Joan W.

Scott

Millennial fantasies: The Future of "Gender" in the 21st Century

At the turn of the last century when prophetic voices raised concerns about the future, a frequent theme was the relations between the sexes. Some worried that conventional hierarchies would be inverted: the "woman on top," would emerge from the sanctity of her household to command armies, practice law, or preside over parliaments, leaving men to tend the children and mend the clothes. Others, more optimistically or perhaps desperately as war loomed on the hori!on pro"ected the reign of the feminine principle in an era of cooperation, harmony and lasting peace. Still others imagined a world without sex, in which reproduction was handled "scientifically," and pleasure became an entirely cerebral affair. #hen, and only then, they believed, would equality between women and men be possible. #he very range of these fantasies suggests that shared historical moments do not necessarily generate shared opinions. And their intensely distilled quality contrasts sharply with what we $now to be the complexity and messiness of social and political experience. #hat alone ought to caution us against giving too much credibility to millennial forecasts, our own as well as those of our contemporaries. %istory always seems to exceed whatever explanatory structures we try to impose on it. %aving recogni!ed the limited predictive value of millennial fantasies, & must nonetheless admit that & have one a nightmare scenario, in which biological determinism returns to regulate gender. 'ender, of course, is exactly the term coined to resist the reduction of social relations to physical sexual differences. #here was a moment not long ago, when feminists thought "gender" would be an invincible barrier against biology. #he sex(gender distinction would analytically separate the physical body from the social body) it would then no longer be conceivable that anatomy was destiny. 'ayle *ubin, writing the classic article on the sex(gender system, allowed herself to dream of the elimination of obligatory sexualities and sex roles. "#he dream & find most compelling is one of an androgynous and genderless +though not sexless, society, in which one-s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one ma$es love." . &n my nightmare, "gender" is revealed to be feminism-s /aginot 0ine, impotent to stop the return of the $ind of reasoning that led the Scottish biologist 1atric$ 'eddes to warn those agitating for female suffrage in the .223-s about the futility of their quest. 'eddes insisted that a dual pattern of cell metabolism accounted for differences between the sexes: "the hungry, active cell becomes flagellate sperm, while the quiescent, well fed one becomes an ovum." 4rom this it followed that "5hat was decided among the prehistoric Protozacan not be annulled by act of parliament." 6 Although no longer questioning women-s right to vote or, for that matter, to participate in public, professional activity, there is today a strong current of scientific opinion that, li$e 'eddes, extends theories of biological evolution to the social(political realm. 7nown as sociobiologists in the .893-s, today-s "evolutionary psychologists" deduce conclusions about universal differences in behavior and emotional character between men and women from their different reproductive functions. Of course, the science is far more sophisticated than 'eddes-, and genes have replaced cells as the fundamental unit of the transmission of inherited traits. :ut the argument has a disturbingly familiar ring to anyone who has read the nineteenth century pronouncements: /en see$ to sow their seed widely, it is said, to insure their genetic transmission, while women are more discriminating and more 1

"relational" or "associative" because of the investment of time and energy required to bear and nurture a child. Since, it is further asserted, these evolutionary adaptations secured human survival, we can infer from them "the basic ways we feel about each other, the basic $inds of things we thin$ about each other and say to each other..." ; & have heard evolutionary psychologists extend their reasoning about reproduction to the behavior of five year olds on playgrounds +boys fight, girls bond, and to the patterns of intellectual conversation among university undergraduates +men show off to women, women create groups among themselves,. #he New York Times carried a story recently about the research of two scientists who argue that rape is not about violence and power, but about procreation, driven as it is by male adaptive interest. < A recent boo$ advertises its "evolutionary view of women at wor$," attributing the glass ceiling and other gender inequities in contemporary labor mar$ets to "evolved differences between the sexes." = #here are self described feminists who celebrate the political potential of women-s genetically driven relationality or sociability. > And even so strong a critic of evolutionary psychology as Steven ?. 'ould has granted that "differing @arwinian requirements for males and females imply distinct adaptive behaviors" that "probably...underlie some different, and broadly general, emotional propensities of human males and females," 9 while warning against too rigid an application of these ideas to all of human cultural activity. Aloser to home for me is the most recent special issue of the "ournal History and Theorydevoted to "#he *eturn of Science: Bvolutionary &deas and %istory." &t contains eight articles, most of which gush +with an enthusiasm reminiscent of the brief turn to quantitative history in the .893-s, about the possibility of achieving, through a marriage of biology and history, not only a "science of human nature", but that fantastic dream of the scientist as 'od "unity of $nowledge." &n a phrase &-ll leave it to psychoanalysts to interpret, the editor of the volume notes that "science is pressing on history." 2 And one of the contributors concludes his essay with a sentence that combines wish and prophecy in a most stri$ing fashion: "#he @arwini!ation of historical studies would be a paradigm shift of Aopernican magnitude."8 As & was writing this paper & received an e mail from a colleague, who used to wor$ on the social history of American politics, inviting me to "oin him and B. O. 5ilson on a panel at the next meeting of the American %istorical Association on ":iohistory." Among the questions to be discussed are : "5hy are historians so afraid of @arwinC" and "&f history is entirely -constructed,- what are the building materialsC" And, this question added, &-m sure, with me in mind: "@oes the admission of innate tendencies into the discussion of history mean that women will be considered inferiorC" #hose of us who thought that "gender" had helped defeat sociobiological claims about the inevitable translation of anatomical difference into social behavior, those of us who thought that the widespread use of the term gender was an important indicator of the acceptance of our views, are astonished to see sociobiology triumphantly returned now as evolutionary psychology. Alosely tied to the evolutionary theories that drive molecular and neuro biology the sciences that, we are told, will displace the hegemonic reign of physics in the 6.st century evolutionary psychology is in a powerful position to set bac$, if not reverse, .33 years of feminist critical wor$. 0i$e all millennial forecasts +and li$e many fantasies,, that last statement is hyperbolic. &t seriously reduces a multiply contested field to a manichaean struggle in which feminism and neo @arwinism face off for control of the future meaning of sexual difference. And it denies the ways in which random and contingent developments influence both natural and human social history. Still, there is a use for such thin$ing: it identifies issues we need to consider and act on in the present and it does so in an urgent way. #he 2

