Chapter 5
In this chapter, I shall look at definitions and terminology covering issues such as what the label ‘queer’ actually describes and how women in all their diversity can possibly be defined under one label or banner. I will also consider some of the critiques of feminism which have come from some sections of academic scholarship, such as queer politics and poststructuralist theory; critiques which usually rely on the charge that feminism is essentialist. I will introduce theory from famous scholars such as the philosopher Judith Butler, who has posed questions for feminism and introduced many contemporary activists to queer theory and queer politics. Queer theory is informed by postmodernism and is associated with the academic study of sex, gender and sexuality. Scholar Gayle Rubin (1984) suggests that whereas feminist theory is about the study of gender oppression, queer theory is the study of gender as a whole, including all the different kinds of gendered and sexed identities, identifications, possibilities, sexualities and sex and gender minorities. Queer politics is concerned with gender fluidity and with promoting the idea of fluid sexualities rather than using fixed labels which can constrain people; somewhat ironically then, it is a label for people who do not like to be labelled. It is a label that is also sometimes, by no means always, associated with promotion of the sex industry, pornography and prostitution, and with a rejection or troubling of notions of structural inequality, especially sexism. This is just one of the reasons I myself do not ascribe to the label. Queer politics often seem more likely to view human individuals as individuals who are affected by and in turn enact individual power and privilege over others in a myriad of different ways, rather than viewing them as members of fixed and narrow social classes such as women, Black people or gay or lesbian people. While it may appear passé or out of date to some, the bad old structural inequalities of sexism, racism, class oppression and homophobia have not disappeared. That is why I firmly believe that identity movements around those identities are important, until the day those identities are no longer oppressed; and that is why I am not drawn to fluid and individualistic queer politics. This background will be important later in the book when I move on to look at some of the particular conflicts between queer and transgender/transexual activists and feminist activists.
Although from the previous discussions in this book about feminist typologies and the history of feminism we can see that the term ‘patriarchy’ is used frequently without question in many of the journals, classic texts and periodicals from the Second Wave, it has gone on to become far from accepted. From at least the 1980s and from the 1990s in particular, this term increasingly came under the spotlight and has been subject to much criticism, particularly from queer theory and other academic approaches. These are not just academic arguments being debated within the proverbial ivory towers and hallowed halls of our fine universities however; they are also being hotly contested within activist circles, especially online. The main critiques of the term ‘patriarchy’ suggest that the concept is naïve, universalising and ethnocentric.
The concept is also critiqued for essentialising women and men. In translation, this means that the term ‘patriarchy’ allegedly assumes that there is some fixed biological essence to all women that makes them one way, and some equally fixed and fundamental essence in all men that makes them another, different way. Critics go on to argue that not only do feminists invoke and construct these essential differences between women and men, they then use them to separate out human beings by sex alone and unfairly turn one group into a dominator class and the other into a subordinate class. This is seen by critics as simplistic and generalising, because power relationships work in many different ways, and it is argued that not all men oppress all women and that creating a sexed dualism like this just hides more complex relationships between human individuals. In this chapter, I will explore these critiques of the concept of patriarchy. In addition, I will also consider a much broader challenge, a challenge which raises a critique for feminism more widely; indeed, it is a critique which threatens feminism as a whole movement. This challenge comes from the academic deconstruction of the term ‘woman’, and with it the deconstruction of the terrain upon which the Feminist Movement has been built and on which it perhaps still rests.
Judith Butler is arguably one of the most well-known philosophers to have raised these important challenges for the Feminist Movement. Linking to the critiques listed above, one of her arguments is that much feminist theory has been guilty of ethnocentrism, by assuming that patriarchy is universal and that the sex/gender relationships and embodiments in the West are duplicated in every human society. Butler is also known for troubling the category of ‘woman’, seeing this concept as a corollary to the concept of universal patriarchy. She asserts that the category of woman has become a totalising category, a label which falsely assumes a ‘seamless category of women’ (1990:4). Far from being seamless, Butler emphasises the limits of identity politics within the group ‘women’ and she questions what the category even means: what is a woman anyway?
