1
THE TECHNOLOGY OF GENDER
In the feminist writings and cultural practices of the 1960s and 1970s, the notion of gender as sexual difference was central to the critique of representation, the rereading of cultural images and narratives, the questioning of theories of subjectivity and textuality, of reading, writing, and spectatorship. The notion of gender as sexual difference has grounded and sustained feminist interventions in the arena of formal and abstract knowledge, in the epistemologies and cognitive fields defined by the social and physical sciences as well as the human sciences or humanities. Concurrent and interdependent with those interventions were the elaboration of specific practices and discourses, and the creation of social spaces (gendered spaces, in the sense of the âwomenâs room,â such as CR groups, womenâs caucuses within the disciplines, Womenâs Studies, feminist journal or media collectives, and so on) in which sexual difference itself could be affirmed, addressed, analyzed, specified, or verified. But that notion of gender as sexual difference and its derivative notionsâwomenâs culture, mothering, feminine writing, femininity, etc.âhave now become a limitation, something of a liability to feminist thought.
With its emphasis on the sexual, âsexual differenceâ is in the first and last instance a difference of women from men, female from male; and even the more abstract notion of âsexual differencesâ resulting not from biology or socialization but from signification and discursive effects (the emphasis here being less on the sexual than on differences as diffĂ©rance), ends up being in the last instance a difference (of woman) from manâor better, the very instance of difference in man. To continue to pose the question of gender in either of these terms, once the critique of patriarchy has been fully outlined, keeps feminist thinking bound to the terms of Western patriarchy itself, contained within the frame of a conceptual opposition that is âalways alreadyâ inscribed in what Fredric Jameson would call âthe political unconsciousâ of dominant cultural discourses and their underlying âmaster narrativesââbe they biological, medical, legal, philosophical, or literaryâand so will tend to reproduce itself, to retextualize itself, as we shall see, even in feminist rewritings of cultural narratives.
The first limit of âsexual difference(s),â then, is that it constrains feminist critical thought within the conceptual frame of a universal sex opposition (woman as the difference from man, both universalized; or woman as difference tout court, and hence equally universalized), which makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to articulate the differences of women from Woman, that is to say, the differences among women or, perhaps more exactly, the differences within women. For example, the differences among women who wear the veil, women who âwear the maskâ (in the words of Paul Laurence Dunbar often quoted by black American women writers), and women who âmasqueradeâ (the word is Joan Riviereâs) cannot be understood as sexual differences.1 From that point of view, they would not be differences at all, and all women would but render either different embodiments of some archetypal essence of woman, or more or less sophisticated impersonations of a metaphysical-discursive femininity.
A second limitation of the notion of sexual difference(s) is that it tends to recontain or recuperate the radical epistemological potential of feminist thought inside the walls of the masterâs house, to borrow Audre Lordeâs metaphor rather than Nietzscheâs âprison-house of language,â for reasons that will presently become apparent. By radical epistemological potential I mean the possibility, already emergent in feminist writings of the 1980s, to conceive of the social subject and of the relations of subjectivity to sociality in another way: a subject constituted in gender, to be sure, though not by sexual difference alone, but rather across languages and cultural representations; a subject en-gendered in the experiencing of race and class, as well as sexual, relations; a subject, therefore, not unified but rather multiple, and not so much divided as contradicted.
In order to begin to specify this other kind of subject and to articulate its relations to a heterogeneous social field, we need a notion of gender that is not so bound up with sexual difference as to be virtually coterminous with it and such that, on the one hand, gender is assumed to derive unproblematically from sexual difference while, on the other, gender can be subsumed in sexual differences as an effect of language, or as pure imaginaryânothing to do with the real. This bind, this mutual containment of gender and sexual difference(s), needs to be unraveled and deconstructed. A starting point may be to think of gender along the lines of Michel Foucaultâs theory of sexuality as a âtechnology of sexâ and to propose that gender, too, both as representation and as self-representation, is the product of various social technologies, such as cinema, and of institutionalized discourses, epistemologies, and critical practices, as well as practices of daily life.