urgency can have the effect of mobili!ing feminists to redouble our efforts to refuse biological determinism and it can lead us to critically reassess the ways in which we have been announcing that refusal. &t is this second path & want to explore today. &f, in a 4reudian vein, we can ta$e a nightmare to express a wish one too horrible or too difficult to ac$nowledge as such then it might be concluded that what & wish to argue +against a fairly widespread feminist consensus hence the difficulty, is that gender may no longer be the useful category it once was, not because the enemy has prevailed, but because it does not have the power to do the wor$ we need it to do now. #he wea$ness of gender for countering the extreme claims of evolutionary psychology lies precisely in what was once ta$en to be its virtue: its refusal to deal with corporeal sex. #he sex(gender distinction +borrowed by feminists in the .8>3-s from endocrinologists and psychoanalysts ?ohn /oney and *obert Stoller are $ey names in this area, insisted on the fact that sex roles were human contrivances, naturali!ed by reference to physical bodies, but not determined by them. #he point was to study the ways in which "social construction" occurred, to document its variety and mutability, to expose its operations as a system of power, and to offer examples of alternatives or resistances to normative prescriptions. #his was enormously productive wor$ and & don-t want to disavow or underestimate the importance of its impact. +Dor do & want to associate myself with the views of Aamille 1aglia or some queer theorists who maintain that attention to gender and neglect of sex constituted a form of feminist puritanism. & do want to associate myself more forcefully than & have in the past with so called "4rench feminism," always a minority position among American feminists, but which questioned social scientific uses of -genderin the name of psychoanalysis. #hese feminists, anxious to stress both the indeterminacy of sexed sub"ect positions and to emphasi!e inequalities of power, preferred to tal$ about sexual difference and "les rapports de force de sexe.", #he sex(gender distinction, as developed by the ma"ority of American feminists both left aside and left in place, as somehow "natural" and therefore uninterrogated, the bodies on which these constructions were being built. As a result, sex continued to undermine the clarity that "gender" was meant to provide. %ere is the usage note at the entry for "gender" in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language +;d ed., .886,: #raditionally, gender has been used primarily to refer to the grammatical categories of "masculine," "feminine," and "neuter") but in recent years the word has become well established in its use to refer to sex based categories, as in phrases such as gender gap and the politics of gender #his usage is supported by the practice of many anthropologists, who reserve sex for reference to biological categories, while using gender to refer to social or cultural categories. According to this rule, one would say The effecti!eness of the medication appears to depend on the se" #not gender$ of the patient% &ut 'n peasant societies% gender #not se"$ roles are likely to &e more clearly defined #his distinction is useful in principle, but it is by no means widely observed, and considerable variation in usage occurs at all levels. +9=<, #he last sentence here is crucial, both as a reminder of the futility of insisting upon precise linguistic usages and of the difficulty feminists have had in separating social designations from their physical referents. Do matter how insistently feminist theorists have refined the term gender, they have been unable to prevent its corruption. &n popular conversation, the terms sex and gender are as often used synonymously as oppositionally) indeed, sometimes it seems that gender is simply a polite euphemism for sex. And "udging from the number of scholarly boo$s and articles that ta$e gender and women to be synonymous, academics are not much better than the general public at maintaining the distinction between the physical and the social that the introduction of gender was meant 3

to achieve. & thin$ this confusion of the two terms is symptomatic of a number of related problems, all of which stem from the way in which sex(gender replicates the nature(culture, body(mind oppositions. &n each case "nature" is considered an entity outside or apart from human consideration) it is something we must learn to $now that is not created by our $nowledge. &f gender is the use we ma$e of our bodies, our bodies themselves cannot be understood entirely in terms of social construction. 'ender thus does not replace physical sex in discussions of sexual difference) but in the end, it leaves sex in place as the explanation for social construction. 5hen gender depends on sex in this way, nothing can prevent its being identified with +or as, sex itself. 5hat seems then to be conceptual and terminological confusion, is in fact an accurate representation of the interdependence of the two terms: if sex is not entirely natural, neither is gender entirely social. Eet another reason it has been difficult to maintain a clear distinction between sex and gender has to do with the universali!ing impulses of both feminism +a political movement originating in the 5est at the moment of its eighteenth century democratic revolutions, and social science +whose origins are roughly contemporaneous with feminism,. #he universali!ing impulses of feminism and social science have operated to produce a view of women +across time and cultures, as fundamentally homogeneous by ta$ing as self evident the fundamental difference of women from men. Bven when national and(or cultural differences are ac$nowledged, these are treated as second order phenomena, so many variations on a universal theme in which gender always means the same thing: an asymmetrical, if not antagonistic, relationship between women and men that organi!es the different functions of each into separate activities and spaces. :ut if gender the unvarying fact of sexual difference is universal, what, other than biology, can finally explain its universalityC &f gender means the social forms imposed on existing physical differences between women and men, then nature +bodies, sex, is left in place as the determining factor of difference. &f the study of women automatically leads to "gender analysis," then a form of essentialism is driving the investigation: the presence of physical females is ta$en to mean that a system of difference already $nown to us is in effect. 5hen "gender" assumes the prior existence of physical sex differences, indeed becomes a synonym for these differences, then sharp conceptual distinctions between sex and gender are difficult to maintain. 4urthermore, the historici!ing operation that gender was supposed to perform on sex is undone because biology is understood not to have a history. #he fixity of the male(female opposition its lac$ of history is, of course, an axiom of evolutionary psychologists. Although the world -evolution- seems to imply change over time, in fact +as *ichard 0ewontin and ?oseph 4racchia point out in the issue of History and Theory & referred to earlier, there is all the difference in the world in this discourse between -evolution- and -history- the one referring to a "lawful process of selection and adaptation," the other to contingency, contextual specificity, and historicity .3 . Bvolutionary psychologists posit an originary moment when time stopped for the species. %ence /&# psychologist Steven 1in$er +defending 1resident Alinton during the /onica 0ewins$y scandal, wrote: "/ost human drives have ancient @arwinian rationales...A prehistoric man who slept with fifty women could have sired fifty children, and would have been more li$ely to have descendants who inherited his tastes. A woman who slept with fifty men would have no more descendants than a woman who slept with one. #hus, men should Fnotice how the tense shifts here from the conditional past to the future imperativeG see$ quantity in sexual partners) women, quality." .. #he fantasi!ed scenario fixes human traits in ancient pre history with seeming scientific precision but ta$es no account of centuries of changing 4

