Undoing Gender (31 page)

As a way of showing how passions for foundations and methods sometimes get in the way of an analysis of contemporary political culture, I propose to consider the way in which the efforts to secure a theoretical basis for political struggle often read precisely in opposition to the travels of certain key political signifiers within contemporary public culture. The most confusing for me has to do with the status of the term “gender” in relation to feminism, on the one hand, and lesbian and gay studies, on the other. I was surprised, perhaps naively, to understand from my queer studies friends that a proposed methodology for gay and lesbian studies accepts the notion that whereas feminism is said to have
gender
as its object of inquiry, lesbian and gay studies is said to have
sex and sexuality
as its “proper” object. Gender, we are told, is not to be mistaken for sexuality, which seems right in a certain way, but imagine then my shock when the Vatican announced that gender ought to be stricken from the United Nations Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) platform on the status of women because it is nothing other than a code for homosexuality!
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Added to my worries is that some of my closest associates within feminist theory scorn the notion of gender. They claim that sexual difference is the preferred term to gender, that “sexual difference” indicates a fundamental difference, and that gender indicates a merely constructed or variable effect.

The United Nations Meeting on the Status of Women in Beijing in 1995 exhibited yet another challenge to academic commitments. In particular, what is the status of universal claims within the domain of international human rights work? Although many feminists have come to the conclusion that the universal is always a cover for a certain epistemological imperialism, insensitive to cultural texture and difference, the rhetorical power of claiming universality for rights of sexual autonomy and related rights of sexual orientation within the international human rights domain appears indisputable.

Consider first the surprising use of gender in the UN context. The Vatican not only denounced the term gender as a code for homosexuality but insisted that the platform language return to the notion of sex, in an apparent effort to secure a link between femininity and maternity as a naturally and divinely ordained necessity. In late April 1995, in preparation for the NGO meetings in Beijing—called the prepcom—several member states, under the guidance of the Catholic Church, sought to expunge the word “gender” from the Platform for Action and to replace it with the word “sex.” This was called by some on the prepcom committee an “insulting and demeaning attempt to reverse the gains made by women, to intimidate us and to block further progress.”
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They wrote further: “We will not be forced back into the ‘biology is destiny’ concept that seeks to define, confine, and reduce women and girls to their physical sexual characteristics. We will not let this happen—not in our homes, our workplaces, our communities, our countries and certainly not at the United Nations, to which women around the world look for human rights, justice, and leadership.” The statement notes:

The meaning of the word “gender” has evolved as differentiated from the word “sex” to express the reality that women’s and men’s roles and status are socially constructed and subject to change. In the present context, “gender” recognizes the multiple roles that females fill through our life cycles, the diversity of our needs, concerns, abilities, life experiences and aspirations… the concept of “gender” is embedded in contemporary social, political and legal discourse. It has been integrated into the conceptual planning, language, documents and programmes of the UN system. The infusion of gender perspectives into all aspects of UN activities is a major commitment approved at past conferences and it must [be] reaffirmed and strengthened at the 4th world conference.
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This debate led Russell Baker in the
New York Times
to wonder if the term gender hasn’t so supplanted the notion of sex that we will soon find ourselves in relation to our erotic lives confessing to having had “gender” with someone.

As gender became intensified at the UN discussion as a code for homosexuality, the local fields of queer theory and feminism were taking quite a different direction, at least apparently. The analogy offered by methodologically minded queer theorists in which feminism is said to be concerned with gender and lesbian and gay studies with sex and sexuality seems far afield from the above debate. But it is surprising to see that in the one case gender appears to stand for homosexuality, and in the other, it seems to be its opposite.

My point is not simply that academic debate seems woefully out of synch with the contemporary political usage of such terms, but that the effort to take distance from gender marks two political movements that are in many ways opposed to one another. In the international debate, the Vatican denounces the use of the term “gender” because it either (1) is a code for homosexuality, or (2) offers a way for homosexuality to be understood as one gender among others, threatening to take its place among masculine, feminine, bisexual, and transsexual, or, more likely, threatening to take the place of male and female altogether. The Vatican’s fear—and they cite Anne Fausto-Sterling
⁸
on this matter—that homosexuality implies the proliferation of genders. (
La
Repubblica
claims that in the United States the number of genders has leaped to five: masculine, feminine, lesbian, homosexual, and transsexual.) This view of homosexuality as proliferating gender seems to be based on the notions that homosexuals have in some sense departed from their sex, that in becoming homosexuals, they cease to be men or women, and that gender as we know it is radically incompatible with homosexuality; indeed, it is so incompatible that homosexuality must become its own gender, thus displacing the binary opposition between masculine and feminine altogether.

Interestingly, the Vatican seems to share a certain presupposition with those who would make queer studies into a methodology distinct from feminism: whereas the Vatican fears that sexuality threatens to displace sex as the reproductive aim and necessity of heterosexuality, those who accept the methodological division between queer theory and feminism hold out the promise that sexuality might exceed and displace gender. Homosexuality in particular leaves gender behind. The two are not only separable but persist in a mutually exclusive tension in which queer sexualities aspire to a utopian life beyond gender, as Biddy Martin has so ably suggested.
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The Vatican seeks to undo gender in an effort to rehabilitate sex, but method-oriented queer theory seeks to undo gender in an effort to foreground sexuality. The Vatican fears the separation of sexuality from sex, for that introduces a notion of sexual practice that is not constrained by putatively natural reproductive ends. And in this sense it appears that the Vatican, in fearing gender, fears the separation of sexuality from sex, and so fears queer theory. Queer methodology, however, insists on sexuality, and even in
The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader
, on “sexuality and sex.” Such understandings evacuate gender as well, but only because gender stands for feminism and its presumptive heterosexuality.
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In both contexts, the debates were about terminology and whether the term “gender” could be allowed into the platform language for the NGO meetings, and whether the term “sexual orientation” would be part of the final language of the UN conference resolutions. (The answer to the first is yes; to the second, no, but language regarding sexual autonomy was deemed acceptable.) Terms such as gender, sexual orientation, and even universality, were contested publicly precisely on the question of what they will mean, and a special UN meeting was convened in July of 1995 to come up with an understanding of what “gender” means.

