Gender Theory in Troubled Times

Kathleen Lennon, Rachel Alsop

• Editore: Polity
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780745683058
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Scienze sociali
• Categoria: Studi di genere

Theorizing gender is more urgent and highly political than ever before. These are times, in many countries, of increased visibility of women in public life and high-profilecampaigns against sexual violence and harassment. Challenges to fixed, traditional gender norms have paved the way for the recognition of gay marriage and gender recognition acts allowing people to change the gender assigned to them at birth.Yet these are also times of religious and political backlash by the alt right, the demonization of the very term 'gender' and a renewed embrace of the 'naturalness' of gendered difference as ordained by God or Science. A follow-upto the authors' 2002 text, Theorizing Gender, this timely and necessary intervention revisits gender theory for contemporary times.Refusing a singular 'truth about gender', the authors explore the multiple strands which go into making our gendered identities, in the context of materialist and intersectional perspectives interwoven with phenomenological and performative ones. The resulting critical overview will be a welcome and invaluable guide for students and scholars of gender across the social sciences and humanities.

1
The Data of Biology

We … often behave and talk as if the sexes are categorically different: men like this, women like that. … In toy stores sex-segregated product aisles … assume that a child’s biological sex is a good guide to what kinds of toys will interest them. … When we think of men and women in this complementary way it is intuitive to look for a single powerful cause that creates the divide between the sexes. … Wouldn’t it make sense if testosterone … makes men like this, while its minimal presence in females helps to make women like that? … This is Testosterone Rex: that familiar, pervasive and powerful story of sex and society. Weaving together interlinked claims about evolution, brains, hormones and behavior, it offers a neat and compelling account … [But] Testosterone Rex is wrong, wrong, and wrong again. (Fine 2017: 17–22)

The idea of the male brain and the female brain suggests that each is a characteristically homogenous thing and that whoever has got a male brain, say, will have the same kind of aptitudes, preferences and personalities as everyone else with that ‘type’ of brain. We now know that is not the case. We are at the point where we need to say, ‘Forget the male and female brain; it’s a distraction, it’s inaccurate.’ … It is now a scientific given … that the brain is moulded from birth onwards and continues to be moulded through to the ‘cognitive cliff’ in old age when our grey cells start disappearing. So out goes the old ‘biology is destiny’ argument. (Gina Rippon, quoted in Fox 2019)

Sexed/gendered difference

In contemporary discussions of sexed differences, there is a renewed search for a determining factor which both divides us clearly into men and women and fixes the distinguishing features of each category. In favour again are sex hormones, particularly amounts of testosterone (Fine 2017). The other favourite contender is the brain (Rippon 2019). In many theories, the quantity of testosterone is thought to determine the development of the brain. With Fine and Rippon, we hope to challenge the assumptions informing such claims.

The concern of this book is to explain how we end up as sexed human beings, with self- and other-assigned categorizations as men or women, male or female (or trans men or women, or intersex, or non-binary), with which we may be happy or unhappy, but which, either way, is one of the defining features of both our subjectivity and our social positionality. As we noted in the introduction, this area of investigation is now termed ‘gender theory’, and the term ‘gender’ has come, in everyday usage, to signal such sexed positionality. Under discussion is the status of our categories of sexed difference – categories that may be marked by use of the terms ‘male’ or ‘female’ or ‘man’ and ‘woman’. There is a complexity here considering what terminology to use. ‘Male’ and ‘female’ are employed throughout the animal and, to some extent, plant kingdoms and so have more claim to be categories whose identifying criteria are fixed by biological science, criteria which may vary for different scientific purposes. But in everyday practice, for humans, we do not make a distinction between, for example, being female and being a woman. Here we are concerned with these categories as used in everyday interactions to characterize ourselves and others we encounter. What we are exploring is the (most common) binary division of people into male and female, a categorization which becomes fundamental to people’s sense of their identity, frames the way they are seen by others, and carries with it associated expectations of patterns of behaviour and social positionality. The division into male and female bodies, men and women, is linked in a complicated way to a division into masculine and feminine people – where masculinity is a set of psychological and behavioural traits that are considered particularly appropriate to those classified as male, and feminine traits appropriate to those classified as female. The link between being male and masculinity and being female and femininity is a normative one. It is what is supposed to happen but is often deviated from. And, indeed, there is never an absolute coincidence. In investigating how we end up as men and women, or as non-binary, we are therefore investigating a phenomenon that has bodily, psychological, behavioural and social dimensions. It also has mythical or imaginary ones. For we are surrounded by stories and images which convey meanings about what it is to be a woman or man which interact with the other strands of individuation. In this first chapter, we will be exploring the contribution made by what Beauvoir (see chapter 4) calls the data of biology.