environments and the strategic adaptations they might require. +&t is ironic or perhaps entirely predictable that this insistence on tying men-s social(sexual behavior to reproductive imperatives comes at a moment when new technologies threaten to ma$e men though not their sperm unnecessary for procreative acts., #his theory of evolution which removes human activity from its time bound contexts has not been adequately addressed by arguments about "cultural constructions" of gender, for at least two reasons.6 . #he first &-ve already alluded to: while gender is given a history, biological sex is not. #he second is related to the first: theories of cultural construction have been used by feminists to delegitimi!e science and often to prevent our engagement with those aspects of biological $nowledge that might usefully historici!e anatomical sex. 5e have analy!ed the politics of scientific discourses that legitimate social inequalities between women and men and we have insisted on the empirical inadequacies of certain categorical descriptions of women, but +with the exceptions of trained scientists li$e Anne 4austo Sterling and @onna %araway, we haven-t grappled with the epistemic authority of biology itself.; . @onna %araway noted a do!en years ago that in the effort "to remove women from the category of nature and to place them in culture as constructed and self constructing social sub"ects in history, the concept of gender has tended to be quarantined from the infections of biological sex.".< %aving described science +with its claims of ob"ectivity and the transparency of nature, as "socially constructed" has somehow impugned its authority and the necessity to engage it, in its own terms, as a serious form of $nowledge. #o the list of oppositions sex(gender, nature(culture, body(mind, has been added that of science(feminism. #he whole chain of association reverses the usual male(female opposition that posits mind and masculinity against sex and the feminine, but it grants sex to science and places women outside that field. .= 4eminists can then denounce the political bias of evolutionary psychology-s strong claims about the biological bases for gender, but we can-t dispute the concrete science of evolutionary genetics that informs it, nor find within that field those whose research might help articulate a different position. #his has the effect of abandoning the very terrain on which we need to wor$ and of allowing models +fantasiesC, of scientific $nowledge as coherent and unified to stand as representatives of what is, in fact, a contentious and conflicted field. .> Science is a form of $nowledge, the organi!ation of which also has a history not a narrowly conceived political history +which treats science as simple reflection of social pre"udice, but a history of contending concepts and organi!ing principles that represent nature to us. +5ithin the field of biology, for example, there are ma"or differences -civil wars,- according to one account about what counts as scientific explanation., .9 &f this is the case, it might be that the conflation in ordinary usage of sex and gender can be considered a correction of the "mista$e" that treats sex and nature as transparent entities outside of "culture") instead, both gender and sex have to be understood as complexly related systems of $nowledge. Of course, the achievement of the sex(gender opposition has been precisely to treat anatomical sex as a form of social $nowledge, but it has also overemphasi!ed the external social determinations, neglecting the autonomous aspects of the history of scientific ideas. +'enetics, for example, can-t be reduced to a reflection of class or gender struggle in late capitalism., & agree with the neuro psychologist Bli!abeth 5ilson that feminist attention to gender and a narrow focus on women has prevented our engagement with the biological sciences and & agree, as well, that "feminism needs to engage with scientific authority not simply at those sites where it ta$es women as ob"ects, but also in the neutral !ones, in those places where feminism appears to have no place and no political purchase." 4or her, this means ta$ing up not research about sex 5

differences in cognitive abilities, but research about "the nature of cognition itself." .2 4or dealing with evolutionary psychology, her approach would mean, & thin$, arguing less about whether or not all women are relationally inclined, and more about how bodies register their history. Or it might mean turning to the "epigenetic" research of Shirley #ilighman, who insists that "genetic expression" is contextually and complexly that is, in some sense, historically determined. .8 'ender is not a particularly useful category for thin$ing along these lines. 5ilson finds in "connectionist" psychology dynamic theories of cognition that challenge simplistic notions of biological determinism. :rain function and consciousness, she maintains, are far more complex than can be explained by reductive notions of genetic programming. &nstead, she points out, research shows that cognitive patterns are established differently in the course of individual histories. Bli!abeth 'ros!, in a more utopian vein, suggests that study of the body might provide some of the ammunition feminists need: &sn-t it even more interesting to show, not that gender can be at variance with sex...but that there is an instability at the very heart of sex and bodies, that what the body is capable of doing, and what anybody is capable of doing is well beyond the tolerance of any given cultureC 63 &f some of you hear an echo in this of those last enigmatic pages of 4oucault-s History of (e"uality% )olume ' & thin$ you are right. #hose of us intent on combating essentialism in the name of gender anxiously pondered the meaning of these words of 4oucault: 5e must not thin$ that by saying yes to sex, one says no power Fthis was the argument against the idea of sexual liberation the boo$ had shown that sex was not a natural force outside history, but an effect of ideas about sexualityG)...&t is the agency of sex that we must brea$ away from, if we aim through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and $nowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. #he rallying point for the counterattac$ against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex(desire, but bodies and pleasures.6. & now understand that 4oucault wasn-t resorting to a transparent body outside its conceptuali!ation, but to a material entity that 5ilson deems "biocultural." "&t is the body as it is lived and as it lives a specific set of biocultural and biopsychical parameters."66 #he aim of feminist science, for 5ilson, is to produce $nowledge of the body as interacting with and also exceeding the possibilities of the physical parameters within which it operates. &n her view of it, the body is produced by contingent impressions +radically individuali!ed, that mix sensory responses and unconscious fantasies +registered neurologically, in ways that ma$e nonsense both of genetic determinism and mind(body separations. &t-s interesting, and probably not surprising, that 5ilson lin$s her wor$ to psychoanalysis, finding useful for her own neurologically oriented research psychoanalysis-s attempts to historici!e the body and to refuse the mind(body opposition. +4reud-s Pro*ect for a (cientific Psychology is particularly important to her for this reason, but so is a long standing thread of feminist theori!ing associated with pyschoanalysis and deconstruction., &t may be that my own attraction to some psychoanalytic theori!ing is a perverse response to the recent attac$s on it +the controversy over the 4reud exhibit is "ust the tip of the iceberg,, but it-s also the case that nothing else addresses questions about sexual identity and sexual behavior as directly as psychoanalysis. & find, with 5ilson, that it is helpful to have accounts of human development that understand drives and desires not as innate pressures, but as products of individual histories. #a$e for example 4reud-s discussion in Three Lectures on the Theory of (e"uality of how the nursing baby comes to 6

