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Information to Users INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissenation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and contim1jng from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. 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MI48106-1346 USA 313!761-47oo 800:521-0600 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.
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