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ELISION AND SPECIFICITY WRITTEN AS THE BODY: SEX, GENDER, RACE, ETHNICITY IN FEMINIST THEORY

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN POLITICAL SCIENCE DECEMBER 1995

By Carolyn DiPalma

Dissertation Committee: Kathy Ferguson, Chairperson Michael Shapiro Phyllis Turnbull Deane Neubauer Ruth Dawson UMI Number: 9615516

UMI Microform 9615516 Copyright 1996, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.

This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 iii

~ Copyright 1995 by Carolyn DiPalma All Rights Reserved iv

With respect and love to:

Flora Tolbert Moyers (1888-1968)

and

Mary Louise Stande DiPalma (1889-1975) v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The process of writing this dissertation began

with my first Women's Studies course in 1980. Many

thanks to Megan McClard for her inspiring pedagogy and

for teaching me an appreciation of process. Thanks

also to Pat Ralston and Vicki LoSasso who shared the

discovery of Women's Studies and whose intellectual

support and friendship have been sustaining.

I wish to acknowledge the importance of the Femi­

nist Theory Reading Group at the University of Hawai'i

in inspiring my decision to pursue doctoral work in

Political Science and, in particular, for introducing me to Kathy Ferguson who has provided much intellectual

support and friendship throughout the years. I am also

indebted to Phyllis Turnbull for her careful and

informed reading, thoughtful counsel and friendship.

Thanks also to Michael Shapiro for his help and guid­ ance in understanding postmodern theories and their political application, to Nancy Riley for constructive comments and friendship, and to Amy Kastely for vigor.

Thanks to Michael, Frances and Patricia DiPalma, for their encouragement--even in the face of their con­ fusion about the process. Finally, I want to thank

Paul Larned for his unfailing support through thick and thin. Vl

ABSTRACT

In this dissertation, patterns of sex and race

insistences are examined in order to invite thinking

against prevalent truth claims and to address the chal­

lenge for feminist theory to discuss race and sex at

the same time. Sex and gender, as well as race and

ethnicity, are described as elided, rather than

specific, differences. In order to focus on the

embodied stakes in the arena covered by the slide, the

words are combined into sexgender and racethnicity.

Textual evidence of bodily constructions

highlighting the construction of sex and race, as well

as the political and material consequences of such con­

structions, are examined. Biology--from Aristotle to

the Human Genome Project--is described as a culturally

informed discursive practice. Nietzsche's proposition--truth is a woman--is examined as a space

in which to tease out the power of the inequities in

hierarchical assumptions and binary oppositions, and to examine notions of gender and sexuality. The manner in which legal racial distinctions have been "guided" by

science and popular prejudice demonstrates that race discourse is not simply governed by a mere presumption of biology, but also by relationships of power. It is the recognition of the slide--not the negation of the vii various components--in the conceptualizations of sex­ gender and racethnicity which is helpful; one can ges­ ture in a general way toward an arena of material, yet specificity is required in any particular analysis. To the extent that feminist theory can refuse to separate the elision of sex, gender and sexuality, and/or the elision of race and ethnicity, it can critically con­ test heterosexist or racist assumptions by requiring a radical specificity.

Feminists need a specifically spatial (not grounded) theory where an active confluence of identity

~nd difference can be encountered and its effects allowed to reconfigure the body. Focusing on the eli­ sion produces an implosion of collective social, dis­ cursive and embodied uncertainty resulting in a poten­ tial space for a new subjectivity. When the body is an unknown and unclosed category, when all is radical specificity, then universal concepts must be questioned by the demand for recognition of complexity. viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments v Abstract vi Chapter 1: Introduction: Articulating and Imploding Differences 1 [A] Investigating the Knowable and the Variable 3 [El Denials and Questions 19 [Cl What Lies Ahead 22 Chapter 2: Biology as Ideology: Metaphor, Hierarchy and "Truth" Written as the Body 25 [A] Thinking Through the Changes: Mind and Body 30 [B] Representing the Naturally Social 43 l C] Finding Difference in the Body 51 [D] From Body to Behavior 63 [E] Chemical Causality: Hormones 70 [F] Circular Reasoning and Imprecise Categories 79 [Gl Representing Genetic Foundations 88 Chapter 3: Sexgender: Its Requirement and Deployment as a Bodily Based Vector of Power 103 [A] Truth is a Woman 105 [B] The Sexgender Which Is Not One 121 [C] Reframing Sexgender 142 [D] New Riddles for the Sphinx 152 Chapter 4: Racethnicity: Its Requirement and Deployment as a Bodily Based Vector of Power 158 [A] Leaking Categories 162 [B] Blood Drops, Re-presentations, Power 169 [C] Whiteness 187 [D] Questions 196 Chapter 5: Disciplining the Body of Feminist Theory: Dealing Simultaneously with Racethnicity and Sexgender 201 [A] The (Im)Possibility of Analogy: Racethnicity and Sexgender 205 [B] Disciplining Feminist Sex 213 [C] Sexgender: Raced and E-raced 219 [D] Conclusion: Body Politics in an Undecidable Non-Place 230 Bibliography 237 ix

"All terms which semiotically condense a whole process elude definition; only that which has no history can be defined. "

The Genealogy of Morals

Friedrich Nietzsche

"History is a story Western culture buffs tell each other; science is a contestable text and a power field; the content is the form. Period."

nSituated Knowledges"

Donna Haraway 1

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: ARTICULATING AND IMPLODING DIFFERENCES

The distinction between sex and gender which

defines sex as biological and gender as cultural seems

fairly widely accepted. I find that people often

appreciate this explanation, and usually understand it

to mean something like: sex means women have babies,

but gender determines who changes their diapers. That

some women can not, will not, or do not have babies

does not seem to interfere with the notion of every

woman--throughout history and across cultures--as

biologically always already potentially pregnant.

Biology is destiny. There seems to be little diffi­

culty in recognizing that a person must be trained to

change diapers, or in recognizing that who gets trained

is a cultural decision (which may also have class

implications). Culture is acquired. However, when I

attempt to discuss the construction of sex with people who are not familiar with the theoretical material that

I read, the conversation rapidly turns to Adam and Eve or to chromosomes, as the scramble for empirical con­

firmation begins--the existence of hermaphrodites, 2

"bearded ladies," and unisex clothing notwithstanding. 1

Some boundaries, it seems, resist being blurred. Sex

is knowable. Gender is v~riable. And, it goes without

saying, sexuality is--naturally--hetero.

Race and ethnicity present similar problems when

race is approached as a construction. Race is assumed

to be a completely definable biological attribute; eth-

nicity a behavioral and cultural assignment. Echoes of

religion and chromosomes can be heard here as the Bib-

lical stories of the sons of Noah, the tower of Babel,

and other igrations get retold through racial and eth-

nic stereotypes presented as genetic predispositions.

Attempts to mark the boundaries of a racial group often

begin with biological features such as skin color, hair

type, or bone structure. The ambiguous nature of

quantum blood levels derived from presumed hereditary

lines, and the often undefined, unmarked norm of the

category white do not seem to alter the resolve of

1 Some of the attempts I have made to counter the push for a strictly empirical view of these matters have included the use of: Michel Foucault, ed., He~­ culine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of ~ Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon, 1980); Suzanne J. Kessler, "The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16.1 (Autumn 1990): 3-26; and, a video about a lesbian performer who lives her life with a full beard: Juggling Gender, dir. Tami Gold, Women Make Movies, New York, 1992 (27 min, color) . 3

those seeking authentic, biologically-based, race

labels. 2 Race is knowable. Ethnicity is variable.

[A] INVESTIGATING THE KNOWABLE AND THE VARIABLE

Arguments around stories with religious sig-

nificance have a history with which most people are at

least somewhat familiar, and these arguments often

swirl around issues of faith. Arguments about

scientific stories, however, become legitimacy claims

about facts, objectivity, and the methodology which produces hard-core evidence. To question science is to be a genuine late twentieth-century heretic. Most arguments seem to suggest that if one can just get down

to the finest, most minute genetic evidence, sex or race or sexuality will become a completely definable, ultimately knowable category. The problem is not assumed to be with empiricism or rational thinking, but

2 For one very readable account of the scientific racism involved in notions of biological determinism see: Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981); see also Richard C. Lewontin, Steven J. Rose, and Leon Kamin, Not in Our Genes (New York: Pantheon, 1984). There are a number of fairly recent writings about women and whiteness, see espe­ cially: Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1993); Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992); Minnie Bruce Pratt, "Identity: Skin Blood Heart," Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (New York: Long Haul Press, 1984) 11-63; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Massachusetts: Har­ vard UP,1992); bell hooks "Representations of White­ ness," Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992) 165-178. 4

with those of us not trained as scientists. Non­

scientists--it is assumed--just do not know enough

about science to actually settle this, but some

scientist, somewhere, does or will, as the truth

unfolds. Nowhere is the push to define and label more

obviously tied to identity than in the areas of sex,

including sexuality, and race; even though the slightly

more flexible categories of gender and ethnicity are

readily available. Why? What is at stake here? Why

are these areas and beliefs such sacred ground? What

are the benefits of maintaining these beliefs, and what

might be lost or gained if they are changed?

This is a problem. Sex and race are not knowable,

finite categories; and, (recognizing that arguing

against beliefs anchored in faith is never very fruit­

ful) understanding that scientific rationality does not provide access to unadulterated truth is part of the key to realizing this. How does it come to pass that in the presence of much evidence to the contrary, beliefs in clearly bounded categories of sex and race remain? In my experience, once there is doubt about the unwavering truth of scientific rationality, understanding the politics of the construction of race 5 and sex becomes possible;3 but convincing examples of the ways in which the construction of race and sex hap- pen, along with the associated political charge, need to be provided, and still, even then--as if just having witnessed a magic trick--doubt persists. Nevertheless,

I am interested in the potential of these moments where the magic trick is thought to occur. These are the moments Michel Foucault refers to as "emergence," an

"entry of forces," a "place of confrontation."4 These moments are not a stable location, they are a process that happens. These moments, these magic non-places are where the possibilities for different understand- ings, for new ways of knowing, for recognizing other

"realities," reside and are enabled. These are,

Foucault writes, "where forces are risked in the chance of confrontations, where they emerge triumphant, where they can also be confiscated."5 I am interested in

3 This experience is, apparently, shared by at least one other person. A message posted on the Women's Studies electronic mail list contained the fol­ lowing comment: "I find that once students connect to the central issues in feminist biology they see how the culture is saturated with assumptions deriving from patriarchal biology [. .J" (Kathryn Morgan, 20 May, 1994, on-line posting, Women's Studies List, WMST­ L@UMDD. UMD . EDU) •

4 Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984) 84.

5 Foucault, "Nietzsche" 92-3. 6

finding and creating these moments and non-places; in

retelling or describing them; in examining, analyzing,

and, perhaps--eventually--predicting them. I am also

interested in the politics which produce and inhibit

them; as well as how those politics might produce and

inhibit us.

Of course the variable categories of gender and

ethnicity, although more fluid than sex and race, are,

nevertheless, problematic. Gender and ethnicity are

often (though quite incompletely) thought of as the

cultural or behavioral versions of sex and race.

Generally, the possibilities for gender, like sex, are

limited--with overlapping between them--to two: mas-

culine and feminine; but, perhaps, two is not enough to

capture the variability of everyone on the planet with

any meaningful clarity.6 It is not just that there are

diminutive men and burly women, or that men can do

housework and women can do road construction; these are merely reversals which keep the masculine/feminine binary intact. Disrupting this dyad produces more pos-

sibilities, more appreciation of nuance, and more acknowledgement of the power involved in the com-

6 Two basic works on the limits and the overlap­ ping characteristics of gender are: Jessie Bernard, Women and the Public Interest (New York: Aldine, 1971) and Robert J. Stoller, Sex and Gender, on the Develop­ ment of Masculinity and Feminity (New York: Science House, 1968). 7

plexities of the activities, politics, and semiotics of

daily living. What gets lost here is the notion of

both sex and gender as imposition, negotiation, per­

forrnativity.7 Ethnicity, on the other hand, offers

more variety than race, and is often thought of as a

blend of national and regional history and attributes,

which are nevertheless governed by notions of race.

For example: "mestizo" is somewhat problematically

defined as "a person of mixed European and non-

Caucasian stock, specifically one of European (as

Spanish or Portuguese) and American Indian ancestry";

or, often more simply, as a mongrel, a bastard. 8 I say

"somewhat problematically defined" since there is an

invisible, therefore all-but-naturalized, presence of

the history of Conquistadors, Catholicism, navigation,

colonialism, indigenous peoples, pre-contact empires,

and inter-continental relationships, among others, written into this definition. Some would argue the

7 For more on the perforrnativity of gender see: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subver­ sion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

8 Webster'2 Third New International Dictionary, 1976. The work of Gloria Anzaldua (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), as well as the works of Cherrie Moraga (Loving in the War Years, Boston: South End Press, 1983), Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider, Trumansburg, New York: Crossing Press, 1984) and others, make productive, political use of the non­ legitimate identity produced from such problematic definitions. 8

inclusion of Spanish and Portuguese as European, rather

than Mediterranean, in the first place. Furthermore,

these are categories which vary with time and place;

for example, for a number of years in Hawai'i,

Portuguese were counted as a separate category from

Caucasian in the census data. There are other diffi­

culties as well; such as the parallel use of "Euro­

pean"--a geographic identifier--with "non-Caucasian"--a

racial identifier used in the negative. There is also

the problematic history of the term "American Indian,"

beginning with a continent named after a sixteenth

century Italian navigator--Amerigo Vespucci--and the

confusion in the Age of Exploration which led to land being designated as the "West Indies." Continuing the difficulties of defining ethnicity and race, American

Indians are, more specifically yet no less prob­ lematically, defined (in the same volume) as an aboriginal people of the western hemisphere "constitut­ ing one of the divisions of Mongoloid stock"--Mongoloid meaning, among other things, native to Asia.

Rather than pointing to the limits of a biological definition, ethnicity, instead, provides for the pos­ sibility of a flexible cultural and behavioral space which actually enables a (presumably) biologically based definition of race (such as non-Caucasian, in the case of mestizo) to remain unchallenged. In other 9

words, the notion that one might be flexible in one's

practice of gender ard ethnicity need not, necessarily,

interfere with, and may actually encourage, the addi-

tional notion of one as both biologically definable and

stable within the parameters of a particular sex and

race. As variables, then, gender and ethnicity can

provide the latitude, while the presumed stability of

sex and race can offer reassurance.

It is very difficult to imagine how one might find

a site which would permit a discussion of "race and sex

at the same time.,,9 Searching for a site where the

simultaneous discussion of sex and race can take place

is like looking for the "green flash" as the sun sets

into the Pacific. If it is there at all, it is present

for only an instant. You have to be quick. Looking

for textual evidence of bodily constructions which

highlight the construction of sex and race

simultaneously as well as the political and material

consequences of such constructions is an elusive task

at best. It often seems as if one produces the other.

Any attempt to discuss mutual constructions and politi-

cal effects at the important simultaneous intersections

of sex and race becomes difficult, if not impossible.

9 Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, "Interview with Donna Haraway" Technoculture, Cultural Politics, Volume 3 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1991) 11. 10

As Judith Butler points out:

It seems crucial to resist the model of power that would set up racism and homophobia and misogyny as parallel or analogical relations. The assertion of their abstract or structural equivalence not only misses the specific his­ tories of their construction and elaboration, but also delays the important work of think­ ing through the ways in which these vectors of power require and deploy each other for the purpose of their own articulation. This demand to think contemporary power in its complexity and interarticulations remains incontrovertibl important even in its impossibility. 1b

How one might begin to think through the interchanges

between and among the "vectors of power" is even

awkward to describe. One has to examine a grid con-

sisting of the construction of sex, the construction of

gender, the construction of race, the construction of

ethnicity, any and all mutually informed constructions,

distinctions, valences, and prohibitions while main-

taining a simultaneity which is, necessarily,

impressive. 11 Like dependent and independent vari-

10 Judith Butler, Bodie~ that Matter: pn the Dis­ cursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Rout.Ladqe , 1993) 18­ 19.

11 Among others, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Chandra Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Patricia Williams, and, to a certain extent, Ruth Frankenberg manage to write in a way that addresses issues of both race and sex; sometimes serially, sometimes, though less frequently, simultaneously. However, none of these authors focusses primary attention on the dis­ course of science as it relates to notions of bodily construction, and its resulting political and material consequences. 11

ables, one must be held constant while the others are

featured. Binary oppositions and their attendant dif­

ficulties are at work here in several arenas, and keep­

ing hierarchies at bay is a full-time job. While these

examinations, sortings, deployings, balancings, over­

lappings, weighings and mergings make a project such as

developing, say, an anti-racist and an anti­

heterosexist feminist theory difficult (although no

less vital), they make it clear that discussing notions

about the body and its construction is important.

Feminist theory might benefit from the irony of

working with scientific rationality while recognizing

cultural productions in order to develop points which

support enough discursive potency to disrupt, agitate,

and scatter hegemonic constructions of the body. Work­

ing with apparently incompatible and mobile "truths"

might provide a site of emergence, the magical moment

of arising in history. Among other benefits, this

strategy might provide a change from working with the

seemingly ubiquitous presence of "twoness" in binary

oppositions, dichotomies, psychoanalytic notions of

splitting, and boundary crossings. Donna Haraway recommends thinking in terms of "zones of implosion" 12

rather than boundary crossings. 1 2 To this end, Haraway

favors the optical metaphor of diffraction, rather than

reflection or representation. "Diffraction is about

the production of interference patterns, about

small changes--light bent around corners, rather than

reflected to a focal point.,,13 Diffraction is "the

noninnocent, complexly erotic practice of making a dif-

ference in the world, rather than displacing the same

elsewhere. ,,14 This is more than a magical moment.

"The trick is," she writes, "to make metaphor and

materiality implode in the culturally specific

apparatuses of bodily production. ,,15

Bodies are not knowable, finite categories anymore

than race and sex are; they are part of the knowledge we produce in the stories we tell ourselves. Biology

is not the body, it is an area of discourse which attempts, in part, to define what it means to be human

12 Donna Haraway, "A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies" Configura­ tions: ~ Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 2.1 (Winter 1994): 62.

13 Donna Haraway, "Science, the Very Idea! Femi­ nist Diffractions," talk given at Indiana University February 7, 1991 9-10, 11, 5; quoted in Katie King, "Feminism and Writing Technologies: Teaching Queerish Travels through Maps, Territories, and Pattern," Con­ figurations: ~ Journal of Literature, Science and Tech­ nology 2.1 (Winter 1994): 97.

14 Haraway, "Cat's Cradle" 63.

15 Haraway, "Cat's Cradle" 62. 13

without, necessarily, examining the culturally driven

descriptions, expectations, and gendered and raced

assumptions it employs while undertaking this allegedly

neutral and objective project. Biological explanations

are seductive even when they are speculative; "they

seem," as R.C. Lewontin writes, "to smell of material

reality. ,,16 Thus, Aristotle was able to claim, with

confidence, "females are weaker and colder in their

nature; and we should look upon the female state as

being as it were a deformity, though one which occurs

in the ordinary course of nature.,,17 Or, more cur-

rently, when, for example, the action of sperm is

described as going on a ~~est for an egg, while the

action of an egg is described as a bride waiting for a

kiss, it becomes clear that scientific descriptions are

embedded in culture, and that, at least in this exam-

pIe, gender roles are written--as though they were nat­ uralistic descriptions--at the level of the cell. 1 8

Another example of a currently limiting practice is the

16 "Women versus Biologists," The New York Review of Books ApriJ. 7, 1994: 34.

17 Aristotle, The Generation of Animals trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1990) IV,vi, 459-461.

18 Emily Martin, "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance based on Stereotypi­ cal Male-Female Roles" Signs: Journal of Women in Cul­ ture and Society, 16.3 (Spring 1991): 485-501. 14

Human Genome Project, a gigantic project set up to

determine the sequence and composition of DNA in all

twenty-three chromosomes. This is a definition project

for which identity politics is everything. This pro-

ject intends to define the human, not merely the gen-

dered, ethnic-eo, sexed or raced, "despite the fact,"

as Ruth Hubbard points out, "that we seem to share 99

percent of our genes with the chimpanzees. ,,19 The

Human Genome Project will make it possible to "register

an individual's genetic composition at birth. ,,20 A

very disturbing prospect. This project is about

clarity of definition, about what is known and know-

able. But a definition project which takes as its task

"defining the human" needlessly reduces and cements the

ongoing dynamic processes of living, the interaction

between and among multiple causal pathways, the random

and cumulative fragmentations and mergings of life.

One of the difficulties of recognizing "that our lives

are the consequences of a complex and variable interac-

tion between internal and external causes" is that this

"does not concentrate the mind nearly so well" as that

19 Ruth Hubbard, The Politics of Women'~ Biology (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990) 83.

20 Dorothy Nelkin and Laurence Tancredi, Dangerous Diagnostics: ~he Social Power of Biological Informa- tion ( Basic Books/Harper Collins, 1989) 169. 15

of a more straight-forward and "simplistic claim. ,,21

Any notion of complexity or fluidity of difference

seems to lose currency. Instead of an origin project,

why not begin a new project by asking how our many dif-

ferent cells function in so many different ways, even

though they have the exact same genes?22 That,

however, would be quite a different project; that would

be a project about difference, not definition, not

sameness. I agree with Haraway: we need to "foment a

state of emergency in what counts as 'normal' in tech­

noscience and in its analysis. ,,23

Engaging the terms of practice in science and the

ways in which it invents nature is important to any

investigation of the construction of raced and sexed

bodies; it is also important in examining and negotiat­

ing the power at stake in maintaining distinctions. 24

Investigating how bodies are inscribed and constructed,

the prohibitions against knowledge, and the political

21 Lewontin, "Women" 32.

22 Ruth Hubbard makes a similar suggestion, Politics 84.

23 Haraway, "Cat's Cradle" 60.

24 There are many sources which engage the prac­ tices of science in ways that are helpful to this pro­ ject. Some of the main sources are works written by: Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, Valarie Hartuni, Ruth Hubbard, Evelyn Fox Keller, Emily Martin, Londa Shiebinger, Nancy Tuana, and Anne Fausto-Sterling. 16

and material insistencies and consequences which are

the effects of various constructions matter, especially

if we care about understanding what is at stake in

interweaving more fluid notions of the way the body is

marked. 25 "The point is not just to read the webs of

knowledge production; the point is to reconfigure what

counts as knowledge in the interests of reconstituting

the generative forces of embodiment."26 Haraway calls

this practice: "materialized refiguration."27 Haraway

considers " [d]estabilizing the positions in a dis-

cursive field and disrupting categories for identifica­

tion" as a potentially "powerful feminist strategy."28

She regards destabilization as "a collective undertak-

ing," and although "new dominations are possible" there

might also "be something else.,,29 Michel Foucault

examines discourses for inconsistencies and potential

change. He sees discourse as an event and the "produc-

tion of discourse" as being simultaneously "controlled,

25 For more on the political use of "insistence" see: William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modern­ ity (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988) 136.

26 Haraway, "Cat's Cradle" 62.

27 Haraway, "Cat's Cradle" 62.

28 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989) 310.

29 Haraway, Primate 303. 17

selected, organized and redistributed" by various pro-

cedures with the task of controlling its "powers and

dangers," its "chance events," and "to evade its

ponderous, formidable materiality. ,,30 In other words,

the dominant discourse can be agitated in ways meant to

implode, to produce contradictions and/or

inconsistencies as potential non-places for change, for

new stories, and for political action.

Irony can also be used to engage the confusion and

disruption caused by emergence. "Irony," for Haraway,

"is about contradictions that do not resolve into

larger wholes," it is about "the tension of holding

incompatible things together because both or all are

necessary and true," it is about "humor and serious play," and, it is also "a rhetorical strategy and a political method. ,,31 Irony is a tool for sustaining the enigmas agitated into the non-place created by dis- ruptive practices. Irony, as explained by Kathy

Ferguson, can be "a way to keep oneself within a situa- tion that resists resolution in order to act politi-

30 Michel Foucault, "The Order of Discourse," trans. Ian McLeod, Language and Politics, ed. Michael Shapiro (New York: New York University Press, 1984) 109.

31 Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s" Socialist Review 15.3 (1985): 65. 18

cally without pretending that resolution has come."32

Irony works well w i.t.h emergence. Emergence is not "the

unavoidable conclusion of a long preparation," not the

teleological end of a linear narrative. 3 3 Emergence is

an earthquake which disrupts the hegemonic ground, the

master narratives. Emergence offers a spark; the

potential for liberatory change, for power, and, ironi-

cally, for magic. Emergence offers the possibility of

a non-stable space for engaging the tensions produced

by radical specificity.

A project which features the cultural construction

of bodies by combining the incompatible fields of

scientific rationality and the historical contingency

of cultural productions, and which examines our

storytelling processes using discourse theory while

employing the tools of irony, may be able to meet the

challenge of both examining the vectors of power and providing a site, a non-place, a moment, for the

simultaneous discussion of race and sex; and, perhaps,

for the reconfiguration of the body. Implosion.

32 Kathy E. Ferguson, "Interpretation and Geneal­ ogy in Feminism," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16.2 (1991): 338.

33 Foucault, "Nietzsche" 92-3. 19

[B] DENIALS AND QUESTIONS

I would like to clarify several things I am not saying. I am not arguing that science is useless because it is hopelessly overwritten by culture.

Rather, I would like to argue that we might benefit from recognizing that scientific facts are based on cultural agreements, that as Ruth Hubbard writes "[n]a­ ture is part of history and culture, not the other way around,,;34 and, that it is by examining the conditions and consequences of those agreements, as well as where and how they appear in scientific explanations, that we can learn something about what is at stake in main­ taining or changing them. I am also not saying that race and sex are identical, nor am I saying that gender and ethnicity are identical. Rather, I am trying to point to similarities in the ways that both race and sex are claimed to be biological in origin, and the ways that gender and ethnicity are often claimed to be cultural in origin; and, to the resulting limitations and materiality of these insistent claims. I am not saying, nor am I prepared to argue, that sex and gender are different or that race and ethnicity are easily separated. Quite the opposite. I am much more inter­ ested in connecting the perceived differences between

34 Hubbard, Politics 1. 20

sex and gender, as well as those of ethnicity and

race--especially those thought of as biological.

Having said that, I am not in pursuit of some grand

assimilation theory which would rely on these

similarities as the ground work for featuring a liberal

humanist notion of sameness between all peoples. Same­

ness is tedious, unbroken, monotonous; sameness is

death.

Differences, appreciated as a result of the

actions and responses by the surrounding, discriminat­

ing world, are important--evenvital; but so are the

precise differences which get featured, re-produced, or

diffracted. For example, we do not generally (although

we might) find power differentials, social inequities,

or privileges associated with a politics of weekday of

birth, length of toes, navel depth, tongue curling

ability, or the relationship c:: our sleeping body to magnetic north.

I have many initial questions, beginning with why and how are the categories of race and sex the dif­

ferences that get featured and re-produced? How might we engage them simultaneously? When, under what condi­ tions, do these differences of race and sex seem to matter most? Where and why are they written into our historical, cultural, scientific, and political narra­ tives? Can examining these vectors of power, the con- 21

ditions of when, why, and how these differences are

featured, re-produced, or diffracted help to understand

th~ ways in which privileging these differences

actually underwrites and constitutes our knowledge and

perception of the body--our own and others? will it

enable us to understand how the hegemonic construction

of the body is produced? Can it help us imagine other

possibilities which might be more fluid, more libera­

ting (even while it carries the additional risk of,

say, totalitarian possibilities)? What actually counts

as the body, and why?

I need to figure out, balance, and produce an

account which conveys simultaneity, appreciates the

historical contingency of knowledge and subjectivity,

recognizes semiotic techniques, and is committed to making a difference that matters. "In this sense,"

Judith Butler writes, "to know the significance of something is to know how and why it matters, where 'to matter' means at once 'to materialize' and 'to mean.,n35 Ultimately, I need to seek answers to two basic questions. How might I form a zone of implosion which will diffract the vectors of power and enable a materialized refiguration of body knowledge? How might

I mobilize the semiotics of body knowledge toward an anti-racist and anti-heterosexist feminist practice?

35 Butler, Bodies that Matter 32. 22

[C] WHAT LIES AHEAD

After situating the shift in thinking known as the

"scientific revolution," Chapter 2, "Biology as Ideol­

ogy: Metaphor, Hierarchy and 'Truth' Written as the

Body," provides a chronological look at a series of

shifts in concepts of the body as representation and as

foundation, as various aspects of the body--organs,

hormones and genes, among others--are given primacy.

This is a discussion of the changing biological body as

formed by the powers of ideology, discursive practices, hierarchy, and metaphor.

Chapter 3, "Sexgender: Its Requirement and Deploy­ ment as a Bodily Based Vector of Power," looks to

Nietzsche's use of Oedipus and the Sphinx, in his claim that truth is a woman, as a site for discussing the will to power over truth and the gendering of dis­ cursive practices. This is followed by a discussion of sex and gender which points toward their embodiment as both elision and specificity, as well as to how these qualities may be informed by Nietzsche's wariness of absolutes and, then, mobilized in feminist theory.

Chapter 4, "Racethnicity: Its Requirement and

Deployment as a Bodily Based Vector of Power," pursues and examines the power of race and ethnicity insistences through personal accounts, discursive prac­ tices and institutional demands; demonstrating that 23 while these categories are inconsistently applied, and not necessarily, readily distinguished they are very powerful bodily based texts which need to be read by feminist theory--though not in isolation.

"Disciplining the Body of Feminist Theory: Dealing

Simultaneously with Racethnicity and Sexgender," Chap­ ter 5, examines various intersections of sex, gender, race and ethnicity for mutually contesting and inform­ ing constructions, elaborations and articulations of power. The body becomes an increasingly contested site when an attempt is made to examine these qualities simultaneously. Unknown and unclosed categories are cultivated for their promise of bodily reconfiguration, and destabilization of the sovereign subject. The notion of the body as singular universal gives way to a space, a non-place, for multiple possibilities of bodies which must be discussed with radical specificity, in order to move toward an antiracist, antiheterosexist, specifically feminist theory. 24

"In science, just as in art and in life, only that which is true to culture is true to nature."

Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact

Ludwik Fleck

"The normal is not a static or peaceful, but a dynamic and polemical concept."

The Normal and the Pathological

Georges Canguilhem

" [0] ur ways of understanding in the West have been and continue to be complicitous with our ways of oppressing. "

Gynesis

Alice Jardine 25

Chapter 2

BIOLOGY AS IDEOLOGY: METAPHOR, HIERARCHY AND "TRUTH"

WRITTEN AS THE BODY

For many people science has the power of a late

twentieth century religion, where the legitimate

authority of scientistpriests to explain and predict

goes unquestioned. Like Plato's Philosopher Kings, who

know things as they are, scientists are thought to be

qualified to sort objectively fact from fiction, the

real from the imagined, the normal from the pathologi­

cal, and, ultimately, true from false. However, this

capability is not so precise.

The title for this chapter, "Biology as Ideology, II

is taken from the title of a small book by noted Har­ vard geneticist R. C. Lewontin. He uses the phrase to

refer to a dual process. On the one hand there is

"social influence and control of what scientists do and

say" because scientists are social beings immersed in culture and, as a result, "view nature through a lens that has been molded by their social experience. II On the other hand, the phrase refers to the way in which what scientists do and say is used to legitimate, natu­ ralize and "further support the institutions of society, II partly, as a result of scientists' use of 26

money, commodities, and time from the dominant social

and economic forces in society.1 This dual process

comprises science as ideology. Here, "ideology" is

used in the sense that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

used it to refer to the ruling ideas of a particular

society at a given time which maintain a certain social

order by expressing the naturalness of that social

order. 2

In other words, rather than considering science as

something unique, objective and distinct from society,

Lewontin's phrase points toward a symbioti relationship

between science and societYi and, more directly, to the

notion of science as part of culture and society. I

would like to investigate this relationship--especially

as it applies to particular notions of the body.

Practitioners within science are often less

enthralled by the notion that science is able to make

sweeping claims of absolute truth than those who view

science from a distance. Scientists are often com- mitted to a more tentative notion, to the positivist,

1 R.C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York: HarperPerennial-HarperCollins, 1993) 3-4.

2 "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas[i ...J ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality." Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Part X (New York: International Publishers, 1989) 64, 65. 27

empiricist mode of a careful, incremental, cumulative

accretion of potentially verifiable facts. This

presumes, of course, that the world is knowable, that

the face we see is legible, that careful meth­

odologically valid and reliable forms of inquiry,

reflecting increasingly refined instrumentation and

conceptualization, will indeed enable us to know the

world. However, what those with a more sweeping faith

in science have in common with the less enthralled

practitioners of science is the assumption that,

eventually, scientific knowledge practices will bring

together all the data in an integrated understanding

which does not differ with the perspective of the

viewer, but which is equally available to all

reasonable, careful people who use the same sound forms

of reasoning.

The "truth," as revealed by science, is not reli­

gious revelation but is, instead (even in its positivist and empiricist forms), a storytelling prac­

tice constituted by the logic of the scientlfic method--a method whose logic is not beyond the

influence of history, culture, politics and ideology, but is, instead, informed Qy them. In the case of biology (and its next of kin: medicine) this informed story is now, as it has been in various historical 28

forms, written as the body.3 That is, the biological

story is told as though it were the body itself--truth

waiting to be found. But the plastic nature of the

story of the body exposes the lie of one eternal-­

bodily--truth. Some would argue that the changes in

knowledge of the body are indicative of new and

improved scientific methods and understanding. This

is, of course, an important aspect; but, it does not

speak to the on-going sYmbiotic relationship of "biol-

ogy as ideology," or to the power of common-knowledge

institutional and individual understandings and

expectations of the body--that is, to the power of the

relevant discursive practices.

Not surprisingly, the dominant story of the body as contested and constructed terrain follows the ebb and flow of the tides and sea changes in philosophical thinking and scientific practices. In this chapter, after examining various moments in this scientific mythological legacy, I hope to show that when a dif- ferent tale is told, a different body appears. At some

3 For a discussion of the relationship between medicine and science see: Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Science and Literature, ed. George Levine (Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 1989) 17; for a brief discussion of the medicalization of society see: Denise Donnell Con­ nors, "Sickness Unto Death: Medicine as Mythic, Necrophilic and Iatrogenic," Advances in Nursing Science 2.3 (April 1980): 39-51. 29

point one has to begin to ask what, if any, are the

essential qualities of this mobile referent--the body?

And, who or what is served or produced by the search

for or attribution of these specific qualities? Fur-

ther, why is there resistance, in the presence of this

apparent historical fluidity, to doubting the construc­

tion, production and mobility of the--bodily--qualities

which are only momentarily conceptualized, yet defined

as essential and specific? For example, as Kessler

argues, when deciding the "true sex" of intersexed

infants the doctors do not see themselves as participa-

ting in a contestable culturally informed story about

infant bodies; rather, they see themselves as unearth-

ing the truth of the body, the true sex. 4 The ambiguity of the bodies of intersexed infants does not motivate the doctors to question their search for truth--at least not overtly--although one might argue that the general confusion and panic which surrounds undecidability does, in fact, suggest the vulnerability and fragility of the scientific account. Nevertheless,

4 Suzanne J. Kessler, "The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16.1 (Autumn 1990): 3-26. See also: Michel Foucault, intro., Her­ culine Barbine: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of ~ Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon, 1980), in the introduction Foucault discusses the search for a true sex. 30

in terms of self understanding the doctors and

scientists, in this example, unflaggingly hammer recal-

citrant bodies into one of two standard categories

(male or female) and call it the discovery of truth.