experience suc$ing not only as a means of satisfying his(her hunger, but also as a source of oral pleasure. &ndependent of the need for food, the mouth and lips become erogenous !ones, motors of corporeal desire that preceed conscious thought. #hose children for whom suc$ing early provided great sexual satisfaction, 4reud wrote, may in later life "become epicures in $issing, ForG will be inclined to perverse $issing..." 6; #he point +made differently and with more intricacy by 0acan, is that these oral drives li$e other drives associated with vision, hearing, the genitals are not purely biological. 1hysical experience, remembered unconsciously, invests the body with significance beyond that which can be explained by purely physical need. 6< #his $ind of formative developmental process +this individuali!ed history, produces desires that don-t fit neatly into behaviors deemed masculine or feminine and that can-t be read bac$ to genetic determination. #he process continues as individuals confront, adapt to, and resist historically specific social rules and expectations. #he sexed individuals +with their drives, desires, and bodies, who live this process, are the products neither exclusively of "gender" nor of biology. 4or 4reud, the challenge was to analy!e the interactions between individual variation and social categori!ation that evolutionary psychologists prefer to ignore. "&n human beings," he wrote, "pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or a biological sense. Bvery individual on the contrary displays a mixture of the character traits belonging to his own and to the opposite sex) and he shows a combination of activity and passivity whether or not these last character traits tally with his biological ones."6= +#his is not a 4reudian account of sexual difference, but an attempt to problemati!e what are often ta$en to be natural differences between the sexes., 6> &n addition, there is no guarantee that children will identify with the parent of their physical sex in their "ourney to adulthood. &nstead, a complex process of identification mar$s an individual-s assumption of masculinity or femininity, and it, too, resists easy correlations between anatomical sex and socially constructed gender, as ?udith :utler +critically using psychoanalytic concepts for the study of sexed identities, so nicely points out: 5hat happens, Fshe as$sG when the primary prohibitions against incest produce displacements and substitutions which do not conform to Fcultural models of heterosexualityGC...FAG woman may find the phantasmatic remainder of her father in another woman or substitute her desire for her mother in a man...F&Gf a man can identify with his mother, and produce desire from that identification...he has already confounded the psychic description of stable gender development. And if that same man desires another man, or a woman, is his desire homosexual, heterosexual, or even lesbianC 69 #hese questions about individual identity and the role of phantasmatic identification in securing it, assume that the categories -man- and -woman- are ideals established to regulate and channel behavior, not empirical descriptions of actual people, who will always fall short of fulfilling the ideals. #hey assume further that social and political institutions offer the possibility and the pressure to fulfill normative ideals of masculinity and femininity. And that terms li$e -man- and -woman- are, li$e all signifiers, meanings which are not fixed and absolute, but established differentially in relationship to one another. %istorians and anthropologists interested in collective identities have shown how variable these normative ideals have been) how, for example, imperatives to marry and reproduce have depended upon ideas about, say, the importance of $inship for transmitting property and power, or about how the si!e of population signifies the strength of societies or states. Deedless to say notions of masculinity and femininity differed in different "reproductive regimes." 62 *eproductive behavior, in other words, is context dependent, as are the bodies that reproduce it only complicates matters, as they should be complicated, to add that these 7

bodies sometimes reproduce under psychological, if not physical, duress. & don-t want, in this paper, to elaborate a full scale response to evolutionary psychology-s reductive pronouncements. /y aim was to begin an exploration of the limits of gender as an analytic category and evolutionary psychology provided one avenue of exploration. :ut &-d already become uneasy about the term, even before & became aware of the resurgence of biological explanation. #hat was because gender seemed to have become routini!ed, contributing to, rather than unsettling the stability of the man(woman opposition. & got tired of finding myself cited in boo$s and articles that simply too$ for granted the transparency of physical differences between the sexes, that raised gender to the status of a theory, when in fact it served merely as a synonym for the uninterrogated categories -women- and -men.- /y own use of gender depended +still depends, on what has been called "the linguistic turn)" & have been dismayed to see that theory evacuated by the themati!ation of "gender." #his is not to deny that the term was once extremely useful. &n the .893-s and 23-s the heyday of feminism-s embrace of gender the limits of gender were apparent to some critics +@onna %araway in the H.S., 0uce &rigaragy in 4raqnce to name only two,, but the concept still performed important theoretical and political wor$. &t enabled us to separate biology from culture +detrimentally, perhaps in the long run, but usefully at that moment,, to agree with Simone de :eauvoir +against functionalist social science, that "one is not born a woman," and to "ustify change in the relations between the sexes as an aspect, not of dangerous social engineering, but of historical process. &n addition, the word gender itself was "arring transposing as it did a grammatical concept +even though it came by way of medical discourse, to the arena of human social and sexual identity. & don-t $now how many courtly older scholars expressed great disturbance +and a certain malicious pleasure, at having caught me misusing the term. "&sn-t that a grammatical referenceC" they would politely inquire at the end of a lecture. 68 :ut the question gave me the chance to explain what & was up to and to call into question an entire world view that denied women +and the relations between women and men, a history. #here was a delicious mischief, too, in the use of a grammatical term to tal$ about sexual difference. &n grammar, gender is understood to be a way of classifying phenomena, a socially agreed upon system of distinctions rather than an ob"ective description of inherent traits. #his was exactly the point of using gender instead of sex in our discussions of the roles and behaviors of men and women they were not natural, but ascribed or assigned. +And there was, too, the possibility for questioning heterosexual presumptions opened by the fact that in some &ndo Buropean languages gender involves not two, but three categories: masculine, feminine and neuter., &n history and the social sciences, gender pointed the way to what might be called social studies of sexual difference. 5e as$ed under what conditions different roles and functions had been defined for each sex) how regulatory norms of sexual deportment were created and enforced, how issues of power and rights played into definitions of masculinity and femininity, how symbolic structures affected the lives and practices of ordinary people, how sexual identities were forged within and against social prescriptions. &n the context of the A&@S epidemic and with the explosive intervention of queer theorists, the view long held by psychoanalytic feminism came into greater prominence: heterosexuality itself was redefined as a normative, not a natural system. #here was a heady sense that we were addressing our own situation by unmas$ing "gender" as a relationship of power) in that sense we were practicing what /ichel 4oucault called "the history of the present" in our analyses of the past. And there was a great deal of new empirical information produced about many varieties of social and cultural practices. Bven the tensions among feminists 8