In the introduction we introduced the notion of gender essentialism, the suggestion that there is some fixed set of conditions which determine whether we are male or female, men or women. Those who adopt gender essentialist positions most commonly anchor them in biology. It is assumed that biology will provide us with the answer to the questions of what determines whether a person is male or female, man or woman, or maybe some combination of both. In this book we resist the claim that biology is determining in this way. But to resist this claim is not to make our biological bodies irrelevant to the complex story of how we end up gendered. They are part of the picture but not the whole of it. Moreover, our biological bodies are themselves infinitely complex, open and changing, susceptible to multiple understandings, and interwoven with our wider material and social environments in ways that render it impossible to isolate the contributions they make from other aspects of our becomings (Rippon 2019).

Sexed categories as natural kinds

Sex difference research has been a continually thriving area for at least the last two hundred years (Cameron 2007; Fine 2012). There are two fundamental assumptions underlying this work which will be scrutinized separately here. First is the assumption that the binary division of bodies into male and female is part of the natural order of the world. Within this assumption, facts about our biology provide an explanatory grounding for our sexed categories in a way that makes a division into male and female a recognition of objective facts of nature, which, in some sense, demand attention. Objective here means having a unifying factor that is independent of our practices of classification. There are differing accounts of what the most basic biological determinants of this binary division are, and research into the biology of sexed difference explores the roles played by, for example, visible morphology, brains, hormones and chromosomes. But such exploration takes place within an assumption that the sexed kinds ‘male’ and ‘female’ are biological kinds, reflecting a naturally occurring grouping of properties that have important causal effects, particularly within the biology of reproduction – for example, ‘the ability to make a distinctive contribution to reproduction – i.e. [for females] to gestate, give birth to and breast-feed babies’ (Stone 2007: 44). We will return to evaluate these claims below.

Psychological and behavioural sex differences and their biological anchorage

The second key assumption of much scientific work on sex differences is that the assumed division into male and female bodies is accompanied by other differences, associated psychological and behavioural dispositions, which have consequent effects on social positionality. There is, of course, disagreement as to what range of responses are supposed to be conditioned by sex differences in this way. Recurring themes concern greater aggression and competitiveness in men and greater nurturing qualities in women, greater spatial and abstract reasoning abilities in men and greater linguistic skills in women. The differences picked out are supposed both to causally explain and, sometimes, to justify the differing social positions that men and women typically occupy. ‘People with the female brain make the most wonderful counselors, primary school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists … People with the male brain make the most wonderful scientists, engineers … musicians, architects … toolmakers’ (Baron-Cohen 2003: 11). The defence of sex differences of this kind is given causal anchorage in the hormones and chromosomes that contribute to distinct bodily characteristics and/or evolutionary theory and/or in claimed physical differences in male and female brains. An example of this kind of thinking was found in discussions following the crash of Lehman Brothers, and consequently of the global financial sector, in 2008. There was speculation that the high-risk strategies and large-scale financial speculation which led to this crash would not have been pursued if the financial traders had not been predominantly men. And here the reference was not to learnt patterns of gendered behaviour but to the link between the supposed male hormone testosterone and risk-taking. ‘There is a very simple reason why most financial traders are youngish men. The nature of trading incorporates all the features for which young males are biologically adapted. … All the actions of testosterone are echoed by the qualities of a successful trader’ (Herbert 2015: 116–18, cited in Fine 2017: 151).