This question may sound like a non-question to many readers, but to feminist activist organisers, it is no doubt one they have encountered numerous times. It is both an academic but also a practical question and it has a history, an important history. It contains challenges to racism within feminism for example, and to homophobia within feminism; it asks us to think about who our movement speaks out for, who we mean when we say ‘women’ and who we exclude and include. As we all see the world from our own perspective, standpoint or position, we can sometimes assume that the issues we face as women in our own personal lives will be similar for all other women. But too often, this ‘we’ in feminism is White, heterosexual, able-bodied, feminised, heterosexualised and highly educated for example. All these features are factors of identity, and they will affect one’s experiences of sexism, as well as of advantage and disadvantage more broadly. This is summed up in the term explained earlier – intersectionality – a term which has recently moved out of academia and into fairly mainstream commentary on contemporary feminism and feminist activism. It is a term which many activists today will probably be overly familiar with. Even if you are not immersed in feminist activism though, but follow reviews or accounts of feminist campaigns and publications in the media, then you may also have come across this term before. Recent attention on the term does not mean that it is widely understood however.
Intersecting inequalities across borders
To move on then from the earlier brief introduction to this term, intersectionality, we can use this term to describe how power relationships intersect and interrelate, both within and between different identified social groups or identities. For example, there is a power relationship along the fault line of sexed identity between women and men, but there will also be powerful differences between women and men along the lines of race and class. There are power differences between men, who share a sex but may not share a race or social class or sexuality. Women too are not all the same, or all equal. There are power relationships at work between women as well, along the lines of social class, sexuality, disability and race for example. Sometimes, in the Western context at least, when we think of terms like those in that list, like ‘gender’ or ‘race’, we tend to think about rights for women and rights for Black people. It seems like the term ‘gender’ has actually developed a sex, or maybe it always did have; and the term ‘race’ definitely has a race, and probably always did. It is not so common then to think of White people when we hear reference to race or to men when we hear reference to gender. An intersectional perspective draws our attention to the fact that all human beings actually inhabit many identities all at once, that all of us have a race, a gender identity, a sex, a social class and a sexual identity for example.
An intersectional perspective highlights then that identities are never fixed and singular, but often many and varied; thus, power relationships between individuals are rarely straightforward. There are power relationships between all of us, whether we like it or not. They surround us like camouflaged contours on the maps of our lives and they play out in our relationships, our careers and our education for example. Power relationships may seem simple enough; they are often hierarchical dualisms with which we are familiar: Black/White, adult/child, gay/straight, man/woman. But we also know too that of course, no individual is just one of these labels or identities, nor do these identities necessarily stay the same throughout our whole lives – our age changes, our sexuality may change, our health may change, our caring or parenting status may change. With such changes, we move in and out of certain recognised social groups; we also move in and out of power. This power shift happens because certain elements of our identity might bring us degrees of privilege in society, and others may not.
We all then inhabit a complicated position at the eye of the storm of power relationships which surrounds us, our history and our trajectory. At different times, we may be made by our society to be more aware of certain elements of our identity rather than others, and they may not always be the features others might assume would be paramount. For example, my experiences of homophobia throughout my life have been far more visible to me than my experiences of sexism. This is an example of a difference between myself and a heterosexual feminist woman, who may be much more alert than I would be to sexual harassment and everyday sexism.
The scholar Kimberle Crenshaw, who coined the term ‘intersectionality’ in 1989, explored how a failure to adequately recognise those standing at the intersection of various oppressed identities, such as Black women, results in the ultimate failure of political social movements for racial equality and for women’s equality. Crenshaw argued that in relation to male violence against women for example, adequate prevention and response for BME or Black and global majority ethnic women who are affected by male violence is limited by racism and sexism, including from within anti-racist and feminist communities themselves. Crenshaw pointed out that some anti-racist groups were male-dominated, did not understand the needs of Black women and were sexist. Likewise, some feminist groups were Whitedominated, racist and did not understand or pay attention to the experiences of Black women who face both racism and sexism together. The persistence of racism and sexism within movements aimed at overturning those very oppressions is perhaps an example of what feminist academic and activist Mieke Verloo (2005) calls the ‘interfering inequalities’, which trouble and complicate the passage of all equality movements.
