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From De Beauvoir to Butler How Gendered Categories Have Been Used in Five Classical Texts on Gender

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From De Beauvoir to Butler How Gendered Categories Have Been Used in Five Classical Texts on Gender Linnéuniversitetet Institutionen för samhällsvetenskap 2010-01-08 SOD543 From De Beauvoir To Butler How gendered categories have been used in five classical texts on gender Författare David Sandin Handledare Glenn Sjöstrand Abstract The focus of this thesis is to investigate how gender related concepts have used in practise from Simone De Beauvoir’s ―The second sex‖, to Judith Butler’s ―Bodies that matters‖. The other texts used are ―the traffic in women‖ by Gayle Rubin, ―Gender: an ethnomethodological approach‖ by Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna and ―Gender and power‖ by Robert Connell. In my theoretical part I use the idea that categories are human inventions and that no categories including those important to the gender issue are more correct than any other and that the usefulness of categories can only be measured by the usefulness of the theories attached to it. I am also inspired by the theory of critical realism that claims that research must focus on the internal mechanisms that causes the effects that we are observing. The method used is an adaptation of philosophical concept analysis where I have analyzed how gender related concepts such as ―men‖ and ―women‖ are used in my empirical material. The focus was to create an understanding of how gender categories where used in the texts that I where analyzing. There is also a metatheoretical approach where the empirical material is used in order to get an understanding on how to create new theories. The conclusions of this thesis is that the theoretical concept of gender has developed from a description of how social forces affected people in the category ―women‖ different from those in the category ―men‖ to a more and more intricate philosophical and theoretical discussion of how to understand and analyze this difference. The second conclusion is that all the authors of my material are struggling with how the relation between the sexed\gendered bodies and the social characteristics of men and women should be explained. This leads to a number of problematic conclusions that I claim can be solved by not using specific theories about gender but instead focusing on general social theories based on causality and internal relations that explains the phenomena that are studied. 2 Table of Contents 1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................. 4 1.1 THE DISPOSITION OF THIS THESIS ........................................................................................................................... 5 1.2 AN INTRODUCTION TO GENDER............................................................................................................................. 5 2 THE PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY ....................................................... 8 3 THEORY .............................................................................................. 9 4 METHOD ........................................................................................... 13 4.1 META THEORIZING ........................................................................................................................................... 13 4.2 SELECTING MY MATERIAL................................................................................................................................... 13 5 EMPIRICAL STUDY ........................................................................... 16 5.1 THE SECOND SEX ............................................................................................................................................. 16 5.2 THE TRAFFIC IN WOMEN .................................................................................................................................... 19 5.3 GENDER: AN ETHNOMETHODOLOGICAL APPROACH ................................................................................................. 24 5.4 GENDER AND POWER ....................................................................................................................................... 28 5.5 BODIES THAT MATTERS. .................................................................................................................................... 34 6 CONCLUSIONS ..................................................................................41 WORKS CITED ..................................................................................... 44 3 1 Introduction The idea of gender is today something that should be familiar to all students of sociology and the sex gender distinction is at the core of most feministic literature. It has also created the new interdisciplinary subject of gender studies that is being taught at universities all over the world. Although the theory of gender has been so widely spread the concept of gender is still problematic. The question of what gender is and what kind of relation it has to sex is causing trouble for many contemporary writers and some have raised the question if gender as an analytical tool serves any purpose today. One critique is that gender theories only concern white heterosexual middle class woman in the western world (Hawkesworth 1997: 650 f), the other common critique comes from the post-structural movement who among other things claim that the body have disappeared in gender analysis and that this reproduce misogynic and dualistic assumptions (Grosz 1994: 3) and that the idea of gender unifies ideas that should be treated as diverse (Hawkesworth 1997: 651). For me the interest in the gender problematic started a few years ago when I was reading feministic literature and realized that the concept of gender was problematic in several ways. That was the starting point for my bachelor thesis in sociology in which I studied three sociological dissertations with gendered perspectives from which several of my ideas and concepts in this thesis are taken. In my bachelor thesis I found that in the dissertations I studied the researchers used both common sense approaches and more theoretical perspectives on gender and that the views on how gender should be understood in many cases where very vague. This led me to the idea that I should study how some of the leading figures in gender studies interpret and understand the question of gender. When writing about how gender is described throughout its history I will inevitable interpret it through my own cultural background. When I read my material I will read it through the perspective of someone who studied gender and have been taught what the perspective of gender means. Even though this is a critical examination of the gender concept, my views on the subject have been shaped by the classes on gender I have taken and the books about gender I have read. As with us all, my own interpretation of gender is inevitable linked with how gender has been viewed by researchers and by society as a whole 4 1.1 The disposition of this thesis The first chapter of this thesis consists of a short introduction to the gender issue, how it was first used and it´s development over time. Since this is also part of the aim of this thesis it is more of a general overview than a thorough investigation. In the second chapter I will outline the purpose of this thesis which is how the gender categories have been used in practice from the beginning up till today. In the third chapter I will go through the theories I will use when I analyze my empirical material; these are not gender theories but instead theories about how to view and analyze categories and concepts from a sociological perspective. The fourth chapter consists of the methods I used in this thesis, they can be characterized as a combination of a conceptual analysis influenced from philosophy and meta theorizing, which is a method for understanding and creating new theories. In this chapter I also describe and motivate how I selected my material, which texts I have used and why. The fifth chapter is my empirical part, here I review the texts which I have selected and also analyze them individually from the purpose of the thesis. In the sixth and final chapter I analyze all texts together from my theoretical view to see what they have in common and how they differ from each other and what conclusions that can be drawn from them from my meta theoretical approach. 1.2 An introduction to gender The idea that the differences between men and women are caused by social effects and not due to some essential properties or biology is not a new one. Simone de Beauvoir’s book ―the second sex‖ originally printed in 1949 is by most seen as the first text in this gender tradition and the phrase ―One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.‖ (De Beauvoir 1993: 281) is considered the first example where being female is not seen as something innate (Carlson 2001: 17) and is also one of the texts that I analyze in this thesis. Gender as a concept in the modern term was probably first used by John Money in 1955 when he described gender role as to ―mean all those things [behaviors] that a person says or does to disclose him or herself having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively‖ (Diamond 2004: 592) but it was Robert Stoller´s account of gender from 1968 where gender was defined as the cultural and psychological differences between men and women that was later adopted by the feministic movement (Carlson 2001: 19). Later the clear distinction between the biological sex and the cultural gender was beginning to get problematic and the view that the biological is something unchangeable and given became questioned by a
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