The magic here is that the myth of the superiority,

social insularity, and infallibility of the rigor and

resulting truth of scientific practices and knowledge

remains untainted by the "facts" and culturally

informed historicity of its storytelling processes. It

is, instead, written simply as the known and knowable

body.

[A] THINKING THROUGH THE CHANGES: MIND AND BODY

The heretical evidence gained by Galileo's obser-

vations through his telescope and its relationship to

Copernicus's hypotheses of a world which traveled

around the sun (rather than the earth-centric reverse), put more in question than merely checking hypotheses

against facts. The world order crumbled. "No aspect of medieval thought," writes Thomas Kuhn, philosopher and historian of science, "is more difficult to recap-

ture than the symbolism that mirrored the nature and

fate of man, the microcosm, in the structure of the universe, which was the macrocosm. "5 This cosmologically-based tenet of medieval thinking is

5 Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cam­ bridge, Mass: Harvard U P, 1957) 113. 31

often difficult to comprehend. But modern thinking is

not so removed from this process as we have been led to

believe. Modern science also projects historical

social destinies onto nature. Atomistic thought,

reclaimed from Democritis and reapplied by modern

science, for example, claims that at its most basic

level nature is made up of uniform distinct units.

Furthermore, after this atomistic thinking reappeared,

it was eventually mirrored in the claims of liberal

political theory and industrial capitalism. A dif­

ferent world order was established. 6

Francis Bacon stressed the importance of empirical

investigation. Any intellectual activity achieved

without close observation and a study of the facts was,

for Bacon, of questionable worth. Bacon's observations

and facts were gleaned from a world of matter, or

things, composed--atomistically--of discrete individual entities: "nothing exists in nature except individual bodies, exhibiting clear individual effects, according

to particular laws.,,7 By systematizing the separation between faith and knowledge, Bacon, according to wil-

6 For more discussion see: Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1986) esp. 225, 226.

7 Marie Boas Hall, ed. Nature and Nature'~ Laws (Macmillan, 1970) 449; cited in Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) 130. 32

liam Blake, "put an End to Faith. ,,8 It was Bacon's

contemporary, the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who was

convinced that diverse empirical observations could be

expressed as a particular order through mathematics,

through principles or laws of change. 9 Meanwhile,

Galileo worked on the principles of mechanics and

motion, insisting that the task of the scientist is to

discover the most primitive motions, to isolate simple

phenomena in order to measure them--and he applied

mathematical principles to the motions studied by

Kepler.

Rene Descartes focussed on what Galileo had to say

about mathematics and decided that mathematics was the

only rational science. Descartes carried this convic-

tion to the point of distrusting sense experience

altogether. The one thing Descartes could not doubt was the existence of mind, the person tr.at doubted.

This thinking being was not temporal or spatial, it was not a body, it was a mind. It was reason, for Des-

8 William Blake, Essays, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1966) 398; as cited by Arblaster, Western Liberalism 131.

9 My understanding of the relationship of the var­ ious thinkers and theories that I discuss in this sec­ tion (especially Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes and Locke) has been informed by both Arblaster, Western Liberalism and by Mulford Q. Sibley Political Ideas and Ideologies: ~ History of Political Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). 33

cartes, that played an essential part in acquiring true

knowledge and it was this stress on reason which marked

him as a rationalist and which separated him from the

empiricists. Following Descartes, Sibley explains,

lithe inner world was that of a qualitative sense expe­

rience, while the outer universe was that of mathemati­

cally measurable and therefore real bodies. The inner

world was what later came to be called merely subjec­

tive; while the outer world was real and objective. 1110

While empiricists and rationalists differ on many

points, they both stress the experience of the individ­

ual as a basis for knowledge and certainty.

Empiricists dwell on specifics and particularities and

are, therefore, more wary of generalization and

categorization. Empirical thinkers argue that sense

experience is the first source of each person's knowl­

edge of the world, which can then be added to or

revised both by collecting the experiences of others and by the rational ways which the mind organizes

information. Descartes shared with the scientists who were his contemporaries a mechanistic view of natural order--including the human body as an exceptionally sophisticated machine. As the experience of the rational individual became the foundation for truth,

10 Sibley, Political Ideas 347. 34

Descartes was able to decide that he was verifiable as

a thinking being, but less verifiable as a sense­

experience based, bodily being. It is this distrust of

sense-experience, the mind-body split, which separated

Descartes so radically from Bacon's empiricism. For

Descartes the world was not a jumble of particulars, it

had a logical order which the careful, rational, mind

(not the sense-experience based body) could detect.

Though it is empiricism which is often associated with

science, in some respects, it might be said that it is

rationalism which argues that there must be some meet­

ing between the rationality of the mind and the

rationality of nature.

Individualism (for both rationalists and

empiricists) stress~s both the separateness of one per­

son from another person and each person from the natu­

ral world. This permits thinking that a person can be

a detached, neutral observer of scientific facts.

Values, which had once been woven into the fabric of

the universe by Aristotle and the medieval church, for example, could no longer be unquestioningly dictated by priests or kings. To an individual, values became a matter of rational, individual choice and commitment, based, like empirical science, on an objective assess­ ment of the facts. As the atomization process of indi­ vidualism developed, it found its philosophical form as 35

fact was separated from value, as "is" was separated

from "ought." As an individual one was expected to

observe objectively and examine the facts, the "is,"

before concluding an opinion, a value, or a judgment,

an "ought." To confuse facts with values shifts

responsibility onto God, nature, or history, and away

from individuals. It is the acceptance of the notion

of the rational individual, separate from the factual

world, which finally banishes the cosmically ordered

universe overseen by an interventionist God who deploys

signs and miracles.

Wholeness and completeness were attributes of a

community or polis where each person was expected to

depend upon others and society, not to behave as a

separate person, a free agent. Aristotle's polis, for

example, was always prior to the individual, whereas in

liberal political theory it is the individual, the

atomistic unit which is prior. Philosophical atomism,

then, is the notion of separate and singular individu­

als collected into the concept of a society.

Eventually these ideas also worked their way into

economic practices. Liberalism and western capitalism

grew up together. For one thing, the existence of eco­ nomic power in the hands of private individuals can be

seen as limiting the direct economic power of the

state, and therefore as safeguarding and maintaining 36

individual liberties. For another, capitalism is

thought to allow and encourage individual enterprise

and initiative in ways that a more state controlled

economy does not. In this reading of economic prac-

tices industrialization, by destroying feudal types of

dependence, tends to encourage the independence of mind

that Descartes cultivated. While the spirit of growing

commerce between nations during the Enlightenment was

meant, in part, to unite nations peacefully, it had an

atomizing effect on their societies by increasing com-

petition and rivalry as each person considered his or

her own advancement.

By the end of the seventeenth century, what has

come to be called the "scientific revolution" was

definitely underway. The work on biology by Aristotle

(Generation of Animals) and Galen, a second century

A.D. physician, was being questioned. Galen's studied

comprehension of the body as organically related to the

cosmos had been undermined. 1 1 These notions were

replaced by an epistemology of atomistic mechanistic

empiricism, mathematical analysis, and by rational

thinking which were featured especially in the works of

11 Some of Galen's notions about therapeutics remained popular; however, for more on the decreasing popularity of Galen's notions about the body, see: Oswei Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of g Medical Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1973). 37

Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, and Rene Des-

cartes; and which were further developed in the

philosophic and theoretical work of Thomas Hobbes, John

Locke and others--right through the death of the more

cosmological notion of the Divine Right of Kings and on

to the more individualistic notion of nineteenth- and

twentieth-century democratic governments as being based

on one man one vote, with liberty and justice for all.

It was during this process of change that the

notion of the individual began to take a form which is

currently recognized--and, currently being challenged by postmodern thinking. Prior to the eighteenth

century there was more emphasis on collectivity, and little or no emphasis on the importance of the individ- ual. Michel Foucault has demonstrated this notion of the emerging individual in areas as diverse as prisons, medicine and sexuality; and he has linked this notion to various practices of power and to new interpreta­ tions of collective identity.12 For example, Foucault writes:

One of the great innovations in the techni­ ques of power in the eighteenth century was

12 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1979); Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1975); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexu­ ality: Volume ~: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1980). 38

the emergence of "population" as an economic and political problem. [ ...J Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a "people," but with a "population," with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, pat­ terns of diet and habitation. 1 3

This is the description of a collective identity of

individuals which would not support Galen's cosmically

connected body or the medieval mutual obligations oI

serfs and lords as members of an organic whole, as

readily as it would support the basic notions of lib-

eral political theory and industrial capitalism: an

electorate made up of autonomous individuals and a

freely moving competitive labor force; a collection

made up of separate units which variously are born,

give birth, consume food, require housing, move,

migrate, get sick, and die. Death, for example, had

seemed to John Donne to bring human beings together

with a realization of their common fate: "any man's

death diminishes me, because I am involved in

Mankinde.,,14 Whereas the activities of a population

was figured in units which could be individualized,

divided, counted, organized and analyzed. These are

13 Foucault, History of Sexuality 25.

14 John Donne, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (Nonesuch, 1962) 538; quoted in Arblaster, Western Liberalism 16. 39

not the properties of the prior period--an organic

whole working as one with the rhythms of the cosmos.

This is atomistic thought describing uniform distinct

units.

Susan Bordo gives gendered, emphasis to the

instability caused by the discursive shift to Cartesian

thought. She suggests that we view

the "great Cartesian anxiety," although manifestly expressed in epistemological terms, as anxiety over separation--from the organic female universe of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Cartesian objectivism, correspondingly, [is a] defensive response to that separation anxiety, an aggressive intellectual "flight from the feminine" rather than (simply) the confident articula­ tion of a positive new epistemological ideal. 1 S

Cartesian thought, then, represents a major shift in

epistemology from a relational mutuality in the spheres

of social organization and nature to an autonomous

independence in each, very separate, sphere. Mind.

Body. Liberal political theory discussed equality by

recognizing the individual in the enforcement of rights

15 Susan Bordo, "The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 11.3 (1986): 441; see also: Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, California: Harper and Row, 1980) and Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Femi­ nism. 40

and duties. 16 Science instituted the logic of its

method by recognizing each legitimate observer of

empirical data as equal to all other legitimate observ-

ers, and underscored the importance of this claim by

the requirement for replication of data. Capitalism

was practiced in ways which situated individuals as

bits of machinery in the overall process of trade and

production.

16 Hobbes, for example, opens The Leviathan with a discussion of society as a machine, and people as parts (Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan [New York: Prometheus Books, 1988]). Although Hobbes was not a liberal, he was an empicist and certainly formative in the articulation of modernity and was a precusor to liber­ alism. He had strong notions of people as individuals who were "little more than a collection of self-seeking atoms," egoistic by nature, and who, as a result of their fierce individuality required an absolute sovereign in order to avoid conflict (Arblaster, Western Liberalism 136). For Hobbes, then, natural law as a system and principles which rational beings could recognize, could not be enforced and would not be obeyedJ.n a state of nature where there is IIwar of every man against every manll (Leviathan, 64). Instead, security for this egoistic group can only be achieved via a social contract which sets up a sovereign. John Locke was also an empircist. The world we access through our senses, according to Locke, is individualistic--he writes: IIAll Things, that exist, being Particulars ll and lIuniversality belongs not to things themselves, which are all of them particular in their Existence ll (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch [Clarendon Press, 1975] 409, 144; as cited in Arblaster, Western Liber­ alism 140). But, it can be argued that Locke was also a rationalist, in part because for Locke, as opposed to Hobbes, individuals are rational long before their social contract. Locke argued against the theory of divine right, and defended a form of government within the framework of natural rights which was used as an intellectual foundation by many of the founders of the United States. 41

But this shift also had more subtle manifesta-

tions. It left trails less clear, but no less impor-

tanto "Alone," Foucault writes, in a discussion about

the "invisible visibility" of clinical anatomy,

the gaze dominates the entire field of pos­ sible knowledge. [ ...J On the line on which the visible is ready to be resolved into the invisible, on that crest of its dis­ appearance, singularities come into play. A discourse on the individual is once more pos­ sible. 1 7

He is referring here to the vanishing point on the

horizon in a field of knowledge. What was visible and

had been considered previously to be an indissoluble

whole of the great chain of being, had reached, to use

Foucault's term, the crest of its disappearance and had

become a series of parts. 1 8

It is in Part Five of the Discourse on Method that

Descartes cautions us to think, specifically, of the

"body as a machine, [. .J a clock.,,19 And it is this admonition which first introduced the clock mechanism as the "informing metaphor" for all of modern science--

17 Foucault, Clinic 165,167.

18 "What was visible" might refer to many things including what comes to be regarded as a "fact" or a reliable observation.

19 Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Medita­ tions, trans. Laurence J. Lafleur (New York: Macmil­ lion, 1986 [1637, 1641]) 41, 43. 42 especially biology.20 The world became a system of gears and levers; atomized bits easily divisible, readily isolated. Biology divided individual bodies into various systems and bits of matter. Molecules.

Atoms. Neutrons. Protons. Hormones. Estrogen.

Testosterone. Androgen. Chromosomes. Genes. DNA.

Each bit carried its own power, its own influence.

Each successive unit became the source of particular properties of the whole. A hierarchy of parts as causal sources developed and became naturalized. Des- cartes' clock kept ticking and the notion of metaphor was long forgotten. 21 Tick. Tick. Tick. Hierarchy was naturalized. DNA makes genes. Individual people are made of genes. Society is made of individual people. Hence, today, "truth" is revealed in digital time: DNA makes society. Genes for intelligence.

Genes for deafness. Genes for being raped. 2 2 In the

20 Lewontin, Biology as Ideology 12.

21 A current popular manifestation of this meta­ phor is the notion of a woman's decreasing chances for conceiving as the result of time passing on her "biological clock." For a discussion of how this became popularized see: Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1991) xi, 27, 77, 101, 133, 205, 209, 254, 255, 265, 344, 372.

22 For an enthusiastic and informed discussion of the production, manipulation, and social implication of genetic information see: Ruth Hubbard and Elijah Waldo, Exploding the Gene Myth: How Genetic Information is Produced and Manipulateq Qy Scientists, Physicians, Employers, Insurance Companies, Educators, and Law Enforcers (Boston: Beacon, 1993). The combination of 43

closing years of the twentieth century, moved by the

magic vibration of quartz crystals, the ticking of the

clock can no longer be heard. Truth is told silently.

With the notion of the Cartesian shift, biology as

ideology and the importance of discursive practices

firmly in mind, what follows is a somewhat brief, if

peculiar and irregular, history of the body; moments

which illustrate certain concepts and shifts in think-

ing and the fluidity of bodily understandings. This

history features a series of shifts in concepts of the

body as representation and as foundation, as various

aspects of the body--organs, hormones and genes, among

others--are given primacy. Thus, what follows is evi- dence of an ever changing body--not, necessarily, a more truthful body. A body formed by the powers of

ideology, discursive practices, hierarchy, and meta- phor.

[B] REPRESENTING THE NATURALLY SOCIAL

Aristotle knew the body. He knew there were two sexes, male and female. However, Aristotle's commit- ment to the importance of distinguishing character- istics between sexes was not based on physical anatomy,

genes for deafness and genes for being raped belongs to Hubbard and Waldo (4). 44

but on the social realm--males are active, females are

passive. 2 3 These were the hard core facts for

Aristotle. In other words, the category we would call

gender was natural. It was truth. It was not that the

social categories of gender were based on biology;

rather, it was the social categories themselves that

were part of the natural order of things. The physical

distinctions between the sexes were not lost on

Aristotle; however, they were less vital, more con-

tingent matters than natural social categories. He

had a conception of the body as a singular notion which

was manifested in various degrees and orders; and,

which was enabled by the particular requirements of

specific circumstances. Certainly he saw male and

female bodies as adapted to specific roles, but these

adaptations were not because of binary sexual opposi-

tion. Different adaptations had different advantages

in the division of labor needed to run the household,

the village and the polis. 24 Furthermore, these adap-

tations and divisions were natural, true and right.

Sex, as a biological distinction and binary opposition,

23 My clearer understanding of Aristotle is indebted to Lacqueur's nuanced discussion. Thomas Laquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard U P, 1990) 24-33.

24 Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1988) 1.1252a.1-1.1260b.1. 45

only fully mattered for Aristotle in terms of reproduc-

tion, where females contribute the matter, the body,

and males contribute the form, the soul. 2 5 Aristotle

writes,

By a "male" animal we mean one which gener­ ates in another, by "female" one which gener­ ates in itself. [. .] Hence it is necessary that for the purpose of copulation and procreation, certain parts should exist, parts that are different from each other, in respect of which the male will differ from the female; for although male and female are indeed used as epithets of the whole of the animal, it is not male or female in respect of the whole of itself, but only in respect of ~ particular faculty and ~ particular part--just as it is "seeing" and 'walking" [sic] in respect of certain parts--and this part is one which is evident to the senses. (Emphasis added) .26

In other words, for Aristotle, the conception of one

flesh, made up in varying degrees and orders to serve the variety of social functions, was interrupted but only for the specific demands of "copulation and procreation." Aristotle, as I read him, considered male and female to be principles which were subject to shading and alteration; they were not just the instrumental identification of genitalia. To make this

25 It is, partly, on this notion of the contribu­ tion of matter that Judith Butler builds the pun for the title of her book Bodies That Matter: On the Dis­ cursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge,199~31­ 35.

26 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard U P, 1990) 1.2.716a, 1.2.716a. 46

clear he discusses the changes brought on by castra-

tion,

where, although the generative part alone is destroyed, almost the whole form of the animal thereupon changes so much that it appears to be female or very nearly so, which suggests that it is not merely in respect of some casual part or some casual faculty that an animal is male or female. It is clear, then, that "the male" and "the female" are ~ principle. At any rate, when animals undergo a change in respect of that wherein they are male and female, many other things about them undergo an accompanying change, which sug­ gests that ~ principle undergoes some altera­ tion. (Emphasis added.) 27

All was gender, the somewhat flexible, natural princi-

pIe. Sex, the casual part or faculty, existed only--

albeit importantly--for reproduction. Period.

However, this neat division was disrupted by a com-

plicating factor which needs to be addressed: slaves.

In Aristotle's notion of a well ordered state what defined a person's function was whether she or he was

(1) a citizen (male), (2) a free woman (female in the

family of a citizen), or (3) a slave. As Elizabeth

27 Aristotle, Generation of Animals 1.2.716b. A. L. Peck, the translator, reads this passage with a dif­ ferent emphasis. He sees this as prefiguring a dis­ tinction between primary and secondary sex character­ istics, rather than as a slide in the definition of sex distinction itself. Peck writes that the distinctions between primary and secondary sex characters "depend on the secretion of the sex hormones from the interstitial cells of the testis and ovary respectively" (14, 15). This is interesting because the body Peck knew in 1942 (the time of the first printing of his translation) was based on hormones, not DNA or genes; hence, Peck's dis­ cussion, in turn, prefigures the genetic body. 47

Spelman notes, "[t]hough a slave may be female, what

defines her function in the state is the fact of her

being a slave, not the fact of her being female. ,,28

Therefore any difference between male and female was

only relevant for citizen males and the free women of

their families--not for slaves. For Aristotle, then,

there was no recognition of sexual distinction among

slaves. It was not necessary, and did not exist.

"[O]ne can't tell," Spelman writes, "from the fact that

there is a female body whether one is in the presence

of a 'woman' or a female slave," and the same holds

true for deciding if a male body is a "man" or a male

slave. 2 9 It is the presence of the soul--specifically,

the rational soul--in the male citizen which marks him as different from the rest of the bodies--those of women, and slaves. 3 D What we would refer to as the

28 Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston, Mass: Beacon, 1988) 42.

29 Spelman, Inessential Woman 44.

3D I do not mean by this statement to conflate women with slaves. I only want to note that a woman's contribution to reproduction was matter or body, not soul. And, that although female slaves contributed body, and male slaves contributed form or soul, these were "lesser" than those of a free woman or a citizen. A slave's soul, for example, was not a fully rational soul. Women were not identical to slaves. Spelman (Inessential Woman) has a lona discussion about this important matter and about the ways in which some femi­ nists have, wrongly, neglected to note the differences. See also: Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (New York: Schocken, 1975); Susan Moller Okin, "Woman's Place and Nature in a Functionalist 48

"sex" of slaves did not matter politically, therefore they had none. It is one's nature, not one's body, which organizes the positions of power and dominance for Aristotle when he writes, "some men are by nature free, and others slaves.,,31 This is not a matter of biological sex as we know it, but a matter of gender; of conceiving a cultural, political, and social realm based on the primacy of a more pervasive truth--a natu­ ral order of social categories. 32 It was the soul and the gender, not the body, which were the representation for the naturally ordered foundation of difference and subordination.

Five centuries later, Galen described woman as inverted--therefore less perfect--man; and, as a result, he re-formed Aristotle's biologically separate reproductive anatomies into one cornmon anatomy with more and less perfect manifestations. Galen described turning man's external genitalia inward, and woman's

World," Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton U P, 1979) 73-96.

31 Aristotle, The Politics 1.1255a.1.

32 This thinking is not unique to Aristotle. The white slave-owning class in the United States had a very similar philosophy. The stereotype of a patriar­ chal plantation was one headed by a male voter-provider and a delicate-vulnerable female; attributes unavail­ able to the (male and female) slaves they owned (Spel­ man, Inessential Woman 43) . 49

uterus outward--the cervix and vagina become the penis,

the ovaries become the testes, the uterus becomes the

scrotum, and so on. Through these parallel moves man

becomes woman, and woman becomes man. This anatomic

description allowed Galen to point to the telos of per-

fection that was represented by man: "Now just as

mankind is the most perfect of all animals, so within

mankind the man is more perfect than the woman. "33

This facilitated an interpretation of the female inter-

nal reproductive organs as "the material correlative of

a higher truth without its mattering a great deal

whether any particular spatial transformation could be

performed. "34 In other words, this biological descrip-

tion supported a particular world order; a particular

hierarchy; one with woman as less perfect, less potent,

and--following the Hippocratic notion of humors--Iess

hot and more moist than the hot, dry, active, canonical

body, the telos: man. Of course, Aristotle, too, had

proclaimed man as the true form and woman as a less

hot, less perfect, misbegotten man. 3 5 However, it was

33 Galen, ---On the Usefulness ----of the Parts ---of the Body, trans. Margaret Tallmadge May, 2 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1968) 2.630; quoted by Laqueur, Making Sex 28.

34 Laqueur, Making Sex 28.

35 Aristotle, Generation of Animals esp. 2.3.737a, 4.6.775a. 50

Galen who declared woman's interior genitals as

inferior male genitals, thereby, providing the evidence

of woman's arrested development secondary to lack of

heat--since it was the half-baked condition of woman

which prohibited the genitals from reaching their

fully-baked external, more perfect, male, location.

Galen wrote: "Aristotle was right in thinking the

female less perfect than the male; he certainly did

not, however, follow out his argument to its conclu-

sion, but, as it seems to me, left out the main head of

it, so to speak. "36

This description of woman as inverted man, one

Thomas Laqueur, a historian, refers to as the one-sex body, is replicated by Galen, and, later by others, in accounts of physiology and other anatomically based

functions throughout the body. Alchemists, too--having been influenced by Aristotle's and Galen's views-- associated heat with perfection and the superiority of the male principles over the female principles. 3 7

Anatomical drawings clearly show woman's genitalia as inverted male genitalia well into the eighteenth

36 Galen, On the Usefulness of Parts of the Body 14.2.296

37 For a discussion of this see: Nancy Tuana, "The Misbegotten Man" in The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman'~ Nature (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana U P, 1993) 25-34. 51

century. In each case the result is to verify and

express the "truth" of a body, and hence a world, whose

most perfect form is male. The body was a representa-

tion, though importantly, not the foundation, of the

natural order of the more social category: gender. The

natural, cosmically ordered, macrocosm of the universe

was simply mirrored in the microcosm of the one-sex

body.

[C] FINDING DIFFERENCE IN THE BODY

Until the eighteenth century, although some fEmale

bodies were, in fact, dissected, the major differences

noted between men and women were: reproductive organs

and external form. Galen's view of reproductive dif-

ference remained predominant, while the differences in external bodily form were attributed to the placement of fat, rather than significant differences in deep structure. Apart from a few feminist stirrings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which stressed anatomic, therefore social, equality of women; there were few, if any, attempts to question biologically based sex difference. 38

38 These are discussed in: Londa Schiebinger, "Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy," The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley, California: U of California P, 1987) 42-82, esp. 46-50. 52

Londa Schiebinger, a historian, reports a shift in

thinking about sex differences beginning with a call

during the 1750s, in French and German literature, for

ever more meticulous sex delineation. 3 9 By 1788, Jakob

Ackermann had produced a 200-page book on sex dif-

ferences in everything from hair and eyes to sweat,

blood vessels and brains; and, he encouraged research

on all bodily parts in order to discover "the essential

sex difference from which all others flow."40 By 1796,

as part of the movement to search the body for specific

sex differences, Samuel Thomas von Soernrnerring, a

German anatomist, published an illustration he claimed

to be the first, of a female skeleton; although "first"

female skeletons had already appeared in England,

France and Germany between 1730 and 1790. 4 1 A variety

of sex differences were featured with each new

illustration of a skeleton, and these various

representations--larger or smaller skull, wider or nar-

rower ribs, larger or smaller pelvis--can be examined

for the emphasis they place on different cultural

39 Schiebinger, "Skeletons" 51.

40 Jakob Ackermann, De discrimine sexuum praeter genitalia (Mainz, 1788); tiber die k6rperliche Verschiedenheit des Mannes vom Weibe ausser Ges­ chlechtstheilen, trans. Joseph Wenzel (Koblenz, 1788) 2-5; quoted by Schiebinger, "Skeletons" 53.

41 Schiebinger, "Skeletons" 42. 53

values. Since the skeleton was the frame on which

nerves, veins, muscles and so on would be drawn, sex

differences found in the skeleton would mean that sex-

ual identity would penetrate all bodily aspects. This

challenged the notion of a neutral body, as part of the

great chain of being, differentiated only by sex organs

which were either inside or outside. 4 2

This, seemingly sudden, scientific interest in sex

differences was not arbitrary. Certain body parts were

42 Laqueur writes about some seventeenth-century accepted transformations in reproductive organ place­ ment. He relates the case of Germain Garnier, a well­ built, red bearded man, who had lived as a female, Marie, and had shown no sign of masculinity until, at age fifteen, while chasing pigs through a field, he jumped over a ditch causing male genitalia to rupture from their, heretofore, enclosing ligaments. "Such transformations," writes Laqueur, "seem to work only W the great chain of being," because nature tends toward the perfect (read: male) and not the reverse (emphasis added). Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley, California: U of California P, 1987) 13-14. This incident may be similar to, what is today termed, a genetic mishap; and, is most often discussed in the literature with reference to some villages in Santo Domingo. Genetically male individuals lack a certain enzyme which results in the "normal" develop­ ment of internal male organs with ambiguous or "female" external genitalia. With the testosterone produced at the onset of puberty these individuals "suddenly" become male. See: Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gen­ der:Biological Theories About Women and Men, 2nd ed. (New York: BasicBooks-HarperCollins, 1992) 86-88; Gail Vines, Raging Hormones: Do They Rule Our Lives? (Berkeley, California: U of California P, 1993) 99-100; Ethel Sloane, Biology of Women, 2nd ed. (Albany, New York: Delmar, 1985) 151-152. 54

focused on for their political significance. A smaller

skull, for example, demonstrated woman's decreased

intellectual capacity, while a larger pelvis was proof

of the natural destiny of motherhood, interest in the

home, and other nurturant tendencies. These new ways to

represent and interpret the body were not merely the

result of increased scientific knowledge. If contrasts

between the sexes had been needed or useful prior to

this time, there were grounds available. Obviously,

for example, even the ancients realized that although

all who have internal genitalia do not give birth,

those who give birth do have internal, not external,

genitalia. These new interpretations, then, were new

ways of representing and constituting changing social

realities. Cartesian thought, with its dualism of mind

and body, and its mechanistic empiricism, began to take hold. 43 "The new biology," Laqueur writes, "emerged at precisely the time when the foundations of the old social order were irremediably shaken, when the basis

for a new order of sex and gender became a critical

43 For a discussion of how the shift to Cartesian thinking, and liberal political thinking dealt with women (and how women dealt with it), see: Londa Schiebinger, "Competing Cosmologies: Locating Sex and Gender in the Natural Order," The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mas­ sachusetts: Harvard U. P., 1989) 160-188; Sandra Hard­ ing, "Natural Resources: Gaining Moral Approval for Scientific Genders and Genderized Sciences," The Science Question 111-135. 55

issue of political theory and practice. "44 At a time

of fading feudalism, emerging capitalism, and when lib-

eral political theorists were making appeals to natural

rights, any evidence of natural difference could be

used as reason for social and civil difference. 45 If

44 Laqueur, "Orgasm" 4; see also, Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (New York: Pantheon, 1982) 70.

45 This is evident in the professionalization of medicine. Medical skills, which midwives had employed for centuries, were being commodified; institutional­ ized, and codified in a way which removed them from the domain of women and placed them squarely in the hands of men. Midwives were not properly trained, it was claimed, in the methods of science. And, biology began to prove that women were too weak and delicate for the intellectual strain (on their smaller skulls and brains) required by the rigors of science. This was compounded by the new cult of domesticity (or, as it is also called: the cult of true womanhood) which saw women's place as in the home rather than in the public sphere practicing medicine. For a discussion on the professionalization of medicine which looks at the relationship between racial and sexual domination, see: Ronald T. Takaki, "Aesculapius was a White Man," The "Racial" Economy of Science: Toward 9,. Democratic Future, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana U P, 1993) 201-209; Darlene Clark Hine, "Co­ Laborers in the Work of the Lord: Nineteenth-Century Black Women Physicians," The "Racial" Economy of Science 210-227. For more on the professionalization of medicine see, for example: Ludmilla Jordanova, "Nat­ ural Facts: An Historical Perspective on Science and Sexuality," Sexual Visions, 19-42; Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 years of the Experts' Advice to Women (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1978). For more on the cult of domesticity see, for example: Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America:From Colonial Times to the Present, 2nd ed. (New York: New Viewpoints, 1979). For more on the current manifesta­ tions of parts of each of these issues see, for exam­ ple: Paula A. Treichler, "Feminism, Medicine, and the Meaning of Childbirth," Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, eds. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Routledge, 1990) 113-138. 56

seemingly objective science could show natural dif-

ferences between divisions such as age, race, and sex,

then, justice, it could be said, would be served well

by maintaining any corresponding social differences-­

such as slavery and denial of civil rights to women. 4 6

In other words, when the primary notion of a world

order changed from mankind as the microcosm of the

earth-centered universe to individual humans as

specific parts in the workings of a sun-centered solar

system, the primary notion of the body changed from a

basically neutral one-sex body with heat- and humor-

induced hierarchical variations to a specific two-sex

body with vital parts and distinct, functional, dif­

ferences. 4 7

46 For a discussion about biological determinism as a legitimation for inequality during the change from fourteenth century feudalism to seventeenth century bourgeois society, and through to today see: R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, "The Legiti­ mation of Inequality" Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideol­ Qgy, and Human Nature (New York: Pantheon-Random House, 1984) 63-81.

47 Tuana (The Less Noble Sex) follows this change in a slightly different way. She begins with the dif­ ferent creation stories in Genesis and follows Christian thinking about the relative difference between sexes through Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Cal­ vin and the alchemists. She shows the influence of Christian thought on the alchemists in order to demonstrate the important influence of religious cos­ mologies on the development of scientific theories. It is, she argues, the metaphysical beliefs which are part of a strong religious world view that provide a back­ ground for the development of scientific ideas and for scientific practice. This is compatible with the points made here. 57

The new biology of incommensurability treated the

relations of men to women not as matters of equality

versus inequality but as a difference to be understood,

struggled with, and interpreted. 4 8 Biological facts of

difference, then, were used to justify cultural and

political differences between the sexes at a time when

liberal political theory was claiming that the so

called "natural" authority of the Divine Right of

Kings, or lords over serfs, or the Pope over priests,

or slaveholders over slaves, or--it was argued in some

quarters--man over woman, had no "natural" basis.

Bodies became the foundation for the facts of dif-

ference and subordination; not, as was previously the

case, their representation. With bodies as the founda-

tion people began looking to science and medicine, not

just to the church and priests, for answers to their questions about the body. The Enlightenment's universalist notion of liberty and justice for all was proving to be problematic, and certain bodies began to bear the weight of new cultural meanings. 4 9 With the

48 The term "incommensurability" is Laqueur's.

49 Although this discussion is beyond the scope of this paper, it should be noted (as Laqueur does) that feminism and its claims for women's role in public life also required a recognition of difference, and fostered both an enthusiasm for and a fear of women. The universalism of the new liberal political theories and their language of an undifferentiated body, did not seem to give any more voice to women than had the teleologically male interpretation of the body. However, if women were, in fact, considered as part of 58

growing industrialization of Europe and America depend-

ent on exploiting the labor of the native populations

of America and Africa it "became imperative to draw

distinctions between that small number of men who were

created equal and everyone else."SO

the undifferentiated body of liberal theory, then on what grounds could women speak as women; that is, how could women validate their different social and pOliti­ cal experience as women? A number of feminist investi­ gations into political theory--from the ancients to the Enlightenment--pursue variations of this thematic ques­ tion; for example, see: Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, New Jersey: Prin­ ceton U P, 1979); Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Women in the Histo~y of Political Thought: Ancient Greece to Machiavelli, Women and Politics (New York: Praeger, 1985); Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics: ~ Feminist Reading in Political Theo~, New Feminist Perspectives Series (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988); Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman, eds., Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State U P, 1991); Christine DiStefano, Configurations of Mas­ culinity: ~ Feminist Perspective on Modern Political Theory (Ithaca, New York: Cornell U P, 1991); and, of course, the classic writing contemporary with new lib­ eral political theory, Mary Wollstonecraft, ~ Vindica­ tion of the Rights of Woman (New York: Norton, [1792] 1967) .