While such interfering inequalities have always been a key concern in the WLM, issues of inclusion and exclusion have continued to become increasingly significant for contemporary feminist activism, with many activists today enthusiastically committed to opening up feminism to all allies, rather than imposing any borders around the movement. Many activists are committed to an intersectional feminism, to a social movement which actively tries to recognise the complexity of identity, as well as notice and include those previously and currently silenced and excluded. There has been a marked shift towards mixed activism for example, with men increasingly included in feminist spaces; there has also been a necessary clarification of trans inclusion in women-only feminist spaces. In contrast to the early days of the Second Wave, groups today often clarify what they mean by the term ‘woman’, as this is no longer seen as selfevident. Groups often state that their spaces are open to ‘self-identified women’, thereby including transexual- or transgender-identified women. As any feminist activist will know, these sorts of decisions are fraught with controversy and have become a common fault line in the modern WLM. This is just one reason why these debates do matter, and why it is important to engage with the challenges from queer theory, a body of work which actually has a lot more in common with feminist theory than is often acknowledged.
The new woman question
The category of woman itself has come under fire from queer theory, and so also have the categories of gender and even sex. Judith Butler’s important theory of gender performativity defines gender as a social construction. By gender, I mean masculinity and femininity. Butler asserts that gender is a phenomenon that is brought into existence only by the repeated, high-quality performances of the current cultural norms for masculinity and femininity. It is the quality and the repetition of these performances that ironically adds to their natural appearance, and thus to their presumed naturalness. It follows then that if we all stopped ‘doing’ gender, it would cease to exist. The argument is that there is no ‘real’ gender behind your gender presentation – there is only your presentation. From this perspective, categories such as woman and man are not clear and fixed, and they certainly cannot exist outside of the cultural norms that create, label and define them. In fact, it is these cultural norms which bring the labels into being in the first place, through the act of naming, recognition and the following presumption of continued compliance and maintenance. To simplify this theory then, gender, as in masculinity and femininity, is not natural or biological, and it does not come naturally to human beings. In fact, most people put a great deal of work into their gender; they spend a lot of time, money and effort on appearing recognisably masculine or feminine.
It is important to note that gender is not the same as biological sex. Sex currently describes at least three recognised sexes: female, male and intersex. These labels describe biological features of the body, such as reproductive capacity, hormones, chromosomes and genitalia. Intersex refers to people born with what are sometimes rather inappropriately called ambiguous genitalia, but this simply just means that they are born with different sexed characteristics which include features labelled as male and female, not just genitals and reproductive capacity, but also hormones for example. This used to wrongly be referred to in a very medicalised or pathologising way as hermaphrodite or hermaphroditic. Thankfully, there is now a growing, global intersex rights movement, which tries to stop medical institutions from performing unnecessary surgery on babies born with these bodily characteristics. Too often the response has been a brutal one, which sought to forcibly ‘normalise’ these babies, determined to fit them into one sexed box or another with medical interventions that often resulted in a lifetime of ill health, scrutiny and painful surgeries on one’s most intimate body parts.
Very different to biological features of the sexed body however, gender most simply describes masculinity and femininity. There are actually many more than two genders though; the term can also be used to describe any individual’s expression of their own sense of gender identity. For example, we could say that androgynous, macho or camp might also be gender expressions, as might be a mixture of these, or something else entirely of someone’s own creation. There are also many people, including many feminists, who do not wish to be defined by gender at all, or to define themselves as one gender or another. In fact, for many feminists, the existence of gender at all is a problem; I will go into this in more detail later. For now, to return to the most common, narrow sense of these terms, sex and gender are usually assumed to be congruent; that is, to be matching. Matching, in contemporary Western society, usually means of course that females are supposed to be feminine and males are supposed to be masculine. If we think of current stereotypes or ideal types of masculinity, we can see what men are meant to be, usually strong in wealth, power or physicality for example, perhaps preferably all three. Gender can therefore certainly be expressed through the body, in terms of physicality in the definition of masculinity above, but it does not depend on the body or lie dormant within it like some sort of genetic feature or inherent essence. Gender is not born. No baby is born masculine or feminine. Although we may hear such terms often, especially in policy, legal and employment documents, there is no such thing as a ‘birth gender’ or a ‘gender acquired at birth’. Gender is a set of learnt behaviours; it is the cultural roles and expectations of behaviour, dress, work, appearance and physicality that are attached to males and females.
