘placing’ people in interaction.

These attributions of Hill-Meyer were made online, by social participants who made diagnoses of Hill-Meyer’s ‘true self’ from visual clues using the generally accepted rules of sex/gender, which they assume to be essential, fundamental, binary and universal. This same subjective and intersubjective attribution of dualistic and biologically essential sex/gender identity accounts for the subversive failure of the virtual, where ‘the rules’ are still held by social participants and attributions according to them irresistible.

The 2007 book Alter Ego: Avatars and their Creators (Cooper 2007) is paradigmatic of what Braidotti calls ‘the imaginative poverty of virtual reality’ (Braidotti 1996: n.p.) in relation to gender, and this example clearly illustrates how little gender attribution has to do with biology. As I have outlined before (Nicholas 2009), it presents a data set of 66 avatars (‘computer generated visual representations of people or bots’ (Nowak & Rauh 2005: n.p.)) alongside portraits and stories about their creators. Of this international collection of participants in virtual worlds, an overwhelming 56 of the 66 avatars, are directly gender-referential, in that the declared gender of the avatar is continuous with the sex category presented or declared by the creator. Additionally while six avatars are entirely non-human, five of these are anthropomorphised and therefore gendered. Only one avatar is non-human and non-gendered (the ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’). This demonstrates not only the compulsarity of gender as a marker of legible identity, but also the bigenderism that limits the proliferation of gender categories so that, at best, there can be an incongruence between the choice of which binary sex and which binary gender a social participant holds. Indeed, avatar research by Nowak & Rauh (2005) further demonstrates the intersubjective imperative of gender online. These researchers sought to test the importance of the stable establishment of gender for interaction in online interaction where no bodily cues are available. In asking research participants to evaluate a series of pictures of avatars, they discovered that the more androgynous and less humyn the avatars, the more difficult people find it to communicate with them:

The responses to the images were consistent with what would be predicted by uncertainty reduction theory. The results show that the masculinity or femininity (lack of androgyny) of an avatar, as well as anthropomorphism, significantly influence perceptions of avatars. (Nowak & Rauh 2005: n.p.)

Uncertainty reduction theory suggests that the more familiar and understandable the other person is in an interaction, the more likely we are to trust and like them. It also states that, in order to reduce uncertainty about a stranger, in the ‘initial entry stage of interpersonal interaction’ we attempt to place them according to pre-existing behavioural norms and categories (Berger & Calabrese 1975: 99). This avatar research demonstrates that this ‘placing’ holds true for online interaction where there are no bodily cues, and that placing gender is an integral part of placing someone in familiar terms in social interaction. This research challenges early futurological predictions of the internet as a space in which traditional identity would be challenged by demonstrating that the same rules of social interaction apply in virtual contexts as in real life. Rather than demonstrating greater freedom in the virtual, this demonstrates the gendered limits to the qualitative possibilities of self-presentation and of intersubjective understanding, and the persistence of gendered selfhood and interaction in virtual interactions (O’Brien 1999; Warhol 2002). Importantly, this revelation illustrates that gendered assumptions precede biological sex, rather than following from them, just as they do in the ‘sexing’ of newborn infants.

Supporting these findings, in an early consideration of the possibilities for gender in virtual worlds, while asserting that theoretically ‘users are able to create a virtual self, outside the normally assumed boundaries of gender, race, class, and age’ (Reid 1995: 181), Reid also acknowledged that ‘many obviously feel very uncomfortable and at a disadvantage in interacting with others whose gender is unclear and feel even more discomforted on discovering that they have been interacting under false assumptions’ (Reid 1995: 180). As well as highlighting the imperative of stable gender certainty, the notion of ‘false assumptions’ underscores the way that the virtual is rooted in humanistic concepts of self-hood and of gender as a reflection of a true aspect of the material self. On this theme, Rak’s (2005) research into blogging demonstrates people’s ongoing attachment to humanistic ideas of subjectivity even in the virtual, to the extent that actual uses of virtual reality are predicated on a liberal notion of unified subjectivity, on ‘the assumption that experience congeals around a subject, and makes a subject who can be written and read’ (Rak 2005: 166) according to existing frames.

More sophisticated research about online social dynamics (see e.g. Hine 2003; Wajcman 2004) has moved from viewing the virtual as a place with certain inherent characteristics, to understanding it rather as a sphere of interaction and considering the co-constitution of technology and the social. In emphasising this resilience of gender as a central defining characteristic even in the virtual, Wajcman, for example, has theorised the internet as a ‘new technology with the same old narratives’ (Wajcman 2004: 70). Exemplary of these analyses is sociotechnical studies, which would support this by theorising the causal relationship between technology and the social beyond even an interactive view to a more radical ‘seamless web view’ (Bijker & Law 1992: 201). This marks a break from early futurological and optimistic accounts of the internet as a space that would allow for free play of identity. It also accounts better for the resilience of gendered interaction, emphasising instead ‘the continuation of pre-established relations’ (Webster 2006: 5). Extending the notion of ‘performativity’ – which views being as an ongoing practice or repetition that gives the illusion of stability – to this relationship in an approach comparable with performative geographies, proponents of this sociotechnical account assert that the distinction between ‘machines and those who operate them … [is] an accomplishment’ (Bijker & Law 1992: 201). Importantly here, this is all demonstrative of the relatively small part that pre-existing biology plays in this construction of gender, so that sex can perhaps be understood to be a result of gendered interpretation, rather than a pre-existing entity.

The imaginative limit of social interaction in the virtual, then, is presentation of a binary gender that is not continuous with the binary sex a social participant is assumed to hold. This is the extent of the challenge to the gender rules given the pervasiveness of stable social attributions of sex/gender and ultimately to greater or lesser degrees, social interaction online ensures that bigenderism itself is upheld. As the notion of ‘false assumptions’ discussed demonstrates, e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Resilience of Bigenderism
• 2 Diagnosing and Transcending Sexual Difference
• 3 Gender Justice
• 4 Philosophical Arguments for Post-Gender Ontological Ethics
• 5 Queer Futures and Queer Ethics: Sketching Inexhaustibly Reciprocal Androgyny
• 6 The Politics of Implementing Post-Gender Ethics: Beyond Idealism/Realism
• 7 The Fully Armed Self: Cultivating Post-Gender Subjects
• 8 Ethical Post-Gender Sexual Relationships and Communities
• Conclusion: Utopian Realism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index