It is research into sex differences of this second kind which feminist writers were initially most concerned to contest. That is, they have been concerned to contest that psychological and behavioural differences are anchored primarily in biological ones. In the debates surrounding such research into psychological and behavioural sex differences there are two steps which need to be evaluated. First is the claim that there are empirically significant differences between the psychological characteristics and behavioural dispositions of those people classified as male or female, men or women. Second is the claim that these psychological and behavioural differences are to be explained by biological features, by hormones, genetic variations anchored in chromosomes, and/or differences in male and female brains – biological traits whose presence is frequently explained by evolutionary selection. As Deborah Cameron noted in 2007, from the 1990s a ‘steady trickle of books’ about the sex differences of men and women ‘began to develop into a raging torrent’; from scientific papers which appear to suggest cognitive or behavioural differences, to popular science books and self-help books designed to aid communication across the presumed gap between men (who are from Mars), and women (who are from Venus), to coin an ubiquitous current usage’ (2007: 2).

It is not possible here to give a comprehensive review of the research into psychological and behavioural sex differences, and there are some really excellent texts which provide a critical review of this work, from biologists, psychologists and historians of science (see, for example, Bleier 1984; Fausto-Sterling 1992, 2000; Fine 2012, 2017; Cameron 2007; Jordan-Young 2010). It is, however, worth looking at examples of currently active research to give a sense of the kinds of difficulties surrounding it. If biological explanations are to be offered for psychological and behavioural differences between men and women, then these differences must themselves be established. Clearly, if we look around us, wherever we are, there are a large number of psychological and behavioural differences between those classified as men and those classified as women. But if these are to be biologically based then they must not be differences that vary historically or cross-culturally. Moreover, once we add that restriction, then the characteristics for which we might seek biological explanations become much fewer and highly contested.

The biological explanations offered for the supposed differences currently utilize two, often interwoven, strands of theory. One is evolutionary psychology. The second is research into differences between male and female brains.

Evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology is a development from sociobiology, which assumes that behavioural differences between men and women of multiple kinds are adaptive for survival and have been selected in a process of evolution. The work of sociobiologists suggested that our genes programme our behaviour. Genetic similarities, which had been taken to explain physical similarities among relatives and to explain the recurrence of certain illnesses in families, are viewed in a much more problematic way to be the basis of complex behavioural traits such as ‘shyness, alcoholism or criminality’ (Fausto-Sterling 1992: 62) and, crucially for our purposes, behavioural differences between men and women. Sociobiology assumed sexual differences have evolved through natural selection to the maximal advantages of both sexes. It is important to be clear exactly what this programme requires – namely, that patterns of behaviour, supposedly empirically observed now, are of adaptive value.

Ideally, to show that a behaviour is an evolutionary adaptation, researchers must demonstrate that (1) the behaviour is heritable, (2) there is or was behavioural variability among individuals in a population, and (3) that differential reproduction, caused by the presence of the behaviour in question, led to an increase in the frequency of individuals tending to exhibit that behaviour in a population. Since researchers cannot go back in time to directly observe the evolution of current behaviours, they most often rely on indirect evidence. (Fehr 2011)

This has the consequence that hypotheses are invented for the supposed adaptive advantage of currently observed patterns of behaviour at some supposed earlier time in our evolutionary history. As many biologists, feminist and otherwise, have pointed out, this amounts to little more than the invention of Just So stories.

For example, Thornhill and Palmer in their book, A Natural History of Rape (2000), argue that rape is either a by-product of male adaptations to desire multiple sexual partners, or an evolutionary adaptation itself. In the adaptation view, rape is a facultative reproductive strategy, meaning that rape is the result of natural selection favouring men who commit rape when its evolutionary benefits in terms of producing offspring outweigh its evolutionary costs. (Ibid.)

There has been significant criticism of such stories (Travis 2003). For example, Elisabeth Lloyd (2003) highlights not only the complete lack of evidence that rape is of adaptive value but also the assumption that ra...