Like sexuality, we might then say, gender is not a property of bodies or something originally existent in human beings, but âthe set of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and social relations,â in Foucaultâs words, by the deployment of âa complex political technology.â2 But it must be said first off, and hence the title of this essay, that to think of gender as the product and the process of a number of social technologies, of techno-social or bio-medical apparati, is to have already gone beyond Foucault, for his critical understanding of the technology of sex did not take into account its differential solicitation of male and female subjects, and by ignoring the conflicting investments of men and women in the discourses and practices of sexuality, Foucaultâs theory, in fact, excludes, though it does not preclude, the consideration of gender.
I will proceed by stating a series of four propositions in decreasing order of self-evidence and subsequently will go back to elaborate on each in more detail.
(1) Gender is (a) representationâwhich is not to say that it does not have concrete or real implications, both social and subjective, for the material life of individuals. On the contrary,
(2) The representation of gender is its constructionâand in the simplest sense it can be said that all of Western Art and high culture is the engraving of the history of that construction.
(3) The construction of gender goes on as busily today as it did in earlier times, say the Victorian era. And it goes on not only where one might expect it toâin the media, the private and public schools, the courts, the family, nuclear or extended or single-parentedâin short, in what Louis Althusser has called the âideological state apparati.â The construction of gender also goes on, if less obviously, in the academy, in the intellectual community, in avant-garde artistic practices and radical theories, even, and indeed especially, in feminism.
(4) Paradoxically, therefore, the construction of gender is also effected by its deconstruction; that is to say, by any discourse, feminist or otherwise, that would discard it as ideological misrepresentation. For gender, like the real, is not only the effect of representation but also its excess, what remains outside discourse as a potential trauma which can rupture or destabilize, if not contained, any representation.
1.
We look up gender in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and find that it is primarily a classificatory term. In grammar, it is a category by which words and grammatical forms are classified according to not only sex or the absence of sex (which is one particular category, called ânatural genderâ and typical of the English language, for example) but also other characteristics, such as morphological characteristics in what is called âgrammatical gender,â found in Romance languages, for example. (I recall a paper by Roman Jakobson entitled âThe Sex of the Heavenly Bodiesâ which, after analyzing the gender of the words for sun and moon in a great variety of languages, came to the refreshing conclusion that no pattern could be detected to support the idea of a universal law determining the masculinity or the femininity of either the sun or the moon. Thank heaven for that!)
The second meaning of gender given in the dictionary is âclassification of sex; sex.â This proximity of grammar and sex, interestingly enough, is not there in Romance languages (which, it is commonly believed, are spoken by people rather more romantic than Anglo-Saxons). The Spanish gĂ©nero, the Italian genere, and the French genre do not carry even the connotation of a personâs gender; that is conveyed instead by the word for sex. And for this reason, it would seem, the word genre, adopted from French to refer to the specific classification of artistic and literary forms (in the first place, painting), is also devoid of any sexual denotation, as is the word genus, the Latin etymology of gender, used in English as a classificatory term in biology and logic. An interesting corollary of this linguistic peculiarity of English, i.e., the acceptation of gender which refers to sex, is that the notion of gender I am discussing, and thus the whole tangled question of the relationship of human gender to representation, are totally untranslatable in any Romance language, a sobering thought for anyone who might be still tempted to espouse an internationalist, not to say universal, view of the project of theorizing gender.
Going back to the dictionary, then, we find that the term gender is a representation; and not only a representation in the sense in which every word, every sign, refers to (represents) its referent, be that an object, a thing, or an animate being. The term gender is, actually, the representation of a relation, that of belonging to a class, a group, a category. Gender is the representation of a relation, or, if I may trespass for a moment into my second proposition, gender constructs a relation between one entity and other entities, which are previously constituted as a class, and that relation is one of belonging; thus, gender assigns to one entity, say an individual, a position within a class, and therefore also a position vis-Ă -vis other pre-constituted classes. (I am using the term class advisedly, although here I do not mean social class(es), because I want to retain Marxâs understanding of class as a group of individuals bound together by social determinants and interestsâincluding, very pointedly, ideologyâwhich are neither freely chosen nor arbitrarily set.) So gender represents not an individual but a relation, and a social relation; in other words, it represents an individual for a class.