about whether or not to historici!e the categories men and women were fruitful for a time because they allowed us to debate the political implications of the radical historici!ing pro"ect. @id @enise *iley-s attempt to produce a 4oucaultian genealogy of "women" inevitably undermine the feminist political pro"ect +as #ania /odels$i argued it would in +eminism without ,omen,, or did it carry our critique of essentialism to its ultimate conclusionC;3 5as there a stable female sub"ect whose story we could tell despite the different contexts within which she livedC 5ere we producing that sub"ect through our research and writing, or did she preexist our interest in herC 5hen gender was ta$en to be an open question about the ways in which sexual difference was conceived, it served as a provocative category of social, cultural, and historical analysis. &n addition, gender enabled feminists to participate in a broader constructivist discourse that was challenging the predominance of structuralism and functionalism in the biological and social sciences. & don-t thin$ it operates that way anymore, at least not in the Hnited States, where the increasing prominence of neurobiology, microbiology and information technology, the excitement about the %uman 'enome pro"ect, and the search for genetic explanations for all physical and social conditions have posed strong challenges to constructivism at least to simple notions that this $ind of science is only "social" and that its substance can be dismissed for that reason. As the discussion extends to biological sex +is there a gene for homosexualityC do female hormones and reconstructive surgery ma$e once aggressive men nicer as @onald(@eirdre /cAlos$ey maintainsC ;. are diseases sex lin$edC, and the body looms large as a causal factor, constructivist arguments at least as we once used them to insist on the overwhelmingly social and narrowly political origins of scientific $nowledge seem wea$. +'ender may still provide a critical wedge in other countries, where there have been fewer feminist inroads in politics and the academy, particularly where there is no exact translation for the word. As a foreign import, often left untranslated, gender serves as a point of contestation for a whole range of issues +about biological and cultural causation in the field of sexual difference, as well as about 5estern theoretical influence, among feminists and between feminists and their allies and(or foes. ;6 :ut, for the most part, gender has acquired exactly that allure of social scientific neutrality that is meant to distinguish it from the politically engaged pro"ect of feminism and that guarantees its academic respectability. &t has become a way of ta$ing +or not ta$ing, a position on the question of feminism, which is the contested term these days. 'ender can be a means of distinguishing one-s wor$ from the special pleading associated with feminism, or it can serve to disguise the explicit feminist aims of scholarly pro"ects in either case it is feminism, not "gender" that is at issue. Bven as "gender studies" programs proliferate in many places, notably the countries of the former Soviet bloc, & would argue that "feminism" has replaced "gender" as an incitement to international controversy. &s feminism a 5estern importC An international movementC 5ho are the women who form its constituencyC &s there a common ground for the women-s movements of the worldC &s feminism a global or a local phenomenonC 5ho spea$s in the name of womenC #hese are, at present, matters of intense debate within many countries and across the borders of nation states, religious movements, and human rights organi!ations. 'ender does not pose comparable controversy.,;; #he contentious forum of feminist international politics provides an illustration from another perspective of the former strengths and current wea$nesses of gender as a category of critical intervention in political and academic debates. "'ender" was a controversial term at the Hnited Dations 4ourth 5orld Aonference on 5omen held in 9

:ei"ing in the fall of .88=. &n the wee$s before the meeting convened, a subcommittee of the H.S. %ouse of *epresentatives held hearings at which *epublican congressmen and delegates from right to life groups pointed to the subversive implications of "gender" and urged Aongress not to fund the official delegation that was to be led by 4irst 0ady %illary *odham Alinton. #he spea$ers warned that morality and family values were under attac$ by those who believed that there might be as many as five genders +men, women, homosexuals, bisexuals, and transsexuals,. +%ere is an example of the confusion of gender and sex sexual behavior and sexed identity mixed up with social roles and biological descriptions., #hey also warned that the HD program for the :ei"ing Aonference had been hi"ac$ed by "gender feminists, who believe that everything we thin$ of as natural, including manhood and womanhood, femininity and masculinity, motherhood and fatherhood, heterosexuality, marriage and family, are only culturally created -fixes,originated by men to oppress women. #hese feminists profess that such roles have been socially constructed and are therefore sub"ect to change." ;< 5ithin the HD, the controversy was such that the Aommission on the Status of 5omen had earlier set up a contact group to see$ agreement on "the commonly understood meaning of -gender,-" and to convey its conclusions "directly to the conference in :ei"ing." @isagreement between those who insisted on a strictly biological definition and those who wanted to refer to the "socially constructive FsicG roles of men and women" ;= led to an entirely uninformative resolution, which was nonetheless offered as an appendix to the 1rogram of Action of the conference. #he "Statement on the Aommonly Hnderstood /eaning of the #erm -'ender-" reads as follows: %aving considered the issue thoroughly, the contact group noted that +., the word "gender" had been commonly used and understood in its ordinary, generally accepted usage in numerous other Hnited Dations forums and conferences) +6, there was no indication that any new meaning or connotation of the term, different from accepted prior usage, was intended in the 1latform for Action....Accordingly, the contact group reaffirmed that the word "gender" as used in the 1latform for Action was intended to be interpreted and understood as it was in ordinary, generally accepted usage. ;> 5hat is stri$ing about this attempt at clarification is that there is nowhere any explication of "generally accepted usage." &t was as if the meaning were self evident, free of ambiguity and all possible misinterpretation. #he wording of the statement, of course, attempts to settle controversy by denying that it exists. Still, some participants at the conference felt pressed to spell out their understanding of the term. #he representative of 'uatemala, for example, wrote that "in conformity with the ethical, moral, legal, cultural and natural criteria of the 'uatemalan people, 'uatemala interprets the concept of gender solely as female and male gender in reference to women and men." ;9 A similar statement came from 1araguay. 1eru too$ matters further, anticipating the dangerous implications "gender" seemed to have by insisting that "sexual rights refer solely to heterosexual relationships.";2 And the representative of the Iatican interpreted the common meaning of "gender" as "grounded in biological sexual identity, male or female." "#he %oly See thus excludes dubious interpretations based on world views which assert that sexual identity can be adapted indefinitely to suit new and different purposes." Dot that biology determined sex roles statically. #he 1ope was all in favor of "a certain diversity of roles...provided that this diversity is not the result of an arbitrary imposition, but is rather an expression of what is specific to being male and female." ;8 +&n other words, homosexuality was unnatural and could not be countenanced by "gender.", On the one hand, this flurry of ob"ection testifies to the radical potential of "gender" to denaturali!e sex by relativi!ing and historici!ing it +and contradicts my earlier assertions 10

