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What Is a Woman ? and Other Essays

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What Is a Woman ? and Other Essays What is a Woman ? And Other Essays TORIL MOI OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Grr-at Clarendon Sire ft, Oxford OX2 6uf Oxford University Press is a department of iht- University of Oxford. It further!, the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in For Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Hvn*nos Aires DAVID Cape Town Cheiuiai Our e<i Salaam Delhi Florfiitt Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkala Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Munibai Nairobi Paris .Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark ol Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain oilier countries Published in the United Stales by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Tori) Mo) 1999 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 1499 i'ou musi not circulate, this book in any other binding or t-iwer and yyo u must unposp e this SJ.UK condition on any acquirej r British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Min, Toril. What is a. woman?-, and other essays/Toril Moi. Includes bibliographicagraphical referencereerencess and index. 1, Feminist theory, •i. Feminism andd literal lire. 3. Women and literature, J.. Title. HQIIIJI .M64 iggy 3Of,.42'oi—dc2i 99—16111 ISBN 0-L9-812242-X (hbk) ISBN 0-19-818675-4 (pbk) 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset in Baskcrville by Cambrian Typesetters, Frimley, Surrey Primed in Gvcal Rriiain on acid-dee paper by Bookrraft Ltd, Midsomer Norton. Somerset CtNIRE FOR 1HE STUDV OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY Date: tSUuJSjt What Is a Woman ? Sex, Gender, and the Body in Feminist Theory INTRODUCTION Since the 1960s English-speaking feminists have routinely distin- guished between sex as a biological and gender as a social or cultural category. The sex/gender distinction provides the basic frame- work for a great deal of feminist theory, and it has become widely accepted in society at large.1 Over the past ten years or so, the distinction has nevertheless become highly contentious among feminist theorists. Feminists inspired by psychoanalysis, French feminist theory, and queer theory have questioned its value.2 Poststructuralist theorists of sex and gender such as Donna Haraway and Judith Butler have subjected it to merciless critique.3 I want to thank Kate Bartlctt, Sarah Beckwith, Sara Danius, Terry Eagle ton, Maria Farland, Sibylle Fischer, Sally Haslanger, Julia Hell, Alice Kaplan, Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Diana Knight, Walter Benn Michaels, Mats Rosengren, Vigdis Songe-Mpller, Martin Stone, Lisa Van Alstyne, and Jennifer Wicke for much needed critical feedback on earlier versions of ihis essay. The fabulous participants in my seminar on 'Sex, Gender and the Body' at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University in the summer of 1997 helped me to put the finishing touches to this paper. 1 Handbooks in non-sexist usage routinely recommend that we use 'sex to mean the biological categories of male and female and gender to designate the cultural and other kinds of identities and attributions associated with each sex' (Frank and Treichler 14). 2 Moira Gatens's eloquent 1983 defence of the concept of sexuality is the best and earliest example of a psychoanalytic critique of the sex/gender distinc- tion. Eve Sedgwick's discussion of the distinction in Epistemology of the Closet exemplifies the queer critique. Tina Chanter argues that the sex/gender distinc- tion makes it impossible to understand French psychoanalytically inspired femi- nism, and particularly the work of Luce Irigaray. 3 Here and throughout this essay, I use the term 'poststructuralist' to indi- cate English-language critics working on the sex/gender distinction from a post- structuralist perspective. (For obvious reasons, theorists who do not write in 4. Feminism of Freedom: Simone de Beauvoir What Is a Woman ? 5 For them, the original 1960s understanding of the concepts has the man) in a given society. No feminist has produced a better theory merit of stressing that gender is a social construction and the of the embodied, sexually different human being than Simone de demerit of turning sex into an essence. Considered as an essence, Beauvoir in The Second Sex. Because contemporary English- sex becomes immobile, stable, coherent, fixed, prediscursive, language critics have read Beauvoir's 1949 essay through the lens natural, and ahistorical: the mere surface on which the script of of the 1960s sex/gender distinction, they have failed to see that her gender is written. Poststructuralist theorists of sex and gender essay provides exactly the kind of non-essentialist, concrete, histor- reject this picture of sex. Their aim is to understand 'sex or the ical and social understanding of the body that so many contem- body' as a concrete, historical