We can say that most female people have the biological capacity to give birth, but we cannot say, for example, that most female people biologically have long hair or sit with their legs crossed. There is no biological link between being female and having long hair, wearing make-up or wearing dresses, while there is a biological link between being female and having the capacity to give birth. Likewise, there is no biological link between being male and having short hair, or liking football or being violent. Of course, scientific studies emerge periodically, usually very well received and publicised, which seek to ‘prove’ such gendered couplings: that girls like pink, that boys like blue, that men are biologically incapable of ironing and so the list goes on. There is often an accompanying lack of reflexivity as to the irony in these studies, which on the one hand portray men as naturally physical, practically minded, logical providers and protectors, while simultaneously claiming they are naturally unable to cook for themselves or wash their own pants. Such pop psychology has been beautifully branded by the scientist and author Cordelia Fine as neuro-sexism; same old sexism, wrapped up in peer review.
The gender binary that so many seek to prove, maintain and justify scientifically or otherwise, is what Judith Butler calls the ‘heterosexual matrix’. This matrix depends on humans being organised by sex and gender, and then living up to their sexed and gendered labels. Female babies are called girls and are supposed to grow up to be feminine; male babies are called boys and are supposed to grow up to be masculine. When a baby is born, the question usually asked first is whether the baby is a boy or a girl – this is seen as an intrinsic part of being human. As it stands, society may have a hard time adjusting to human beings who were not sexed and gendered because this is such a fundamental distinction. Butler argues then, that, in contemporary Western society at least, being sexed and gendered is compulsory, and, taking on from the work of feminist poet and writer Adrienne Rich (1980), that this system is also marked by compulsory heterosexuality. This phrase refers to societies where heterosexuality is taken as the norm and assumed to be the norm, but also, where that status quo is enforced. Heterosexuality is enforced by being aggrandised, actively promoted, rewarded and maintained above other sexual identities and expressions which are silenced, discouraged and punished. We can see this in hate crimes against lesbian, bisexual and gay people for example, in homophobic bullying within schools and in tragic murders, such as the fatal assault against 62-year-old gay man Ian Baynham in 2009, punched and kicked to death in the middle of Trafalgar Square in central London simply for holding hands with another man. In order for heterosexuality to be promoted and maintained, individuals need to be divided up by sex and gender into polar opposites and they need to comply with those labels visibly and unmistakably if heterosexuality is to continue as an institution in its present form. It should be noted then that it follows that, like gender, heterosexuality is also a social construction; it too is neither natural nor biological.
Butler questions the relationship between feminism and the heterosexual matrix. Firstly, she argues that the category of ‘woman’ cannot possibly contain all the diverse human beings that may be identified as, or identify as, women. Therefore, attempting to draw borders around the identity inevitably invokes cases which will not fit, or which will refuse to fit, within those boundaries. Secondly, Butler suggests that by building a political movement and a politics around and for this category ‘woman’, feminism also constructs the category itself and brings it into being, while claiming simply to represent it. Thus, Butler raises the highly provocative question as to whether feminism is complicit in the very system it claims to oppose, by using predefined, narrow concepts of men and women, rather than searching for more radical alternatives or rather than rejecting the heterosexual matrix and its labels outright. The argument follows then, that every time feminism invokes the idea of woman as a category, we bring it into being, we buy into and maintain the heterosexual matrix. ‘The suggestion that feminism can seek wider representation for a subject that it itself constructs has the ironic consequence that feminist goals risk failure by refusing to take account of the constitutive powers of their own representational claims’ (1990:4). Or, as transexual activist and writer Kate Bornstein puts it more simply, to accept women and men as two distinct, pre-existing or a priori gendered categories, and to identify with one or the other, only serves to construct and maintain those categories. ‘Once we choose one or the other, we’ve bought into the system that perpetuates the binary’ (1995:101).