50 Ruth Hubbard, "Race and Sex as Biological Categories," Challenging Racism and Sexism: Alterna­ tives to Genetic Explanations, eds. Ethel Tobach and Betty Rosoff, Genes and Gender VII (New York: Feminist, 1994) 12. Hubbard explains that it was economic reasons--the necessity of free labor to open up the New World--rather than racist reasons alone which promoted slavery. In other words, there was a need for a rationalization for the exploitation. This rationalization was provided by physicians and biologists, and was, therefore, necessarily framed in racist terms. 59 It should not be surprising, then, that Soemmer- ring, the person who claimed to have illustrated the first female skeleton, also wrote a book on the com- parative anatomy of the "Negroll and the European. Just as he had found every part of the body to be imbued with sexual distinction, so he found race to permeate the entire organism. He writes, IIIf skin is the only difference then the Negro might be considered to be a black European. The Negro is, however, so noticeably different from the European that one must look beyond skin color.,,51 Soemmering was not alone in this think- ing. Race was conceived as a biological concept, a matter of species. liThe negro race, II wrote Voltaire, lIis a species of men (si.:::) as different from ours .. as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhounds. 1152 Most of the literature shared one of two basic views on this Eurocentric matter: 1) the biologic IIfacts ll demonstrated the inferiority of non-Europeans, and, therefore, justified their enslavement and coloniza- tion; or, 2) although non-Europeans were, in IIfact," inferior and less intelligent than white Europeans (or

51 Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring, tiber die kOkPerliche Verschiedenheit des Negers vom Europaer (Frankfurt, 178) 2; quoted by Schiebinger, IISkeletons ll 80. 52 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994) 63. 60

white Americans), the basic "natural" right of freedom

should not depend on a particular level of intelligence

(which could after all, it was argued, be addressed by

rigorous education) .53 The undifferentiated body of

liberalism, that is, the natural body as the bearer of

the rational subject, had to explain and be accountable

for the various cultural practices of domination. This

paradox was resolved, at least partially, by reading

the natural, the biological--the body--as the founda-

tion for apparently indefensible social practices.

Rather than Aristotle's notion of woman as mis-

begotten man, by the mid-nineteenth century--in the age

of Darwin--woman and non-European man, had become

unevolved white European man. 54 This truth, too, was

written as the body. Craniologists, for example,

explained the inferiority of woman, and a hierarchy of

perfection among races, by several series of

scientific-like measurements: prognathism, orthog-

53 In 1792, a "Founding Father," Dr. Benjamin Rush, argued before the American Philosphical Society that "the 'color' and 'figure' of blacks were derived from a form of leprosy. He was convinced that with proper treatment, blacks could be cured (i.e., become white) and eventually assimilated into the general pop­ ulation." Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Cul­ ture in 19th-Century America (Seattle: U of Washington P, 1979) 28-35.

54 Evolution provided another kind of teleology; however, as I indicated above, with the important change that this teleology used the body as the basis for difference. 61

nathism, high foreheads, or vertebral-skull angle, for

example. Each measurement, index, or trait was seen by

its proponent as a revision or improvement on the for-

mer research; all of which supported the belief of

woman as more infantile than man, and classified Euro-

peans as more developed than non-Europeans. 55 For

example, one of the studies done in 1849, by proslavery

physician Samuel George Morton on his collection of 800

skulls from around the world, showed that "the English

skulls in his collection proved to be the largest, with

an average cranial capacity of 96 cubic inches," fol-

lowed by the Americans and Germans (90 cubic inches) as

seconds, with Negroes, Chinese and Indians in descend-

ing order (83, 82, 79 cubic inches) at the bottom of

the list. 5 6 As Nancy Tuana, a feminist philosopher,

points out, "these characteristics were reliable

indicators of more primitive skulls because they were

traits possessed both by women and non-European

55 For a comprehensive and very readable critical account of two centuries of biological determinism from craniometry to IQ and other intelligence testing, writ­ ten by an evolutionary biologist, see: Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981).

56 Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Schocken, 1965) 74; quoted in ami and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States 183. For more on Morton's data, and his assumption, see: Gould, Mismeasure of Man 50-69. 62

races. ,,57 With impressively circular reasoning and

with echoes back to Aristotle's notion of women and

slaves, the inferiority of woman and non-European man

had to be presupposed in order to create the list which

would classify them as primitive. A curiously self-

fulfilling, male and Euro-centric, scientific finding--

from, not surprisingly, a science practiced with few

women and non-Europeans. 5 8

Racial characteristics (especially after the

first use of the word Caucasian to mean white race in

1800) were becoming more and more defined in the over-

lapping literatures of social science (anthropology)

and natural science (biology) .59 The beard, for exam-

pIe, which had been used by Carl Linnaeus, the "father"

of taxonomy, as a distinguishing feature between man

and woman, began to take on a significance in part of

the discussion of hair texture and color, and its

presence, absence and quality as a defining racial

57 Tuana, The Less Noble Sex 46.

58 For an analysis on the literature by minorities and the marginal about the sciences of themselves (from about 1870-1920), see: Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L. Gilman, "Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism," The "Racial" Economy of Science 170-193. For a discussion of women who were in science see: Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? e~ 245-264.

59 "Caucasian," Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1986). 63

characteristic. "Women, black men (to a certain

extent), and especially men of the Americas simply

lacked that masculine 'badge of honor'--the

philosopher's beard. ,,60 The political life of men was

determined, at least in part, by distinctions in physi-

cal characteristics--including strength, hair charac-

teristics, and skin color. It seems that the

scientific discussions of racial difference focused on

males in the same way that males were discussed as the

center of Enlightenment political struggles; while the

scientific discussions of sexual difference--that is,

how woman differed from the basic body of man--were

basically discussions of middle-class (that is: white)

Europeans (or Americans of European descent) .61

[D) FROM BODY TO BEHAVIOR

The medical literature of the late eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries radically naturalizes femininity

by reducing woman to the uterus--the seat of femi-

ninity. Foucault refers to the power of the process of

medicalizing the female body as a "hysterization of

women's bodies," which he describes, in part, as "a

threefold process whereby the feminine body was

60 Londa Schiebinger, "Anatomy of Difference," Nature'§ Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon P, 1993) 115-142.

61 I am agreeing here with Schiebinger's argument in Nature'§ Body. 64 analyzed--qualified and disqualified--as thoroughly saturated with sexuality. ,,62 This "saturation" with sexuality can be se~n, for example, in the iconographic images of woman in science and medicine, as well as in art--especially, the sexualized images of colonized or non-European woman. 63 The mysteries of nature, it was thought, would succumb to rational analysis, to the methodical experimentation and inspection of sexual behavior, anatomy and physiology. Women were rarely compared across racial lines in the medical literature, since distinctions were (often) unnecessary; woman was universal, reproductive, sexual, and disenfranchised-- although, significantly, non-European women were seen as more available than white European women for inspec- tion and experimentation.

62 Foucault, Sexuality 104.

63 For example, see: Sally Shuttleworth, "Female Circulation: Medical Discourse and Popular Advertising in the Mid-Victorian Era," Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, eds. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Routledge, 1990) 47-68; Mary Poovey, "Speaking of the Body: Mid­ Victorian Constructions of Female Desire," Body/Politics; Women and the Discourses of Science 29­ 46; Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions; T.J. Clark, "Olympia's Choice," The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, (New York: Knopf, 1985) 79-146; Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis, Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1986); Sander L. Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth­ Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," "Race," Writ­ ing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986) 223-261. 65

with the discovery, in 1843, of spontaneous ovula-

tion in dogs, attention soon shifted from the uterus to

the ovaries. 64 If ovulation occurred spontaneously,

while the dog was in heat, and without coition (which

had previously been thought necessary), then woman's

menstruation must indicate woman's "heat" and, there­

fore, her most "receptive" time. 65 Woman, then, func-

tioned the same as dogs and other animals. "The bitch

in heat," Augustus Gardiner, an American physician

explains with astonishing clarity, "has the genitals

tumefied and reddened, and a bloody discharge. The

human female has nearly the same.,,66 By the mid-

nineteenth century the ovaries were considered "as

largely autonomous control centers of reproduction in

the female animal, and in humans they were thought to

64 Laqueur, Making Sex 211. An unfertilized egg was not discovered until 1930.

65 A quotation from 1845 demonstrates the medical ignorance about ovulation and menstruation: "an ovum-­ by which is usually meant an embryo enveloped in mernbranes--does not pass from the ovarium during menstruation ... from the fact that an ovum is never formed but as a consequence of impregnation." Robert Lee, "On the State of the Ovaries During Menstruation," The Lancet 1 (1845), 584; quoted in Shuttleworth, "Female Circulation" 67.

66 Augustus Gardiner, The Causes and Curative Treatment of Sterility, with g Preliminary Statement of the Physiology of Generation (New York, 1856) 17; quoted in Laqueur, Making Sex 213. 66

be the essence of femininity itself."67 This can be

seen in a discussion, written in 1848--with a haunting

similarity to Aristotle's discussion of castration--by

Rudolf Virchow, a giant of nineteenth century physiol-

ogy and medicine, as he describes the function of the

ovaries.

It has been completely wrong to regard the uterus as the characteristic organ. . The womb, as part of the sexual canal, of the whole apparatus of reproduction, is merely an organ of secondary importance. Remove the ovary, and we shall have before us a mas­ culine woman, an ugly half-form with the coarse and harsh form, the heavy bone forma­ tion, the moustache, the rough voice, the flat chest, the sour and egoistic mentality and the distorted outlook ... in short, all that we admire and respect in woman as womanly, is merely dependent on her ovaries. 68

The ovary, then, became the "driving force of the whole

female economy," as well as the object of widespread

surgical removal for sexual, menstrual, social, and

psychiatric transgressions. 69 Menstruation was heat,

67 Laqueur, "Orgasm" 27.

68 V. C. Medvei, ~ History of Endocrinology (The Hague: MTP Press, 1983) 215; quoted in Nelly Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body: An Archeology of Sex Hormones (London: Routledge, 1994) 8.

69 Laqueur, "Orgasm" 27. For a sobering discuss­ ing of nineteenth century oophorectomy (removal of the ovaries) and clitoridectomy in America see: Lawrence D. Longo "The Rise and Fall of Battey's Operation: A Fash­ ion in Surgery," Women and Health in America, ed. Judith Walzer Leavitt (Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wis­ consin P, 1984) 270-284; G.J. Barker-Benfield, "Sexual Surgery in Late-Nineteenth-Century America," Seizing Our Bodies: The Politics of Women'£ Health, ed. Claudia Dreifus (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1977) 13-41; 67

and a single organ--the ovary--dominated the processes,

characteristics, and demeanor that defined woman.

The slide from body to behavior, from sex to gen­ der was relatively swift and complete. 7 0 In the new evolutionary conscious world, the "natural" order meant that bodies were dissected, inspected, rated, and ranked. Behaviors were founded in bodily functions and malfunctions, which needed only to be acknowledged, discovered or uncovered, then recognized, repaired or removed. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

In 1877 biologists, making close observations under a microscope, were able to see cell division and with it, the appearance of chromosomes. By 1892,

August Weismann, a German physiologist, was able to write that

at last it was settled that the male and the female parent contribute equally to the heredity of the offspring; that sexual reproduction thus generates new combinations of hereditary factors; and that the

and, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, For Her Own Good.

70 Laqueur discusses this as well as the litera­ ture which questioned the association of menstruation with heat, Making Sex 210-227. 68

chromosomes must be the bearers of heredity. 71

By 1896, E. B. Wilson, an American cell biologist, had

explained a chromosome theory of heredity.72 And, soon

after this, in 1900, Gregor Mendel's papers on the

dominant and recessive characteristics of plants and

the laws of inheritance were rediscovered and reap-

plied. This set the conditions for Francis Galton (a

cousin of Charles Darwin) who proposed improving human

stock in the same manner as plant and animal breeding--

by getting rid of "undesirables" and multiplying

"desirables"--through a program he named "eugenics.,,73

Eugenicists were concerned with social degeneration,

and the social and behavioral discord--such as, crime,

poverty, slums, disease--found in newly industrialized

71 August Weismann, The Germ-Plasm: ~ Theory of Heredity, trans. W. Newton Parker and Harriet Ronnfeldt (London: Walter Scott, 1893), esp 1-35; cited by Horace Freeland .rudson, "A History of the Science and Technol­ ogy Behind Gene Mapping and Sequencing," The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project, eds Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood (Cam­ bridge, Massachusetts: Harvard U P, 1992) 37-80, esp. 41-42.

72 E. B. Wilson, The Cell in Development and Inheritance (New York, 1896), 182-185; cited by Judson, "A History of the Science" 42.

73 Daniel J. Kevles, "Out of Eugenics: The His­ torical Politics of the Human Genome," The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project, eds Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood (Cam­ bridge, Massachusetts: Harvard U P, 1992) 3-36, esp. 3­ 5; Judson, "A History of the Science" 41. 69

urban society at the turn of the century. In order to

analyze the biological roots of such social discord and

degeneration, eugenically-minded biologists understood

that human heredity needed to be studied. The mental

and behavioral characteristics of different races were

a major concern of eugenic science, and class and race

prejudice were pervasive. Race was equated with

specific and distinct hereditary characteristics; for

example, intelligence, sexuality, temperament, as well

as other traits thought to be racial in character.

"Racial intermixture was seen as a sin against nature

which would lead to the creation of 'biological throw­

backs. ,,,74 Eugenicists "urged the application of their

putatively objective knowledge to the social problems

of their day and offered their expertise to state and

national governments for the formation of biologically

sound public policy. ,,75 This advice was to 1) manipu-

late human breeding so that heredity produced superior people (called: positive eugenics); and, 2) to

74 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 15. For further information see also: Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist U, 1963); and Peter I. Rose, The Subject is Race (New York: Oxford U P, 1968). For a history of eugenics see: Allen Chase, The Legacy of Malthus (New York: Knopf, 1977); and Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985).

75 Kevles, "Out of Eugenics" 9. 70

eliminate biologically inferior people by discouraging

reproduction or by discouraging entrance into one's own

population through restrictive immigration laws

(called: negative eugenics) .

With race, sex, gender, class, disease, poverty,

crime, and behaviors labeled as biological concerns,

the path was clear for social Darwinism and eugenics to

proceed into the new century with scientific knowledge

of the raced and sexed body, and with a scientifically

informed foundation for the social and political rank-

ing and investigation of its associated behaviors.

[E] CHEMICAL CAUSALITY: HORMONES

By the early twentieth century it was no longer

the ovary, a single organ, but a chemical substance--

sex hormones, born as a concept in 1905--which

dominated discussions of sex differences. 76 The

biological roots of difference were found in the new

concept of a hormonally constructed body. Many types of allegedly gender specific behaviors, character-

istics, and roles were attributed to the presence or absence of certain sex hormones. "Male" and "female" sex hormones were the body's own special endocrine mes- sengers of masculinity and femininity. Increasingly it

76 Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body 9. I am indebted, for my understanding of the "politics" of sex hormones, and the discusion which follows, to Oud­ shorn's detailed archeology. 71

was, specifically, the female body which was described

as being controlled by hormones--an explanation which

maintains much of its currency today.77

Hormones entered into the controversial biologi-

cal debate on sex development in the decade between

1910 and 1920. The concept of hormones allowed

laboratory scientists, as well as clinicians

(gynecologists and surgeons, for example), to link

(most often, female) disorders with experimental

laboratory practices. Although, as in the nineteenth

century, it was gynecologists who "were particularly

interested in the functions of the ovaries in order to

control all kinds of disorders ascribed to ovarian mal-

function"; Nelly Oudshoorn, a feminist biologist and

historian, rightly points out that it was the

physiologists who "had a broader interest in the role

of the ovaries and testes in the development of the

body. ,,78 On the one hand, physiologists claimed that

embryonic development was affected by both environment

and physiology, and this affect, in turn, determined

sex characteristics. On the other hand, geneticists

77 For a very accessible book which discusses cur­ rent scientific and popular issues about hormones: desire, appetite drive, stress, circadian rhythms, PMS, menstruation, menopause, hormonal replacement therapy; see: Gail Vines, Raging Hormones: Do They Rule Our Lives? (Berkeley, California: U of California P, 1993).

78 Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body 20. 72

claimed that nuclear elements--sex chromosomes--

determined sex at conception. The concept of sex

hormones allowed sex endocrinologists to claim "they

had found the missing link" between the two sides in

this debate. 7 9 The geneticists and sex

endocrinologists divided up the playing field of

environmental, physiological, and nuclear elements as

follows:

It is clear that we must make a radical dis­ tinction between sex determination and sex differentiation. In most cases the factors of sex determination are chromosomal, and subject to the usual laws of Mendelian inheritance. .. In the higher vertebrates, the mechanism of sex differentiation is taken over by extracellular agents, the male and female sex hormones. (Emphasis added.)80

Sexual development had been reduced, divided, and

labeled as two distinct processes. The geneticists

took sex determination. The sex endocrinologists took

sex differentiation; and, they were soon joined in

their inquiry by biochemists and the pharmaceutical

industry. 81 Sex and gender, the body and behavior,

79 Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body 21.

80 Frank R. Lillie, "Biological Introduction," Sex and Internal Secretions ed E. Allen, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, Maryland: Williams and Wilkins, 1939) 7-8; as quoted in Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body 21.

81 The legacy of this involvement, of course, includes the aggressive, and, some would argue, abusive marketing history of hormone-based contraceptives, and their experimentation--especially on poor women and on women in less developed countries; as well as the his­ tory of hormone "treatment" for regulating menstrua­ tion, PMS, menopause, osteoporosis, and various cardiac 73

were both biological, they were both written as the

chemically informed body unveiled before the eyes of

laboratory scientists. This is even more evident in

the increasing use of technical language to define and

standardize the terminology of and testing for

hormones. The culturally informed definition of sex

was replaced with an ever increasing technical account

of sex and the body; for example: "female hormones

induce the cornification of the epithelial cells of the

vagina in ovariectomized mice," or "the extracts of

bull testes induce the growth of the atrophic comb of

the capon. ,,82

ailments. There is an enormous literature based on these matters; for example, see: Barbara Seaman and Gideon Seaman, Women and the Crisis of Sex Hormones (New York: Bantam, 1981); Rita Arditti, "Have You Ever Wondered about the Male Pill," Seizing Our Bodies: The Politics of Women'§ Health, ed. Claudia Dreifus (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1977) 121-130; Martha Coon­ field Ward, Poor Women, Powerful Men: America'§ Great Experiment in Family Planning (Boulder, Colorado: West­ view, 1986); Gena Corea, The Hidden Malpractice: How American Medicine Mistreats Women, Updated Edition (New York: Harper Colophon, 1985); Betsy Hartmann, Reproduc­ tive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Popula­ tion Control and Contraceptive Choice (New York: Harper and Row, 1987); B. Mintzes, ed., ~ Question of Control: Women'§ Perspectives on the Development and Use of Con­ traceptive Technologies, Report on an International Conference held in Woudschoten, The Netherlands, April 1991, Amsterdam: WEMQS Women and Pharmaceuticals Pro­ ject and Health Action International (1992); Phillida BunkIe, "Calling the Shots? The International Politics of Depo-Provera," The "Racial" Economy of Science 287­ 302.

82 Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body 59. 74

Early on, the concept of sex hormones was very

simple. The origin and function of sex hormones was

sex specific. There were two distinct sex hormones:

one for each unproblematically distinct and opposite

sex. Eventually, it was thought that sex hormones not

only stimulated the characteristics of the specific

sex, but that they also (in the same individual)

depressed the characteristics of the opposite sex.

This process was naturalized as being a kind of inter­

nal chemical war between the sexes; and sounds, at

times, as though it was only sex hormones that were

keeping Galen's one-sex body at bay. However, a dis­

pute began in the 1920s--right about the time women

were (finally) getting the vote in America--about sex

hormones as specific in function and origin. It was

Ernst Laqueur (the great-uncle of Thomas Laqueur) who

isolated--from the urine of stallions--the "female" sex

hormone. 83 Worse, it was the gonads of a male animal

that turned out to be "the richest source of female sex

hormone ever observed. "84 This suggested a cause for

concern; something male (something, that is, from the urine of stallions, and the gonads of a male animal) was to be found in female organisms; and, perhaps even

83 Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body 9.

84 Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body 26. 75

more disconcerting, something female was to be found in

male organisms. This raised, as Thomas Laqueur notes,

"the uncomfortable possibility of endocrinological

androgyny at the very moment when science seemed to

have finally discovered the chemical basis of sexual

difference. "85 The scientific literature began to

report female sex hormones in both the testis and the

urine of "normal, healthy" men; but others, certain

this was an impossibility, argued these men must be

"latent hermaphrodites. ,,86 This was definitely confus-

ing; certainly it was an inconvenience to the one-sex

hormone-per-sex theory. Male sex hormones were

reported in female organisms but, interestingly enough,

this received much less attention in the literature.

It seems the threat to the definition of "mas-

culinity"--at a time of increasing female franchise,

rising fascism, and economic depression--was of far

greater concern. The criteria of sex exclusivity for

sex hormones had to be abandoned and the names "female

sex hormones" and "male sex hormones" were no longer

referred to as being sexually exclusive. As Oudshoorn

reports, this "shift in conceptualization led to a

drastic break with the dualistic cultural notion of

85 Laqueur, Making Sex 249; quoted in Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body 9.

86 Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body 25, 27. 76 masculinity and femininity that had existed for centuries. "87 It may be interesting to note, however, that the necessity of abandoning the notion of sex exclusivity for sex hormones did not seem to disturb belief in the scientific model, and may be presumed to have confirmed the model for those who see the tenta­ tiveness of the process of collecting evidence and testing a hypothesis as having worked well in this case. In other words, the notion of hammering recal­ citrant bodies into standard categories and calling it a discovery of truth remained undisturbed--the founda­ tional categories were merely shifted to other sites.

By the 1930s, the categories of male and female were not considered to be mutually exclusive in terms of the origins of sex hormones; and, "heterosexual" hormones (that is, female sex hormones in men and male sex hormones in women) were thought to have a function in normal development. In the late 1930s the idea of the essence of femininity and masculinity residing in the gonads--respectively the ovaries and testes--was reconceptualized into a new kind of bodily fragmenta­ tion, a notion of "sex that included the brain as the organ that controls sexual development."88 This recon-

87 Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body 26.

88 Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body 33. 77

ceptualization included postulating new hormones:

gonadotropic hormones. Any idea of a single center for

sexual definition was irreversibly fractured. About

this same time, the idea of one single female and one

single male hormone was modified to include both

estrogen and progesterone for women, and testosterone

and androgen for men. Sex had become an even more

fragmented notion. The body was a machine which pro-

duced and responded to, in part, chemical messengers

sent to the far corners to carry the sexed and gendered

messages of masculinity and femininity in just the

right amounts. Sex hormones were said to affect organ

and body weight, various metabolisms, and to generate

many synergistic actions. The concept of sex had

shifted from being anatomically based to being chemi­

cally based--making (among other things) transsexual

surgery, which began in 1922, a more "understandable" possibility.89 If one was anatomically at "odds" with

one's chemical sex, then corrective surgery was,

arguably, a reasonable response.

89 Gail Vines, Raging Hormones 171. Between 1916 and 1921 at least eleven homosexual men had the "Steinach operation": the transplantation of testicular tissue from a heterosexual man into a homosexual. "These experiments inextricably linked the discourse on homosexuality with the discourse on gender and launched the biomedical sciences' search for biological markers of femininity and masculinity in homosexuals" (Oud­ shoorn, Beyond the Natural Body 57) . 78

Causality of sex became the focus of study, rather

than identification of sex. In other words, the focus

turned toward the biology of sex development and behav­

ior, not definitive sex organs. The idea of a relative

sexual specificity gained currency; that is, rather

than being classified by sex organ as male, female or

hermaphrodite, an individual, it was argued, could be

classified in many categories. One could, presumably,

be a masculine female, a feminine female, a masculine

male, a feminine male--or any of a variety of other

possibilities. Chemically speaking, all organisms were

both male and female. One could be anatomically male,

say, but could, because of the presence of female sex

hormones, possess feminine characteristics and behav­

iors. The cultural notions (already informed by

science) of masculinity and femininity helped to shape

the early scientific notions (already informed by cul­

ture) of the function and origin of male and female sex

hormones; however, in return, scientific notions

(shaped by culture) helped to modify cultural notions

(shaped by science) by putting (the possibility of) a drastic reconceptualization of sex differences into circulation.

The reconceptualization and new found relativeness of sex differentiation, based on the presence of hormones, was in a somewhat uneven circulation. It 79

does not, for example, seem in evidence during Freud's

remarks in his 1933 lecture on "Femininity" when he

states: "When you first meet a human being, the first

distinction you make is 'male or female?' and you are

accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating

certainty. ,,90 Yet, Margaret Mead, for instance, began

to promote the theory of sex as being randomly distrib-

uted in nature, but culturally assigned, in her 1935

book, Sex and Temperament. Reconceptualization, then,

made a new discussion of the body possible, but in no

way mandatory. The dualistic notion of two sexes was

never fully abandoned--in fact, its presence remains

remarkably resilient.

[F] CIRCULAR REASONING AND IMPRECISE CATEGORIES

Currently there is much evidence that "sex hormones, "--estrogen, progestins, and androgens--have a variety of effects on the structure and functioning of many cells, organs, and tissues, and that they con- tribute to additional biological and physiological sex differences--although their specific effects are still largely a matter of conjecture. But many of the motivating questions for sex hormone research are, in turn, questionable. Ruth Bleier, a medical doctor and

90 Sigmund Freud, "Femininity," New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1933). 80

professor of neurophysiology and biology, explained

this, in 1984, as follows:

The underlying assumptions are that there are sex-differentiated behaviors, temperaments, and characteristics, and these differences are determined by biological factors. The question that is then explored is, What are the biological factors? A vast scientific enterprise is now devoted to measuring sex differences and to finding how the effects of hormones on the developing brain influence sex differences in adult behaviors and char­ acteristics. 91

Bleier continued by explaining that the premises of

this research are faulty, the logic is faulty, and that

the most influential studies are flawed meth-

odologically. But, it is not just a matter of "bad

science," that if one was more meticulous a scientifi-

cally reliable outcome would, finally, appear. The difficul.ty is that these studies try to establish

clear-cut biological sex differences (in the brain, the hormones, the genes) in order to, then, explain behav- ioral sex differences which are, in fact, not clear- cut. For any given characteristic the range of varia- tion is greater among males or among females than it is

91 Ruth Bleier, Science and Gender: ~ Critique of Biology and its Theories on Women, The Athene Series, general eds. Gloria Bowles and Renate Duelli-Klein, consulting ed. Dale Spender (New York: Pergamon P, 1984) 108. Another excellent book which critiques the scientific work on gender differences is: Anne Fausto­ Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories Abont Women and Men, 2nd ed. (New York: BasicBooks­ HarperCollins, 1992). 81

between the two. 92 That is, of course, provided one is

comfortable with a simple male/female division ini-

tially, and with the idea that certain behaviors are

intrinsically masculine or feminine, thereby providing

independent criteria for biological realities named:

masculinity and femininity. Bleier points to the

culturally constructed assumptions of this work which

accept, at face value, the idea of, say, "tomboyism as

an index of a characteristic called masculinity,

presumed to be as objective and innate a human feature

as height and eye color.,,93 The circular reasoning in

these experiments and studies is, unfortunately, as

durable and impressive as the mid-nineteenth century

notion which ranked the inferiority of woman and non-

European man by first presupposing that inferiority in

order to create a list which would classify woman and

non-European man as primitive.

In fact, much of the work on racial categorization

suffers from the same difficulties: the foundational

criteria for the definition of groups have proven to be

problematic, since it is not possible to find a list of

92 Bleier, Science and Gender 109.

93 Ruth Bleier, "Sex Differences Research: Science or Belief?," Feminist Approaches to Science, ed. Ruth Bleier, The Athene Series, general eds. Gloria Bowles, Renate Klein, and Janice Raymond, consulting ed. Dale Spender (New York: Pergamon P, 1986) 147-184; esp. 150. 82

characteristics which always apply; and, the variations

within a group may exceed those found between groups.

The results of Anthony Appiah's detailed genetic cal-

culations, for example, show that lithe chances of two

people who are both Caucasoid differing in genetic con-

stitution at one site on a given chromosome are about

14.3 per cent, while, for any two people taken at ran-

dom from the human population, they are about 14.8 per-

cent. ,,94 It has, with slow and irregular movement,

taken about one hundred years for--most--scholars to

accept race as a social concept, and to reject the

notion of race as based in biology. In fact, during

World War II the American Red Cross, for example, at

first refused to accept blood donations from Blacks;

then, after protests accepted it but only if used

exclusively for "Negro soldiers. II Further, they con-

tinued to separate the blood of African Americans and

whites until December 1950. 95 But, perhaps; it is the

vividness of the political struggles fought in the name

of race: colonial struggles, the Holocaust, United

States Civil Rights, South African apartheid, and

94 Anthony Appiah, "The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race" "Race," Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985) 21-37, esp. 31.

95 Hubbard, "Race and Sex as Biological Categories II 13. 83

others which have placed race more firmly in the

political, rather than the biological realm. Neverthe-

less, there remains a prevalent "common sense"

understanding of race as having a strong foothold in

biology. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, sociological

theorists of race and ethnicity, explain that

Although the concept of race invokes biologi­ cally based human characteristics (so-called "phenotypes"), selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial sig­ nification is always and necessarily a social and historical process. [ ...J Indeed, the categories employed to differentiate among human groups along racial lines reveal them­ selves, upon serious examination, to be at best imprecise, and at worst completely arbitrary. 96

In other words, biology cannot write race or ethnicity

as the body--not with any precision. 9 7

However, cultural and social practices continue to

employ the concept of race in st.ruct.urLnq and

96 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States 55. Of course, this is not the only notion of race in circulation. Sociobiologists, for example, see racism and nationalism as culturally supported notions of simple tribalism; in other words, these are merely the actions of kinship altruism, an extension of one's (always) loving relationship with family, a bonding of blood relatives. Martin Barker, "Biology and the New Racism," Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis, Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1990) 18-37, esp. 35. Se also, other articles in this same volume.

97 See, for example, Gisela Kaplan and Lesley J. Rogers, "Race and Gender Fallacies: The Paucity of Biological Determinist Explanations of Difference," Challenging Racism and Sexism 66-92. 84

representing the world. Race is not an essentialist,

biological formation known to science, it is an element

of social structure which organizes everyday practices

of power. Of course, it is those very practices which

require analysis. Ethnicity, too, is socially con-

structed; it is based on the cultural history,

geography and language of a people. A recent Newsweek

story on the non-biological nature of race concludes

with a note of resistance, maintained, in part, by the

"common sense" understanding of race as rooted in

biological truth. "Changing our thinking about race

will require a revolution in thought as profound, and

profoundly unsettling, as anything science has ever

demanded. ,,98 Race and racism, to paraphrase H. Rap

Brown, a civil rights activist in the late 1960s, "is as American as apple pie.,,99

In reference to sex differentiation, Ruth Hubbard, a biologist, explains, there is no way to separate the effects, for example, of biology and environment; and, further, these effects may be either additive, simultaneous, or both. She calls this process, trans-

98 Sharon Begley, "Three is Not Enough: Surprising New Lessons From the Controversial Science of Race," Newsweek, 13 February (1995) 67-69.

99 Of course these are not practices exclusive to America. See also:Pamela Trotman Reid, "Racism and Sexism: Comparisons and Conflicts," Challenging Racism and Sexism 93-121. 85 formationism: biology and the environment change the organism, while the organism transforms the environment which includes more organisms. 100 If, for example, half a group of children are put in short skirts and told not to show their panties, then, later, they are told to eat daintily, to watch their weight, and to wear high heels, while the other half of the children are encouraged to wear jeans, to move actively, to climb trees and to play ball, then, later, the second group is told to eat heartily so they will grow big and strong, and to wear comfortable boots; then, Hubbard explains, "these two groups of people will be biologi- cally as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. ,,101 In short, Hubbard's point is, we cannot sort nature from nurture.

The specific differences that are manifested-- whatever they are and however they are noted--only mat- ter if they are correlated with differences in power.

100 Ruth Hubbard, "The Political Nature of 'Human Nature, '" Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Accounts of the Relations Between Women and Men, eds. Alison M. -­ Jaggar and Paula S. Rothenberg, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993) 140-149, esp. 144-145.

101 Hubbard, "Political Nature" 145; see also: Ruth Hubbard, The Politics of Women'§ Biology (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers U P, 1990). 86

Many feel that power "rightfully" belongs "somewhere,"

and the results of science which searches for specific

sex differences act as a--bodily--foundation for a wide

variety of arguments which are ready to dictate where

that "somewhere" is. It is precisely this point which

motivates so much of the research on racial categories

and sex hormones as well as the continual search for

biologically based--dualistic--sex differences. There

is, of course, no necessary connection between behav-

ior, hormones, gonads or genitalia--let alone

chromosomal sex. In other words, biology cannot write

dualistic sex or gender as the body--not with any

precision. l 0 2

There are, Anne Fausto-Sterling claims, at least

five sexes--maybe more; and, this can be seen most

clearly in the case of intersexed individuals, who are often entered into a program of hormonal and surgical management, as infants, "so they can slip quietly into society as 'normal' heterosexual males or females. ,,103

102 For a discussion of a continuum of sex and gender see: Martine Rothblatt, The Apartheid of Sex: ~ Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender (New York: Crown, 1995) .

103 Fausto-Sterling explains the three major sub­ groups of intersexed individuals (who make up approxi­ mately 4 per cent of all births) as: (1) true hermaphrodites, who possess one testis and one ovary; (2) male pseudo-hermaphrodites, who have testes and some aspects of female genitalia but no ovaries; and, (3) female pseudo-hermaphrodites, who have ovaries and some aspects of the male genitalia, but no testes. Notice that although there is room here for a variety, 87

In other words, science and medicine connive to enable

the cultural system of codified laws and regulations

built to maintain a two-party sexual system. To put

the system into question would mean that, for example,

selective service registration, marriage, and the

labels on public restrooms would be put into question.

The truth of intersexual bodies, or the slippage in the

dualistic notion of male/female or masculine/feminine

is not, significantly, written at the level of most

societal mandates because the pressure of recognizing

their presence would call the clarity of sexual dif-

ference, and the roles, positions, and powers that

depend on it, into question. The fear is, chaos would

reign. It would be expensive. It would raise moral questions. An entire value system and power structure would need to be reconsidered. Like the effects of

Galileo's discovery--the world order would crumble, and a new order would have to be established. It is much neater to pursue (or package) a science which can make declarations which fit more neatly into the current discourse; a science which does not challenge the

the reliance on ovaries, testes, and genitalia as among the defining characteristic is still given primacy. Anne Fausto-Sterling, "How Many Sexes Are There?,11 The New York Times, op-ed, 12 March 1993: A15. On the medical identification and care of intersexed infants see: Suzanne J. Kessler, liThe Medical Construction of Gender." 88

reigning ideologies; a science which writes truth as a

known and knowable body.

[G] REPRESENTING GENETIC FOUNDATIONS

While endocrinologists, biochemists, pharmaceuti-

cal industries, behavioral psychologists, and others

were pursuing the manner in which chemical messengers

wrote truth as a hormonally constructed body, other

scientists were pursuing the body as a construction of

hereditary elements--chromosomes, genes. The genet-

icists shared and expanded the advice of both the posi-

tive and negative eugenics which had been offered in

the early part of this century. An example of this can

be found in the 1939, "Geneticists Manifesto," issued

at the Seventh International Congress of Genetics; it

states:

The most important genetic objectives, from a social point of view, are the improvement of those genetic characteristics which make (a) for health, (b) for the complex called intelligence, and (c) for those temperamental qualities which favour fellow-feeling and social behavior. .A more widespread understanding of biological principles will bring with it the realization that much more than the prevention of genetic deterioration is to be sought for. 1 04

However, "the confidence in the power of genes over human behavior" and "the eugenic potential of genetics"

104 H. J. Muller, "Social Biology and Population Improvement," Nature, 144 (1939), 521-522; quoted in Evelyn Fox Keller, "Nature, Nurture, and the Human Genome Project," Code of Codes 281-299, esp. 283-284. 89

rapidly declined in the wake of the legacy of Hitler's

rise to power, World War II, and a general revulsion

against Nazi eugenic practices. 1 05 Evelyn Fox Keller,

a historian and philosopher of science, with a back-

ground in physics and molecular biology, suggests that

in revulsion against Nazi eugenics in Germany (as well as, it should be added, the revul­ sion against racist eugenics in the United States and "classist" eugenics in England), the direct link between genetics and its eugenic implications that had earlier been so visible, and so powerfully motivating, was no longer politically tolerable. 1 0 6

The post-World War II call for a separation of genetics

and eugenics had the effect of confining genetics to

the realm of physiology and aligning issues of behavior

strictly within the domain of culture--where (as was

evident in the pursuit of sex differentiated behavior)

they were rapidly embraced by psychologists,

psychoanalysts, and, eventually, sociobiologists.