and social phenomenon, not as an porary feminists are looking for. In short, Beauvoir's claim that 1 essence. Although they want radically to change our under- 'one is not born, but rather becomes a woman' has been sorely standing of sex and gender, they retain these concepts as starting misunderstood by contemporary feminists.6 Lacan returned to points for their theories of subjectivity, identity, and bodily sexual Freud; it is time for feminist theorists to return to Beauvoir. difference. With respect to sex and gender poststructuralists are I do not mean to say that the distinction between sex and 1 reformist rather than revolutionary.' gender does no useful work at all. That we sometimes need to In this paper 1 too am trying to work out a theory 01 the sexu- distinguish between natural and cultural sex differences is obvi- ally different body. Unlike the poststructuralist theorists of sex and ous. The feminists who first appropriated the sex/gender distinc- gender, however, I have come to the conclusion that no amount of tion for their own political purposes were looking for a strong rethinking of the concepts of sex and gender will produce a good defence against biological determinism, and in many cases the theory of the body or subjectivity. The distinction between sex and sex/gender distinction delivered precisely that. I agree that femi- gender is simply irrelevant to the task of producing a concrete, nists have to reject the claims of biological determinism in order historical understanding of what it means to be a woman (or a to produce a forceful defence of women's freedom. But feminists managed to make a convincing case against biological determin- ism long before they had two different words for sex to choose English usually do not discuss this particular distinction. Foueaull, for example, from. Even in a language without the sex/gender distinction it is uses the word sexem much the same way as Beauvoir.) I take the most influen- tial of these theorists (o be Judith Buller and Donna Haraway. Their analyses of not difficult to convey one's opposition to the idea that people in sex and gender have been accepted by a great number of coniemporary femi- possession of ovaries are naturally unsuited to sports, intellectual nist critics and theorists. I also draw on Elizabeth Grosz's work on the body, since work, or public careers. From the fact that Norwegian or French it provides a particularly clear example of the way Buller and Haraway's critiques have only one word for sex {kj0nn; sexe), it hardly follows that of the sex/gender distinction have been taken up by other theorists. Norwegian or French feminists are unable to distinguish between i The formulation 'sex or the body' is widely used in poststructuralist sex. and gender." Working in German, another language with only theory. It is theoretically confusing in thai it makes us believe thai it makes sense to ask questions such as 'Is sex the same thing as the body?', 'Will a theory of "sex" be the same thing as a theory of the "body"'? As this paper will show, such 6 Sara Heinamaa is an exception to this rule. See her excellent critique of questions are based on a confused picture of sex, gender, and the body, and can the tendency to project the sex/gender distinction on to Beauvoir, particularly have no clear answer. in 'What Is a Woman?". j Donna Haraway dreams of a deconstructed and reconfigured understand- 7 In much feminist work in Norway expressions such as 'social sex' and ing of sex and gender (see 148). Judith Butler's two books Gender Trouble and 'biological sex' have been used. Swedish feminist theorists on the other hand Bodies That Matter come across as massive attempts to hammer the sex/gender introduced a distinction between kon and genus modelled on the English distinc- distinction into poststructuralist shape. After showing that gmderis performative, tion in the ii)8os. For a Swedish discussion of sex and gender, see Danius. In Butler aims to prove that sex is as constructed as gender. In her pursuit of a histor- French neither Simone de Beauvoir nor Monique Wittig have had any trouble ical and political understanding of the body, Butler never asks whether the criticizing the belief that sex alone can explain social behaviour. Recently, sex/gender distinction actually is the best framework for her own project. however, Christine Delphi,1 and other feminists have been struggling to introduce 6 Feminism of Freedom: Simone de Beauvoir What Is a Woman ? 7 one word for sex, in 1920 Freud had already developed a theory becomes the subject of critical analysis. In Section IV I show that of subjectivity that explicitly distinguished between 'physical Simone de Beauvoir's understanding of the body as a situation sexual characters', 'mental sexual characters', and 'kind of offers a powerful alternative to sex/gender theories, and in Section [sexual] object choice' ('The Psychogenesis of a Case of V I bring the Beauvoirean approach to bear on some legal cases.
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