So, if we take Butler’s theory then, if gender is performative and a social construct, does this mean that gender is not ‘real’? Is it just an act that we can choose to take on or take off? The answer to the latter question is definitely no. Butler’s theory of gender performativity is not the same thing as performance. Performance suggests voluntarism – it suggests choice, temporality, diversity and play, whereas in the heterosexual matrix, none of these is generally present. Exceptions to the rule do occur of course. I am not trying to suggest that everyone goes through life like some kind of robotic Barbie or Ken doll. However, sometimes any exceptions that do occur only further solidify the rule. To take an example, say a person assumes that a baby dressed in blue is male, or that an individual with short hair and trousers is a man, their reading, or assumption, may not always be right. The baby may be female; the individual in trousers may identify as a woman. Such an incidence will often be seen as a ‘mistake’. When such a mistake or misreading occurs, people rarely use the event to reflect on the wonderful variety of human identity and expression. They simply think to themselves that they made a mistake due to the individual’s sex and/or gender presentation being unclear. Of course, what they are comparing this unclear presentation to is an assumed norm, the binary, narrow, rigid gender norm of female femininity and male masculinity. Thus bodies are seen not to ‘fit’, or to have the ‘wrong’ presentation, or to be unclear or unreadable to viewers, resulting in ‘mistakes’ which, strangely, usually only further entrench people’s belief in the naturalness of the norm. Or to put it more simply, we need to believe that one way of being and appearing is the ‘right’ way in order to view any other way as ‘wrong’.
To return to the earlier question then, does all of this theorising mean that gender is not ‘real’? I think it probably does. Gender is clearly a very social construction. This is proven in the fact that gender changes over time and space, whereas biological sex stays pretty much the same. Gender is historically, culturally and geographically specific – by which I just mean that it looks different in different countries and cultures and that it has looked different throughout history. In Britain, in the 1900s for example, pink was often considered too bold and brash a colour for girls to wear, being seen as more suitable for boys. Today however, pink is not considered a very masculine colour, and toys and clothing seem to have become more gender segregated over the years, rather than less. If gender were biological, then we would expect masculine appearance, roles and behaviours to stay the same over time and place. The fact that this is not the case should surely make us doubt the fixity of gender. None of this suggests that gender is not lived and experienced though. It does not mean that our gendered lives and experiences are not ‘real’.
In her 1993 book Bodies That Matter, Butler attempted to address some of the misreadings and simplifications that had developed around her earlier work. She clarified that she never suggested that gendered categories did not matter, or that we can all freely play around with gender like children at some giant pick and mix sweetie stand. As Butler reiterated more recently in a 2014 interview, we must not lose track, amongst all our theorising, of the right to live out our own sex and gender identity, whatever that may be and whether we personally experience it as biological or not. Nor must we forget that doing just that, living one’s preferred personal identity, can sometimes be dangerous and can actually lead to loss of life.
No matter whether one feels one’s gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives. So whether one wants to be free to live out a ‘hard-wired’ sense of sex or a more fluid sense of gender, is less important than the right to be free to live it out, without discrimination, harassment, injury, pathologization or criminalization – and with full institutional and community support.
Butler, 2014
All of us live in real bodies, bodies that are policed and trained by the social norms which surround us. Ours are bodies that can be hurt through trying to tow the line, as well as hurt for stepping out of line. Gender may be a fiction, but it is not a joke; it can mean life and death. We live gender therefore, we live it out in our human bodies, just as it also acts upon us and shapes us accordingly, moulding us into acceptable displays of masculinity and femininity.
Significantly for my discussion about the definition of the category of ‘woman’, Butler also asserted that this particular identity category is necessary for feminist political reasons. Butler clarified that she never suggested that the category of woman did not matter, or that subjects within it did not have a bodily materiality, albeit under/within the current binary gender system. She does repeat however, that there are dangers associated with mobilising politically under terms constructed by the system which that very mobilisation is against. Therefore, she argues, for our part, feminists can open up the category of ‘woman’, or at least leave it open, not pin it down or fence it off. This does not just mean that we leave open what it means to be a woman, it also means we leave open what a woman even is in the first place and how, or whether, we could define all women. Butler sees this as an exciting emancipatory project, one that could make feminism change and grow to become more relevant to more people.