In 1953 the previously hypothetical units, genes,

were identified as sequences of DNA; and, by 1969 molecular geneticists were discussing "a new

eugenics"--a eugenics that "could, at least in princi-

105 Diane Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," Journal of the History of Ideas, 45 (1984), 589; cited by Kel­ ler, "Nature, Nurture" 284-285.

106 Keller, "Nature, Nurture" 285. 90

pIe, be implemented on a quite individual basis. ,,107

The "old eugenics" was centered on massive social and

political programs at state and national levels; it

required "nurture" (culture) to be malleable--that is,

any change required a flexibility in culture. The "new

eugenics" recognized the possibilities inherent in the

manipulation of individual "nature"--that is, the pos-

sibility to manipulate the biology, the genetics, of a

given individual. Molecular biologists had learned how

to sequence, synthesize and alter the "Master

Molecule. ,,108 The power of control loomed large.

Robert Sinsheimer, a molecular biologist (who

became the chancellor of the University of California

at Santa Cruz in 1977, and who convened the first meet-

ing on sequencing the human genome in May 1985, sixteen

years after the following remark) claimed, "The new

eugenics would permit in principle the conversion of

107 Robert Sinsheimer, "The Prospect of Designed Genetic Change," Engineering and Science, 32 (1969) 8­ 13; reprinted in Ruth Chadwick, ed., Ethics, Reproduc­ tion, and Genetic Control (London: Croom Helm, 1987) 145; quoted by Keller, "Nature, Nurture" 289. Of course, one development from the eugenics in the early decades of this century, the notion of "fam­ ily planning," might, arguably, be seen as an individu­ ally applied principle. However, that was only one aspect of a much broader social movement.

108 Keller, "Nature, Nurture" 288. 91

all the unfit to the highest genetic level. "109

Genetic determinism, then, did not simply reappear In

its former state; it was being transformed. Curbing

cultural "ills" using the social movements of the "old

eugenics" had proven to be difficult and unpopular, as

well as politically loaded. However, Sinsheimer envi-

sioned a new route to the "cultural perfection ot man"

the chance to ease the internal strains and heal the internal flaws directly, to carryon and consciously perfect far beyond our pre­ sent vision this remarkable ~roduct of two billion years of evolution. 1 0

This new, transformed, notion of "cultural perfection"

placed an emphasis on the role of individual choice in

the possible interventions of the new eugenic genetics.

This is nowhere more clear than in the linking of

genetics with the concept of disease--a linking

referred to by Abby Lippman, a genetic epidemiologist,

as the process of geneticization:

Geneticization refers to an ongoing process by which differences between individuals are reduced to their DNA codes, with most dis­ orders, behaviors and physiological varia­ tions defined, at least in part, as genetic

109 Sinsheimer; reprinted in Chadwick; quoted in Keller, "Nature, Nurture" 289. For more on Sinsheimer and his role in the beginnings of the Human Genome Pro­ ject see: Robert Cook-Deegan, The Gene Wars: Science, Politics, and the Human Genome (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994) esp. Chapter 5, "Putting Santa Cruz on the Map" 79-84; and Kevles, "Out of Eugenics" 18-19.

110 Sinsheimer; reprinted in Chadwick; quoted in Keller, "Nature, Nurture" 290. 92

in origin. It refers as well to the process by which interventions employing genetic technologies are adopted to manage problems of health. Through this process, human biol­ ogy is incorrectly equated with human genet­ ics, implying that the latter acts alone to make us each the organism she or he is. 111

Geneticization, then, is the implication that it is

genetics alone, unencumbered by environment, nurture or

culture, which makes the individual--genetic

determinism. It is also the genetic technology used to

manage problems perceived to be a matter of health.

In the past, health was thought to be negatively

affected by deficiencies of a needed resource or by

exposure to some sort of hazard. In other words, dis-

ease was basically caused by external factors. The

concept of genetic disease requires a conceptual shift

to the notion of an internal cause of disease. It is,

in fact, this concept of genetic disease, which created

the climate for the acceptance of the multimillion dol­ lar project to sequence the human genome. 11 2 In other

111 Abby Lippman, "Prenatal Genetic Testing and Screening: Constructing Needs and Reinforcing Inequities," American Journal of Law and Medicine, 17 (1991) 15-50, esp. 19; quoted in Hubbard and Wald, Exploding the Gene Myth 2.

112 I am agreeing here with Evelyn Fox Keller's argument. This can be contrasted with the position of Horace Freeland Judson, who, in the same volume, takes a more teleological position to the project by stating: "Like the oak in the acorn, the human genome project was implicit in the discovery of the structure of DNA" ("A History of Science" 40). 93

words, it was, in part, the notion of genetic disease

which made possible a project to facilitate technologi-

cal, as opposed to social, control of "undesirable"

traits at the level of (alleged) individual choice.

Here then, science is not facing the blurred boundaries

of, say, five sexes and the impact, cross-fire, or

rebound from the implications of working on the rela-

tive nature of sex distinction. In this new, trans-

formed, notion, the individual is to be enabled and the

society improved, while the scientist dispenses wisdom

and technology defining the known and knowable frag-

mented body, at the level of the gene, in response to

"individual choice."

But, the voices of societal pressures can be heard

in a project which promises to shed light on the dis-

eases "that are at the root of many current societal

problems. "113 When the molecular biologist and editor

of Science magazine, Daniel Koshland, claims that with-

holding funds from the project would be a "failure to

apply a great new technology to aid the poor, the

infirm, and the underprivileged. "114 When a suggestion

113 U. S. Congress, Office of Technology Assess­ ment, Mapping Our Genes (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1988) 85; quoted in Keller, "Nature, Nurture" 281.

114 Daniel Koshland, "Sequences and Consequences of the Human Genome," Science 146 (1989) 189; quoted in Keller, "Nature, Nurture" 281-282. 94

that some of the money for the project be diverted to

the homeless is met with the claim: "What these people

don't realize is that the homeless are impaired

Indeed, no group will benefit more from the application

of human genetics. ,,115 When, while voicing a few mis-

givings, Koshland can unabashedly ask

Is there an argument against making superior individuals? Not superior morally, and not superior philosophically, just superior in certain skills: better at computers, better as musicians, better physically. As society gets more complex, perhaps it must select for individuals more cagable of coping with its complex problems. 110

When an opinion piece in the scientific weekly Nature

asks: "Would it not be profitable to keep the plants

[which use vinyl chloride, a carcinogen that produces

liver cancers and to which some people are supposedly

'hypersusceptible'] going and to use part of the eco-

nomic wealth created to compensate those with the bad luck to be susceptible?,,117 When psychiatrists look to behavioral genetics for explanation. When prenatal

115 Koshland, remarks made at the First Human Genome Conference, October 1989; quoted in Keller, "Nature, Nurture" 282.

116 Daniel E. Koshland, Jr. "The Future of Biological Research: What is Possible and What is Ethi­ cal?" MBL Science 3 (1988-1989) 10-15; quoted in Hub­ bard and Wald, Exploding the Gene Myth 116.

117 "More Genome Ethics," Nature 353 (1991) 2; quoted in Hubbard and Wald, Exploding the Gene Myth 133. 95

testing is encouraged by legal pressures. When genetic

screening and genetic monitoring are required for

employment. When genetic counselors question who is the

patient--the individual, the family, the spouse, the

brother, the child? When partner notification is the

law. When newspapers report stereotyped sociobiologi-

cal assumptions such as: mental illness, homosexuality,

dangerousness, job success, exhibitionism, arson,

criminality, stress, risk taking and shyness as readily

reducible to genetic explanations. 11 8 When on a single

day the Boston Globe's "Medical Notebook" section con-

tained these four headlines: "Genetic link hinted in

smoking cancers." "Schizophrenia gene remains elusive."

"A gene that causes pure deafness found." "Do the

depressed bring on problems. "119 When Business Week

ran a series of articles on "The Genetic Defense of the

Free Market," !!. Q. News and World Report prints a

story on Baby M titled "How Genes Shape Personality,"

and The New York Times runs a headline "Study Suggests

118 Dorothy Nelkin, Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1988) .

119 Richard Saltus, "Medical Notebook," Boston Globe 10 October (1991) 3; quoted in Hubbard and Wald, Exploding the Gene Myth 4. 96

Strong Genetic Role in Lesbianism. ,,120 When a new

industry of companies with names such as Genentech,

Genzyme, Repligen, Biogen, Amgene have the molecular biologists as directors, stockholders, and consultants in order to produce the predictive tests, the drugs, the hormones, and the modified genes. Then, in fact, we can claim to be hearing the voices of societal pres- sure. Pressures which will be felt by the individual making the "choice"; and, one might argue, by the scientist deciding what questions to pursue, what counts as an answer, and what choices to enable.

The report from the Office of Technology Assess- ment underscores the pressures on the individual making the "choice" enabled by the "new eugenic genetics" by stating: "individuals have a paramount right to be born with a normal, adequate hereditary endowment. ,,121 The concept of individual choice here supposes that there are few, if any, constraints on an open field of pos- sibilities, and, that "normal" is an obvious, desirable, and recognizable condition to be chosen or,

120 Dorothy Nelkin, "The Social Power of Genetic Information," The Code of Codes 181 and New York Times 12, March 1993 A 8.

121 Mapping Our Genes 85; quoted by Keller, "Nature, Nurture" 295. 97 presumably, rejected, freely.122 Further, it supposes that the concept of an "individual" is unproblematic; but, there are a number of questions which could be asked about the subject, the self, the individual which would add necessary complexity to any discussion of

"individual choice."

Nevertheless, the close examination represented by the voices of the societal pressures demonstrates an atmosphere of control and domination. This examining gaze which searches and demands, this "constraint of a conformity" which "compares, differentiates, hierar- chizes, homogenizes, [and] excludes" is what Foucault refers to as "normalization.,,123 with echoes of turn-

122 For further discussions about the pressures on "individual choice" in genetic matters, see: Dorothy Nelkin and Laurence Tancredi, Dangerous Diagnostics: The Social Power of Biological Information (: BasicBooks-HarperCollins, 1989); Ruth HUbbar~The Politics of Women'~ Biology (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers U P, 1990); Ruth Hubbard, Profitable Promises: Essays on Women, Science and Health, The Politics of Science Series (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 1995); Ruth Hubbard and Elija Wald, Exploding the Gene Myth: How Genetic Information is Produced and Manipulated Qy Scientists, Physicians, Employers, Insurance Companies, Educators, and Law Enforcers (Boston:Becon, 1993); Ethel Tobach and Betty Rosoff, eds., Challenging Racism and Sexism: Alternatives to Genetic Explanations, Genes and Gender VII (New York: The Feminist Press, 1994). For the classic work on how "normal" gets defined in health and disease with relationship to institutional power, see: Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, intro. Michel Foucault, (New York: Zone Books, 1989).

123 Foucault, Discipline and Punish 183. 98

of-the-century eugenicists' notions, and with a dis-

regard for the post-war positioning of genetics as a

physiological concern, the voices of societal pressure,

that is, the voices of normalization, demonstrate a

confidence in the genetic basis of emotional,

intellectual, and behavioral development. Under these

circumstances it is not merely behavior, but culture

which is biological; written at the level of the gene.

Culture written as the body.

The gene becomes the foundation, for cultural rep-

resentation. This can be seen more clearly in the des-

cription of the planned "composite person" expected to

be the first complete human sequence of the Human

Genome Project, inaugurated in 1991 as a formal federal

program receiving roughly 135 million dollars.

[The composite person] would have both an X and a Y sex chromosome, which would formally make it a male, but this "he" would comprise autosomes taken from men and women of several nations--United States, the European countLies, and Japan. He would be a multina­ tional and multiracial melange, a kind of Adam II, his encoded essence revealed for the twenty-first century and beyond. 1 24

124 Kevles, "Out of Eugenics" 36. I am indebted to Dr. Hsia, from the Department of Genetics and Pediatrics at the University of Hawaii Medical School and Kapioloni Medical Center, for his helpful explana­ tion regarding the meaning of "composite person" (a term he does not accept). The reference is to dividing up twenty-three pairs of chromosomes so that one team from the Human Genome Project may be concentrating, say, on chromosome fifteen, while another team may be concentrating on chromosome twenty, and so on--for a total of twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. Since each person has six billion pairs of DNA divided into 99

The quest for the "biological grail" of genetics has

managed to build in race, sex, nationalism, assinlila-

tion and expectations based on the Old Testament. This

is far more than nineteenth century craniologists could

have ever hoped for. The gene becomes much more than a

metaphor, more than "an abstract gene with magical

influences upon individual and human societal behav- ior.,,125

What better ideology for those in positions of

power than one which explains societal "ills" as part

of the natural, the ordinary, the human condition, the

body; rather than as an outcome of societal pressure,

constraints of conformity, or inequity? Like turning

water into wine, the gene becomes a sign of a biologi-

cally based, scientifically produced, cultural

transubstantiation--written by science as the revealed

"truth" of the known, knowing and knowable body.

The function of ideology is to naturalize the status quo; and certainly biology, at least as it has been produced in the descriptions in this chapter, has

twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, the combined team effort results in analysis of the genetic structure of a "composite person."

125 Val Woodward, "Can We Draw Conclusions about Human Societal Behavior from Population Genetics?" Challenging Racism and Sexism 35-64, esp. 35. 100

done so.126 However, epistemologically ideology

presumes that the status quo, the social--in this case

the biological--represents a deeper underlying order of

the body; an order which has been the focus for the

question: IIwhat is the body?1I This deeper representa-

tion must be deciphered, and the founding principle

must be uncovered and interpreted accurately. Ideol-

ogy, then, in this epistemological context, is part of

a concern with accuracy, truth, scientific certainty.

However, a discursively based process would focus on

the ways in which the presumed principles and the rep-

resentation become, in fact, dominant interpretations.

A discourse based question would assume a fundamental

disorder, understanding that order is imposed, not dis-

covered, that there are only surfaces not depths, that

any particular interpretation is only produced at the

expense of other possible interpretations, and it would

ask, instead: IIhow is the body?1I In short, a dis-

cursive inquiry would engage the manner in which the

body becomes identified, understood and produced; and,

it would consider the discursive economy in which the

principles of understanding were determined. It is

here, in the examination of discursive practices, that

126 For a helpful discussion on the relationship between discourse and ideology, see: Juri Mykkanen, "The Social Divided, II Philosophy and Social Criticism 18.1 (1992): 1-27. 101

the power of a more general discursive system can be

seen as one which includes the intelligibility struc-

tures which produce and govern the body, as well as one

which contributes to the positions of power attributed

to particular bodies.

In the end, how does the body come to be this

mobile entity which receives and distributes attribu-

tions, descriptions, and intentions so variously? When

organs are transplanted, sperm is banked, eggs are

farmed, and a uterus is a uterus is a uterus--bodily

fragmentation is complete. These are, as Rosi Bradotti

put it "organs without bodies"--existing, apparently,

in a culture, or perhaps a world, ruled by DNA.127

Like belief in Plato's Philosopher Kings and the

Noble Lie, popular culture would have us believe that

the scientistpriests have spoken "truth": Genes "R" Us.

127 Rosi Braidotti, "Organs Without Bodies," dif­ ferences: ~ Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies Life and Death in Sexuality: Reproductive Technologies and AIDS 1.1 (1989): 147-161. 102

"And a'n' t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And a'n ' t I a woman?"

"Akron Convention [18511, n History of Woman Suffrage Sojourner Truth

" [W] hen a subject is highly controversial- -and any question about sex is that--one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold."

A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir

" [T]ranssexualism in our society is informative because it raises the possibility that gender is an accomplish­ ment. " Gender Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna

"Heterosexuali ty [. . .] presupposes homosexuality. " "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" Judith Butler 103

Chapter 3

SEXGENDER: ITS REQUIREMENT

AND DEPLOYMENT AS A BODILY BASED VECTOR OF POWER

Biological definitions and descriptions are often

disputed truth claims which come with a somewhat

negotiated culturally charged ideological edge. When

approached as part of a discursive economy, biological

definitions can be thought of as determining the pos-

sible understandings and productions of various bodily

based positions of power. Therefore, I have chosen to

refer to sex and gender in the title of this chapter

(and in my discussion) as an elided, rather than a

specific, difference: sexgender. 1 However, I will con-

1 For feminist discussions on gender see, for example: Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," Towards an Anthropol­ Q9Y of Women, ed. Rayna Rapp Reiter (New York: Monthy Review, 1975) 157-210; Sylvia Junko Yanagisako and Jane Fishburne Collier, "Toward a Unified Analysis of Gender and Kinship," Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward Be. Unified Analysis, eds. Jane Collier and Sylvia Yanagisako (Stanford: Stanford U P, 1987) 14-50; Donna Haraway, "'Gender' for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a Word," Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) 127­ 148; Rosi Braidotti, "Theories of Gender; or, 'Language is a Virus, '" Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia U P, 1994) 258-280; Teresa de Lauretis, Tech­ nologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (London: Macmillian P, 989); Sandra Lipsitz Bern, The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality (New Haven: Yale U P, 1993; Catherine MacK­ innon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and The State: An Agenda for Theory," Signs: Journal of Women and Culture 104 tinue to use the terms sex and gender in order to mobi- lize their various implications and, in part, because I am not so easily separated from my own use of language--even while I am able to critique its limita­ tions. 2 It is the--all too often embodied--stakes of the elision itself that will be the focus of this chap- ter, and the title word, sexgender, is meant to emphasize that.

An informed politics consists, in part, of becom- ing (and staying) aware of who benefits from various practices, who does not, and why. Attention to the limitations of discursive practices can be helpful in this process, and since he sets forth the complexities of power and truth in ways that feature both the eli- sion and the embodiment of the problematic of sexgender well, while critiquing metaphysicians and "the English-

in Society 7.3 (1982): 515-544; Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia U P, 1988; Denise Riley, "Am 1. That Name?": Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History (Minneapolis: U of Min­ nesota, 1988).

2 For more discussion on the pOlitics of the prac­ tice of sliding between partial and more global terms within a critique of essentialist practices see: Kathy E. Ferguson, The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist Theory (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991) esp. 80-83, 200-201 note 33. 105

mechanistic doltification of the world," so can

Nietzsche. 3

[A] TRUTH IS A WOMAN

Nietzsche begins Beyond Good and Evil by supposing

truth is a woman. 4 He then questions the temptations

of the will to truth, and wonders why it is more tempt-

ing than, say, untruth, uncertainty, or even ignorance;

3 Nietzsche is refering here to Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, among others; see: Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to g Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1966); references will be cited by section number (or in the case of the preface, page number) 252. Although what I have to say here is my own reading of Nietzsche, there is a wide literature discussing Nietzsche's writ­ ings in reference to Woman, women, and the feminine (often in relation to Woman as the untruth-in-truth, following Derrida in Spurs); see, for example: Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche'§ Styles/Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche, trans. Barbara Harlow, intro. Stefano Agosti (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978); Gayatri Chak­ ravorty Spivak, "Displacement and the Discourse of Woman," Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krup­ nick (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986); David Farrell Krell, Postponements: Woman, Sensuality, ang Death in Nietzsche (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1986) ; Jean Graybeal, Language and "the Feminine" in Nietzsche and Heidegger (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1990); Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia UP, 1991); Alan D. Schrift, "Derrida: Nietzsche Contra Heidegger," Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (New York: Routledge, 1990) 95-119; Drucilla Cornell, "The Feminist Alliance with Deconstruction," Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Rout­ ledge, 1991) 79-118; and Diane Elam, "Questions of Women," Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en abyme (London: Routledge, 1994) 27-66; Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985).

4 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil preface 2. 106

"What in us really wants 'truth?, '" he asks. S Nietzsche

wants to understand and, more importantly, to question

the lure of truth, the need for certainty, the desire

for foundations, the power of ideals, the demand for

absolutes; for him, these are denials of perspective,

the errors of dogmatists. Truth, Nietzsche claims, is

a woman, a Sphinx, the two-faced goddess/monster of

birth and death who sat on the walls of the citadel

with two heads and two foreparts and looked in two

directions. 6 It was she who, according to legend,

destroyed all passers-by who could not solve the riddle

she proposed--that is, until Oedipus guessed the answer

to the riddle and caused the Sphinx to kill herself.

Nietzsche writes:

The problem of the value of truth came before us--or was it we who came before the problem? Who of us is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks. (Emphasis added.) 7

S Nietzsche, Beyond section 1.

6 Mythology references are to the legend, not the specific Greek tragedy; sources used: Edward Tripp, The Meridian Handbook of Classical Mythology (New York: Meridian-New American Library-Times Mirror, 1970); Bar­ bara G. Walker, The Woman'£ Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco, California: Harper & Row, 1983); and Patricia Monaghan, The Book of Goddesses and Heroines (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1981); and thanks to Gina Pusateri for helpful comments about the myths of the Sphinx and Oedipus.

7 Nietzsche, Beyond section 1. 107

Does "the problem" (Saussure's IIlanguage," Derrida's

"writing," Lacan's "sliding signifiers," Foucault's

"discourse") precede, construct, create "us"; or, do

"we" precede, construct, create it?8 Do, for example,

the predecessor/parents name/create/empower the child;

or, does the son (Oedipus) unname/uncreate/kill his

predecessor/creator/father (Laius) and

name/create/empower (marry, and make Queen) his

predecessor/creator/mother {Jocasta)?9 Nietzsche's use

of Oedipus and the Sphinx provides rich sexgender ter-

rain for exploring the problem of the will to power

over (sex and gender) truth.

Truth, in Nietzsche's hypothetical, is a woman.

The Sphinx bridges the natural and unnatural, the evil

and the divine, she is an Egyptian-turned-Greek

8 Ferdinand de Saussure, "Course in General Linguistics: Nature of the Linguistic Sign," Critical Theory Since 1965, eds Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee, Florida: UP of Florida, 1986) 645-656; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chak­ ravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1974); Jac­ ques Lacan, "The Agency of the Letter in the Uncon­ scious or Reason since Freud," ~crits: A Selection trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977); Michel Foucault, "The Order of Discourse," Language and Politics, ed. Michael J. Shapiro (New York: New York U P, 1984) 108-138.

9 The chicken-egg problematic is also evident in the two-faced aspect of the Sphinx as goddess of birth and death. Walker reports that this glyph was refered to as "the Lions of Yesterday and Today," which is similar to the Sphinx's Greek designation as Alpha and Omega (Women'~ Encyclopedia 957) . 108

female/goddess/woman/monster who ate the young men that

failed to answer her riddle. Oedipus bridges a wide

range of cultural practices from the highly valued to

the most unsavory; he is a Greek male/hero/man/king who

killed his father and married his mother. The Sphinx

asks the questions, the riddles. Oedipus is the only

man who has an answer. The Sphinx, in an arrogant rage

at hearing the correct answer, flings herself from the

walls of the citadel and dies--making Oedipus a hero as

a result. Oedipus becomes king and accepts the reward

of marriage to the woman who is, unbeknownst to all,

his mother. Truth is a woman, a monster/goddess who-­

while looking in two separate directions--knowingly

tempts, asks confusing questions, and, if the question

is answered correctly, kills herself, creating a male

hero and king in the process. Truth, then, in

Nietzsche's example, is not merely resistant to

clarity; rather, importantly, it dies in the presence of a knowing other. Truth is killed by certainty; by dogmatism; by arrogance.

Nietzsche begins his discussion about the will to power over truth with a deadly rendezvous of sexed heroic powers which leave an enduring legacy of suicide, murder/patricide and incest. Played out in a patriarchy, on a heterosexual stage against a backdrop of foundational western mythology, the will to power 109

over truth is also, it seems, power over woman. The

will to power over truth is, then, in Nietzsche's anal-

ysis, an enigmatic, gendered entanglement with impor-

tant political, cultural, and generational implica-

tions, as well as very deadly limitations.

Nietzsche is playing, between the lines, with the

subtleties and the powers of the notions of difference

and opposition when he asks who is Oedipus and who is

the Sphinx. However, Nietzsche's deceptively simple

questions can be taken much further. Nietzsche's story

about truth suggests, among other things, a firmly placed binary opposition that many feminists have

noted: woman's knowing kills man; man's knowing kills woman. Man/Woman. Presence/Absence. Truth/Untruth.

Yet, Nietzsche asks "How could anything originate out of its opposite?,,10 A fundamental faith in opposite values is, for Nietzsche, the original sin of metaphysicians--especially Descartes; it is the threshold where they refuse to place their doubt, "even if," Nietzsche writes, "they vowed to themselves, 'de omnibus dubitandum.,,,ll Nietzsche "considers the

10 Nietzsche, Beyond section 2.

11 Nietzsche is quoting Descartes: "All is to be doubted" (Beyond 2). For more on Nietzsche's critique of metaphysical philosophy and its affinity for oppo­ sites see: Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: ~ Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Texts in German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) 1.1. 110 belief in opposite values an inveterate prejudice [.

•J and insists on a scale of subtle shades, degrees and nuances. ,,12 This is an important point. Without a belief in opposites, the practices of representation, mimesis, dialectical thinking and imitation--all dependent on presence and absence--come into question.

I like to read Nietzsche's question about Oedipus and the Sphinx as asking: who is man? (Freudian and

Lacanian presence) and who is woman? (Freudian absence,

Lacanian lack). In this reading, Nietzsche prompts us to ask ourselves, how can we tell men from women if there are no ideals, no oppositions, and only shades of difference?13 I would like to push the point and read

Nietzsche as though he were questioning the notion of biologically opposite sexes, of only two genders. I would like to push it even further and ask if Nietzsche could be read as questioning heterosexuality? In these rendezvous, then, what trace separates questions from question marks, or signifiers from signifieds, or one sex, or gender (or race, or ethnicity) from another?

12 Walter Kaufman, trans., Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to ~ Philosophy of the Future, by Friedrich Nietzsche, (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1966); 222­ 223 note.

13 It is the introduction of the third term, truth, which acts to foreground the relationship between the two elements in the binary, man/woman, enough to generate the questions Nietzsche asks. 111

What is the mark? Where is the line? What power

relies on the particularities of its presence? Who

codes the degrees of difference, the shades, the

nuances, and why? Is everything due to perspective?

By placing the positive valence on truth as woman,

Nietzsche demands a reversal: woman as presence, man

as absence; truth (woman) versus untruth (man). "Sup-

pose we want truth," Nietzsche asks, "Why not rather

untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?,,14 If truth

is woman and untruth is man, then, Nietzsche's reversal

subtly interrupts "standard" heterosexual presumptions

by placing man (untruth, uncertainty, and ignorance) as

desired absence; while, simultaneously, mobilizing the

ready-made, ideal, notions of woman as {now,

un-)desirable temptress on the side of presence

(truth) .15 Nietzsche's request for us to suppose truth

is a woman puts Protagoras' claim that "Man is the

measure of all things," as well as a great deal of

other Western thought, at risk. 1 6 But, one is left to

wonder whether Nietzsche is referring to embodied,

physical, material, "real" women or if he is using

14 Nietzsche, Beyond section 1.

15 This also makes clear Nietzsche's presumption of the reader having a male heterosexual perspective.

16 Nietzsche asks us to suppose "that not just man is the 'measure of things'" (Beyond, section 3). 112

metaphysical/metaphorical Woman, an ideal, to talk

about truth; and, more importantly, can those acts be

separated when there is slippage between Woman/women,

when the notions of an ideal and binary opposition are

in question, and when the concepts of truth, power,

sexgender, and heterosexuality, rest in the balance?

It seems that Nietzsche's informed use of the

Sphinx--a two headed female--is meant, in part, as a

female to contrast with the male Oedipus, and, to con-

vey, in part, the ironic presence of simultaneous

incompatibilities and mutual dependencies within any

notion (in this case: truth). Nietzsche's informed use

of Oedipus is meant, in part, as a male to contrast

with the female Sphinx (a contrast which works with and

against the heterosexual imperative), and, in part, to

convey the complexity of powers at work in the neces-

sarily mistaken simplicity of any (necessarily, self-

deluding) reversal.

Nietzsche continues his investigation into the

will to truth by recognizing that the reversal in the act of naming truth as 2 problem (giving woman a posi-

tive valence) is both new and dangerous.

And though it scarcely seems credible, it finally almost seems to us as if the problem had never even been put so far--as if we were the first to see it, fix it with our eyes, 113

and risk it. For it does involve a risk, and perhaps there is none that is greater. 1 7

If the signified--the concept, the problem--has "never

even been put so far," then it is indeed risky to "fix

it with our eyes" and settle upon a signifier--an

image, a graphic, a sound. These two internal elements

of the Saussurian sign can be seen as a type of

binarism;18 the signified and signifier are each dif-

ferential, negative, and only definable by what they

are not--it is their combination as a sign that is

positive, definite, firm. 1 9 Truth. Woman. Presence.

The world gets divided up by language into specific

17 Nietzsche, Beyond section 1.

18 I am taking chronologoical liberties here. I am aware of the fact that Saussure's lectures were not published in Nietzsche's lifetime (1844-1900), indeed they were not published in Saussure's lifetime (1857­ 1913). Nevertheless, there are parallels between Nietzsche's and Saussure's thinking on language. If anything, Nietzsche was the more radical since he does not appear to confine his claims of meaning as a rela­ tion of difference to linguistics alone {see, for exam­ ple, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals in: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor­ Doubleday, 1956).

19 "Language," Saussure tells us, can be "compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time." Although the signified and signifer are differential, when two signs are compared (each having its own signified and signifer) the signs are not different--only distinct. "Between them," Saussure writes, "is only opposition" {Saussure, "Course," 649, 653). Here we can insert Nietzsche's critique of oppositions and the limitations of dichotomous thinking. 114

entities--signs--which come to be experienced as dis-

tinct, fundamental, natural. A risky practice: truth

is killed by certainty. This is, as Nietzsche suggests

(above), a great risk--"perhaps there is none that is

greater"--it is the risk of the binary and arbitrary

nature of binding the non-hierarchical elements of sig-

nifier and signified within the (two-headed/Sphinx-

like?) concreteness of a sign; it is the risk of the

limitations of language; it is the always already gen-

dered risk of differencp.; it is the risk of opposition;

it is the risk of the violence of discursive practices.

Ultimately, it is the risk of recognizing our own

will, our own arrogance, our own connivance with

power--our own will to power over truth. The risk is,

also, that we will realize what, and how much, our

arrogance puts at stake. In other words, the notion of

will and arrogance are important as part of the notion

of power--the Sphinx, after all, was in an arrogant

rage at the violation of her omnipotence upon hearing

the correct answer, or, variously, at the penetration

(rape?) of her secrets (a rage which ended when she

flung herself from the walls of the citadel and

died) .20 Arrogance is also important in the story of

20 The Sphinx is sometimes thought to be a Maenad (a contested category); that is, she was one of the women of Greece participating in an ecstatic worship, a mania, a religion of madwomen. Therefore the "rage" in the tale of Sphinx, in this interpretation, can also be read as a transformation of religious mania or ecstasy. 115

Oedipus. It was the arrogance with which he enjoyed

his reputation, as well as his reputation itself which

was destroyed when Oedipus realized that he had killed

his father and married his mother; thus, following his

discovery, he jabbed out his eyes with a clasp from his

wife/mother's cloak and was blinded/castrated, then

banished/killed. 21 Jocasta, his wife/queen/mother,

hanged herself. A risky business all around. In the

end, then, the will to power over truth destroys

Oedipus--man--too.

Nietzsche's reversal gambles with the com-

plexities, the tensions, the ironies of power, and

challenges us to recognize the arrogance and deadly

risk of clarity, of certainty, of absolutes. He is

suspicious of attempts to conceptualize the entire

universe. He sees more room for play than most con-

ceptualizations and labels allow. He is leery of

Monaghan explains that these women "flung themselves into their religion with such fury that it often seemed terrifying to men--who were forbidden to witness, much less to join, their secret rites" (Goddesses and Heroines 186) .

21 The clasp "may have been a euphemism for the castrating moon-sickle. [ ...J Blindness was a common mythic sYmbol of castration. [ ...J In Egypt also, a penis was called an Eye" (Walker, Woman'£ Encyclopedia 737) . In Spurs, Derrida examines Nietzsche's link of woman-truth-castration (and Oedipus) (see esp. 83-123). Spivak, Krell, Schrift, Cornell, Elam and Jardine examine Derrida's examination (see footnote 3). 116

theories which make no provision for subtle shades. He

looks forward to the coming of "philosophers of the

dangerous 'maybe'''; meaning those who are willing to

accept the challenge of examining the possibilities of

insidious--ironic--relationships between seemingly

opposite things. 2 2 "To recognize untruth as a condi-

tion of life," Nietzsche tells us, "means resisting

accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way. ,,23

Dangerous indeed. This recognition puts the entangle-

ment of traditional presumptions ("accustomed value

feelings") about sex, gender and sexuality, among other

things, at risk. "One should," Nietzsche warns us,

"have more respect for the bashfulness with which

nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent

uncertainties. ,,24 One should, then, examine the condi-

tions and possibilities of the "dangerous maybe."

Yet, why does Nietzsche describe truth as a woman?

Why does he use woman to describe the great risk, why

22 Nietzsche, Beyond section 2.

23 The remainder of the quoted phrase is: "and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil" (Nietzsche, Beyond section 4). Nietzsche'S injunction to "live dangerously" can also be found in: Friedrich NietzSChe, The Gay Science: With g Prelude in Rhymes and an Appen­ dix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1974) i references will be cited by section number, 283.

24 Nietzsche, Science preface 4. 117

not juggle some other metaphysical ideal in order to

make his point about the will to truth? This is, of

course, a feminist question which points to woman as '. the necessary present absence in Western thought. As

Alice Jardine reminds us, "when you problematize 'Man,'

[. .] you are bound to find 'woman '" and, perhaps,

risking woman does not sound as ominous as risking Man,

the allegedly generic totality.25 That which is gen-

dered "feminine" in many philosophical and theoretical

systems (allegedly) has little to do with embodied

women. It is meant merely as a contrast to the "regu-

lar" mode, "the measure of all things," gendered, gen-

erically, human--meaning, male.

Simone de Beauvoir complicates this binary rela-

tion between the two sexes. She describes it as not

completely symmetrical since "man represents both the positive and the neutral, as indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.,,26 Woman is

25 Jardine, Gynesis 58.

26 It is worth noting that at this point de Beauvoir begins listing biologically based arguments (including Eve's story in Genesis) which posit man's body as "normal" and woman's body as a "prison" or lacking. That this is the next step in presenting her argument is in keeping with my opening observations in Chapter 1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1952) xviii. 118 defined, in this scenario, by reference to man; however, man needs no referent; man is "the measure of all things," man is. The result of this asymmetry is, of course, a hierarchy: man as subject, as absolute; and, woman as the "Other.,,27 Man is neutral, absolute human; woman is sex or gender, derivative other.