about the limits of gender analysis,. Aatholic spo$esmen clearly recogni!ed the danger to religious dogma posed by the argument +made by theorists such as ?udith :utler who, much to her delight and that of her friends and admirers, was specifically mentioned by the 1ope as an antagonist in the days before :ei"ing, that sex was an effect of gender and that there was no necessary correlation among physical bodies, social roles, and sexual behavior. On the other hand, feminists could ridicule the five genders fantasy, but they did not have strong rebuttals for the assertion that the human species consisted only of women and men. /ore telling, perhaps, was the fact that the final report from :ei"ing and the statement on "ordinary usage," show that *ome-s anxiety was misplaced. As the American Heritage Dictionary entry for "gender" indicated, gender had become "ust another way of referring to women and men. &n the report, "gender equality" means equality between women and men) "gender balance" is fair representation for each sex) "gender awareness" +which is supposed to inform all policy decisions, means an awareness of how policies may affect women and men differently. #he Aonference calls on governments and D'Os to "mainstream a gender perspective in all policies and programmes, so that before decisions are ta$en an analysis may be made of their effects on women and men, respectively." <3 #his means, for the most part, that statistics and statistical pro"ections should be disaggregated by sex. #he 633 or so mentions of "gender" in the 1rogram of Action from :ei"ing are often simply substitutes for the word "women." "'ender" also indicates importantly a belief in the possibility that women-s roles can be drastically altered for the better and that some measure of equality between the sexes can be achieved. &t is a discreet way of endorsing aspects of the egalitarian feminist agenda. Eet the use of the term "gender," while it signaled an opening to change in some traditional roles of women and men, had none of the subversive qualities so feared by its critics. &n ordinary usage, "gender" had become a synonym for the differences between the sexes, both ascribed and "natural." & thin$ this containment of the subversive possibilities of gender was only partly the result of the triumph of conservative forces at :ei"ing +and elsewhere,) it was also an effect of the sex(gender distinction itself, which tends implicitly to ratify a biological discourse that emphasi!es the ahistoricity of physical bodies. +And which doesn-t contest the essentialism that would have sex determine gender., #his is a severe limitation at a moment when, under the confluence of many factors ranging from the powerful impact of gay and lesbian movements to the prominence of evolutionary theory in the fields of cognitive studies and microbiology sex and sexual difference have become the focus of intense political and scientific discussion. As the .883-s draw to a close, the limits of gender seem to me ever more apparent. &n the Hnited States +and in the Hnited Dations, gender has become an aspect of ordinary usage, routinely offered as a synonym for women, for the differences between the sexes, for sex. Sometimes it denotes the social rules imposed on men and women, but it doesn-t often refer to the $nowledge that organi!es our perceptions of nature. :oo$s that purport to offer a "gender analysis" are typically quite predictable studies of women, or +li$e the 1rogram of Action from the :ei"ing conference, studies of differences in the status, experience, and possibilities open to women and men. :ut they rarely examine how the meanings of "women" and "men" are discursively established, what contradictions trouble these meanings, what the terms exclude, what variations of sub"ectively experienced "womanhood" have been evident in different normative regimes of gender, what the relationships are if any between current scientific understandings of, say, cognition or evolution, and sexual difference. &ndeed, many feminist scholars who use the term gender do so while explicitly re"ecting the premise that "men" and "women" are historically variable categories. #his has had the effect of reifying the man(woman opposition as foundational 11

