Engendering debate: how to formulate a political account of the divide between genetic bodies and discursive gender?

Abstract

In her article on ‘the Sign Woman’ on gender studies and feminist theory, Robyn Weigman identified the most profound challenges for contemporary feminist theory as twofold: ‘not simply to address the divide between genetic bodies and d\scursive gender but to offer a political analysis of the socially constructed afflictions between the two’. This article seeks to engage these challenges. It attempts to chart the terrain of dilemmas for gender theory from which analyses of gender as performed distinct from ‘sexed’ bodies has emerged, and which these analyses offer to resolve. It then seeks to interrogate the conception of identification and analysis of gender as distinct from the sexed body for application in empirical work, teasing out both benefits and limitations of this theoretical position for empirical (and theoretical) practice. In the final sections of the article, theoretical pathways that may lend fruitful analytical tools for the empirical study of gender productions, incorporating recognition of the impact of the material on productions and on power, are explored. It is argued that concepts of heteroglossia and interpretive communities may offer understanding of the ways in which gender operates as discursive production, and the ways in which gender is identified and analysed.

Keywords:

• masculinity
• femininity
• female masculinity
• sex
• gender
• power

Notes

1. Although Butler does recognise the discursive, structural constraints on agency concerning gender performance and identification, see for example Butler (2004) for discussion.

2. Halberstam (1999) suggests that much of her conception is based on appearance rather than ‘content’ of masculinity, but this response seems to ignore the way in which aspects of appearance (muscle culture, posture, gait and so on) are based on notions of ‘characteristics’ of gender.

3. As Cohen Shabot (2006) has observed, even cyborgs, held up by Donna Haraway as exemplifying the possibilities of a genderless future, tend in popular culture to be represented as hyper-sexual, rather than genderless. Cohen Shabot maintains that the loss of the maternal body in the cyborg which signifies a ‘dissolution of normative categories of sex and gender’ (p. 225) is experienced as so threatening that this anxiety is resolved by ‘a radicalization of the classic, binary features of normative sexuality’ (p. 225) – i.e. hyper-sexuality.

4. See for example Butler's (2004) discussion of homophobic murders, and the normative medical practices pathologising and disciplining intersex and trans bodies; or Lloyd's (2005) examination of the murder of Venus Extravaganza, as brutal punishment for her breaking of heteronormative codes.

5. See Walkerdine's (e.g. 1990) application of the conception of the dichotomised masculine-Subject/feminine-Other, which draws on psychoanalytic structuralist and poststructuralist theory, illustrating the ways in which the feminine is constructed as not just different to the masculine, but rather as lack.

6. See note 3 above.

7. Speer's analysis of practices of gender identification shows how consequential this is for the ‘reader’ of gender, as well as the performer. For the spectator that surveys and classifies the other's gender, provision of an ‘incorrect’ gender identification has implications for the subjectivity and judged social competence of the subject making the identification.

8. Exceptions might include Halberstam's discussion of the phenomena of ‘mis-identification’ (see e.g. Halberstam 1999).

9. Work in schools and playgrounds by researchers such as Davies (1989) and Reay (2002) have demonstrated poignantly the potential consequences for individual pupils when their behaviour is deemed non-gender appropriate by their audience of peers, with sobering examples of bullying and marginalisation.