My view is that no simple definition of gender will suffice, and that more important than coming up with a strict and applicable definition is the ability to track the travels of the term through public culture.

The term “gender” has become a site of contest for various interests.

Consider the domestic U.S. example in which gender is often perceived as a way to defuse the political dimension of feminism, in which gender becomes a merely discursive marking of masculine and feminine, understood as constructions that might be studied outside a feminist framework or as simple self-productions, manufactured cultural effects of some kind. Consider also the introduction of gender studies programs as ways to legitimate an academic domain by refusing to engage polemics against feminism, as well as the introduction of gender studies programs and centers in Eastern Europe where the overcoming of “feminism” is tied to the overcoming of Marxist state ideology in which feminist aims were understood to be achievable only on the condition of the realization of Communist aims.

As if that struggle internal to the gender arena were not enough, the challenge of an Anglo-European theoretical perspective within the academy casts doubt on the value of the overly sociological construal of the term. Gender is thus opposed in the name of sexual difference precisely because gender endorses a socially constructivist view of masculinity and femininity, displacing or devaluing the
symbolic
status of sexual difference and the political specificity of the feminine. Here I am thinking of criticisms that have been leveled against the term by Naomi Schor, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, and others.

In the meantime, sexual difference is clearly out of favor within some reigning paradigms in queer theory. Indeed, even when queer theory is seeking to establish the anachronism of feminism, feminism is described as a project unambiguously committed to gender. Within critical race studies one finds, I believe, very little reference to sexual difference as a term.
¹¹

But what is this sexual difference? It is not a simple facticity, but neither is it simply an effect of facticity. If it is psychic, it is also social, in a sense that is not yet elaborated. Much recent scholarship seeks to understand how psychic structure becomes implicated in dynamics of social power. How are we to understand this conjuncture or disjuncture, and what has it to do with the theorization of sexual difference?

I want to suggest that the debates concerning the theoretical priority of sexual difference to gender, of gender to sexuality, of sexuality to gender, are all crosscut by another kind of problem, a problem that sexual differences poses, namely, the permanent difficulty of determining where the biological, the psychic, the discursive, the social begin and end. If the Vatican seeks to replace the language of gender with the language of sex, it is because the Vatican wishes to rebiologize sexual difference, that is, to reestablish a biologically narrow notion of reproduction as women’s social fate. And yet, when Rosi Braidotti, for instance, insists that we return to sexual difference, it is rather different from the Vatican’s call for such a return; if for her sexual difference is a difference that is irreducible to biology and irreducible to culture or to social construction, then how are we to understand the ontological register of sexual difference? Perhaps it is precisely that sexual difference registers ontologically in a way that is permanently difficult to determine.
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Sexual difference is neither fully given nor fully constructed, but partially both. That sense of “partially” resists any clear sense of “partition”; sexual difference then operates as a chiasm, but the terms that overlap and blur are perhaps less importantly masculine or feminine than the problematic of construction itself; that what is constructed is of necessity prior to construction, even as there appears no access to this prior moment except through construction.

As I understand it, sexual difference is the site where a question concerning the relation of the biological to the cultural is posed and reposed, where it must and can be posed, but where it cannot, strictly speaking, be answered. Understood as a border concept, sexual difference has psychic, somatic, and social dimensions that are never quite collapsible into one another but are not for that reason ultimately distinct. Does sexual difference vacillate there, as a vacillating border, demanding a rearticulation of those terms without any sense of finality? Is it, therefore, not a thing, not a fact, not a presupposition, but rather a demand for rearticulation that never quite vanishes—but also never quite appears?

What does this way of thinking sexual difference do to our understanding of gender? Is what we mean by gender that part of sexual difference that
does
appear as the social (gender is thus the extreme of sociality in sexual difference), as the negotiable, as the constructed— precisely what the Vatican seeks to restore to “sex”—to the site of the natural, where the natural itself is figured as fixed and non-negotiable?

Is the Vatican’s project as unrealizable as the project to produce gender
ex nihilo
either from the resources of culture or from some fabulous will? Is the queer effort to override gender, or to relegate it to the superseded past as the proper object of some other inquiry, feminist, for example, that is not its own? Is this not an effort to still sexual difference as that which is radically separable from sexuality? The regulation of gender has always been part of the work of heterosexist normativity and to insist upon a radical separation of gender and sexuality is to miss the opportunity to analyze that particular operation of homophobic power.
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From quite separate quarters, the effort to associate gender with nefarious feminist aims continues along other lines. In a disturbing cooptation of anti-imperialist discourse, the Vatican went so far as to suggest that gender was an import from decadent strains within Western feminism, one imposed on “Third World countries,” often used interchangeably with the term “developing countries.”