Posted: Sep 01, 2010 10:08 pm
nunnington wrote:I was just recalling that 1980s feminism was full of conflict over these issues. Some feminists saw gender as entirely a social construct, yet others seemed to argue for an essential femininity or femaleness. They tended to be derided for being 'essentialists', yet they had a rather interesting reply, that social constructionism tends to dissolve the notion of femaleness or femininity.
I also recall (without reference) various research projects on playground behaviour, which seemed to argue that whereas girls flock together and socialize, boys stand around sullenly, kick footballs and lumps out of each other.
But that doesn't really tell us whether these behaviours are also socially constructed.
Of course, anecdotally again, many parents swear that boys 'instinctively' reach for the toy tractor and the gun, and girls reach for the doll. Surely there has been some more substantial research on this?
I think the research on male brains might throw some light on this (Baron-Cohen), as male brains seem to be rather emotionally switched off and dissociative. This research also seems to predict that men will tend to be atheists more than women (although some women have male brains).
What you're referring to here is the classic nature/nurture debate. Clearly the jury is still out on a lot of this, but I don't actually have a problem with the idea that a lot of the differences between typically male and typically female behaviour may be innate and biological. That's not my point though.
Even if these behaviours ARE innate and biological, that doesn't mean that there is a real thing that can be subjectively experienced called "gender". In fact, to the extent that the behaviours are biological in origin, we don't call them gender; we call them sex. If it is discovered one day that a specific genetic difference between men and women causes men to be more aggressive, or women to be more compassionate, or whatever, then all that knowledge will do is add to our awareness of the reach of biological sex.
But the whole point of gender is that it isn't necessarily tied to biological sex. A tomboy, an effeminate man or in extreme cases a transexual can identify with the gender of the opposite physical sex.
As far as I can tell, gender is simply the name given, externally to the experiencing individual and after the fact, to certain clusters of typical characteristics. And "typical" is the oeprative word, since every individual seems to have a different mix of these characteristics anyway.
It all comes down to whether the overall word used to group the characteristics is a real part of the subjective experience of the characteristics or not. As I said, for me it definitely isn't. When I have sex with women, or enjoy fixing computers, I don't "feel male". I just feel the thing that I am doing. Likewise, when I look after my children in ways that might have been considered "motherly" to my parents' generation, or when I enjoy a scented bubble bath, I don't "feel female". Again, I am just doing those things. There is no disconnect in my personality between the part of me that enjoys "typically male" things and the part that enjoys "typically female" ones. The fact of somebody putting them in those boxes has no connection with my subjective experience of them, and would continue to have no such connection even if their "typical" association with masculinity or femininity were proven to be largely biological in origin.
I'm willing to admit that I'm the unusual one, if it turns out that most other people do actually experience this thing called "maleness" or "femaleness", as opposed to just having their behaviour named that way after the fact by society. I suppose that's why I'm interested in talking about it, like a blind person wondering what it's like to experience red.
It may be that gender, as I hypothesised above, is something that people are only aware of when it doesn't work the way it's supposed to (eg when they're born in the "wrong" body, or when their internal nature tells them to be happy as a very butch gay woman, but society judges them for it). Or it may be that people who are naturally at the extremes of the spectrum do experience it as such, and the people like me who are closer to the middle don't. Or it could be all an invention of social control that nobody, if they really examine their internal state of mind, actually feels at all. I don't know...