27 This hierarchical asymetry is also incorporated into reading Nietzsche's reversal. If truth is woman, the two-headed Sphinx, then there is room for both notions (one for each head), the subject and the absolute. Sphinx as woman (subject); Sphinx as absolute (truth). If untruth is--man--Oedipus, he is indeed "Other," since either one, untruth or Oedipus, is derivative, defined by relationships, referents, limits. Helene Cixous writes about the hierarchies in Western patriarchal binary thinking. She writes: Where is she? Activity/passivity Sun/Moon Culture/Nature Day/Night [. . .] Man__ Woman Cixous refers to these pairs of oppositions as "couples," and asks: "Does that mean somethinq? Is the fact that Logocentrism subjects thought--all concepts, codes and values--to a binary system, related to 'the' couple, man/woman?" Further, she sees "the movement whereby each opposition is set up to make sense" as "the movement through which the couple is destroyed." This is, she claims, a "universal battlefield" where each and every time, "a war is let loose. Death," she writes, "is always at work." (Helene Cixous, "Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays," The Newly Born Woman, Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, trans. Betsy Wing, intro. Sandra M. Gilbert, Theory and His­ tory of Literature, 24 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 63-132; esp. 63-64. 119

To look briefly again at Nietzsche, truth is con-

sidered by many to be an absolute; and, in that case,

untruth would be considered derivative. Nietzsche,

looking through a hierarchical lens, wants to question

the notion of absolutes; therefore, Nietzsche asks us

to consider what happens if truth is a woman. In other

words, Nietzsche wants to agitate and deploy our

expectations in new ways, he wants us to consider what

we end up with if woman is absolute and man is, then,

derivative; or, if truth is derivative and untruth is,

then, absolute. In short: What if our absolutes are,

instead, derivatives?28

But, where does the claim that the "feminine" or

"woman" has nothing to do with women leave embodied

women--or men? Where does the notion of generic "man"

leave embodied men--or women? Indeed, where are there

any bodies?29

These philosophical and theoretical questions (and

systems) are being developed and played out on rich

sexgender terrain. Why? It is, in large part, the

requirement of a hierarchically structured sexgendered

28 This is, of course, what deconstruction--after Derrida--is all about.

29 For a discussion of Nietzsche's conception of the body, see: Elizabeth Grosz, "Nietzsche and the Choreography of Knowledge," Volatile Bodies: Toward £! Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1994) 115-137. 120

playing field--dictated by our Western conceptual,

linguistic, discursive apparatus--which marks the mag­

nitude of the (foundational?) risk Nietzsche recognized

when he wrote: "perhaps there is none that is

greater. "30 Nietzsche's hypothetical, then, turns on

the power of the slippage between the negative, non-

hierarchical elements in the positive, symmetrical and

distinct sign: truth; and the asymmetrical, hierarchi­

cal relationship in the binary opposition: manjwoman. 3 1

In other words, it turns on the slippage between the

distinct, absolute and non-derivative attribute of

truth, and the always already derivative, "Other,"

attribute of woman. It is precisely here where the

disruptive power of Nietzsche's proposition, truth is a

woman, makes a space and claims its terrain. It is

this slippery and risky sexgender terrain I wish to

travel upon as I explore the (embodied) powers and practices of the will to sex and gender truth.

30 Nietzsche, Beyond section 1.

31 The abstract internal relation of Saussure's two negative elements, signifier and signified, is com­ posed of equal units which are always already endlessly differential and non-hierarchical. Saussure sees the relationship between signs as distinct and opposi­ tional. He assumes a kind of symmet~ between signs. However, as de Beauvoir, Derrida, and Cixous argue, Western traditional binary oppositions are not £Yill­ metrical, they are hierarchical. Power-­ phallocentrism--is at work. 121

As a final stop before travel begins, I would like

to (re)visit Luce Irigaray's response to questions

about her inquiry into the dominant discourse and the

interrogation of men's mastery:

There is one question, however, that I should like to examine at the outset. More­ over, it is the first question, and all the others lead back to it. It is this one: "Are you S! woman?" A typical question. A man's question? I don't think that a woman--unless she has been assimilated to masculine, and more specifically phallic, models--would ask me that question. Because "1." am not "I," I am not, I am not one. As for woman, try and find out ... In any case, in this form, that of the concept and of denomination, certainly not. 32

[B] THE SEXGENDER WHICH IS NOT ONE

Kate Bornstein's book, Gender Outlaw: On Men,

Women, and the Rest of Us, written with honesty, humor

and a celebratory spark, can help to depict some of the

sexgender terrain. 33 In the opening paragraph she

writes:

My identity as a transsexual lesbian whose female lover is becoming a man is manifest in my fashion statement; both my identity and fashion are based on collage. You know--a

32 Luce Irigaray, "Questions," This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, New York: Cornell U P, 1985 [1977]) 120.

33 Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1994) . 122

little bit from here, a little bit from there? Sort of a cut-and-paste thing. 34

Bornstein recognizes that although clear divisions in identity, fashion, gender and sexuality are "driving forces in our culture"; they are not so clear in her own case. 3 5 Perhaps Bornstein, is, then, to place her phrase with Nietzsche's, a "collage" of Oedipus and the

Sphinx, and, we might consider her as--returning once again to Nietzsche--an embodied rendezvous of questions and question marks. She writes that she is "neither male nor female," "neither straight nor gay.,,36 There- fore, one might also say that she is outside the binary sexgender system altogether, that she exists in a third space (in a similar way to Monique Wittig's argument that lesbians exist outside the gendered category woman

34 Bornstein, Outlaw 3. In the new Afterword (in the paperback edition) Bornstein qualifies the reference to herself as a lesbian. She recognizes that although the direction she takes is lesbian, much of lesbian culture is quite different than transgendered culture--although there is overlap. "I live my life as a lesbian, with many similarities to some lesbians, but I'm not under the illusion that I am a lesbian. It's the difference between being an identity and having an identity. The latter makes more room for individual growth, I think" (Outlaw 243) .

35 Bornstein, Outlaw 3.

36 Bornstein, Outlaw 4. 123

and are therefore not women) .37 With the increasing

fluidity in Bornstein's "borderline life" and a

decreasing need to belong to any particular camp, has

come a "more playful and less dictatorial" (less dog-

matic, less arrogant?) sense of fashion and self­

expression. 38

Her writing is enriched by being personally,

politically and theoretically informed. While I want

to consider her thoughts seriously (and, admittedly,

use them toward my own purposes), Bornstein makes no

claim to speak for all transsexuals and it is not my

intention to present her as though she does. She

acknowledges those who are angry or who disagree with

her, and responds gently to those who position them-

37 Wittig sees "sex" as a gendered category and, therefore, posits that lesbians have no sex, they are their own, third, gender. To be a woman, then, for Wittig, is to be part of the man/woman binary which assumes heterosexuality. Monique Wittig, "One is Not Born a Woman," The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader eds. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale and David M. Hal­ perin (New York: Routledge, 1993) 103-109. Judith But­ ler offers a critique of Monique Wittig's position in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) esp. 111-128. Sandy Stone writes: "I suggest constituting trans­ sexuals not as a class or problematic 'third gender,' but rather as a genre--a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexu­ alities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored." Sandy Stone, "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttrans­ sexual Manifesto," Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, eds Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991) 280-304, esp. 296.

38 Bornstein, Outlaw 4. 124

selves in opposition to her, by noting that: "there are

as many truthful experiences of gender as there are

people who think they have a gender. ,,39 She discusses

the pain of having a "non-traditional gender identity,"

in a world which insists on assigning everyone to one

of two possibilities, as her "biggest secret" and

"deepest shame.,,40 "'Sex changes, I" she writes, "never

were an appropriate topic of conversation--not at the

dining table, not in the locker room, not over a casual

lunch in a crowded restaurant. ,,41

Bornstein's writing extends an invitation to a

developing conversation (rather than a distant observa-

tion) about gender and to an investigation of the

39 Bornstein, Outlaw 8.

40 Bornstein, Outlaw 8. Although the tone of Bornstein's book is celebratory and affirmining, I include these more painful remarks at the outset for two reasons: one, because she includes them herself early on in her text and I want to respect her having done so; and two, in order to avoid the appearance of overstating the playful possibilities in fluid idenities. In a similar instance, Michel Foucault's introduction to the life story of the intersexed Her­ culine Barbin is criticized by Judith Butler for sentimentalizing Barbin's (often troubled) past as the "happy limbo of non-identity." On this point, Kathy Ferguson, in turn, critiques Butler for her selective account of Foucault's introduction. Herculine Barbin, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of g Nineteenth-Centu~ French Hermaphrodite, intro. Michel Foucault, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon, 1980) xiii; Butler, Gender Trouble 94-96; Ferguson, Man Question 139-142.

41 Bornstein, Outlaw 9 125

notions and myths of male and female, as well as the

penalties for sUbscribing to and transgressing them.

However, this is not a conversation she wants to monop-

olize or an investigation she wants to control: "More

important than my point of view, than any single point

of view however, is that people begin to question gen­

der.,,42 She asks, among other things, whether women

and men, female and male exist at all.

[T]he culture may not simply be creating roles for naturally-gendered people, the cul­ ture may in fact be creating the gendered people. In other words, the culture may be creating gender. No one had ever hinted at that, and so, standing outside a "natural" gender, I thought I was some monster, and that it was all my fault. 4 3

This echoes back to Nietzsche's question asking which

came first: did "the problem," ("language," "writing,"

"sliding signifiers," "discourse") in this case "natu-

ral gender," come prior to culture (Nietzsche's "us");

or, does the culture (Nietzsche's "we") come before

42 "My voice on this subject," she writes, "is not representative of all transgendered people. But when a minority group has been silent for as long as we have, as disjointed as we have been, the tendency is for those in the majority to listen to the loud ones when they first speak up; and to believe that we speak for the entire group." Bornstein, Outlaw 14.

43 Bornstein, Outlaw 12. This is the focus of Judith Butler's work on performativity in Gender Trouble and her further work in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993) . 126

"the problem" of gender?44 Which of us is male or female, man or woman, both or neither, or something else? How (and why) do we decide sexgender truth?

Gender is often (but by no means only) discussed as a system of classificacions: gender assignment, gen­ der identity, gender role, and gender attribution. 4 5

These labels, among others, are either implied or, more often, used to label the sexgender terrain and are, therefore, worth carefully retracing. In describing

44 See page 5 of this chapter for Nietzsche's quote, also see footnote 8; see also Elam's comment on page 32 and in footnote 56, as well as Judith Butler's related argument in footnote 63.

45 Unless stated otherwise, I am refering to traditional readings of these terms; and I am relying heavily on the analysis of Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna in Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978) esp. 8-20. Bornstein also refers to Kessler and McKenna's work. For a slightly different classification system see: Esther Newton and Shirley Walton, "The Misunderstanding: Toward a More Precise Sexual Vocabulary," Pleasure and Danger: Explorina Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance, [Papers presented at the Scholar and the femi­ nist IX conference, held Apr. 24, 1982 at Barnard Col­ lege, New York City] (London: Pandora, 1989 [1984]) 242-250. Gender is, of course, also an axis of power institutionalized in a variety of practices. However, I begin by examining these gender classifications writ­ ten at the level of the individual, in part, because this foregrounds the practices of naturalizing the links between gender, sex and sexuality. Also, in part, because, as I explained in Chapters 1 and 2, it is precisely at this point where arguments based on religion and genetic biology emerge as legitimacy claims for true, real, natural, divinely-inspired chromosomally-determined biological-sex and hormonally­ driven behavior-specific gender-roles. 127

the specifics of each term I use the word gender,

though not unproblematicallYi however, in every case--

certainly, and most clearly, in the first and last

cases below of gender assignment and gender

attribution--sexgender would more accurately capture

the biological-behavioral slide of attributes and

expectations embedded in and assumed by the descrip-

tion.

Gender assignment occurs once--at birth--and is,

usually (and importantly, legally) declared by the doc-

tor (or midwife) who attends the birth. This is com-

monly referred to as: sex. There are two possibilities

for gender assignment, each based on genital

inspection--penis present indicates gender label:

"bOY"i lack of penis indicates gender label: "girl.,,46

If the genitals are ambiguous no assignment is made

until other criteria are examined. 4 7 These would be

46 As Bornstein rightly notes, it "has little or nothing to do with vaginas. It's all penises or no penises: gender assignment is both phallocentric and genital. Other cultures are not or have not been so rigid" (Outlaw 22).

47 For a fascinating discussion on what happens when physicians are confronted with ambiguous genitalia see: Suzanne J. Kessler, "The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16.1 (1990): 3­ 26. In this article, Kessler points to the prevailing notion that good medical decisions--in the case of ambiguous genitalia--are based on the ability to inter­ pret the "real" sex of the infant, rather than on recognizing cultural understandings of gender. The medical task is to reveal the truth, to reveal the real sex, and to complete the genitals. Interestingly, 128

biological criteria in our culture (as discussed in

Chapter 2) but, as may be the case with Native American

berdache or Hawaiian mahu, they could be behavioral

criteria. 4 8

Although the term "reassignment" might be used in

the case of a "mistake," the better term would be

"reconstruction" since "the child's history, as short

as it may have been, must now be reinterpreted.,,49 It

is this precise dynamic of writing history based on

gender assignment which also underscores what happens

when for example, based on ultrasound results, the

"sex" assignment is "revealed" in utero.

infants are male, unless or until proven otherwise; this can be seen, for example, in references made to an underdeveloped phallus rather than to, say, an over­ developed clitoris. "What is ambiguous," Kessler writes, "is not whether this is a penis but whether it is 'good enough' to remain one ("Medical" 13).

48 It is worth noting that the assignments based on behavior are often done in childhood, and, there­ fore, are done after an initial gender assignment has been made and a gender label given. For more on ber­ dache see, for example: Will Roscoe, The Zuni Man-Woman (Alburquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1991); and Walter Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1988). For more on mahu see, for example: Carol E. Robertson, "The Mahu of Hawai'i," Feminist Studies 15.2 (Summer 1989): 313-326.

49 This is a point which emphasizes the potential for gender assignment and gender construction to be read as synonomous (Kessler and McKenna, Gender 8) . 129

Gender identity applies to self-attribution of

gender. This is what the person "feels" s/he is. It

is, importantly, not necessarily the same as the gender

attribution others would make; in fact, it can be inde­

pendent of the attribution of others. In other words,

gender identity overlooks the fact that people (almost

always) attribute gender to one another without asking

if their gender attribution is the same as the person's

gender identity. Gender identity is inferred from

listening to how a person refers to him or her self.

One of the most obvious difficulties, then, with the

classification of gender identity is that the only way

to find out what a person's self-attribution is, is to

ask; however, since "I don't know," or "I don't care,"

or "Neither" or "Both" are all unacceptable answers,

the possibilities are limited to only one of two.

How one "feels" is also a difficulty, since one's

"feelings" may be influenced, in part, by how one per­

ceives being categorized by others; and, presumably,

one can only know if one "feels" like a man or woman if

one has acquired the cultural markers of understanding

and expectation which then get expressed and inter­

preted as "feeling like a man" or "feeling like a woman." These "feelings" are not unproblematically

acquired, they are produced as effects of the power of discursive practices--unless an argument is made for 130 the most completely transparent, purest essentialist position of innate, natural, and prediscursive attributes of maleness and femaleness (echoes of Der- rida's transcendental signified). In Bornstein's instance, for example, she states

I've no idea what lIa woman" feels like. I never did feel like a girl or a woman; rather, it was my unshakable conviction that I was not a boy or a man. It was the absence of a feeling, rather than its presence, that convinced me to change my gender. 5 0

In other words, at some point, gender identity is about choosing (from two choices) a gender with which one wants to be, or feels, or is most aligned. 51 An example would be if one knows that an individual's gen- der identity and gender assignment conflict, then one knows that the person with the conflict is a trans-

50 Bornstein's further discussion demonstrates some of the (experiential, behavioral, and linguistic) difficulties in using "feelings" as an indicator of gender. Five sentences after the declaration of an absence of feeling (which I quoted above), in a discus­ sion of the relationship of being and belonging as con­ cepts related to gender she writes, "I felt I was a woman (being), and more importantly I felt I belonged with the other women (belonging) (emphasis added, Out­ law 24) .

51 For a compelling transgendered story, about the brave and difficult life of a "differently gendered" person, a he-she who was born female, came out as a working class "butch," took hormones, had breast removal suxqery, passed as a man, and then "returned" to butch--this time as a political activist and organizer, see: Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues: ~ Novel (Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books, 1993). 131

sexual. 52 There is an ironic (and often painful) dif-

ficulty in this example, since in order to get

insurance coverage, or even just in order to meet the

medical criteria for gender changing surgery (called

reconstructive surgery--not "sex change"--for insurance

reasons), pre-operative transsexuals are often forced

to exaggerate their own "feeling" of gender identity

and its conflicts with their gender assignment. The

dissonance between the two must meet some criteria of

"sufficiency," some critical mass of believability

according to the standards of someone else, in order to

qualify for the surgery.53 The power and the violence

52 Kessler and McKenna point out that gender identity (feeling) should not be confused with the more behavioral category of gender-role identity, as they claim some authors have done (Gender 10) .

53 Kessler and McKenna report an example of precisely this difficulty (which also demonstrates the heterosexual imperative). A psychiatrist claims to have helped a patient realize that, because he related sexually to women, he was not really a male-to-female transsexual. "So finally ... I asked him: 'What do you want to be, a Lesbian?' And that crystal­ lized the contradiction for him." (Kessler and McKenna's emphasis, Erickson n.d. as cited in, Gender 118) . Sandy Stone reports that "gender reassignment surgery" was available on demand until the first "academic clinics" opened in the 1960s. It became necessary, at that time, to construct the category "transsexual" in order to construct eligibility criteria for surgery ("Posttranssexual" 290). Judith Shapiro emphasizes a different point through her discussion of the large degree of con­ servatism in transsexuals' views about masculinity and femininity. "While transsexuals may be deviants in terms of cultural norms about how one arrives at being a man or a woman, they are, for the most part, highly 132

of discursive practices are all too evident here. In

other words, gender identity, in the case of someone

seeking surgery or hormones, ceases to be a self-

attribution (as if this, too, were an unproblematic

notion; as if sUbjectivity were fixed), and must become

a successful argument (at some level) for a particular

gender attribution as defined Qy the other person'~

rules of gender.

A gender role is a single classification with mul-

tiple components, it is the collections of expectations

about what behaviors are proper for people of one

gender--these might include appearance, interests,

skills, jobs, hobbies, or, arguably, sexual orienta­

tion/preference. 54 In other words, gender roles pro-

conformist about what to do once you get there." Judith Shapiro, "Transsexualism: Reflections on the Per­ sistence of Gender and the Mutability of Sex," Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, eds. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991) 248-279; esp. 253.

54 Sexual orientation implies an innate component; whereas sexual preference implies some notion of a decision or choice (a quality which is not alleviated by use of the sometimes popular: erotic choice). These terms are problematic in several ways; two ways, for example, are: 1) even if one's orientation were innate it still could be argued that, in a culture which demands compulsory heterosexuality, it takes a more active decision to act on that innate orientation if it is other than heterosexuality; 2) if sexuality is a preference, rather than innate, then one could--the argument goes--act otherwise, and in the case of a preference other than the compulsory one of heterosexuality, one could be "cured" of that prefer­ ence (like one is "cured" from the preference for, say, alcohol). The controversy over whether or not there are biological differences between homosexuals and 133

vide a text of practices which can be, and are, read by

others; of course, this is complicated by the fact that

these categories may vary with location, and do not

remain static over time. Generally, roles can be

either ascribed or achieved; however, the attributes of

gender roles are most often seen, wrongly, as

ascribed--because they are most often seen as biologi-

cally based (this would include behaviors such as

aggressiveness, for example). Once again, though, no

matter how many practices are exhibited (or listed) for

a given role, or how many travel between roles, there

are still only two possible conclusions permitted from

reading the text of gender role behavior.

Gender attribution results from the presumed

ability to read someone's body and practices as a gen-

dered text and conclude from that reading that the per-

heterosexuals (as if those terms were not also prob­ lematic) is often about these precise matters-­ orientation (read: biological) or preference--and these are not small matters. In the case of declaring homosexual brain differences, those of us who argue against a rigid reading of biology find ourselves--very uncomfortably--on the side of radical conservatives! For a good discussion of these biological findings and their--often political--implications see: Ann Fausto­ Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men, second edition (New York: BasicBooks­ HarperCollins, 1992) esp. 245-256; 261-262. All of this, of course, begs the question which asks if sexual practices are static enough to be readily isolated and used to classify someone neatly in the first place. 134

son is a "man" or a "woman." In other words, it is

often from our gender attributions that we make our

assumptions about someone's sex. 55 Sex, then, is read

as the "retrospective projection of gender, its fic­

tional origin.,,56 Cues used in gender attribution--

some of which are read more easily than others--are,

for example: physical, behavioral, textual and mythic

characteristics; power dynamics, sexual orienta-

tion/preference, and sex. 57 Of course, the tricky part

of gender attribution is that even if one knows a per-

son's gender assignment, gender identity, and gender

role, that is still not enough information for an

55 For a discussion of this process see: Holly Devor, Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1989) esp. 146-148. See also: Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991) 13­ 31.

56 "[G]endered bodies," Elam argues, "are like actors in an unscripted play desperately trying to imitate a life that no one has ever led" ("Questions of Women" 50; also refer to footnote 44) .

57 Physical includes: body, hair, clothes, voice, skin, and movement; behavioral includes: manners, decorum, protocol, and deportment; textual includes: histories, documents, names, associates, relationships; mythic includes: cultural and sub-cultural myths-­ including archetypes; power dynamics includes: modes and techniques of communication, degrees of aggressive­ ness, assertiveness, persistence, and ambition; sex includes biological gender (body type, chromosomes, hormones, genitals, reproductive organs, etc.). Bornstein discusses these cues in more depth, and finds them useful for training actors in cross-gender role playing (Outlaw 26-31). 135

unproblematic, concrete, definite gender attribution to

be made (for a declaration of sexgender truth) .

Nevertheless, these difficulties do not seem to stop

our daily practices of attributing gender or sex or

gender assignment with (an arrogant?) confidence.

Once having made a gender attribution, one can

(and does) then interpret, read, or, perhaps most

importantly, react to, and interact with, gender­

related practices and information with g certainty that

is not easily shaken. In other words, first impres­

sions can be everything; once gender has been

attributed, seeming "inconsistencies" are read through

a lens of the attributed gender (a masculine woman or a

feminine man, for example). Gender attribution, then,

is determined by the way in which the signs of gender comply with the rules of gender as understood Qy the beholder. There can, of course, be dramatic con­ sequences when, after having resolved any

"inconsistencies" one is confronted with the dissonance of having made a "mistake" in gender attribution.

Hence, for example, the "surprise" in the film The

Crying Game and the play (and film) M. Butterfly, and the brutal murder of Venus Xtravaganza in the documentary film, Paris is Burning; examples of the 136

dangers (too often deadly) of the will to power over

truth. 5 8 It is, however, generally the case that while a

male cue, by itself, might be read as a sign of male-

ness, a single female cue is not necessarily read as a

sign of femaleness; the only sign of femaleness is the

absence of any cues for maleness--one is assumed male

until proven otherwise. 5 9 Practically speaking, then,

when reading bodies, too: male is neutral; female is

58 The Crying Game, dir. Neil Jordan, prod. Stephen Woolley, Miramax Films, 1992; David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly, 1988; M. Butterfly, dir. David Cronenberg, prod. Gabriella Martinelli, Geffen Pic­ tures, 1993; Paris is Burning, dir. and prod. Jennie Livingston, Off-White Productions, 1990. See also, footnote 69.

59 For a discussion of multiple studies which underscore this point see: Kessler and McKenna, Gender 142-159. Bornstein points to the fact that it takes approximately four female cues to override the presence of one male cue (Outlaw 26) . The notion of a particular number of cues takes on an even more distressing tone when they are legally demanded. In Stone Butch Blues--while recalling police "busts" in Canadian bars in the late 1950s--the main character says, the "law said we had to be wearing three pieces of women's clothing. [. .] He [the cop] put his hands allover me, pulled up the band of my Jockeys and told his men to cuff me--I didn't have three pieces of women's clothing on" (Feinberg 8-9) . Audre Lorde mentions similar incidents occurring in the bars of New York City at about the same moment in his­ tory; see: Zami: 8 New Spelling of MY Name (Freedom, California: Crossing, 1982). 137

other. 6 0

Earlier I wrote that sexual orientation/preference

was, arguably, an aspect of gender role. It can also

be argued that sexual orientation/preference is impor-

tantly related to gender attribution; in fact, its

consideration--along with having the word "sex"

understood, commonly, as meaning gender assignment,

gender attribution, intercourse and other erotic acts--

can muddy the waters in the sexgender terrain con­

siderably.61 What counts as feminine behavior--in a

60 For an interesting discussion of gender con­ struction, based on interviews with fifteen "gender blending females" who are often mistaken for men see: Devor, Blending. Devor describes gender blending people as those with "normal" and matching gender attributions and gender identities, but whose gender role patterns are a mix of standard masculine and standard feminine. She writes:

They mix these characteristics in such a way that people who do not know them personally often, but not always, mistakenly attribute them with membership in a gender with which the gender blenders themselves do not identify i.e., females who think of them­ selves as women are mistaken for men. Gender blending people report that they do not con­ sciously attempt to project confusing or mis­ leading gender impressions, although they may, under certain circumstances, allow mis­ takes to stand uncorrected (Blending viii) .

61 At this' point, Saussure's negative signifer and signified, bound into a positive sign, are no longer as helpful. Here we begin to see the appeal of Lacan's work, and his arguments for a more open sign, derived from sliding signifiers. Lacan makes a hierarchy out of Saussure's non-hierarchical elements. It is the relationship and activity between signifiers, for Lacan, which generates the signified. (This is a new world order.) See: Lacan, "The Agency." Although this is the case, Elizabeth Grosz cau- 138

presumed female--for example, is, often, highly sexu-

alized heterosexuality. In this way the asymmetrical,

hierarchical, binary, gender dichotomy "system" is

linked to the asymmetrical, hierarchical, binary, sex-

ual dichotomy "system," with assumptions and presump-

tions available and ready-made. Meanwhile differences

are collapsed all around with mind-numbing regularity,

in an attempt to claim sYmmetrical, non-hierarchical,

simple, distinct, and absolute, sexgender truth. 62

This is a will to power over truth.

In a culture of compulsory heterosexuality, where

shades of difference in sexual partner choice are not

generally acknowledged, one is classified as either

heterosexual or homosexual on the basis of one's gender

(attributed according to rules of the beholder) and,

following that, the gender of one'~ sexual partner(~)

tions feminists that for Lacan, a subject must--in order to be considered a subject at all--"take up a sexualised position, identi.fying with the attributes socially designated as appropriate for men or women." See: Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: ~ Feminist Intro­ duction (London: Routledge, 1990) 148.

62 The phrase "mind-numbing regularity" is Donna Haraway's: "qualities essential to the male-dominant, 'monogamous,' heterosexual family, named 'the family' with mind-numbing regularity." See:Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989) 282. 139

(again, as attributed by the beholder) .63 It is, importantly, the results of the gender attribution made about each partner, in turn, which determine whether one is labeled heterosexual or homosexual, not the other way around. In other words, one's sexuality label is "finalized" after one's partner's gender label has been attributed--not before. The use of sexual orientation/preference as a cue highlights the presence of compulsory heterosexuality in dominant culture and compulsory homosexuality in lesbian and gay culture;

Bornstein writes,

many male heterosexual transvestites who wish to pass as female will go out on a "date"

63 For the germinal article on compulsory heterosexuality see: Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5.4 (Sumrrler 1980): 631­ 660. Judith Butler argues, importantly, that homosexuality is not an imitiation or a derivative of heterosexuality. With echoes back to Nietzsche's ques­ tion (refer to footnote 44) which asked if "the prob­ lem" came before "us," or if "we" came before "the problem," Butler writes: The origin requires its derivations in order to affirm itself as an origin, for origins only make sense to the extent that they are differentiated from that which they produce as derivatives. Hence, if it were not for the notion of the homosexual as copy, there would be no construct of heterosexuality as origin. Heterosexuality here presupposes homosexuality. And if the homosexual as copy precedes the heterosexual as origin, then it seems only fair to concede that the copy comes before the origin, and that homosexuality is thus the origin, and heterosexuality the copy ("Imitation" 22). 140

with another man (who is dressed as a man)-­ the two seem to be a heterosexual couple. In glancing at the "woman" of the two, an inner dialogue might go, "It's wearing a dress, and it's hanging on the arm of a man, so it must be a [heterosexual] woman." For the same man to pass as a female in a lesbian bar, he'd need to be with a woman, dressed as a woman, as [what seems to be] a [lesbian] "date.,,64

In other words, after having made an initial gender

attribution to someone, that person's sexual orienta-

tion/preference, like all sexual orienta­

tion/preference, is "based solely on the gender of

[the] partner of choice.,,65

But this too can get complicated since all sexual

partner choices do not necessarily fall easily into the

heterosexual/homosexual binary--and including

bisexuality as a third term does not necessarily allow

all possibilities to be encompassed either. 6 6 A les-

bian woman, for example, in a relationship with a

bisexual woman, is not the same as if (or when) that

same lesbian woman is with a heterosexual woman, or if

64 Bornstein, Outlaw 29-30. See also: Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992) 9-13.

65 Bornstein, Outlaw 32

66 For an interesting collection of writings by bisexual feminists, see: Elizabeth Reba Weise, ed. Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism (Seattle, WA: Seal, 1992). 141

(or when) she is with another lesbian woman. 67 Neither

can all heterosexuals, or homosexuals, be projected

onto a flat wall of sameness--there are a variety of

styles, combinations, seasons, modes, energies,

spirits, and hues of practices. Additionally, it does

not seem to me to require much imagination to consider

the possibility that sexuality might be organized

around orbits other than sex or gender. Basing sexual

orientation/preference on the (two possible) gender(§)

of partners, within the dominant hierarchical binary

system of heterosexuality/homosexuality, does not allow

us to acknowledge or address the multiple shades of difference available in other possibilities. Inter- estingly, the neatness and completeness of these apparent dualities does encourage and indeed it demands

that we silence, ignore, or readily categorize any sex- ual desires which might be "incompatible" with the dominant system. 68 To do otherwise means questioning

67 This example of multiplicity juggles common labels, but one could also consider the possibilities in cyberspace interactions (and the sexgender anonymity cyberspace allows), and the potential for technological possibilities such as virtual reality; for some discus­ sion on this point see: Martine Rothblatt, The Apart­ heid of Sex: ~ Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender (New York: Grown, 1995) 140-153.

68 Hence, the political value of "coming out." Additionally, Bornstein notes that one of the reasons for the silence of transgendered people is that trans­ sexuality is considered an illness, that can only be cured by silence after becoming a member of one gender or another. Transsexuals are told to only disclose their status during intimacy. "Transsexuals presenting l42

either: available dualities, or desire--a risky and

dangerous business. 69 Here the Sphinx re-enters as a

female presence who embraces dualities and desire, and

who engages in the risky and dangerous business of

questioning. "The Sphinx," Teresa de Lauretis,

explains:

is the enunciator of the question of desire as precisely enigma, contradiction, dif­ ference not reducible to sameness by the sig­ nification of the phallus or to a body exist­ ing outside discourse; an enigma which is structurally undecidable but daily articu­ lated in the different practices of living (emphasis added) .70

[C] REFRAMING SEXGENDER

Sexgender is, then--culturally speaking--a

cultural-self-fulfilling prophecy, imposed, natu-

ralized, and woven throughout the cultural fabric. It

is a will to power over (sex and gender) truth. It is

themselves for therapy in this culture," Bornstein writes, "are channeled through a system which labels them as having a disease (transsexuality) for which the therapy is to lie, hide, or otherwise remain silent" (Outlaw 62) .

69 Revulsion is very entangled with desire, and its presence underscores the (often deadly) cost of arrogance, of the will to power over truth. II [A] ny­ thing that undermines confidence in the scheme of clas­ sification on which people base their lives sickens them as though the very ground on which they stood precipitously dropped away" (Murray S. Davis, Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology [l983]; as cited by Bournstein, Outlaw 72) .

70 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn'~: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1984) 157. 143

power written as the unchangeable, distinct, absolute,

non-derivative truth of a transparently consistent

sexed and gendered body. Teasing out the power

inequities resulting from hierarchical assumptions

about sexgender embedded in the binary opposition

man/woman has been, primarily and importantly, a femi-

nist project. Reframing gender needs to be done in a

way that addresses how the differences of man/woman and

male/female have been and are, transformed institu-

tionally, discursively, and physically into particular

disadvantages for women, females, and other "Others."

Changing binary gender also means, in part, a recogni-

tion and, then, loss of the male privilege built into

current practices--though, loss of privilege is rarely

easy.71 And, because of the linkage between sexuality,

sex and gender, reframing gender also puts heterosexual

privilege in jeopardy. It should be understood that

disadvantages and privileges (no matter how ubiquitous

they may appear) are rarely read in only one direction;

and changing, displacing, and recombining certain ele-

71 A small book (32 pages) which presents three essays ("More Power Than We Want: Masculine Sexuality and Violence"; "Understanding and Fighting Sexism: A Call to Men"; "Overcoming Masculine Oppression in Mixed Groups") written by and for men on ways to struggle against patriarchy is: Off Their Backs ... And On Our Own Two Feet (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: New Society Publishers, 1983). See also, John Stoltenberg, Refus­ ing to be ~ Man: Essays on Sex and Justice (New York: Penguin-Meridien, 1989). 144

ments may, in fact, have the effect of altering current

valences or creating new ones. It should also be

understood that, vital aspects of the mythical norm--

which Audre Lorde defined as: "white, thin, male,

young, heterosexual, christian, and financially

secure," where "the trappings of power reside within

this society"--are at risk. 72 "To recognize untruth as

a condition of life," just as Nietzsche told us, "means

resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way. ,,73

While discussing the possible paths for reframing

sexgender seems, admittedly, rather artificial and

forced, it can, nevertheless, be rewarding. Such a

discussion can help us disrupt familiar terrain in ways

which may produce more liberatory possibilities and

uncover firm attachments which, once recognized, might

then be better examined and theorized. Whichever path

is taken to reframe sexgender, there is always the danger of forming new categories, labels and clas-

sifications which are just as rigid as those in current circulation. These are paths best traveled lightly, while maintaining a robust sense of the difference

72 Audre Lorde, "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference," Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, New York: Crossing, 1984) 114­ 123; esp. 116.

73 NietZSChe, Beyond section 4. 145

between being an identity (or identities) and having an

identity (or identities); and while recognizing the

plasticity of daily practices of power and the affects

(and effects) of mobile sUbjectivities. 74

There are basically two paths to deconstructing

and reframing sexgender, to what might be considered

Nietzsche's philosophy of the dangerous "maybe"; they

are: validating multiplicities and using a third term.