The neuter gender in English, a language that relies on natural gender (we note, in passing, that ânatureâ is ever-present in our culture, from the very beginning, which is, precisely, language), is assigned to words referring to sexless or asexual entities, objects or individuals marked by the absence of sex. The exceptions to this rule show the popular wisdom of usage: a child is neuter in gender, and its correct possessive modifier is its, as I was taught in learning English many years ago, though most people use his, and some, quite recently and rarely, and even then inconsistently, use his or her. Although a child does have a sex from ânature,â it isnât until it becomes (i.e., until it is signified as) a boy or a girl that it acquires a gender.3 What the popular wisdom knows, then, is that gender is not sex, a state of nature, but the representation of each individual in terms of a particular social relation which pre-exists the individual and is predicated on the conceptual and rigid (structural) opposition of two biological sexes. This conceptual structure is what feminist social scientists have designated âthe sex-gender system.â
The cultural conceptions of male and female as two complementary yet mutually exclusive categories into which all human beings are placed constitute within each culture a gender system, a symbolic system or system of meanings, that correlates sex to cultural contents according to social values and hierarchies. Although the meanings vary with each culture, a sex-gender system is always intimately interconnected with political and economic factors in each society.4 In this light, the cultural construction of sex into gender and the asymmetry that characterizes all gender systems cross-culturally (though each in its particular ways) are understood as âsystematically linked to the organization of social inequality.â5
The sex-gender system, in short, is both a sociocultural construct and a semiotic apparatus, a system of representation which assigns meaning (identity, value, prestige, location in kinship, status in the social hierarchy, etc.) to individuals within the society. If gender representations are social positions which carry differential meanings, then for someone to be represented and to represent oneself as male or as female implies the assumption of the whole of those meaning effects. Thus, the proposition that the representation of gender is its construction, each term being at once the product and the process of the other, can be restated more accurately: The construction of gender is both the product and the process of its representation.
2.
When Althusser wrote that ideology represents ânot the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they liveâ and which govern their existence, he was also describing, to my mind exactly, the functioning of gender.6 But, it will be objected, it is reductive or overly simplistic to equate gender with ideology. Certainly Althusser does not do that, nor does traditional Marxist thought, where gender is a somewhat marginal issue, one limited to âthe woman question.â7 For, like sexuality and subjectivity, gender is located in the private sphere of reproduction, procreation, and the family, rather than in the public, properly social, sphere of the superstructural, where ideology belongs and is determined by the economic forces and relations of production.
And yet, reading on in Althusser, one finds the emphatic statement âAll ideology has the function (which defines it) of âconstitutingâ concrete individuals as subjectsâ (p. 171). If I substitute gender for ideology, the statement still works, but with a slight shift of the terms: Gender has the function (which defines it) of constituting concrete individuals as men and women. That shift is precisely where the relation of gender to ideology can be seen, and seen to be an effect of the ideology of gender. The shift from âsubjectsâ to âmen and womenâ marks the conceptual distance between two orders of discourse, the discourse of philosophy or political theory and the discourse of âreality.â Gender is granted (and taken for granted) in the latter but excluded from the former.
Although the Althusserian subject of ideology derives more from Lacanâs subject (which is an effect of signification, founded on misrecognition) than from the unified class subject of Marxist humanism, it too is ungendered, as neither of these systems considers the possibilityâlet alone the process of constitutionâof a female subject.8 Thus, by Althusserâs own definition, we are entitled to ask, If gender exists in âreality,â if it exists in âthe real relations which govern the existence of individuals,â but not in philosophy or political theory, what do the latter in fact represent if not âthe imaginary relation of individuals to the real relations in which they liveâ? In other words, Althusserâs theory of ideology is itself caught and blind to its own complicity in the ideology of gender. But that is not all: more important, and more to the immediate point of my argument, Althusserâs theory, to the extent that a theory can be validated by institutional discourses and acquire power or control over the field of social meaning, can itself function as a techno-logy of gender.
The novelty of Althusserâs theses was in his perception that ideology operates not only semi-autonomously from the economic level but also, fundamentally, by means of its engagement of subjectivity (âThe category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology,â he writes on p. 171). It is, thus, paradoxical and yet quite evident that the connection between gender and ideologyâor the understanding of gender as an instance of ideologyâcould not be made by him. But the connection has been explored by other Marxist thinkers who are feminists, and better still the other way around, by some feminist thinkers who are also Marxists. MichĂšle Barrett, for one, argues that not only is ideology a primary site of the construction of gender, but âthe ideology of gender ⊠has played an important ...