and fundamental +of accepting the terms of evolutionary psychology,, and thus denying gender its former radical academic and political agency. 4or that reason, & find myself using "gender" less and less in my wor$ and tal$ing instead about sexual difference +a term that doesn-t presume fixed differences, but studies the operations of difference, and about biological sex as an historically variable concept. #his doesn-t solve the problem &-ve been describing, since it runs the ris$ of being heard +especially in the current discursive context, as an endorsement of the idea that sex is a natural fact.<. Still, it seems to me necessary to loo$ elsewhere for terms and theories that will disrupt what has become the business as usual of history in general, and of women-s history in particular. &-m not arguing that we erase gender and the useful notions associated with it from our vocabulary. Dor do & thin$ we should police usages of the term so that our meaning is the only one to prevail. #hat-s not only an impossible tas$, but one that denies the flexibility and mobility of language, its crucial role as an agency of change. *ather, & thin$ we need to move on, to provo$e a rethin$ing of what have become our routini!ed assumptions. &t is precisely when we thin$ we $now what a term means, when usage is so commonly agreed upon that meaning need no longer be disputed or provided, that new words and new concepts, or perhaps redeployments and reformulations of existing ideas, are needed. #he point of feminist inquiry and for me its continuing appeal has always been its refusal to accommodate the status quo. 4eminism has historically resisted the consolidation of -women- into homogeneous categories, even as it has launched political appeals in the name of -women.- Although this tension has troubled those who sought the security of a fixed identity, it has also been the source of feminism-s most creative political interventions. At its most effective, feminism has caused consternation by pointing out the contradictions and inconsistencies in societies claiming to provide equality and "ustice for all. &ndeed, it is because their claims have startled prevailing orthodoxies, because they have refused or reformulated "generally accepted usages" that feminists have been able to call attention to their cause. <6 As gender has become a word associated with a certain feminist orthodoxy, as well as with "ordinary usage", it is time to reflect on its limits, time to loo$ for reconceptuali!ations of the problem of sex and sexual difference that will enable feminist inquiry to reinvigorate its research, while continuing to play its traditionally provocative and disruptive role.

Notes &-m grateful for the critical readings done by /ary 0ouise *oberts, @ebra 7eates, and Bli!abeth 5eed, and to Aarol 0asser, Sandy Jagarell, *osi :raidotti, and #ony Scott for their helpful suggestions. .. 'ayle *ubin, "#he #raffic in 5omen: Dotes on the -1olitical Bconomy- of Sex," in *ayna *app, ed. Toward an Anthropology of ,omen +Dew Eor$: /onthly *eview 1ress, .89=,, .=9 6.3. 6. 1atric$ 'eddes and ?. Arthur #hompson, #he Bvolution of Sex +0ondon: .228) Dew Eor$: .283,, cited in ?ill Aonway, "Stereotypes of 4emininity in a #heory of Bvolution," in /artha Iicinus, ed. (uffer and -e (till. ,omen in the )ictorian Age +:loomington, &ndiana: &ndiana Hniversity 1ress, .896,, .<< <>. ;. *obert 5right, #he /oral Animal, cited by Stephen ?ay 'ould, "Bvolution: #he 12

1leasures of 1luralism," New York 0e!iew of -ooks +6> ?une .889,: =.. <. Brica 'oode, "5hat 1rovo$es a *apist to *apeC" The New York Times, .= ?anuary 6333, sec. :, pp. 8,... . =. 1ublicity for 7ingsley :rowne, Di!ided La&ours. An E!olutionary )iew of ,omen at ,ork +Dew %aven: Eale Hniversity 1ress, 6333,. >. A recent example is %elen 4isher, The +irst (e" +Dew Eor$: *andom %ouse, .888,. 9. Aited in ?ames Schwart!, "Oh /y @arwinK 5ho-s the 4ittest Bvolutionary #hin$er of #hem AllC" Lingua +ranca +Dovember .888,: 63. 2. @avid 'ary Shaw, "#he *eturn of Science," History and Theory ;2 +@ecember .888,: 8. 8. @oyne @awson, "Bvolutionary #heory and 'roup Selection: #he Luestion of 5arfare," History and Theory ;2 +@ecember .888,: .33. .3."#he differences between these two perspectives are incommensurable, not because of disciplinary boundaries, but because they involve different conceptions about the nature of -scientific- inquiry, different ontological and epistemological assumptions, and accordingly different modes of explanation." ?oseph 4raccia and *ichard 0ewontin, "@oes Aulture BvolveC" History and Theory, op. cit., p.=2. 4or an extended critique of the premises of evolutionary psychology, see 0ewontin, Not in 1ur 2enes +Dew Eor$: 1antheon, .82<,. See also ?ohn @upre, The Disorder of Things. /etaphysical +oundations of the Disunity of (cience +Aambridge, /A: %arvard Hniversity 1ress, .88;,, and @upre, "Scientism, Sexism, and Sociobiology: One /ore 0in$ in the Ahain," -eha!ioral and -rain (ciences .>:6 +.88;,: 686. ...Steven 1in$er, ":oys will be :oys," The New Yorker +8 4ebruary .882,:. 4or a critique of 1in$er, see ?ohn @upre-s ":oo$ *eview" of 1in$er-s How the /ind ,orks% in Philosophy of (cience >>. +September .888,: <28 <8;. See also 7enan /ali$, "@arwinian 4allacy," Prospect. +@ecember .882,: 6< ;3, and #errence 5. @eacon, The (ym&olic (pecies. the 3o4e!olution of Language and the -rain +Dew Eor$: Dorton, .889,. .6.#he critique of evolutionary theory made by Alifford 'eert! in the name of cultural specificities has not informed much of the wor$ done under the aegis of gender, with the noted exception of some anthropologists and historians of science. See 'eert!, "#he &mpact of the Aoncept of Aulture on the Aoncept of /an," and "#he 'rowth of Aulture and the Bvolution of /ind," in his The 'nterpretation of 3ultures, chapters 6 and ;. +D.E.: :asic :oo$s, .89;,. See also, /ichelle J. *osaldo, and . .;.Anne 4austo Sterling, /yths of 2ender. -iological Theories a&out ,omen and /en +D.E. :asic :oo$s, .82=, and (e"ing the -ody. 2ender Politics and the 3onstruction of (e"uality, :asic :oo$s, 6333,) @onna %araway, (imians% 3y&orgs and ,omen. The 0ein!ention of Nature #N Y . 0outledge% 5665$ . .<.@onna %araway, "-'ender- for a /arxist @ictionary: #he Sexual 1olitics of a 5ord," in (imians% 3y&orgs% and ,oman. The 0ein!ention of Nature +Dew Eor$: *outledge, .88.,, .;<. .=.Bli!abeth A. 5ilson, Neural 2eographies. +eminism and the /icrostructure of 3ognition +DewEor$: *outledge, .882,. .>.On the way in which fantasy imposes coherence on otherwise chaotic phenomena, see Slavo" MiMe$, The Plague of +antasies +0ondon: Ierso, .889,. .9.4racchia and 0ewontin, op. cit., p. =8. . .2.5ilson, op. cit., pp. .2 .8. .8.Shirley #ilighman, get cite. See also, Su!anne 0. *utherford and Susan 0indquist, "%sp83 as a Aapacitor for /orphological Bvolution," Nature 768 +6> Dovember .882,: ;;> ;<6. #he authors argue that, in the case of the drosophila they studied 13