The first path would favor multiple shades of

difference. It would provide an ever expanding con-

ceptualization which would appreciate multiple pos-

sibilities. There are numerous (often dramatic)

proposals which take this path--here are two.

One option for creating multiple genders is to

magnify gender differences; and one suggestion for such

a scheme looks like this:

5 sexes (m, f, herm, m herm, f herm)

74 Ferguson explains that mobile subjectivities are "temporal," "relational," lIambiguous," "ironic," "respect [ful]" of the "local" while they "tend to the specific," and they are both "politically difficult" and "politically advantageous." "Thematizing ourselves as mobile subjectivities" she continues, lIeschews the search for an essential reality to which our represen­ tations correspond, while claiming an historical residence in the contentious fields of late modernity and seeking strategies by which to stay honest about our affirmations while we keep moving toward them" (Man Ouestion 153-183; esp. 154). See also: Judith Butler, "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmodernism, '" Feminists Theorize the Political, eds Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992) 3-21. 146

X 4 sexual orientations (het, queer, bi, asexual) = 20 genders X m-f transsexuals and f-m transsexuals = 40 genders X f-m transgendered and m-f transgendered = 80 genders X masculine, feminine, and androgynous = 270 genders and so on. 75

While this would have the immense benefit of broadening

possibilities for sexgender, it still has problems. It

does not change the basic component of a foundation on

genitalia--even while it provides more categories in

that regard. Sexual orientation is, perhaps, too

neatly divided up, and the remaining categories--

although multiple--still seem like only a slight varia-

tion on the basic male/female theme. Also, it is not

clear to me how language might accommodate this wealth

of possibilities; and, unfortunately that is not taken

into consideration in this mathematically dependent

scheme. Although, one might argue that it is precisely because of the cumbersome quality of managing such a wealth of possibilities, that this scheme has appeal.

Exhausted from trying to maintain sexgender primacy by

juggling this cumbersome structure, some other notion might become a more primary organizing principle.

75 This was posted as a summary of a talk by Sandra Bern as part of a discussion of sex differences on the Women's Studies List (Shahnaz C. Saad, 25 April, 1995, on-line posting, [email protected]). In chap­ ter two I refer to Anne Fausto-Sterling's work on five sexes, which this, presumably, relies on. 147

Another suggestion is for "a rainbow lexicon of sexual continuity," which would base sexual identity on three elements: yellow for activeness (or aggression) , blue for passiveness (or nurturance), and red for eroticism (or sex drive/sex appeal). This provides for the representation of an infinite array of sexual identities defined as a chromatic scale. 7 6 Some exam- pIes would be:

Chromatic Self-Reported Sexual Identity Mental Nature

Green An equally aggressive/nurturing person who does not try to appear sexy Pine Green A slightly (about one-third) aggressive but mostly nourishing (about two-thirds) person who does not try to appear sexy Lime Green A slightly (about one-third) nourishing but mostly aggressive (about two-thirds) person who does not try to appear sexy Purple A nonaggressive person, self­ described as equally nourishing and erotic Orange A nonnourishing person, self­ described as equally aggressive and erotic Brown A person equally aggressive, nourishing, and sexy in atti­ tude White A person who feels genderless, lacking aggressiveness, nourish­ ment, or sexiness Black A complexly gendered person who feels all elements of gender are constantly in flux 77

76 Rothblatt, Apartheid 112-116.

77 Rothblatt, Apartheid 114. l48

This is, importantly, not based on the presence,

absence, or variations of genitalia, and it has the

advantage of providing for an enormous array of con­

stantly evolving complex differences. However, it has

the disadvantage of giving primacy to the traditional

elements used in sexual dimorphism historically; and,

in that way limits the possibilities for thinking about

sex or sexual identity otherwise.

While I certainly welcome reconceptualization of

terrain now figured limitedly as sexgender, and might

enjoy referring to myself as "mauve" today, and

"chartreuse" or something else tomorrow, these two pro­

jects seem overwhelming in their scope. I am afraid my

immediate aspirations for reframing gender are more

humble.

The second path to deconstructing and reframing

sexgender considers a third term. The third term

introduces crisis into a binary. The third term has

the difficulty of establishing itself in relation to

the two elements of the binary opposition. The third

term must either recognize the presence of a hierarchy

in the binary opposition, and then place itself apart

from it, or assume that the binary is not hierarchical, that it is two distinct, sYmmetrical and equal terms 149

which can then be readily joined by a third. 78 Having

done one of the above, the third term then requires

that the binary opposition remain in place so that it

can situate itself against the binary. If the binary

were dissolved, the third term would have no referent,

would make no sense. There is, for example, on the one

hand, Wittig's argument that lesbians are not women,

which places lesbians as a third term apart--leaving

the hierarchy, and its battles within the binary,

behind. While on the other hand, when bisexuality, for

example, is used as a third term which assumes no

hierarchy between heterosexuality and homosexuality, it

becomes an equality claim relying on the presumption of

a symmetrical tripartite:

heterosexuality!homosexuality!bisexuality.79

The third term is often used as an attempt to be

inclusive of all that is not captured comfortably

78 For a related discussion of dichotomy and third spaces, see: Nancy Jay, IIGender and Dichotomy, II Femi­ nist Studies 7.1 (Spring 1981): 38-56. For a discus­ sion of the introduction of a third term or a third sex or the generation of space beyond a binary, see: Gar­ ber, Vested Interests 9-13.

79 Of course, bisexuality is not always used this way; it is often used in a string: lesbian, gay, bisexual. (This string is often extended to include transgendered and other "Others.") 150

within the binary.SO For Wittig this, in fact, means

lesbians (since gay men for example, remain men, in

part, because they have access to male privilege), but

there are other possibilities. Bornstein, for example,

makes a suggestion which demonstrates just how slippery

this sexgender terrain can be. She suggests reclaiming

the word "transgendered" to mean "transgressively gen-

dered"--in order to capture all those who "break the

rules, codes, and shackles of gender."Sl The thinking

goes, that because sexual practices take place pri-

vately, the reason gay men and lesbians are excluded by

the culture at large is because they are violators of

(visible) gender codes, rather than because of their

(non-visible) sexual practices; therefore, gay men and

lesbians share the burden, with transgendered people,

of committing crimes against gender. "It's the trans-

gendered who need to embrace the lesbians and gays,"

claims Bornstein, "because it's the transgendered who

are in fact the more inclusive category."S2 However,

80 Theoretically, in the case of assuming no hierarchical relationship with the binary elements, there could, of course, be a fourth term and a fifth term and so on; however, the power of the presence of patriarchy and heterosexual imperative seems too obvious to ignore for long enough to sustain the fic­ tion of equality or sYmmetry between four or five terms.

Sl Bornstein, Outlaw 135.

S2 Bornstein, Outlaw 135. 151 although Bornstein writes hopefully of such a future, she also, rightly, points out that this reclaiming scheme "will offend everyone. 1183 This sort of impulse to rally-round-the-(most inclusive)-identity carries with it the difficulty of all identity politics. As soon as lines get drawn around any particular identity camp the people inside--in order to avoid invisibility and to point to (or participate in) the various work- ings of power--begin to assert multiple differences

(some of which manifest in separation and/or exclu- sion), while some people outside want to change the perimeter in order to be included (often, on privately defined--rather than the larger group's--terms) .84

The biggest difficulty with the third term is that it continues to owe too large a debt to its genesis: the binary opposition; and, therefore, the extent of its abilities to disrupt, reframe and deconstruct--

83 Bornstein, Outlaw 135.

84 In an important attempt to address these exact difficulties, this is usually the point where, for example, discussions of affinity groups, or coalitions (defined more or less narrowly) enter. That vital dis­ cussion is beyond the scope of this writing. See, for example, Bernice Johnson Reagon, "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century," Home Girls: ~ Black Feminist Anthology, ed Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color P, 1983) 356-368; Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto For Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review 15.2 (March-April 1985): 65-107; esp. 65-72; Butler, Gender Trouble esp. 14-16; Elam, "Towards a groundless solidarity," Feminism and Deconstruction 67-88. 152

although important, substantial, and, possibly even

earth-shaking--are limited. Three terms for grouping

everyone on the planet is, arguably, better than two-­

but, not by much. However, the biggest benefit of the

third term is that it creates a space of possibility by

creating a crisis (a "maybell) in the binary opposition.

The third term challenges the hegemony of the one, the

binary unit, the single identity, the certainty of

truth. What is important here, politically, is that

the third term agitate, mutate, question; that it

remain in motion; that it not reside comfortably as one

of the same.

[D] NEW RIDDLES FOR THE SPHINX

But, for feminists, there is also something else going on here--something more two-headed, more Sphinx­ like. 85 In order to clarify what it is, I would like

to return to Nietzsche's question and reword it-- removing the word truth and replacing it with the word lesbian. This time the question is: IISupposing lesbian is a woman--what then?1I

Wittig might be expected to read the question as:

Supposing a distinct, non-derivative: lesbian, is instead, a derivative (of man's institutionalized

85 For a very similar argument see: Cheshire Cal­ houn, liThe Gender Closet: Lesbian Disappearance under the Sign 'Women,' II Feminist Studies 21.1 (Spring 1995) : 7-34. 153

heterosexual imperative): woman? Wittig's argument

shows that she rejects this hypothetical. Lesbians,

for Wittig, are not women; they are distinct, not

defined by any derivative relationship to man. In

other words, lesbians are lesbians--not lesbian women.

This can be problematic, of course, for those who see a

feminist politics as one which foregrounds women.

Butler, on the other hand--given all her work on

performativity and the productions of discursive

practices--might weigh the question differently. She

might be expected to read the question "Supposing les­

bian is a woman--what then?" as: Supposing lesbian is

discursively produced as a (presumed) derivative of a

discursively produced (presumed) derivative: woman? If

woman is, as Butler argues, discursively produced in presumed (heterosexual) relation to man; then, to sup­ pose lesbian--who necessarily has a different (non­ heterosexual) relationship to man--is that same presumed (heterosexual) woman, would require that the notion of woman change: 1) to accommodate the pos­ sibilities of different relationships to man; or 2) to a new conceptualization altogether. For Butler, then, to suppose lesbian is a woman challenges the category woman; it challenges what "counts" as woman, and has the effect of forcing the expansion and reshaping of the category woman to (more or less comfortably) accom- 154

modate lesbian. This can also be problematic for femi-

nists. While recognizing the diversity in women and

challenging an impoverished definition of woman is

vital to feminism and to political action, if the

effect of lesbian is to reshape woman, then, how does

lesbian remain visible as lesbian under the name woman;

and, how (or) does the expansion and reshaping of woman

affect feminist practices and politics? Is there space

for, say, the transgendered?86 At what point of expan-

sion and reshaping might the vitality of feminism be at

risk? What limits the potential for expansion and

reshaping of feminism (is it infinite?), and why?

While answers to these questions may not be readily

apparent, feminists ignore the difficulty and impor-

tance of investigating them at our peril.

Although asking questions of sexgender is more

easily done at the sites of various sexgender "trans-

gressions," one wonders what remains under-theorized

86 There is no small amount of feminist con­ troversy over male-to-female transsexuals inhabiting "women-only" spaces. The most radical stance is the notion that all male-to-female transsexuals are appropriating women's bodies, and lesbian transsexuals are actually raping women's bodies through deception. In other words, male-to-female transsexuals are accused of bringing their sense of male-privilege and male perogative with them into "women-only" spaces. For more on this ungenerous (arrogant?) perspective see: Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Boston: Beacon, 1979). For a discus­ sion of Raymond see: Bornstein, Outlaw; and Stone, "Posttranssexual Manifesto." 155

about the "invisible" more "accepted" terrain, about

the "great unsaid," about the "understood." While

actively seeking to deconstruct and reframe sexgender,

what questions, additional themes and sites of power

might a close interrogation of, say, the (foundational)

constructions, practices and privileges of heterosexual

women unpack and produce? What is it exactly that X (or you) hold on to when X (or you) say "women," or

"feminism," or "sex," or "gender," or "sexuality"?

More work for philosophy of the dangerous "maybe."

More risk and danger.

A feminist response to the power of the bound com-

ponents (biological, behavioral, political/sex-gender-

sexuality) of sexgender need not be--and should not

be--an appeal for conceptualizing a neutral, generic

person who, along with all the other neutral generic

persons, is "the same." Feminists need not choose a

single third term, or between uncovering (sex and gen-

der) truth or destroying it. Instead, feminism might

be best served by recognizing the complex relationships

of sexgender, and by insisting on pursuing a number of

practices which open new (mobile) spaces of "radical

uncertainty. ,,87 A space where agitation of alleged

87 Elam, "Question" 56. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Michel Foucault (fol­ lowing Nietzsche) discusses destabilizing genealogical strategies and the notion of "emergence" as a "non­ place" of confrontation, "where forces are risked," "where they emerge triumphant," and, "where they can 156

sexgender truths and a constant imposition of new ones

is seen as political action.

Political action has to start from where you are;

and, as de Lauretis tells us: "historical women must

work with and against Oedipus. ,,88

Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was the Sphinx. Oedipus said, "I want to ask one question. Why didn't I recognize my mother?" "You gave the wrong answer," said the Sphinx. "But that was what made everything possible," said Oedipus. "No," she said. "When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man. You didn't say anything about woman." "When you say Man," said Oedipus, "you include woman too. Everyone knows that." She said, "That's what you think.,,89

also be confiscated." See: Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," The Foucault Reader ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984) 76-100, esp. 84, 92-93.

88 de Lauretis, Alice Doesn'~ 157.

89 Muriel Rukeyser, "Myth," Collected Poems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978) 498; cited in de Lauretis, Alice Doesn'~ 157. 157

"The privileges, or lack thereof, attached to different shades of skin, texture of hair, shape of eye or gender are encoded into the social fabric." Skin Deep Elena Featherston

" [A]ny system of differentiation shapes those on whom it bestows privilege as well as those it oppresses. Whi te people are ' raced,' just as men are ' gendered. '" The Social Construction oE Whiteness Ruth Frankenberg

"No matter how hard some people may try, racial identities can never be gathered up in one place as a final cuitural property." Race, Identity, and Representation in Education Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow

"For although I can count all the brown faces in a room, there is no way that I can count the 'black' faces. For brown does not equal ' black. '" Notes oE a White Black Woman Judy Scales-Trent

"To be raceless is akin to being genderless." "On the Theoretical Status oE the Concept oE Race" Mi chael Omi and Howard Winant 158

Chapter 4

RACETHNICITY: ITS REQUIREMENT

AND DEPLOYMENT AS A BODILY BASED VECTOR OF POWER

The existence of "race" seems obvious. We can see it as we look around at our world. We do not question what our eyes tell us. That person is one race. That other person is another race. We often assume and attribute the truth of race with relative ease--race is. Ethnicity, assumed to be more culturally based, is a bit more tricky--since it requires some notion of geography and cultural practices--but not by much.

However concrete and objective race and ethnicity appear, they are also, in fact, ongoing acts of creativity, invention, imagination, and, often, neces­ sity.1 "'Race, "' as Judy Scales-Trent writes, "is a

1 See also my comments on race and ethnicity in chapter one. There are many examples of the types of, say, creativity involved with race and ethnicity. One exam­ ple might be the manner in which "white" is commonly treated as race with diverse ethnic possibilities: Italian, Polish, Celtic, Scandanavian, Anglo-Saxon, and so on. While "black" (because much history has been erased or is unknown) is commonly thought of as a more uniform category, rather, than, say, Haitian, Jamaican, Francophone, Ashanti, West-African, or some other pos­ sibilities. One might also point to the difficulty with the notion of Asian versus Filipino, Hmong, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Khmer, and so on. If the majority of Americans cannot differentiate between the variety of possible ethnicities then, a unified race category--white, black, Asian--s "created," con­ structed, believed. For more on this discussion see: 159

very demanding verb. ,,2 Often it is the same group of

people who are referred to in various ways, depending

on their relationship to power. The "terms used--

'ethnic group' or 'race'--describe the distance between

the speaker and the group, and the complexity of their

connection. ,,3

Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, second ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994) esp. 14-23 and 53-76. For other sources which discuss race and/or eth­ nicity see, for example: David Theo Goldberg, ed. Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1990); Dominick Lacapra, The Bounds of Race: Perspec­ tives on Hegemony and Resistance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 1991; Linda A. Bell and David Blumenfeld eds., Over­ coming Racism and Sexism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995); Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent's Tail, 1993); Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of g Law Professor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1991); Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ed, "Race," Writing, and Difference (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990); Gloria Anzaldua,Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Spinsters-Aunt Lute, 1987); Maria P. P. Root, Racially Mixed People in America (Newbury Park: Sage, 1992); and also see other titles listed in this chapter.

2 Judy Scales-Trent, Notes of g White Black Woman: Race, Color, Community (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State U P, 1995) 3.

3 For example, early Italian immigrants to the United States "who lived in the South were sent to the Negro schools. They were so 'different' to white Southerners that they were thought to be a different racial group" (Scales-Trent, Notes 136). Now, Italian­ Americans are an ethnic group. 160

Mary Douglas writes: "all margins are dangerous.

If they are pulled this way or that the shape of funda-

mental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas

is vulnerable at its margins. ,,4 This includes race and

ethnicity. I want to signify the alleged differences

of race and ethnicity as elided--in much the same way

as I did the elision of sex and gender--by the single

word: racethnicity.5 This is, admittedly, not very

satisfactory, and is, in fact, awkward and artificial.

Nevertheless, it serves to make the point that there is

no clear and specific distinction between the very

mobile categories of race and ethnicity, even in the

presence of the social-cultural-political-Iegal-

material importance of the identities re-presented by

various race and/or ethnic labels. Racethnicity serves

as a marker of power in the conceptual interface

between the always already non-biological existence of

race or ethnicity as behavior and the social construc-

tion of race or ethnicity as identity. This interface

4 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966) 121.

5 I am not interested, as I have said elsewhere, in claiming that sexgender and racethnicity are com­ pletely parallel or analogous; however, I do want to suggest that there are some points of similarity, some echoes of familiarity, in the ways we consider these concepts. I encourage the reader to listen for echoes of sexgender issues, but I discourage the reader from using sexgender as a map for racethnicity. 161

is confusingly and necessarily, at least since the

early nineteenth century, always already dependent upon

(sometimes very distant) notions anchored in the con­

cept of biological race. 6

What underlies our confidence in race (and

eventually blends into ethnicity) is a (misguided)

6 The most radical reading of this concept of race "encompasses the idea that test scores, athletic ability or criminality somehow are rooted in racial genetic chemistry" (Robert Lee Hotz, "Is Concept of Race a Relic?" Los Angeles Times Saturday, April 15, 1995, A 1) . Interestingly, Omi and Winant appear (at least at first) to subscribe unproblematically to the biological basis for gender while rejecting biology as a basis for race: "In contrast to the other major distinction of this type, that of gender, there is no biological basis for distinguishing among human groups along the lines of race" (Omi and Winant, Racial Formation 55). This statement is qualified in a footnote which is worth quoting in its entirety: This is not to suggest that gender is a biological category while race is not. Gender, like race, is a social construct. However, the biological division of humans into sexes--two at least, and possibly intermediate ones as well--is not in dispute. This provides a basis for argument over gender divisions--how "natural," etc.--which does not exist with regard to race. To ground an argument for the "natural" existence of race, one must resort to philosophical anthropology (Racial Formation 181) . What I want to say here in response is: "Oh, really?" Nevertheless, to declare that there is "no biological basis for [ ...J race" is to refuse to recognize the legacy of nineteenth century biology which remains operative, at least as part of the notion of "common sense." Of course, I agree that sexgender as well as racethnicity are socially constructed; however, I would also argue that both are thought of-­ quite comfortably by most--as biologically sound, "nat­ ural" notions. 162

notion of it as defined by certain limits; in other

words, a notion of race as foundational, natural,

biological; a notion of race as based in (some version

of) the concept of racial purity. Partly, the forces

which are at work in maintaining the myth of race and

ethnicity are those which, for example, mark recogni-

tion of the "other" as so vital that "the dominant II'

needs the coded 'other l to function.,,7 Nevertheless,

embodied, oppressive, pre-judicial, privileged, con-

fused, liberatory, informed or uninformed construction

and slippage between various racethnicity categories

exists in many forms. In this chapter I will be look-

ing at various examples of racethnicity construction

and slippage in order to point toward venues and prac-

tices of power which argue for, or assert, discrete

categories of race and ethnicity, despite evidences of

that slippage; and, I will look at some of the dis-

advantages and privileges produced as a result.

[A] LEAKING CATEGORIES

Our interpretation of the meaning of racethnicity depends, in part, on our notion of the ways in which

race matters in the social structure. 8 I begin with a

7 James Snead, White Screens: Black Images: Hol­ lywood from the Dark Side, eds Colin MacCabe and Cornel West (New York: Routledge, 1994) 4.

8 See Omi and Winant, Racial Formation 59. 163

specific example. In Notes of g White Black Woman Judy

Scales-Trent uses autobiography to describe her life as

a "white" black woman living at the interface of color

and race--simultaneously inside and outside of both

white and black communities. As a black American who

is often mistaken for white she is an embodied

demonstration of the "slippage between the seemingly

discrete categories 'black' and 'White. ,,,9 Her stories

reveal various aspects of the enormous power that race

has over the practices in our lives. Here is a simple,

yet dramatic demonstration of such power in a story

about the reactions of the principal and faculty of a

high school in New Jersey where, in the early 1960s,

Scales-Trent (now a Professor of Law) taught French.

After having commuted from New York City for a

year, Scales-Trent (known as Mrs. Ellis at the time)

and her darker-skinned husband decided to move to the

suburbs of northern New Jersey, where her husband would

commute into the city several times a week. This would

allow her to be much closer to her daily work for her

second year of employment. The search for a place to

live, as they had expected, was difficult. Whatever had been "available" over the phone, had already been

rented by the time they arrived and the owners saw

9 Scales-Trent, Notes 2. 164 them--presumably thinking that they were an interracial couple (although that was no advantage, no better than being a black couple). One day Scales-Trent told a few colleagues in the faculty lounge that she and her hus­ band were having difficulty finding a place to live because they were black, and she asked if they might know of anything available in the area. "It did not take long for the word to spread," Scales-Trent writes.

The next day she was called into the principal's office.

He looked uncomfortable. Did he hem and haw? Probably not. He was a former Marine and probably went straight to the point. "Mrs. Ellis, I have just found out that you are a Negro. I am worried that something might happen in the school, some kind of disruption or violence. So I thought I would make an announcement over the P.A. system and let everyone know that you are a Negro. Just to avoid trouble. You understand." I was stunned by his fear and his seeming irrationality. Nonetheless, I calmly explained that it was very unlikely that any­ thing untoward would take place in a French class, but that if anything inappropriate were said, I had years of experience handling such comments. He seemed relieved. I left the office. No P.A. announcement was made. But let me tell you, I have told this story plenty of times to my black brothers and sisters. And we roar with laughter as we imagine what the P.A. announcement would have been: "Nigger alert! Nigger alert! We've been invaded! Man your stations!" White folks sure can be a fool sometimes. IO

10 Scales-Trent, Notes 43-44. 165

This story is shocking and remarkable in a number

of ways; it points to the importance and ignorance of

cultural assumptions in reading race, and it raises a

number of important questions. 11 For example, we might

ask what forces are at play regarding "accurate" recog-

nition of race that "to avoid trouble" the principal

felt that an announcement had to be made? At least one

implied purpose of such an announcement is that people

would be forewarned and could then treat Scales-Trent

"accordingly"; but, what would that mean and how (or

why) might people's behavior change from what it had

been? Presumably, part of the principal's concern had

to do with the ways in which this "re-definition" of

one of his teachers might require faculty, staff, stu-

dents and himself to be also "re-defined." In other

words, shifting the definition of the "other" required

a very concerning shifting of the definition of the

"I."

11 Toni Morrison has written a short story which is helpful in learning what we require in order to read race: "Recitatif" (in: Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women eds. Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka [New York: William Morrow, 1983] 243-261). Mor­ rison describes writing this story as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial" (Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination [Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1992] xi). 166

This story points to the folly of supposing that

racethnicity resides comfortably within the cor-

respondence theory of truth, "by which truth rests upon

accuracy of correspondence between the name and the

thing"--in this case between being a "Negro" (with

whatever its associated implications) and being "white"

or fair-skinned (with whatever its associated implica­

tions) .12 Telling stories such as this one, Scales-

Trent writes, provides white black people with a way of

"stating allegiance, of claiming kinship." "We tell

them," she writes, "in order to remind our darker

brothers and sisters that we too know what white people

are really like. We know it in a different way and

have a special knowledge to share. We are family too.

[. .J And, we are everYWhere, white folks. Beware. ,,13

The admonition to "beware" is undoubtedly good

advice: race issues are everywhere. Be-ing aware of

racethnicity requires be-coming and staying informed

about the politics of who benefits from various prac-

tices, who does not, and why. This points to another aspect featured in the above story: the sense and

12 Kathy E. Ferguson, The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist Theory (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993) 17.

13 Scales-Trent, Notes 44. 167

importance of feeling as though one belongs-­

legitimately--to a particular group, to a fixed

identity with its privileges and problems. 14 In other

words, slippage is not always desired or desirable;

and, privilege is not read in only one direction.

Nevertheless, as I hope to demonstrate and as Trinh

Minh-ha tells us, "[d]espite our desperate, eternal

attempt to separate, contain, and mend, categories

always leak."15

To that end it seems more helpful, as Gail Dines

points out, to "discuss 'blackness' rather than people

of color in order to foreground the role that 'black-

ness' has played as a marker of otherness in the

normalization of 'whiteness.,"16 This is not to dis-

14 For an interesting edited collection which addresses some of these matters, see: Maria P. P. Root, ed., Racially Mixed People in America.

15 Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana U P, 1989) 94.

16 Gail Dines, "Racism and Representation: The Social Construction of 'Blackness' and 'Whiteness, '" Iris (Winter 1994) 34-41; esp. 34. At this point I am reminded of a conversation I overheard several years ago between several young black people sitting in front of me while I was in the university audience of a poetry reading given by Audre Lorde. It was a question and answer period. As I remember it, someone either stated this information outright and asked Audre Lorde to comment, or that per­ son asked Audre Lorde some form of the question-­ relatively common in Hawai'i while discussing privileged and derogatory terms of race--whether or not she thought the Hawaiian word : "haole" (meaning white person; formerly meaning any foreigner) was as derogatory as the word "nigger." The loudly whispered 168 miss the importance of the conceptual content of the more multifaceted phrase "people of color"; rather, it is only a temporary move made in order to facilitate other important concepts. In ocher words, shifting from a discussion of people of color to a discussion of the dichotomy "blackness-whiteness" is one way of studying racethnicity which requires examining how

"whiteness" is perceived in relation to the defining characteristics in circulation about "blackness." It is also an approach which moves the spotlight from the less helpful essentialist definitions of race and/or ethnicity and focuses it more directly on the social production of racial and ethnic differences and on racethnicity as a site of both material and representa- tional struggle. Who is able to take advantage of

"white" privilege, and who is defined as "black," changes with the political and historical terrain.

comments between the young black people in front of me were--predictably and understandably--immediate, sharp, and unanimous: Why is it that "nigger" is always the worst word to which ~ comparison can be made or an analogy drawn? It is this point--placement at the rock-bottom of the cosmic derogatory scale--which was loud and clear to these young black people. And it is this same point which brings me to the importance of foregrounding "blackness" early on in my own discus­ sion. 169

[B] BLOOD DROPS, RE-PRESENTATIONS, POWER

In the United States, for example, the long time

definition of black is "any person with any known

African black ancestry. 1117 This is known as the "one-

drop rule" since only one drop of "black blood" is

required to make a person black. In Who is Black? One

Nation'~ Definition, Davis explains that this rule is

also called the "one black ancestor rule" or the

"traceable amount rule" by certain courts, or, as

anthropologists refer to it: the "hypo-descent rule"--

which means that persons who are racially mixed are

"assigned the status of the subordinate group. ,,18

17 For a very comprehensive discussion of this matter see: F. James Davis, Who is Black? One Nation'~ Definition (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State U P, 1991). Gunnar Myrdal, assisted by Richard Sterner and Arnold M. Rose, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper & Bros., 1944) 113-118; Brewton Berry and Henry L. Tischler, Race and Ethnic Relations, fourth ed, (Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1978) 97-98; Joel Wil­ liamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: The Free P, 1980) 1-2; all as cited by Davis, Who is Black? 5.

18 Melvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964) 56, as cited by Davis, and Davis, Who is Black? 5. Scales-Trent also discusses the rule of hypodes­ cent. She gives a brief history of its effect on and within the African American community over the years. She discusses the creation of a light-skinned black elite and the exclusion within this community of dark­ skinned blacks who possessed elite markers, such as: skills, wealth, education. Whites saw light-skinned blacks as a separate group; and in some states, as a result, a tripartite classification of race was the result. However, by the mid-nineteenth century the pressures concerning slavery resulted in an intensification of control and a decrease in tolerance for any "special treatment" of light-skinned blacks. 170

Although the 1896 "separate-but-equal" doctrine

(established in the precedent-setting case of Plessy y.

Ferguson) was overturned by the successes of the civil

rights movement, the legal definition it established of

who is black (any person with black ancestry, based on

"judicial notice" rather than direct ruling) has

remained unchanged. 1 9 Today, every state requires a

The lIone drop rule ll gained more and more support nation-wide, in part because "it helped defend the notion that Africans were 'natural slaves'll (Notes 6).

19 163 U.S. 537. Davis, Who is Black? 8-9. Davis' discussion of the various rulings by state courts reads like a lesson in fractions; for example, a man who was less than one-sixteenth black was jailed for violating an anti-miscegenation law. While the operative definition of black may be a particular fraction--some states, for example, have a criterion of one-eighth for determining blackness--it is the social definition of the lIone-drop rule ll which is relied upon in times of doubt. IIPersons in Virgina who are one­ fourth or more Indian and less than one-sixteenth African black are defined as Indians while on the reservation but as blacks when they leave" (Brewton Berry, Race and Ethnic Relations, third ed. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965] 26; as cited by Davis, Who is Black? 9). For particular purposes, like education or marriage, some states have a legislated definition of black, while some states have a variety of definitions which vary for different situations (Charles Staples Mangum Jr., The Legal Status of the Negro in the United States [Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1940] 38­ 48; as cited by Davis, Who is Black? 9). A lawsuit on behalf of a child who was one two-hundred-fifty-sixth black was cause for the Louisiana legislature to revise its law. The legislature gave parents the right to designate the race of a newborn, and the right to chal­ lenge and change the classification of a birth certifi­ cate if by a "preponderance of the evidence" they can prove the child is white (Davis, Who is Black? 9-10). Nevertheless, the application of the "one-drop rule ll was not abolished. As Scales-Trent points out, the effect of this wide variety of laws is that "a person might be white in one state and black in another. Or a person might 171

race designation on birth certificates; however,

physicians and midwives have no clear guidelines by

which to make this classification. 20 This practice has

been challenged in court, but has been upheld as a

necessity. The case of Phipps, known as Jane Doe y.

State of Louisiana, is illustrative of some of the dif-

ficulties and successes in maintaining race as a dis-

tinct category in the presence of evidence to the con-

trary. I relay this case in some detail since its con-

elusion, in December of 1986, brings home the currency

of the "one-drop rule" and, I would like to argue, it

acts as evidence of the durability of the belief in

be black under state law one day, and the next day white--or vice versa" (Notes 4) .

20 This is reminiscent of the need for a sex assignment at birth, which is also done by physicians and midwives (see chapter three) . The results of the arbitrariness of assigning race at birth can be seen in the following example, told by anthropologist Max Stanton, about three brothers he met in Louisiana, in 1969. The three brothers were Houma Indians, shared the same father and mother, and had a French last name. The eldest brother was delivered at home with the assistance of a midwife. He was clas­ sified as Negro since the Houma were not recognized by Louisiana as Indians before 1950. The middle brother was born after 1950 in a hospital and was, therefore, classified as Indian. The youngest brother was born in a New Orleans hospital, 80 miles from home, and, on the basis of the French last name, was classified as white. (M. Stanton, personal communication, 1990; as cited by, Paul R. Spickard, "The Illogic of American Racial Categories," Racially Mixed People in America 12-23, esp. 23). 172 race as foundational, natural, biological--even while it argues and demonstrates that race is social.

In 1770 Jean Gregoire Guillory, a French planter, took Margarita, his wife's slave, as a "mistress.,,21

Over two hundred and twenty years later, so that she and her siblings could be designated "White" (all the siblings looked white and some had blond hair and blue eyes), Susie Guillory Phipps, their great-great-great- great-granddaughter asked the courts in Louisiana to change the racial classification on the birth certifi- cates of her deceased parents to "White." Phipps had checked "White" on a passport application and, as a result, had been denied the passport because on her birth certificate she was listed as "colored." The information for the birth certificate designation had come from a midwife, who undoubtedly relied upon the family's status or information from the parents.

Phipps, who had lived and married (twice) as white was

21 I am paraphrasing and relying heavily on Davis' discussion of this case, during the course of which he makes reference to the following: F. Peter Model, ed. "Apartheid in the Bayou." Perspectives: The Civil Rights Quarterly 15 (Winter-Spring, 1983) 3-4; Calvin Trillin, "American Chronicles: Black or White," New Yorker, April 14, 1986 62-78; and case reference num­ bers: 479 So. 2d 369, 371, 372, 485 So. 2d 60, 107 Sup. Ct. Reporter, interim ed. 638; as cited in Who is Black? 10-11. 173

shocked to find out she had been declared otherwise. 22

However, the state gathered depositions from a few

relatives who considered themselves "colored" and it

had proof that Phipps was three-thirty-seconds black.

In 1983 the district court declared that Phipps, her

parents and siblings were, therefore, legally black.

The state's Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in

both October and December of 1985, in upholding the

district court's decision, said that the racial desig-

nation of one's parents--or anyone else's parents--

cannot be changed. In other words, if one cannot alter

the designation of one's parents as "colored" then the

descendants must, necessarily, be defined as black by

the "one drop" or "traceable amount" rule. The Guil-

lory parents were "colored," concluded the appellate

court, based on a preponderance of the evidence. Even

22 Omi and Winant also discuss the Phipps case in Racial Formations. When Susie Guillory Phipps' birth certificate was filled out, a 1970 state law was in effect which declared anyone who had at least one­ thirty-second "Negro blood" as black. During the Phipps case this law was defended by the Assistant Attorney General, Ron Davis, who argued that "some type of racial classification was necessary to comply with federal record keeping requirements and to facilitate programs for the prevention of genetic diseases" (emphasis added; 53). Phipps' attorney argued both that the designation of one-thirty-second was inaccurate and that requiring a race designation on a birth certificate was unconstitutional. In the process, he called on a professor from Tulane University "who cited research indicating that most Louisiana whites have at least 1/20th 'Negro' ancestry" (53) . 174

though there was expert testimony which argued that no

one's race can be determined with scientific con-

fidence, the court maintained that science was not a

part of the foundation for the law of racial designa-

tion. The court stated that "individual race designa-

tions are purely social and cultural perceptions and

the evidence conclusively proves those subjective per-

spectives were correctly recorded at the time the

appellants' birth certificates were recorded.,,23 When

reheard in December 1985, the court affirmed the need

for racial designation on birth certificates for

reasons of public health, affirmative action, and vari-

ous public programs. The court also held that so long

as the racial designation was handled as confidential,

there was no denial of equal protection of the law. 24

The Louisiana Supreme Court declined to review the

appellate court's decision in 1986, as did the U.S.

