"certain bodies go to the
gynaecologist for certain kinds of examination and certain bodies do not"
"But ... Why is it
pregnancy by which that body gets defined?"
"the question of pregnancy ... is centering that whole institutional
practice here."
... although women's bodies generally speaking are
understood as capable of impregnation, ...
there are women of all ages who cannot be
impregnated,"
"and even if they could ideally, that is not necessarily the
salient feature of their bodies or even of their being women."
What the
question does is try to make the problematic of reproduction central to the
sexing of the body. But I am not sure that is, or ought to be, what is
absolutely salient or primary in the sexing of the body. If it is, I think
it's the imposition of a norm, not a neutral description of biological
constraints.
I do not deny certain kinds of biological differences. But I always ask
under what conditions, under what discursive and institutional conditions,
do certain biological differences ... become the salient
characteristics of sex.
It's a practical problem. If you are in your late twenties or your early
thirties and you can't get pregnant for biological reasons, or maybe you
don't want to, for social reasons - whatever it is - you are struggling
with a norm that is regulating your sex.
It takes a pretty vigorous (and
politically informed) community around you to alleviate the possible sense
of failure, or loss, or impoverishment, or inadequacy - a collective
struggle to rethink a dominant norm.
Why shouldn't it be that a woman who
wants to have some part in child-rearing, but doesn't want to have a part
in child-bearing, or who wants to have nothing to do with either, can
inhabit her gender without an implicit sense of failure or inadequacy?
When
people ask the question "Aren't these biological differences?", they're not
really asking a question about the materiality of the body. They're
actually asking whether or not the social institution of reproduction is
the most salient one for thinking about gender. In that sense, there is a
discursive enforcement of a norm.
1998 Judith
Butler won first prize in the fourth Bad Writing Contest,
sponsored by the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature. See
Press Release
Her first-prize sentence appeared in "Further Reflections on the
Conversations of Our Time," in the scholarly journal Diacritics in
1997:
"The move from a
structuralist account in which
capital is
understood to structure social relations in relatively
homologous ways to a
view of
hegemony
in which
power relations are subject to repetition,
convergence, and
rearticulation brought the question of
temporality into
the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of
Althusserian
theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in
which the insights into the
contingent possibility of structure inaugurate
a renewed conception of
hegemony
as bound up with the
contingent sites and
strategies of the
rearticulation of power."
[This is about the move from relatively centralised conceptions of power
structures in society, which Butler associates with
Louis Althusser, to
decentralised conceptions of conflict rather than harmony, associated with
Althusser's student
Michel Foucault. She is saying that in the new Foucauldian view,
power is, at least in part, a struggle over the way we say
(articulate
and/or perform) things. If
we can alter the way we say or perform things, we can alter
society.]
|
21st century
Genetics and the sociology of
identity
|
In the 1930s the theory developed that the genetic information about what
characteristics are inherited are carried in an organic chemical which we
now call
DNA (Deoxyribose Nucleic
Acid). These acids are generally found only in the
chromosomes - Thread like structures in cells, see left.
Experiments in the 1940s and 1950s, using
micro-organisms, showed that DNA was the material that transmitted genetic
information.
|
Butler: a more sophisticated enquiry
Sociologists tend to stress social determinants of behaviour and
personality and/or voluntaristic ones, rather than body ones
If you want to see how one sided this sociological approach can become,
watch
"The Gender Equality Paradox" shown on Norwegian television
in March 2010. This was the first of a seven part series in which Harald
Eia confronted Norwegian social scientists with the evidence for some
biological influence on personality.
Judith Butler's theoretical work is valuable in devising a more
sophisticated sociological
approach to
genetics (and the body generally) because she acknowledges the
reality of
the body
[materiality] but argues that no aspect of it is free of
cultural
interpretation.
She says:
"there is no recourse to a body that has not
always
already been interpreted by cultural meanings".
We have to examine the
dialogue of material and cultural reality:
The genetics issue of Sociology says:
"Butler ... reflects on the dualistic relationship between a
material embodiment of sex in chromosomes and genitals... and the socially
construed formation of gender identities."
Genetically, biologists argue, we have our
biological sex (gender)
determined by the combination of X (female determining factor) and Y (male
determining factor)
chromosomes in our cells. Females have two X
chromosomes (XX) - Males have one of each (XY).
The drawings below are by
Steven K Ellis
. In most people the type of sex chromosome matches the type of
genitalia (sex organ). The genitalia are also called "primary sexual
characteristics". However, not everyone engages in sex and reproduction
whereas urinating is universal.
|
|
A diagram depicting the 23 human chromsomes. Based on a diagram in the
glossary of the National Human Genome Research Unit. It shows both the
female (XX) and male (XY) versions of the
23rd chromosome pair.
(Source Wikipedia)
Twenty two of the chromosomes in which the biological information is stored
to transmit to future generations have the same form in men and women. The
twenty-third is different. This then appears, on the surface, to be the
simple, biological, explanation for why men are not women.
The genetics issue of Sociology says:
"The common understanding of genetics, and the social practices
in which it is employed, continue to be largely based on the assumption
that genes cause or are stable indicators for individual
characteristics."
BUT
First of all we need to recognise that biological determination is not that
straightforward. For example, there are people who for complex reasons are
given different sex identities to just "male" or "female".
The genetics issue of Sociology says:
"Bodies, genes, processes of brain development and aspects of
gender identity come in many irregular forms, including atypical genetic
variations in the sex chromosomes, which occur in 1 out of 700 live births,
as well as the many other ways in which bodies and desires trouble the
hetero-normative ideal of sex and gender identity"
|
Spanish hurdler
Maria Patino considered herself a woman, as did everyone else.
Standard sports tests said the same in 1983 but then in 1985 the tests said
that she was a man.
|
Judith Butler suggests that looking at the way we think about people with
an anomalous biological sex can help us to understand more about how we
understand sex generally. She says
"The point here is not to seek recourse to the exceptions, the
bizarre, in order merely to relativize the claims made in behalf of normal
sexual life. ... it is the exception, the strange, that gives us the clue
to how
the mundane and taken-for-granted world of sexual meanings is
constituted."
The genetics issue of Sociology says:
"the complexity of individual experience and desires does not
fit with stereotypical identities. Individuals are forced to match imposed
(or seemingly imposed) societal expectations."
So reality is more complex than genetic determination. As well as the
influence of the body, we have to take into account the social stereotypes
that society imposes and the complexity of individual experience and
desires.
The genetics issue of Sociology says:
"Recent developments in genomic science and its interpretation
appear to favour following Butler... genetic research has highlighted the
extent to which ordinary bodily development is shaped and defined by social
as much as genetic and other biological factors. Scientists and clinicians
are nowadays much more inclined to assume that physiology, sexual desire
and gender identity, far from being naturally linked or aligned with one
another, are profoundly shaped by cultural idioms and individual
experiences."
Top of
Page
Andrew Roberts likes to hear from users:
To contact him, please
use the Communication
Form