there is a "complex relationship between the expression of the trait and the genetypes producing it." Iarious environmental factors create specific conditions that lead to "surprising" effects: the expression of "unexpressed genetic variation" where it was thought not to exist. See also Bli!abeth B. 0yons, ":reeding System Bvolution in Lea!enworthia &&. 'enetic and Dongenetic 1arental Bffects on *eproductive Success in Selfing and /ore Outcrossing 1opulations of Lea!enworthia crassa%9 The American Naturalist 5:; +.88>,: >= 2=. 63.Bli!abeth 'ros!, "Bxperimental desire: *ethin$ing Lueer Sub"ectivity," in ?oan Aop"ec, ed., (upposing the (u&*ect +0ondon: Ierso, .88<,, .<3. 6../ichel 4oucault, The History of (e"uality% )ol '% trans. *obert %urley +Dew Eor$: *andom %ouse, .823,, .=9. 66.5ilson, op. cit., p. ><. 6;.Sigmund 4reud, Three Essays on the Theory of (e"uality% trans. ?ames Strachey +Dew Eor$: :asic :oo$s, .8>6,, <2. 6<.?acques 0acan, the +our +undamental 3oncepts of Psycho4Analysis% edited by ?acques alain /iller, trans. Alan Sheridan +DewEor$: Dorton, .899,. See also, Aharles Shepherdson, )ital (igns. Nature% 3ulture% Psychoanalysis +Dew Eor$: *outledge, 6333,, 2= ..;. 6=.Sigmund 4reud, op. cit., pp. 2= 2>, n. .. 6>.#han$s to @ebra 7eates for this point. 69.?udith :utler, -odies that /atter. 1n the Discursi!e Limits of <(e"< +Dew Eor$: *outledge, .88;,, 88. 62.Bxamples of the anthropological and historical wor$ are: Sherry Ortner and %arriet 5hitehead, eds. (e"ual /eanings +Aambridge: Aambridge Hniversity 1ress, .88.,, and ?ohn @-Bmilio and Bstelle 4reedman, 'ntimate /atters +Dew Eor$: %arper and *ow, .822,. 68.#he current N Y Times usage manual still emphasi!es that gender is primarily a grammatical reference, although it admits the new meanings the word has acquired in social and political contexts and in idioms li$e "the gender gap." &n addition gender can be used "to avoid confusion with physical sex or to avert double meanings." :ut the experience of some Times writers suggests that copy editors prefer sex to gender whenever bodies are the sub"ect under discussion. ;3.@enise *iley, <Am ' That Name=< +eminism and the 3ategory of <,omen< in History +0ondon: /acmillan, .822,) #ania /odeles$i, +eminism ,ithout ,omen. 3ulture and 3riticism in a <Postfeminist< Age +Dew Eor$: *outledge, .88.,. ;..@eidre /cAlos$ey, 3rossing +Ahicago: Ahicago Hniversity 1ress, .888,. ;6.& am told that the %ebrew term for gender used in &srael today is "migdar." According to anthropologist /oshe Sho$eid the word has "the ring of the Bnglish term and its root is most probably in "gader", a dividing wall, fence or partition" a man made boundary. & am grateful to Sho$eid for the reference. ;;.4or the flavor of some of this controversy, see ?oan 5. Scott, Aora 7aplan, and @ebra 7eates, eds. Transitions% En!ironments% Translations. +eminism in 'nternational Politics +Dew Eor$: *outledge .889,. ;<.H.S. %ouse of *epresentatives. .3<th Aongress, 4irst Session. Aommittee on &nternational *elations. >nited Nations +ourth ,orld 3onference on ,omen9 Hearings -efore the (u&committee on 'nternational 1perations and Human 0ights% ?uly .2 and August 6, .88=. +5ashington, @.A.: H.S. 'overnment 1rinting Office, .88>,, <;. ;=.&bid, p. .39. ;>.Hnited Dations Aommission on the Status of 5omen. 0eport of the >nited Nations 14

3onference on Human (ettlements #Ha&itat ''$% 'stan&ul% 745: ?une 5668 Annex I: Statement on the Aommonly Hnderstood /eaning of the #erm -'ender.- Available at: http:((www.undp.org(un(habitat(agenda(annex=.html. ;9.Hnited Dations. 0eport of the +ourth ,orld 3onference on ,omen% -ei*ing% :45@ (eptem&er 566@ Ahapter I, section .3+b,, iii. Available at: gopher:((gopher.undp.org:93(33(unconfs(women(off(a 63.en. . ;2.&bid. section 6=, iii. ;8.&bid, section &&, "Statement of interpretation of the term -gender.-" . <3.&bid, chapter &I, @, section .6;. <..& thin$ it will be instructive to compare efforts to insist on the social construction of race. #hose see$ing to counter essentialist arguments did not come up with anything a$in to the sex(gender distinction. :ecause race as a natural fact had been discredited by anthropologists in the 63-s and politically after 55 &&. On race see @orothy B. *oberts, "#he 'ender #ie,9 The >ni!ersity of 3hicago Law 0e!iew 8A +.88=,: 638 69; and *obert D. 1roctor, 90ace (ince -oas. The (hadow of +ascism and the 3hallenge of /olecular Anthropology%9 unpu&lished paper% No!em&er 566; (ee also 2eorge , (tocking% ?r % 0ace% 3ulture and E!olution in the History of Anthropology +Ahicago: Hniversity of Ahicago 1ress, .8>2,. <6.?oan 5allach Scott, 1nly Parado"es to offer. +rench +eminists 3laim the 0ights of /an +Aambridge, /A: %arvard Hniversity 1ress, .88>,. Fuente: http://www.kcgs.org.ua/RUSSIA /t!"t.ht#$ %25/02/2013&

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