23 Emphasis added to demonstrate the insistences at work; 479 So. 2d 372, as cited by Davis, Who is Black? 10-11.

24 In the appellate courts Phipps' attorney argued that the "one drop rule" violated equal protection because: "If you're a little bit black, you're black. If you're a little bit white, you're still black" (Cal­ vin Trillin, "American Chronicles: Black or White," New Yorker April 14, 1986, 62-78; esp. 76-78). One wonders what definition of "confidential" the court is referring to when the "confidential" informa­ tion is used for public health, affirmative action, and various public programs--including, apparently, pass­ port applications. 175

Supreme Court in December of 1986, saying: "The appeal

is dismissed for want of a substantial federal ques­

tion.,,25 Thus, in the late 1980s--at least in the

Phipps case--the application of the "one-drop" or

"traceable amount" rule remained undisturbed by the

final state court of appeals and by the U. S. Supreme

Court. Although science is rejected as being a basis

for racial definition, the biological notion of

inherited traits (codified at birth) remains--claimed

by the court as having slid over, at least in part,

into the realm of the social. 2 6

At what point is the racethnicity margin crossed?

When does sameness become difference? Phipps did not

change color as a result of the court's decision and,

presumably (although, certainly not absolutely), most

of her social relationships remained unaffected by the

court's decision. However, as ami and Winant point

out, she will have to "wrestle with her newly acquired

'hybridized' condition" and she will have to "confront

the 'Other, '" now residing within herself, and develop

25 485 So. 2d 60, as cited by Davis Who is Black? 11.

26 See the discussion in chapter two for other evidence that the scientific is the social. 176 a new relationship to it in order to redefine the "I.,,27

All race re-presentations, of course, are not based on the social structures of legal definitions and decided in court. Race re-presentations are also process-oriented cultural re-presentations of dif- ference which are managed individually and collec­ tively.28

Several decades before the turn of the century, for example, the Irish and the Chinese were both represented as "Negroes" in cartoons, caricatures, and prose. The Irish were depicted in cartoons "with low foreheads, prognathous features and an ape-like gait.,,29 In 1862 the Irish immigrating to Britain were satirized and attacked as "'The Missing Link, '" and

27 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation 54.

28 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, "On the Theoretical Status of the Concept of Race," Race, Identity, and Representation in Education ed. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow (New York: Routledge, 1993) 3-10; esp. 6.

29 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture [trans. of Wit over zwart: Beelden van Afrika en Zwarten in de Westerse Populair Cultur, (Amsterdam: Koninklijk Institut voor de Tropen, 1990)] (New Haven: Yale U P, 1992) 214. For further discussion see: David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991) esp. 133-163. The Irish as "colored" is also mentioned by Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989) 401-402. 177

described as being "'between the Gorilla and the Negro. , ,,30 Harner'.§. Weekly: 11 Journal of Civilization

routinized as part of American culture the hostile cor-

relation of Irishmen with blacks through its

cartoons. 31 The Chinese who entered the United States

as cheap labor for the railroads were assigned the same

racial characteristics which had been assigned to

blacks: "[h]eathen, morally inferior, savage, and

childlike [. .] also [ ...] lustful and sensual. ,,32

Chinese women were a "depraved class" and Chinese men

were "threats to white women.,,33 The "Negroization" of

30 L. P. Curtis, Jr. Apes and Angels: The Irish­ man in Victorian Caricature (Newton Abbot, 1971) 100; as cited by Pieterse, White on Black 214,

31 Pieterse, White on Black 214. Pieterse also reports that while visiting America in 1881, Edward Freeman, an English historian, wrote: "This would be a great land if only every Irish­ man would kill a Negro, and be hanged for it. I find this sentiment generally approved--sometimes with the qualification that they want Irish and negroes [sic] for servants, not being able to get any other." L. Curtis, Nothing But the Same Old StOkY: The Roots of Anti-Irish Racism (London, 1984) 58; quoted by Pieterse, White on Black 244.

32 Pieterse, White on Black 216.

33 R. T. Takai, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th Century America (London, 1980) 217-218; as cited by Pieterse, White on Black 216. Pieterse also points out that in Germany in the 1920s (during the time Hitler was writing Mein Kampf) Jews were described as having "an insatiable sexual appetite and a large penis, the same as was said of blacks in America." J. Dollard, Caste and Class in E: Southern Town, third ed. (Garden City, New York, [1937] 1957) 161; cited by Pieterse, White on Black 218. For an essay which examines the manner in which whites sexualized their world in the nineteenth century 178

Chinese is also evident in a magazine cartoon which

depicts a Chinese as a "bloodsucking vampire with

slanted eyes, a pigtail, dark skin, and thick lips.,,34

With the annexation and colonization of the

Philippines, Hawai'i, Puerto Rico and Cuba the native

by projecting sexualization onto black bodies-­ especially the black female body as icon--see Sander Gilman's essay. "The primative," writes Gilman, "is the black, and the qualities of blackness, or at least the black female, are those of the prostitute. [ ...] The perception of the prostitute in the late nineteenth century thus merged with the perception of the black" (248). Sander L. Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," "Race," Writing, and Difference ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986) 223-261. This is, however, a problematic essay. "Gilman's essay col­ ludes," writes bell hooks, in the nineteenth century project which contrasts "white female bodies with black ones in ways that [reinforce] the greater value of the white female icon" (64). Gilman is actually most con­ cerned, charges hooks, "with exploring white female sexuality" (64). bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End P, 1992). Mieke Bal also found Gilman's essay problematic and has discussed it with reference to the importance of considering the "politics of citation." (Remarks by Mieke Bal at the Thirteenth International Summer Institute for Semiotics and Structural Studies, June 1991.) I agree with hooks that Gilman's essay ends up, in no small part, partici­ pating in the very thing he claims to be critiquing. To that extent I agree with Bal that citing his essay is problematic. Nevertheless the assertions made by Gilman are powerful, and the legacy of the process he describes (summarized by Donna Haraway as Sex = geni­ tals = female body = woman, especially woman of color) remains present--even though marginal; these assertions remain, as Haraway claims, "the restless undead" the "vampirizing truths created in the light of reason" (Donna Haraway, Primate Visions 403). Thus, the "politics of citation," are clearly at issue.

34 Pieterse, White on Black 244. 179

populations were often characterized as analogous to

blacks or Native Americans ("red Injuns")--Filipinos,

for example, were regularly represented in the American

press as blacks. 3 5 Also, along with the Irish at the

turn of the century, southern central European and

Italian ethnic groups were thought to be specific and

distinct dark-skinned races, possessing "hereditary low

intelligence and propensity for drunkenness and crime"

which so endangered the good of the public that

immigration quotas were imposed by congress. 3 6 These

quotas were also encouraged through the popularity of

books such as The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison

Grant. 3 7 First printed in 1916, it went through four

editions arguing that the "one-drop rule" be applied to all ethnic groups considered by Grant and others as biologically inferior races: Hindus, Asians, Jews,

Italians, as well as Southern and Eastern Europeans. 38

The quotas (repealed in 1965) had the effect of limit-

35 Pieterse, White on Black 216-217.

36 Robert Lee Hotz, "Official Racial Definitions Have Shifted Sharply and Often," Los Angeles Times, Saturday, April 15, 1995: A 14.

37 Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, New York: Scribner, 1916; as cited by Davis 12-13, Who is Black? In Haraway's discussion of Grant, she explains how his "preservation of nature and germ plasm all seemed the same sort of work" (Haraway, Primate Visions 56-58)

38 Davis, Who is Black? 13. 180

ing immigration to the United States except from North­

ern and Western Europe. 3 9

In spite of advocacy from those such as Madison

Grant, the "one-drop rule" has not been applied to any

group other than blacks. 4 0 For example, in the United

States, one who is one-eighth Chinese or Japanese or

Mexican is not defined as being just Chinese or

Japanese or Asian or Mexican or Latino/a or Hispanic.

In the United States, one who is a fraction Italian or

Polish or Greek is not required or expected to be clas-

sified as an Italian, a Pole, a Greek. There is no

insistence that a person in the United States with a

single remote Jewish ancestor must be a Jew. These

practices are confusing to many who find the "one drop

rule" itself confusing and who would, as a result, sug-

gest a reversal: that a person who is "passing" as

white is, in fact, white and has instead--in the eyes

of society--been "passing" as black; that is, a person

who is, say, one-eighth or one-sixteenth white is

"passing" as black. 4 1 In other words, it might be

argued that if any person is perceived culturally as

39 Davis, Who is Black? 13.

40 Davis points out that the rule "is unique in that it is found only in the United States and not in any other nation in the world" (Who is Black? 13).

41 Davis, Who is Black? 14. 181

white the person is, for that time, white. Here we can

refer back to the opening story and see that some might

claim that although Scales-Trent considers herself

black, when she is perceived as white she, in fact, is

white in the eyes of those around her. One might well

ask then, what does it mean to perceive someone as

white, to attribute race in a way different from that

of the person's self-identified "racial identity?"42

42 This is, of course, a complex issue and Scales­ Trent's work presents a good discussion of the compli­ cated issues she faces as a white black woman. And, we might look for echoes here of the diffi­ culties encountered in the processes of gender identity (where the only way to find out someone's gender identity is to ask) and gender attribution (where one's own observations and assumptions are the basis for attributing gender to another). Given the difficulty with observer accuracy in race designations, one wonders about a discussion of changes and criticisms which refer to a fascinating Federal document titled: Directive No. 15, "Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administra­ tive Reporting (as adopted on May 12, 1977)," which notes that: Some have proposed eliminating the five­ category combined racial and ethnic classification in favor of separate, mutually exclusive, racial and ethnic categories. The combined format now permitted by the Directive is particularly suitable for observer identification [ ...] (emphasis added; Office of Management and Budget "Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity," Federal Register, 59.110 [June 9, 1994]: 29833). The combined format (meaning that the minimum eth­ nic designation--Hispanic--is combined with the minimum race designations) referred to above is: 1) American Indian or Alaskan Native; 2) Asian or Pacific Islander; 3) Black, not of Hispanic origin; 4) Hispanic; and 5) White, not of Hispanic origin (Directive No. 15). The notion of observer accuracy combined with official codification carries with it a wide array of implications. When a Centers for Disease Control medi- 182

"It is not, as some might argue," writes Scales-Trent,

"a question of 'passing' for white, but a question of

the need to know. ,,43 There is a need then to "point

out the paradoxes, to emphasize the contradictions

until the system collapses of its own inanity.,,44

Of course, "passing" is a social, not a biological

issue; however, it is an issue that rests on the foun­

dation of the "one-drop rule.,,45 This is a foundation

that, I want to suggest, is reinforced (at some level)

by a misplaced confidence in biology, or nature, or

purity, or absolutes, rather than by the ever-present

cal anthropologist, for example, began investigating infant deaths in the United States, he discovered the difficulty with racial labels. When he compared birth and death certificates for 120,000 babies who had died in 1982 or 1983, "he found that many had been identified as one race at birth and another at death. In the absence of consistent scientific definitions, medical authorities and funeral directors relied on what their eyes told them" (Hotz, "Concept of Race" 3.) With examples such as this, one can see that in terms of public health data race can be a very misleading category (for further discussion and examples of this see Hotz, "Concept of Race") .

43 Scales-Trent, Notes 89.

44 Scales-Trent, Notes 91.

45 For a compelling story of one woman's difficult experience with "passing" see: Nella Larsen, "Passing," An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen, ed. and intro. Charles R. Larson, for­ ward Marita Golden (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1992) 163 275. Judith Butler discusses Nella Larsen's work in "Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen's Psychoanalytic Challenge," Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993) 167-185. 183

evidence for racethnicity slippage. 4 6 As a recent Los

Angeles Times article points out, legal racial distinc-

tions have been "guided" by anthropology and genetics

as long as the "popular prejudice of the day" is sup­

ported. 4 7 "Although the federal government has been

collecting information about race for more than 200

years, official racial distinctions--each seemingly so

rooted in the scientific truth of its day--have changed

as quickly as the seasons."48 Over the years, for

46 Davis writes, that the "concept of 'passing' rests on the one-drop rule and on folk beliefs about race and miscegenation, not on biological or historical fact" (Who is Black? 14). I agree that "passing" rests on the "one-drop rule." However, when Davis refers to "folk beliefs about race and miscegenation" I want to argue that those "folk" beliefs rest on an ill-placed faith in biological truth, on faith in the truth of a scientifically factual foundation for race. When Davis writes that the concept of "passing" does not rely on "biological or historical fact" I want to point simultaneously to 1) the social constructions of the issues addressed by science and to what "counts" as "fact" and why; as well as to 2) the "fact" that race does not exist in terms of an absolute genetic marker or some other final and complete piece of evidence. It is here that I can hear Nietzsche's voice claiming that: we make it up, we put it out there and, then, not surprisingly, we find it.

47 Hotz, "Official Racial Definitions" A 14.

48 Hotz, "Official Racial Definitions" A 14. As mentioned in footnote 42, there is a federal level discussion at present about potential changes to Directive 15 since the categories it uses "are becoming less useful in reflecting the diversity of our Nation's population" (Federal Register 29831). A few highlights of the suggested changes include: "adding a 'multi­ racial' category"; "adding an 'other' category"; "providing an open-ended question to solicit informa­ tion on race and ethnicity, or combining concepts of race, ethnicity, and ancestry"; changing Black to African-American, American Indian to Native American, 184

example, Chinese immigrants were classified by the

United States as "colored" while Japanese immigrants

were not; Armenians have been irregularly classified as

white while those of Mexican ancestry were classified

first as a separate race, then as white, and now, as

Hispanic. 4 9 The changing official racial status of

immigrants from India is a dramatic example of the tug

and pull of the lack of a scientific basis for race,

judicial rulings, and administrative decisions. At

various times since the 1920s, Indian immigrants have

been designated: l)by a religious label used to indi-

cate race, Hindu; 2) Caucasian; 3) nonwhite; 4)white;

and, currently, 5)Asian Indian (which provides minority

and including Native Hawaiians as Native Americans; "including Hispanic as a racial designation, rather than as a separate ethnic category" and "adding 'Middle Easterner'" (Federal Register 29832-29833). Some highlights of the critiques include: "categories and their definitions [ ... fail] to be comprehensive and scientific"; geographic orientation is, or is not, suf­ ficiently definitive; identification of race and ethnic category "is often a subjective determination [ ...] Consequently [ ...] it may no longer be appropriate to consider the categories as a 'statistical standard'''; self-identification versus third party identification; the "use of the Hispanic category in the combined format does not [. .] provide information on the race of those selecting it"; importance of historical com­ parability of data; and, eliminate classification by race and ethnicity entirely as they "serve to per­ petuate an over-emphasis on race in America and con­ tribute to the fragmentation of our society" (Federal Register 29833) .

49 Hotz, "Official Racial Definitions" A 14. 185

status) .50 The current priorities of classification

are evident in the final sentence of the "General Prin-

ciples for the Review of the Racial and Ethnic

Categories" signed by Sally Katzen, Administrator,

Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, in the

June 9, 1994 Federal Register:

The application of these principles to guide the review and possible revision of the standard ultimately should result in con­ sistent, publicly accepted data on race and ethnicity that will meet the needs of the government and the public while recognizing the diversity of the population and respect­ ing the individual's dignity. (emphasis added; 29834)

When the principles of the review begin with the public

acceptability of the data and place the needs of the

government and public prior to the respect for an indi-

vidual's dignity, one can only sit back, wait for the

confusions of racethnicity to multiply, and marvel at

the variety and extent of the powers at work.

Clearly, the re-presentation and discourse of

racethnicity is not simply governed by a mere presump-

tion of biology; rather it is also largely governed by

relationships (social-cultural-political-legal- material-representational) of power. The relationships

in slavery and colonial practices, for example, are evidence that notions of political supremacy work to

50 Hotz, "Official Racial Definitions" A 14. 186

create and maintain the discourse and images of dis-

crete races and ethnicities, in part as an extension of

nineteenth century notions of class and status. 5 1

However, having said this I would like to make it per-

fectly clear that I am not interested in equating the

oppression faced by blacks in the United States with

the oppression faced by other minorities in the United

States (or elsewhere). For although I find that some

level of comparison is helpful in an attempt to

understand the dynamics at work in the importance and

placement of discrete markers of race--especially in

the face of evidence for slippage between races and

ethnicities as well as evidence for the social con-

struction of racethnicity--these oppressions are not

the same. 5 2 One vital difference, for example, is that

51 Pieterse argues that "Once the theory of race had taken shape its adherents usually argued that class differences originated in racial differences: in other words, in a characteristic mixture of social metaphors with biological ones, class distinctions were biologized" (White on Black 219) .

52 Here I am disagreeing slightly with Pieterse who tends, more than I, to push away any importance that might be given to biological notions (however ill­ informed) in order to underscore the primacy of the power relationship. I agree that the power relation­ ship is primary; I disagree with the degree to which he dismisses the importance of biologically based notions. "Irish people," says Pieterse, may as readily be branded as 'human chimpanzees' as Africans. This says nothing about Africans nor about Irish people; rather it says something about the British and the relationship that existed, exists, or is being constructed, between the British and Africans and Irish people respectively 187

other minorities do not have several hundred years of

slavery and the "one drop rule" as a legacy.

[C] WHITENESS

Whiteness and other racethnicity identities are

not constructed in a vacuum, they are socially co-

constructed in the twists, turns, and flows of ever-

changing relationships to each other, affected by such

forces as history, place, sex, age, class, and the

social-cultural-political-legal-material-re-

presentational practices of the moment. In the

presence of this constant motion it is, then, in large

part, the "one drop rule" which, in the United States,

provides a significant anchor of "otherness" for the

social co-construction of whiteness. 53 It is the

(White on Black 223) . This is true, of course; nevertheless I would argue that it is, in part, the confidence (arrogance?) of the belief in biological (read: empirical or "God given" or natural or foundational or pure or absolute) race difference which underscores the durability of such practices.

53 For further sources which feature a discussion of whiteness, see for example: Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of White­ ness (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993); Marilyn Frye, "On Being White: Thinking Toward a Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy," The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1983) 110-127; Adrienne Rich, "Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia," On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979) 275-310; bell hooks, "Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagina­ tion"; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Richard Dyer, "White," Screen 29.4 (Fall 1988): 44-64; Minnie Bruce Pratt, "Identity: Skin, Blood, Heart," Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism 188

positioning of this anchor--firmly attached to

blackness--which stabilizes and facilitates the sense

of cohesiveness evoked by the more inclusive phrase

"people of color"--meant to recognize and celebrate

racethnicity diversity. While I recognize that there

is no small amount of empowerment and vctlue in a name

which underscores the presence of diversity, in order

to facilitate a discussion on whiteness I also want to

note some difficulties. The phrase "people of color"

also has the possible effect of 1) presenting a false

impression of unification and sameness among all "non-

white" people by, for example, glossing over various

power differentials and cultural conflicts; 2) requir-

ing white as a (falsely) unified but "hidden" norm

against which all other racethnicity differences are

measured; and 3) implying that whites are colorless,

and Racism Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith (Brooklyn, NY: Long Haul P, 1984) 10-87; Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992); Leslie G. Roman, "White is a Color! White Defensiveness, Postmodernism, and Anti­ Racist Pedagogy," Race, Identity, and Representation in Education 71-88; Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies," Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology eds Margaret L. Ander­ sen and Patricia Hill Collins (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1992) 70-81; and Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1994); Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991) . 189

and, therefore, have no "racial sUbjectivities, inter-

ests and privileges. ,,54 Even worse, when whiteness is

a "hidden norm" the message conveyed may be the "idea

that whites are free of the responsibility to challenge

racism. ,,55 This dynamic of whiteness as the everywhere

present "hidden norm" requires calling into question

"what a certain racist episteme produces as visible. ,,56

This is happening, although too slowly, and with diffi-

culty.

In the presence of increasing debate on the

inadequacy of post-colonial dualisms such as "Europe

and its others" and increasing multicultural

awareness--from curriculum discussions to Benneton

advertisements--whiteness as a dominant racial identity

is, in fact, losing its transparency, becoming more

54 Roman also discusses some issues with the phrase, "people of color"; for example, "those on the left cannot afford to presume that the phrase has inherently or exclusively progressive meanings, or that socially just consequences will prevail from its use" ("White" 71).

55 Roman, "White" 71.

56 I am using Judith Butler's phrase out of con­ text. She uses it in a discussion of the reversal of gesture and intention in viewing the Rodney King video. Judith Butler, "Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia," Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising ed. Robert Gooding-williams (New York: Routledge, 1993) 15-22, esp. 16. 190

visible, and is less and less the "hidden norm. ,,57

When white identity looses its transparency the effect

is that the "racelessness," which so comfortably

accompanies those within any racially dominate group,

is lost. 5 8 It is at this point--where blindness can no

57 Omi and Winant attribute this dynamic as "pro­ ceeding from the increasingly globalized diversities of race" ("Concept of Race"7-8) .

58 At this point one might hear echoes, from the sexgender discussion, of male privilege. The notion of white as "racelessness" or "trans­ parency" or "hidden" is only possible if one has the unconsciousness available to those whose own position is the only position thought of as "normal" or "ordinary" in one's social environment. This is a privileged view. It does not demand the work of know­ ing; and is, in part, what Haraway means when she writes that a feminist objectivity requires that we become "answerable for what we learn how to see" (Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies 14.3 [Fall 1988]: 575-599, esp. 583). Certainly neither Scales-Trent nor Phipps, for example, are in a position to think of white as "racelessness." "They [whites] think," bell hooks writes, that "they are seen by black folks only as they want to appear" ("Representations" 168-169). Richard Dyer explains that this fantasy extends to the idea that whiteness is a synonym for goodness--proven by its use as light, safety, and purity and by its contrast with blackness as darkness, danger, and evil (Dyer, "White"). hooks pursues representations of whiteness in the black imagination and discusses them as "ter­ rible, the terrifying, the terrorizing" (hooks, "Repre­ sentations" 169-170). There is also an issue here of the power of lan­ guage and discourse. Bourdieu's notion of the need for the established order to naturalize "its own arbitrari­ ness" is at work in the discursive practices of race (Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of 2 Theory of Practice [Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1977] 164). So are Foucault's critiques of the universalizing and legitimizing claims of discourse, of the ruling episteme (Michel Foucault, "The Order of Discourse," Language and Politics ed. Michael Shapiro [New York: New York U P, 1984]). The language of race was "never 191 longer counter emerging visibility--that "whiteness" itself "becomes a matter of anxiety and concern. ,,59

Part of this anxiety and concern can be seen in the recognition, as Leslie Roman tells us, that "White is a color! ,,60

To many whites the concept of racethnicity is treated as a synonym for racially subordinated groups.

This concept of racethnicity contributes to white mis- recognition of the effects of white racial and/or eth- nic location, one which is often privileged. To see race or ethnicity as a synonym for subordination fails to recognize the ways in which power is conferred upon

internalized by blacks and whites in an identical way," as Higginbotham points out; through a range of meaning shifts, blacks "fashioned race into a cultural identity that resisted white hegemonic discourses" (Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 17.2 [Winter 1992]: 267). It has been, she claims, "historically," an example of Bakhtin's "double-voiced discourse" (267). This is a type of heteroglossia which "serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions" (M. M. Bakhtin, "Discourse In the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays ed. Michael Holquist [Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1981] 259-422; esp. 324)

59 Omi and Winant, "Concept of Race" 8. This "anxiety and concern" can, of course, manifest itself in extreamly racist ways such as those of the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazi movements; or, in the less overtly racist methods of neo-conservatism.

60 Roman, "White" 71. 192

whites, individually and collectively.61 "White," is

not merely a (relatively arbitrary) marker of raceth-

nicity, it is a "marker of political space and

power. "62 Whiteness is a concept which "is not just

used," as Marilyn Frye writes, "it is wielded. "63

It is precisely at the point between whiteness

recognized as "political space and power" and the

notion that whiteness is a "privilege" which is

"wielded" that one can, often, see a dynamic of a will-

ingness to recognize (some of the) disadvantages faced

by "people of color" while failing to do the work

necessary to see how those same disadvantages have,

often, become advantages for whites. Anderson and Col-

lins explain that: "In a racist system, well-meaning

white people benefit from racism even if they have no

intention of behaving like a racist."64 Yet, many

"well-meaning white people" refuse to see the ways in

which they have personally benefited from our racist

61 Roman, "White" 71. "White" is neither a unified category nor a privileged location in every single situation--nor is there an implication here that there are no people of color who are advantaged; however, these points do not mean that white privilege does not exist.

62 Haraway, Primate Visions 401-402.

63 Frye, "On Being White" 115.

64 Margaret L. Anderson and Patricia Hill Collins, Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1992) 49. 193

system and, even if personal benefit could be shown,

fewer would be willing to relinquish their rewards.

Peggy McIntosh provides one example of a woman

beginning to do the work necessary to see how she has

personally benefited from white privilege. Describing

white privilege as "an invisible package of unearned

assets," is an act which, McIntosh explains, makes one

"newly accountable. ,,65

McIntosh begins by identifying, for herself, some

of the "daily effects of white privilege. ,,66 She

unpacks her "invisible knapsack of white privilege" by

listing conditions, circumstances, and experiences

which seem more attached to skin-color privilege than

other privileges with which they are intertwined. 67

These are privileges she has not earned but has been made to feel are hers "by birth, by citizenship, and by virtue of being a conscientious law-abiding 'normal' person of goodwill. ,,68 They are also privileges which, as far as she can see, are unavailable to the African­

Americans with whom she is in daily or frequent contact

65 McIntosh, "White Privilege" 7l.

66 McIntosh, "White Privilege" 73.

67 McIntosh, "White Privilege" 76.

68 McIntosh, "White Privilege" 73. 194

"in this particular time, place, and line of work.,,69

Here are a few points from her personal list of forty-

six.

1. I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time. 5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, fairly well assured that I will not be fol­ lowed or harassed by store detectives. 8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race. 12. I can go into a book shop and count on finding the writing of my ra~e represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can deal with my hair. 13. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance that I am finan­ cially reliable. 20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race. 38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative, or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do. 45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences of my race. 70

69 McIntosh, "White Privilege" 73.

70 McIntosh, "White Privilege" 73-75. After living in Hawai'i for almost ten years (and overseas in Asia and the Pacific for a few years before that), it is interesting to read this list and write this section on whiteness. In Hawai'i white is not an unmarked category. This is not to say that there is no white privilege in Hawai'ij rather, I am st1~ck by the contrast between the dailyness of my multi-cultural, multi-racethnicity environment and the implied unusualness of such an environment in McIntosh's personal list. By stating this I do not mean to suggest that Hawai'i is idyllic, harmonious, and peaceful in matters of race--the legacy of colonialism is everywhere present. I am well aware, 195

Facing the truth of this list does not mean whiteness is bad, or guilt is good. It means recognizing various practices of power, that individual will is not enough to build one's life, that "one's life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own."71

By examining the "matrix of white privilege"

McIntosh begins to see a pattern of assumptions passed on to her as a white person: "MY skin color was an asset for any move 1. was educated to want to make. ,,72

However, the term "privilege" for this condition becomes misleading and problematic when one realizes that such privilege "simply confers dominance" and

"gives permission to control" and, as such, it is arbitrary and, therefore, not necessarily a desirable • attribute, or privilege, after all. 73

What McIntosh discovers, in the end, is a web of active and embedded interlocking oppressions: "I did

for example, of the colonial legacy which structures the possibility of my own presence in Hawai'i. This has effects on the peculiarities, impossibilities, and privileges of my own daily conditions and experiences in ways which are variously obvious, subtle, and hid­ den.

71 McIntosh, "White Privilege" 76.

72 McIntosh, "White Privilege" 77.

73 McIntosh, "White Privilege" 77. 196

not see myself as racist because I was taught to recog­ nize racism only in individual acts of meanness by mem­ bers of my group, never in invisible systems conferring

racial dominance on my group from birth.,,74 In the end, it is this obliviousness which is the greatest

"privilege" since it permits the myths about the ubiq­ uitous power of individual will, individual choice, and meritocracy to flourish.

[D] QUESTIONS

But something else is also going on with raceth­ nicity as performance, practice, identity and penalty.

How is it is that racethnicity comes to matter in the particular ways, manifested in the particular prac­ tices, in which it does? How do the elements in the co-construction of racethnicity work to strengthen or , to weaken both each other and the practices--including the definitions (such as the "one drop rule")--of racethnicity? Much of this is (continually re-written) history speaking to us through our individual and col­ lective practices (social-cultural-political-legal­ material-re-presentational). The importance of recog­ nizing the power of our various cultural legacies re­ written into current practices is no small matter, as

Patricia Williams writes: "a refusal to talk about the

74 McIntosh, "White Privilege" 81. 197

past disguises a refusal to talk about the present. ,,75

This is a willed forgetting, an amnesia, an

irresponsibility.

What does whiteness mean when, for example, Phipps

lives her life as white until she fills out a passport

application, has a court battle, and is declared

irrevocably black by the state? What does whiteness

mean if, as Scales-Trent writes, after telling a white

man at a party that she is black, he responds with a

smile: "No, you're not.,,76 Since she looked like him,

and he was comfortable talking with her, he knew she

could not be "Other.,,77 The importance of racethnicity

stratification is evident here. Phipps cannot be white, although she considers herself white and appears white, because she does not meet the racial purity • codes of the state, or the federal government--based on

the "one drop rule" meant to keep people in slavery.

Scales-Trent cannot name herself as black (although that would be in compliance with the mandatory race designation on her state issued birth certificate) as

75 Patricia Williams, "The Obliging Shell: (An Informal Essay on Formal Equal Opportunity," After Identity: ~ Reader in Law and Culture eds Dan Danielsen and Karen Engle (New York: Routledge, 1995) 103-122; esp. 107.

76 Scales-Trent, Notes 73.

77 Scales-Trent, Notes 73. 198

long as she is defying the white people around her who

maintain their sense of entitlement to define her--an

entitlement which is, in part, based on the confidence

(arrogance?) in being able to recognize and name

"otherness" as obvious; and, in part based on the

assumption that to admit to the possibility that some-

one is not like oneself, is not white, is "insulting."

In matters of racethnicity we all have "old

blueprints of expectation and response, old structures

of oppression, and these must be altered at the same

time as we alter the living conditions which are a

result of those structures"; for the "masters tools

will never dismantle the master's house. "78 These mat-

ters require questioning the familiar, with unfamiliar constructions. What if we asked questions in ways that • required answers which would lead us more directly to

our actual racethnicity practices? For example: How, why, and what would white mean if everyone was self- defining? What would it mean to stop practicing white- ness? How would that differ, and why, from stopping other practices of racethnicity-ness? Which unearned advantages might be mobilized in order to weaken (and possibly relinquish) the "invisible knapsack of white

78 Audre Lorde, "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference," Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing P, 1984) 114-123; esp. 123. 199 privilege?,,79 Which unearned advantages strengthen it?

Where can power awarded arbitrarily be used to rebuild power more broadly?

79 McIntosh, "White Privilege" 76, 81. 200

"How can we separate our race from our sex, our sex fronl our race? / And we hear again and again we must struggle against racism at the exclusion of sexism. / And we hear again and again we must struggle against sexism at the exclusion of racism." "Under Our Own Wings" Nellie Wong

"Feminism has dug itself into a hole more than once in operating from the stripped-down abstraction 'woman.' /I "Race and Gender: The Limits of Analogy" Linda Burnham

"What separates the putative object of feminism-­ gender, construed as sex--from the putative object of lesbian and gay studies--sex, construed as sexuality-­ is a chiasmic confusion in which the constitutive ambiguity of 'sex' is denied in order to make arbitrary territorial claims." "Against Proper Objects" Judith Butler

"The refusal to become or to remain a 'gendered' man or woman, then, is an eminently political insistence on emerging from the nightmare of the all-tao-real, imaginary narrative of sex and race." "'Gender' for a Marxist Dictionary" Donna Haraway 201

Chapter 5

DISCIPLINING THE BODY OF FEMINIST THEORY: DEALING

SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH RACETHNICITY AND SEXGENDER

In 1851, in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth peppered

her speech to the Women's Rights Convention with the

powerful refrain: "ain't I a woman?" As a black woman,

a former slave, a mother whose thirteen children were

sold, she had not been constituted as "woman" in the

way that white women in the audience, presumably, were.

She was, for example, neither gallantly helped into

carriages nor marked as a potential participant in the

patronimic exchange system of marriage. She had, in

fact, not even been constituted as human at all--and

she knew it. A heckler, a white male physician, in the

audience of one of her many feminist and abolitionist

speeches, protested her speaking and demanded that she

show her breasts to the women of the audience as proof

of her alleged womanhood. In this sexist and racist

request, the notion of difference is marked by the

presumption of biological truth reduced to and written

as (inferior) female anatomy but meant to indicate gen­

der, and by the notion of black flesh as biologically

"other," as profoundly different, as--at best-­ questionably human. However, Sojourner Truth was not 202

the addition of femaleness plus blackness, she was a

category unknown--a black woman, an "oxymoronic

singularity."l And, the power of her question--"ain't

I a woman?"--which still speaks to feminism after one

hundred and forty-four years, suggests that she has

succeeded in maintaining a potential space with the

tensions and promises of an unknown and unclosed

category, by declaring a kind of radical specificity

and by demanding recognition of the complexity of

simultaneity.

My question, one hundred and forty-four years

later, is: can we do as well? Can feminist theory do

the work necessary to deal with racethnicity and sex-

gender at the same time? This is an important ques-

tion. Just as "human" or "Man" too often means generic male or, even more specifically, white middle class male, "woman" too often means a generic female, an ideal, or even more specifically a white middle class female. Here, in the case of "Man" and "woman," sex is smuggled in as gender, and race is smuggled in as invisible or irrelevant ethnicity. This is at least

1 Donna Haraway, "Ecce Homo, Ain't (Ar'n't) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human i a Post­ Humanist Landscape," Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Rout­ ledge, 1992) 86-100; esp. 92. 203

one version of racethnicity and sexgender at the same

time--though I would not call it feminist.

Certainly feminist theory has to deal with issues

of sexgender--though there is some conflict over what

terrain that might or might not include: sex as biol-

ogy, sex as erotic act(s), gender as cultural assign-

rnent, gender as performativity, gender as hormonally

driven, and so on. 2 Also, just as certainly, feminist

theory has to deal with issues of racethnicity--though

this realization, including the notion that white women

are raced, or that, for example, there are various eth-

nicities among blacks, came to feminism embarrassingly

and destructively late; and then, mostly, at the

insistence, persistence and demand of women of color. 3

As Donna Haraway notes, white women were "forced kick-

ing and screaming to notice" that the category "woman" was not innocent. 4

Rather than dealing with racethnicity and sex- gender in the leap-frog fashion of first one then the other, then one, then the other, I want to work toward

2 I discuss the notion of sexgender in chapter three.

3 I discuss the notion of racethnicity in chapter four.

4 Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review 15.2 (March-April 1985): 65­ 107; esp. 75. 204

a feminist theory which is rich enough to grapple with

the complexities of racethnicity and sexgender

simultaneously--understanding both that these are

embodied vectors of power which do not stand in isola­

tion from other powerful forces and that there is not--

and cannot be--one, universal, feminist theory. I want

to move toward a theory that does not have to be, say,

racist or heterosexist in order to be feminist.

Naming can be seen as a move complicit with a

will to power, as Nietzsche warns us: "only that which

has no history can be defined. "5 However, I want to

use these elided artificial terms--sexgender and

racethnicity--not to define, but to gesture toward the

activity in the wide arena of support, negotiation, and

conflict that is at work constructing their mobile com- ponents and their discursive and material recognition-- as well as the effects of that recognition. In previous chapters I have attempted to point to a vari- ety of slippery qualities inherent in the "truth" of sexgender and racethnicity read as bodily text and to some of the ways in which they are mobilized. If I have been successful, these bodily "truths" will seem less like isolated and specific pieces of an embodied

5 Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Genealogy of Morals," The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1956) 212. 205

puzzle and more like imposed/negotiated/constructed

arenas of power which are ever present but in a variety

of continuously supporting and conflicting motions.

Is it more than coincidence that the key points in

these matters of power--sex, gender, sexuality, race,

and ethnicity--are all written at various levels, too

often perceived as foundational, as scientifically

legitimated embodied biological truths? Is it possible

for feminist theory to feature women while prob­

lematizing the woman/man binary and its heterosexist

baggage? Can a theory which examines the world through

a lens which privileges women--while understanding that

"woman" is contested terrain--do the constant work

needed to keep the multiple and specific vantage points

of various women in circulation? In a world where

women of color are far too often "invisible" within the

general idealized term "woman" can feminist theory

avoid racism? Can feminist theory, in fact, be anti­

racist and anti-heterosexist? What "knowledge" of the

body would the answer to these questions require or

enable? What is at stake? This is what I want to

think about. It is no small task.

[A] THE (IM) POSSIBILITY OF ANALOGY: RACETBNICITY

AND SEXGENDER

One of the dangers of any analogy is that particu­ larities disappear, differences are flattened out, com- 206

plexities are lost, and sameness prevails. 6 This is

not to say analogies are useless; they are, instead,

merely dangerous. Analogies can be convenient, even

enlightening, but they are used best with caution. By

definition, analogies explain or describe an unfamiliar

idea or object by comparing it to something more famil-

iar. But does this actually provide information about

the lIunfamiliarll or does it, in fact, make the

unfamiliar sound as though it were the familiar--

thereby appearing to eliminate the necessity of the

work of actually having to go through the trouble of

learning about the unfamiliar? In other words, in most

analogies similarities are being compared 1) without an

examination of the context of the differences which

exist; 2) without an explanation of what effect those

differences might have on the similarities; and, 3) without mention of the valences held by specific

similarities or differences or by any of their particu- lar combinations. This allows power to hide. For example, some proud white liberals who see the

6 My thinking about the difficulties with analo­ gies of racethnicity and sexgender has been informed, in part, by: Linda Burnham, lIRace and Gender: The Limits of Analogy," Challenging Racism and Sexism: Alternatives to Genetic Explanations, eds Ethel Tobach and Betty Rosoff (New York: Feminist Press, 1994) 143­ 162; and Nancy Leys Stepan, "Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science," The lIRacial ll Economy of Science: Toward g Democratic Future, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1993) 359-376. 207

"essence" of each person as the same, unencumbered by

the effects of social, political, or economic dif-

ferences assume that seeing race difference invalidates

or "judges" the notion of essence, and, as a result, is

racist. This is, at best, reductionist. It comes from

a position of power, a privileged un-seeing. It

requires the collapse of difference while it features a

familiar "essence." This "color blind" perspective,

frequently associated with a liberal view allows the

viewer to set up an analogy which uses her or himself

as the familiar, the standard by which to understand

the "other," the unfamiliar. 7 In other words, it

allows some white liberals to generalize about everyone

without having to consider the specifics of any partic- ular individual. Elizabeth Spelman writes an elegant

summary which points to the universalizing claims of

this essentialist view: "How lovely: the many turn out to be one, and the one that they are is me.,,8 The unfamiliar is described as the familiar. All is then familiar, one, the same. There is no need to struggle

7 For discussion on this "color-blind" perspec­ tive, which she terms "color evasion," see: Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Con­ struction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) ; esp. 14, 15, 142-148, and 175.

8 Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1988) 159. 208

with the unfamiliar, to learn something new, to see

something differently, to appreciate complexity or to

examine power. This is the danger of analogy.

Having said this I would, nevertheless, like to

look quickly at some of the strengths and weaknesses of

analogies between sexgender and racethnicity, between

sexism, heterosexism and racism, since it seems that

one of the temptations in attempting to deal with

racethnicity and sexgender at the same time is to treat

them as analogous. Obviously analogies can be helpful

in some cases, however one must also be aware of the

dangers.

The strength of many racethnicity and sexgender

analogies lies in the presumption of their mutual

embodied legibility. In the case of both racethnicity

and sexgender, then, magnified and distorted sig­

nificance is given to characteristics described as

physical, observable, distinct and foundational; these

are then naturalized and legitimated. Both raceth­

nicity and sexgender are considered to be truths writ­

ten, at least in part, as the body. The analogy between racethnicity and sexgender presumes that they both have a biological foundation, that there is a similarity in the various readings of this foundation, and that the subsequent importance derived from these readings results in parallel inequities of power. In 209 other words, presumed biological difference is re­ written as (often parallel) socially significant dif­ ference in the case of both sexgender and racethnicity, and this, in turn, depending on the particular con­ stellation of socially significant differences fea­ tured, can, when read narrowly, result in sexism, heterosexism and racism. This rewriting of biology into socially significant difference in the case of sexgender, for example, is where we can see the narrow reading of the slide of sex as biology followed by gen­ der as a cultural notion of hormonal, genetic, or some other biologically based behavioral difference, and also, though less clearly, of sex as a biologically­ based notion of sexuality. (I will return to this con­ fusion about sex later.) It is also at this point of rewriting biology into socially significant differences in the case of race, where the narrow reading of the slide of race as a biological notion is followed by the notion of ethnicity as biologically based behavioral characteristics and desires.

The fluctuating meanings attached to these presumptions, readings, writings, and rewritings of the body over time and in various places suggest the varie­ ties and intertwinings of various powers at work. But just as som~ feminist theories have recognized, follow­ ing de Beauvoir, that one is not born but becomes a 210

woman, some feminist theories also recognize that one

is not born but becomes "white" or "black" or

"Hispanic." However, the parallelism here hides the

very different specifics of the history of these

seemingly separate constructions: sexgender and

racethnicity. For one thing, the history of the

beginnings of racism as part of conquest, colonialism

and slavery which was then woven into "scientific

truth" is seemingly much clearer than the history of

the beginnings of sexism, which--while it was also

woven into "scientific truth"--is less obvious, and has

been argued as having to do with such notions as: pre­

history, matriarchies, patriarchies, cosmic order,

Cartesian thought, liberal political theory, or the

relative status of hunting and gathering in relation­

ship to child-rearing. For another, lesbianism gets

hidden by the monogamous heterosexist, always poten­

tially pregnant, history of "woman" as the derivative part of the binary man/woman; as part of the heterosexual story of Adam and Eve. And the paral­

lelism also obscures, for example, the legacy of a his­

tory that features the rape of women in conquered lands or slave women or those--by whatever measure--not con­ sidered fully human.

Analogies between racethnicity and sexgender lose sight of the mutually informing simultaneity of 211

assorted practices of racethnicity and sexgender.

Racethnicity and sexgender are very different when one

examines, say, class issues such as labor, domestic

violence, health or household income. White feminist

women, for example, may be aware of some of the sex-

gendered practices of power to which they are sub-

jected, but at the same time remain oblivious to the

oppressive practices of whiteness in which they are

engaged or to which they are indebted. Historically in

the United States, for example, white women were

exchanged in marriage as part of an oppressive patriar-

ChYi yet, white women were also able to inherit black

slaves (female and male). Another example of raceth-

nicity and sexgender difference might be seen in

statistics such as the following. In 1987-1988 more

white women than African American women were diagnosed

with breast cancer, but 32% of the African American women as opposed to 24% of the white women died from

it. 9 This might be due, in part, to discriminatory practices of health care workers and institutions, or

to environmental or economic factors such as the fact that 19.3% of African Americans have no health insurance, while 12.4% of whites have no health

9 Paula Ries and Anne J. Stone, eds., The American Woman 1992-3 (New York: Norton, 1992)i as cited in Women's Action Coalition, eds, WAC STATS: The Facts About Women (New York: New Press, 1993) 16. 212

insurance; or, that the median net worth of households

headed by white women, in 1988, was $22,100, while it

was only $760 for households headed by African American

women. 10 Although these represent a series of "truths"

written on the body, they are not written sYffiffietri-

cally.

The power of racism and sexism is not separate or

equally distributed. My claim is not that all women of

color or vigilant white women are (or that any person

could be) ever-aware of the specific weight to

attribute to the practices of power of racethnicity

versus sexgender in any particular moment. Although

some moments of power are clearer than others, I only

wish to point out that while the complex of powers

which become recognizable as racethnicity and sexgender may be mutually informing, attempts at analogy may have

the effect of glossing over important and specific dif-

ferences.

Racethnicity and sexgender can be seen as analo- gous in that--in a self-conflicting way--they both exist, indeed are constituted, as part of the ossified

10 Health insurance statistics: ACT UP, eds., Women, AIDS, and Activism (Boston: South End P, 1990); as cited in WAC STATS 25. Median net worth of households: Robert Pear, "Rich Got Richer in 80's; Others Held Even," New York Times, 11 January 1991, sec. 1, 1, 13, citing U. S. Census Bureau statistics; as cited by Linda Burnham, "Limits of Analogy" 156. 213

practices which they are trying to change. The

categories and notions of racethnicity difference which

constitute points of race and ethnic identity are,

themselves, embedded in and imbued with racist prac­

tices. The categories and notions of sexgender dif­

ference which constitute points of sex and gender-­

including sexuality--identity are, themselves, embedded

in and imbued with sexist and heterosexist practices.

In other words, the distinctions of sex, gender, sexu­

ality, race and ethnicity are not well bounded, objec­

tive descriptions of neutral elements. The distinc­

tions, in fact, have the effect of re-inscribing the

problematic practices of power.

An anti-racist and anti-heterosexist feminist

theory would work toward maintaining a potential space

where one might recognize the dangers of analogy while

cultivating the constellation of tensions between

specific differences and specific similarities. It

would be a feminist theory which can sustain an

appreciation for the complicated practices of power in

the presence of the slides of sexgender and raceth­

nicity.

[B] DISCIPLINING FEMINIST SEX

The slide of sexgender blurs simple and easy dis­

tinctions between sex as biology, gender as culture, and sexuality as erotic practice. Biology, presumed to 214

be nature, is culture written as the body. Gender,

presumed to be culture, is written into the biological

as nature. And, sexuality is, at least in part,

attributable by first doing a reading of the gender of

each partner in turn; then, retrospectively reading the

(biological) sex presumably projected as text by the

assumed genders, and then, finally, attributing sexu­

ality. However, sexuality is not reducible to gender

assignment, unless one is prepared to argue for only

two identifiable genders and, at most, two identifiable

sexualities. This is a murky business. No wonder

clarity, easy definitions and distinctions are in high

demand. But, there is more.

Sex and gender are both figured as social

categories in feminist theory and analysis. Sexuality,

of course, is also discussed by feminism--though gay men, for example, mostly disappear except as other

"others," or as bearers of male privilege along with

straight men. Queer theory has become the presumed more inclusive arena for discussions of sexuality.

Theoretically speaking, there seems to be a dis­ ciplinary tug and pull here: gender and a little bit of sexuality under the sign of feminist theory, sexuality and a little bit of gender under the sign of queer theory. But what about sex?

Sex, due to its ambiguous referent, remains hidden in plain view. There is sex as male and female--with 215

male as unmarked; sexual difference as the presumed

original site of gender difference. There is sex as

erotic desire and practice--with heterosexual as

unmarked; sexual difference as a variety of different

sexual practices and different practices of sexuality.

Either sense of sex might be discussed as a focus for

identity: male or female, lesbian, gay, straight and so

on. In the case of lesbian, for example, sex is writ-

ten as both erotic desire and as the biological origin

of gender--even when lesbian is written as a third

category outside of male/female sexual difference it

remains indebted to that binary.l1

There are disciplinary boundaries at stake in the

reading of sex for both feminist theory and queer

theory, as Judith Butler explains, the distinction

between "sex" as anatomical identity and "sex" as regime or practice will become quite crucial to the formulation of lesbian/gay studies as the analysis of sex and sexuality, for the ambiguity of sex as act and identity will be split into univocal dimensions in order to make the claim that the kind of sex that one is and the kind of sex that one does belong to two separate kinds of analysis: feminist and lesbian/gay, respectively.12

11 Some, such as Monique Wittig, would argue that in the case of "woman" sex is written as both erotic desire (that is: heterosexual) and as the biological origin of gender.

12 Judith Butler, "Against Proper Objects," dif­ ferences: ~ Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Femi­ nism Meets Queer Theory 6.2-3 (Summer-Fall 1994): 1-26; esp. 4. 216

However, as Butler rightly discusses, what one is or what one does is informed and produced by a variety of overlapping practices. In both cases, what one is or what one does, in regards to sex, depends, in part, on the way in which sexual difference is--or is not-- figured. 13

Queer theory does not get to be the discipline for sex and sexuality at the expense of feminist theory.

In order for that to happen feminist theory would have to be constituted as a field concerned only with gender as a cultural reading and sexuality as reproductive, leaving the balance of sex and sexuality for queer theory. But feminist theory is richer than that and has established many arguments regarding the complexity of sexgender--including those which discuss matters of sexuality and sexual freedom not restricted to concerns of reproduction. Sexuality cannot be read from gender

13 The discussion of sexual difference is vital, but is beyond the scope of this writing. Butler dis­ cusses this at length in "Against Proper Objects" by discussing the work of Gayle Rubin and Rosi Bradotti. She discusses the ways in which, for some feminists, the turn to gender is seen as moving beyond sexual dif­ ference, beyond masculine and feminine; while for others gender is seen as a symmetrical positioning of men and women. A feminist analysis which begins with sexual difference looks at the asymmetrical relation in the constitution of masculinity and femininity and at the ways in which the sYmbolic precedes the social, while an analysis that begins with gender is less interested in the sYmbolic and more in the social. She also discusses sexual difference as sexual practice and sexuality. 217 alone, one must examine the mobile interrelationships of sexuality and gender. Gender, for example, is, in large part, a result of the various formations of racethnicity and class, and there is a rich post- colonial and third world feminist literature which addresses this. 14

Rather than declaring disciplinary boundaries at the points of gender and sexuality, "it may be, II as

Butler states, "that non-reductive and non-causal accounts of the relation of gender and sexuality are in order. illS I think the elided notion of sexgender dis- cussed in chapter three is helpful here. Sexgender recognizes the slippage between sex, gender and sexu- ality and in doing so it permits one to gesture in a general way toward an arena of material, yet requires specificity in any particular application. When sex,

14 See, for example, Cherrie Morraga, "From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and Feminism, II Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1986) 173-190; Gayatri Chak­ rovorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism," and "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, II Third World Women and the Politics of Femiism, eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann RUSSO, and Lourdes Torres, (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1991) 1-47 and 51-80; Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco, CA: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987); Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1989) and many others.

15 Butler, "Against Proper Objects" 9. 218

for example, (in any analysis) is reduced to and

understood only as sexual intercourse presumed to be

necessarily between a man and a woman, it is a

heterosexist analysis (it may also be racist and

sexist, depending on the context). However, when sex

is seen as part of the sexgender slide, to define it

narrowly would require an explanation not only of the

definition of sex being referred to, but of its rela­

tionship to the component of gender as well. To the

extent that feminist theory can refuse to separate sex

from gender and sexuality Qy recognizing their slide-­

not their negation---in a conceptualization such as

sexgender, then it can critically contest heterosexist

presumptions by requiring specificity.

If one were also going to pursue the matter of

contesting any racist presumptions in this example of

sex, then examining the relationship of sex to gender

in the sexgender slide may require an examination of

the ways in which the forces of racethnicity are at work in the formation of sex (whatever its definition) and gender. To the extent that feminist theory can

refuse an artificial and imaginary "race-neutral"

stance toward sexgender by acknowledging the power of racethnicity as part of the formation of sexgender, it can critically contest racist presumptions by requiring specificity. 219

In the example above about sex, then, in order to

work toward an antiheterosexist and antiracist feminist

theory one would need specificity about the ways in

which the overlapping components of the sexgender

slide, beginning with an explanation of sex, relate to

each other--including the ways in which the sexgender

slide is informed by the slide of racethnicity.

[el SEXGENDER: RACED AND E-RACED

One of the dangers facing an attempt at

simultaneous discussion of racethnicity and sexgender,

or any issue of identity politics, is that at such a moment notions of difference and notions of identity become oppression markers to be arranged hierarchi­

cally. A tug and pull for legitimacy begins and the person with the most markers gains the high ground and carries the most political currency. One feminist effort to address this danger can be seen in the increased attention given to voice. Sometimes atten­ tion to voice can suggest that only persons who represent the specific categories of difference can speak for and about the specific categories. This effort of representation and awareness has the benefit of making visible certain categories which are excluded; hence, a feminism in which one sees only white women and hears only white voices can be changed quite dramatically by listening to the voices of women 220

of color and by being open to the changes which will

necessarily be made by the presence and active partici-

pation of women of color.

However, identity politics often have the added

difficulty of only being able to sustain an accommoda-

tion to one additional category of difference beyond

"woman" making it possible, for example, to speak as an

Asian-American woman, as a lesbian woman, but not as

both--at least not for any length of time. Audre Lorde

speaks to this issue of additional categories when she

writes:

As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of my self and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the ocher parts of self. 1 6

Lorde is resisting the pressures which would ask her to

be less complex, which would simplify and flatten her

intricacies. Lorde sees herself as a whole, a unified

subject with multiple parts. She wants to be able to

integrate all the parts of who she is without being

defined from the outside as any single part. She is,

of course, right to be wary of such simplification.

When race, for example, is the one part that gets fea-

16 Audre Lorde, "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference," Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing P, 1984) 120. 221

tured it is far too often a notion which is both devoid

of complexities and the only recognizable difference

which is given any significance. This means that

Lorde, for example, would only be recognizable as black

and that because a notion of race which would consider

it an attribute to be "plucked" out lacks complexity,

she would then easily be seen as representative of all

blacks. In the name of representation, then, identity

politics of this sort are complicitous with tokenism.

One cannot just pluck out one part, or rearrange

priorities, or identify which is the most oppressed

category at any given moment. To deal with raceth­

nicity and sexgender at the same time requires, among

other things, resisting the impulse to tell

universalizing stories, and, instead, inventing new

ones.

When attempting to deal with racethnicity and sex­

gender at the same time, one often gets weighed against

the cost of the other--especially if or when the grids

of meaning conflict, occlude, enhance or in some way

"interfere" with each other. Conceptually, at least,

one has to juggle constantly in an attempt to relate

racethnicity and sexgender in ways that might allow

them to inform each other. The Anita Hill/Clarence

Thomas spectacle is a fine example of this.

In this story racethnicity and sexgender appeared, disappeared and reappeared in a dizzying whirl. For 222

many whites the race of two African-American people was

canceled out by the fact of their mutual blackness-­

leaving only a sexgender distincticn, marked by the

presence of woman. And the foregrounding of sexual

harassment, read as an issue of sexism, placed both the

event and Hill, for many, squarely in a feminist

frame--even though Hill, as a conservative, had never

defined herself or the issue as feminist. For many

African Americans the race, not the sexgender, of the

two players was the primary sort for the behavior which

could be expected: racial solidarity. But Hill's

racethnicity was eclipsed or negated and her sexgender

was given primacy when the perception of her was as a

stand-in for either a white feminism concerned with

reading an isolated text of sexual harassment or as the

white woman who pointed her finger at a black man so

the lynch mob could do its work. Thomas was seen as an

African American (not necessarily categorized by sex­

gender since he occupies the neutral/male position) who

had become successful in a white arena; however, to the

extent that Thomas had "successfully" shed his color,

his mark of racethnicity, on his way to the Supreme

Court--through neo-conservatism, by having a white wife at his side--he was re-raced, in an explosive con­ fluence of sexgender and racethnicity, as a black rapist, as a stereotype of black male sexuality, by the 223

act of Hill accusing him of sexual misconduct. 1 ?

Aided by the relative invisibility of African

American women and the prominence of African American

men in the representation of race, Hill could occupy

the "raceless" role of white woman, while Thomas could

claim to be the (neutrally sexgendered) victim of

racism. Kimberle Crenshaw explains what happened in

this story of mystifying contradictions.

America simply stumbled into the place where African-American women live, a political vac­ uum of erasure and contradiction maintained by the almost routine polarization of "blacks and women" into separate and competing political camps. Existing within the over­ lapping margins of race and gender discourse and in the empty spaces between, it is a location whose very nature resists telling. 18

It is, according to Crenshaw, the inability of Hill to be heard outside of the narrative structures which organize cultural power that stood in the way. For

Hill, like Sojourner Truth before her, to be a black woman was to be a category unknown and unknowable. In other words, Hill was misunderstood because her claim

17 For an excellent collection of essays which read the Hill/Thomas event see: Toni Morrison, ed., Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (New York: Pantheon, 1992).

18 Kimberle Crenshaw, "Whose Story is it Anyway: Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill," Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon, 1992) 402-440; esp. 403 (emphasis added) . 224

(sexual misconduct) and her presence (black woman) forced a simultaneous recognition of sexgender and racethnicity that cannot be understood within available rhetorical structures--structures in which subjectivity is understood most readily as singular and complexity is avoided.

Because one story tells a tale of sexism and the other story tells an opposing tale of racism "the simultaneity of Hill's race and gender identity was essentially denied. ,,19 Anita Hill, then, was used to tell everybody else's story, but not her own. In order to hear Anita Hill's story a new space for telling, listening, understanding and inventing the possibility for new stories must be formed.

Meanwhile, the heterosexual component of the

Hill/Thomas story in terms of presumed paths of sexual desire, of sexuality, disappeared altogether as part of the understood, as an unmarked aspect of sex within sexgender and as transparent to any effects of raceth­ nicity. Where and when does sexuality get read, and once read how can it accommodate the notion of raceth­ nicity? Without a racial qualifier does the term les­ bian, for example, mean white lesbian? Given the silence, erasure and invisibility of the sexuality of

19 Crenshaw, "Whose Story" 406. 225 black women generally, Evelynn Hammonds wonders if black lesbians are then "doubly silenced?"20 The pos- sibilities for sexuality then, in the presence of racethnicity, in the case of blackness, for example, must be figured so that white sexuality does not become the "normal" presence which is dependent upon the

"pathological" absence of black sexuality. In other words, sexuality cannot be understood as isolated from the power relations of racethnicity. To this end Ham- mond argues that:

Black feminist theorists must reclaim sexu­ ality through the creation of a counternarra­ tive that can reconstitute a present black female subjectivity and that includes an analysis of power relations between white and black women and among different groups of black women. In both cases [Hammond is] arguing for the development of a complex, relational but not necessarily analogous, conception of racialized sexualities. 21

Homophobia, for example, is shaped by racism for black lesbians in a different way than it is for white les- bians. Black lesbians share their racethnicity and an experience of racism with others in a black community; yet, black lesbians remain as (dangerous) "other" within black communities. They are "other," in part,

20 Evelynn Hammonds, "Black (W)holes and the Geom­ etry of Black Female Sexuality," differences: ~ Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6.2-3 (Summer-Fall 1994): 126-145; esp. 130.

21 Hammond, "Black (W)holes," 131. 226

because of their sexuality and they are "other" to the

extent that their sexuality is seen as an obstacle to

solidarity.

Notice that for many whites reading a racethnicity

category such as black, black women have been rela­

tively invisible in terms of being marked by sexgender,

while white women have, in fact, been so marked. This

is noticeable in the Equal Employment Opportunity

phrase: Women and Minorities encouraged to apply--where

"Women" is often read as white women and "Minorities"

is often read as men and women of color (and, some­

times, the differently abled). Yet for many whites

reading the sexgender category woman, white women have

been relatively invisible as being marked by raceth­

nicity, while black women have been marked as visibly

raced. This is noticeable in such phrases as: All women, including women of color--where white women are often thought to come under the heading of "All women" and "women of color" are, then, "the rest"; where color means race and white is not considered to be a color.

When considering sexualities, then, the sexualities of black and white women have not been subject to the same forces of power (this is not to say that sexuality is somehow completely uniform within the categories of black or white). If, for many white women, the categories "white" and "female" are "normal," invisible 227

and unmarked, then they gain that status, in part, as a

result of relegating "black" and "female" to

"abnormal," "pathological," visible and, therefore,

marked. Once squarely in the marked realm of

"abnormal" or "pathological" there is, then, no clear

necessity for reading any distinction within and among

black women in terms of sexuality between, say,

heterosexual and homosexual. Because of this reduction

there is a need for black women to "reconstitute a

female-sexed body as a body for the subject and for her desire. ,,22 That is, there needs to be a space for bodily reconfiguration, where the components of the

slides of sexgender and racethnicity can be dealt with specifically and simultaneously. This requires strategies which will make visible the semiotic, dis- cursive, social, material and specifically embodied effects of power--both distorting and productive--that less visible sexualities are able to produce in rela- tion to more visible sexualities; and, it requires a high index of suspicion regarding any analogy of the shape and structure of sexualities, as a component of

22 Theresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Les­ bian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1994) 200; as cited by Hammonds, "Black (W)holes" 138. 228

sexgender, between and among various racethnicities. 23

In short, it requires a radical specificity with a

recognition of the slippery complexity and importance

of considering racethnicity with sexgender.

The rich relationship between identity and dif-

ference can not be ignored. "Difference," as Trinh

Minh-ha writes, "does not annul identity. It is beyond

and alongside identity. ,,24 How can anyone make a

choice between racethnicity and sexgender? Trinh

writes:

You never have/are one without the other. The idea of two illusorily separated identities, one ethnic, the other woman (or more precisely female), again, partakes in the Euro-American system of dualistic reason­ ing and its age-old divide-and-conquer tac­ tics. Triple jeopardy means here that when­ ever a woman of color takes up the feminist fight, she immediately qualifies for three possible "betrayals": she can be accused of betraying either man (the "manhater"), or her community ("people of color should stay together to fight racism"), or woman herself ("you should fight first on the women's side") . 25

Trinh loosens the hold of the kind of dualistic

thinking--applied, for example, to Anita Hill and

Sojourner Truth--which requires an all or nothing "I"

23 I am agreeing here with Hammonds argument in "Black {W)holes."

24 Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1989) 104.

25 Trinh, Woman 104. 229

or "Not-I"; thinking which assumes (demands?) a flat-

tened, unified singular subject. As a challenge to the

flattened, unified subject, calling identity politics

into question, Trinh writes as a multiple subject: "I,"

"the all-knowing subject," "Iii," "the plural, non-

unitary subject," and "i," "the personal race-and

gender-specific subject.,,26 For Trinh all is process,

not stability. "Difference in such an insituable con-

text," writes Trinh, "is that which undermines the very

idea of identity, deferring to infinity the layers

whose totality forms 'I. ,,,27 Trinh, like Lorde,

refuses to be corralled by one identity. But where

Lorde looks to unite the various aspects of who she is

into one powerful whole, Trinh looks to appreciate the

fluidity of the ebb and flow without the strong pull to

resolution.

Assuming identity is stable or somehow natural has not enabled a simultaneous discussion of both raceth- nicity and sexgender. When identity is claimed power-

fully but narrowly it is readily flattened, when it is

26 Trinh, Woman 9.

27 Trinh, Woman 96. The tug and pull of identity and difference as feminists struggle with the critical location of racethnicty formation in the constitution of sexgender can be seen in many of the writings of Third World and postcolonial feminists, as well as in the writings of white feminists who are interrogating whiteness. These are active and growing literatures. 230

claimed as a whole it is readily isolated, and while a

notion which defers identity to infinity may allow for

more appreciation of a fluid complexity, it is also

subject to critique if it becomes merely interested in

the pleasures of its own infinitude. These notions of

identity and difference are best thought of not as

either/or but as both/and. Feminists need a space

where such an active confluence can be more fully

encountered and its effects allowed to reconfigure the

body.

[D] CONCLUSION: BODY POLITICS IN AN UNDECIDABLE

NON-PLACE

Deferring is not nihilism or relativism, it is a

practice which acknowledges the richness, the pleasure,

and the pain of an infinity of differences, of other

political spaces. It is a refusal to make decisions

based on the pretense of concrete foundations, of

universal claims. Feminism requires action, judgment

and the consideration of obligations and

responsibilities, but it does not necessarily require

that these come only from the flattened plane of a

unified subject.

When feminist theory both features and prob­

lematizes the notion of woman it is able to disrupt the

Western opposition of language and materiality. The notion of woman is both formed by and embedded in the 231

semiotic and discursive practices of language. Femi-

nist theory explores that more symbolic, more

linguistic notion of woman while investigating the

practices associated with bodies labeled by both sex-

gender and racethnicity. As Elam notes "there is no

escape from anatomy for feminism, even as feminism

refuses to accept that anatomy is destiny. ,,28 For this

reason feminist theory cannot afford to ignore the

body. Sex assignment at birth, for example, is usually

done with confidence and ease based on a quick glance

at anatomy; gender assignment follows, and sexuality is

presumed. Racethnicity is assigned (or enforced) by a

variety of means, including observation, pedigree,

choice and available category; then it is written as

the body. The consequences of these decisions, and the

resulting embodied configurations, have a wide variety

of political effects. But focussing on the body does

not necessarily mean relinquishing the symbolic or

linguistic for the material, either. Feminist theory

cannot afford to argue that women are either only 1) a discursive practice and social construct, or 2) a raw material body, an object. All women are in the impossible position of being undecideably both, though there are many variations in intensity.

28 Diane Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en abyme (London: Routledge, 1994) 60. 232

Feminism is not merely about treating all women as

though they were men, or treating all women as a

unified group. There are differences within the

category "women" as featuring racethnicity with sex-

gender readily demonstrates. Lesbianism, for example,

has been important to feminist theory since, among

other things, it is a mark within the category "women"

of internal difference. 29 Featuring racethnicity with

lesbianism can remind feminist theory "that it needs to

examine the way in which women have been determined as

both a linguistic and material category, but have not

been exhaustively determined as (or by) either.,,30

In other words, the feminist subject understands

that the body matters in a way that the disembodied

29 As Diane Elam and Biddy Martin both discuss, lesbians necessarily have an uncertain relationship with femininity. Martin writes of the lesbian femme as a crucial figure. "The very fact that the femme may pass implies the possibility of denaturalizing heterosexuality by emphasizing the permeabilties of gay/straight boundaries. In a sense, the lesbian femme who can supposedly pass could be said most successfully to displace the opposition between imitation (of straight roles) and lesbian specificity, since she is neither the same nor different, but both. II Biddy Martin, "Sexualities Without Genders and Other Queer Utopias," diacritics 24.2-3: 104-121; esp, 113. Elam writes, "Contrary to popular opinion, the 'woman cen­ tered woman' is not more female than heterosexual or bisexual women (nor is she simply manly). [ ...J Les­ bianism is an encounter with woman as question under the sign of Eros rather than an answer or a truth belonging to Logos. II Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction 61.

30 Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction 61. 233

Cartesian subject--who has privileged mind over body-­

does not. "The Body," writes Trinh, "the most visible

difference between men and women, the only one to offer

a secure ground for those who seek the permanent, the

feminine 'nature' and 'essence,' remains thereby the

safest basis for racist and sexist ideologies. ,,31 In

order to make racist, sexist, and heterosexist prac­

tices less safe within feminist theory, then, the body

must remain present while becoming unsecured ground.

Agitating, producing or uncovering a field of bodily

contradictions, inconsistencies, confusions and

presumed truths in this case, then, can, be thought of

as antiracist and antiheterosexist political action.

Attempts to focus simultaneously on the slide of sex­

gender with the slide of racethnicity may be one way to

produce an implosion of collective social, discursive

and embodied uncertainty. Among other things, this

destabilizing could produce a space in which one would

find the "dismantling of the sovereign, authority­

claiming subject. ,,32

The body becomes an increasingly contested site when sexgender is examined with racethnicity. It becomes a space for multiple possibilities of bodies--

31 Trinh, Woman, Native, Other 100.

32 Trinh, Woman, Native, Other 103. 234

plural--rather than the body--singular. There can be

no singular, neutral, objective, generic body--there

can only be specifics. This multiplicity demands radi­

cal specificity based on the notion that there can be mutual constitution of bodily concepts through a range of disparate discourses, and that these do not have to be based on the additive notion of a grid of single, autonomous structures or even on the notion of a new structure based on using different natural or scientific explanations--say, a structure more focussed on genetic explanations, for example. 3 3

When one is forced to discuss bodies in very specific and distinct terms it becomes more and more difficult to generalize to the singular universal. If there is no universal subject, if the body is an unknown and unclosed category, if all is radical specificity, then universal concepts must be questioned by the demand for recognition of complexity. This is

33 Elizabeth Grosz discusses a non-dichotomous understanding of the body in her search for a way to think about the body "outside or in excess of binary pairs." Elizabeth Grosz, "Refiguring Bodies," Volatile Bodies: Toward g Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1994) 3-24; esp. 24. See the end of chap­ ter two for a discussion of some difficulties with genetic explanations. 235 the kind of feminist objectivity Haraway describes as becoming "answerable for what we learn how to see.,,34 What is at stake for feminist theory is not the loss of a rigid belief in a particular political doc- trine, body configuration or theorization; rather what is at stake is that the "nature" of the political must remain open to inspection, question, modification and change. Feminist theory is concerned with the com­ plexity of sexgender with racethnicity; with rethinking the body, in terms that Elizabeth Groz refers to as "embodied subjectivity" or "psychical corporeality," and that Haraway refers to as "material refigura­ tion.,,35 Moving toward an antiracist and antiheterosexist feminist theory requires a new kind of body knowledge. In these discussions of rethinking the body the mutually informing relationships between sex- gender and racethnicity might best be thought of as a potential space where questions might be posed, obser- vations made, mutual influences noted and a new range of distinctions and specificities permitted to appear.

34 Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Par­ tial Perspective," Feminist Studies 14.3 (Fall 1988): 575-599; esp. 583. 35 Grosz, "Refiguring Bodies" 20; and Donna Haraway, "A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies, Fem­ inist Theory, Cultural Studies" Configurations: ~ Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 2.1 (Winter 1994): 62. 236

What I am arguing for is theory which is specifi­ cally spatial--not grounded: feminist theory which is able to mobilize coalitions built on suspicions of familiarity, while being committed to doing the work necessary to uncover, produce, and appreciate radical specificities of difference, peculiarity, and dis­ comfort; feminist theory which holds open the potential space of a non-place by maintaining tensions, by recog­ nizing undecidability as productive, by recognizing stability as a temporary tool of process, and by cultivating unknown and unclosed categories for both their promise of bodily reconfiguration and for their general resistance to the singular universal--a space in which one might move toward an antiracist, antiheterosexist, specifically feminist theory. 237

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