This deconstruction could also co-exist with a strategic use of the term ‘woman’ when politically necessary though. We could do both – use the term, but still continue to recognise and challenge the limits of it. Echoing the important scholar Spivak’s (2008) useful theory of ‘strategic essentialism’, Butler insists that it must be possible to use the term ‘woman’ while still critiquing it, because we acknowledge we are positioned and limited by it. To summarise then, as feminists we often reject the patriarchal definitions of what a woman should be and is, but we still use this very term ‘woman’ to rise up against that patriarchal system. Using a particular term like this, strategically and practically, as a mobiliser or a banner to unite under should always be done cautiously and consciously and it should always be temporary. Spivak reminds that we should always consider the ‘dangerousness of something one cannot not use’ (2008:5).
Butler was wrong however when she stated that ‘the question is not whether or not there ought to be reference to matter, just as the question never has been whether or not there ought to be speaking about women’ (1993:29). In fact, this is just what has happened, the latter has become perhaps the question within feminism, at least for those immersed in, researching or studying this movement. In what could be seen as a reformulation of what was called in the nineteenth century the ‘woman question’, the newer, new woman question is literally the question of what is a woman. Debates about the deconstruction of sex and gender have been interpreted by many feminists as an accusation that the WLM is built on sand, on a fictional category. If there is no such stable, unifying class or group category as ‘woman’, then how can there be such a thing as women’s oppression or a women’s movement to end it?
Reclaiming radical feminism
How can radical feminism respond to these challenging and important debates? Firstly, it is useful to remember the key components of radical feminism. I have identified four key defining features which can distinguish it from other schools of feminism. These are the acknowledgement and analysis of patriarchy, the prioritisation of women-only political organising, a focus on male violence against women as a keystone of women’s oppression and, fourthly, the extension of the analysis of male violence against women to include the industries of pornography and prostitution. It is important to understand that these are only distinguishing features; they are some aspects that arguably set apart or define radical feminism’s particular foci when compared to other recognisable schools of feminism. This definition in no way precludes radical feminist analysis of, or attention to all other social justice issues. For example, the masculinisation of wealth and power, capitalism, war and militarism, racism, environmentalism, reproductive rights, class struggles, caring work, parenthood, childcare and animal rights; all of these and so many more are issues that radical feminist theory, rightly and urgently, has and does address.
The focus of this particular school of feminism certainly does not end at rape, or porn or domestic abuse, it has merely worked tirelessly to ensure that those issues are included in broader political analysis, are on the agenda, are in focus at all. In return for that effort, those of us proud to identify as radical feminists are often assumed to be blinkered to any other kind of human suffering or injustice, as if we do not care about women’s poverty, as if we do not care about men exploited in sweatshops, forced into war, or raped or killed. Some people really believe that radical feminists only care about the issue of male violence against women, simply because we are the ones who have arguably done most to raise awareness of that issue. At the root of this common assumption lies the problem that all too often prioritising women is seen as excluding men. This is just another of the ongoing challenges for feminism in general of course: the difficulty of focussing on women in a phallocentric or male-focussed society. Our work can often invoke a knee-jerk discomfort which kicks against this movement for the less powerful half of humanity. Such discomfort was identified, recounted and commented on frequently by the contemporary feminists I spoke to in my research on RTN activism. It was this discomfort that sometimes appeared to lurk in the background of some resistance to women-only RTN marches for example and it also could be found behind concerns over sexism towards men. I will outline and explore these issues in more detail later in this book, but it is important to note that these very live and current issues can be related back to the fundamental practical questions of borders and definitions which are being addressed in this chapter. These seemingly theoretical debates translate into real and urgent questions such as why should feminism separate out women and men anyway? Why should feminism continue to use a binary division which we know has stereotyped men just as much as women?
From a radical feminist perspective, it is not necessary to advocate that gender is inherent and biological in order to accept that these categories were not created equal. I disagree with the former and agree with the latter. As already discussed, gender arguably has no basis in biology. Even biological sex may not be as fixed and binary as has been assumed, as in the case of infants born intersex for example. However, as mentioned earlier, this does not mean that sex and gender are not experienced as lived identities, by humans who often have little or no choice whether they adopt gendered roles or not, within a heterosexual matrix that uses sex and gender as a marker of humanity itself.
It is possible then to say that ‘women’ exist. They are adult human beings who have been defined within patriarchy as women and as female, usually based on a cursory exam of their genitals at birth when they were labelled female and girls. But, all these women are also all unique individuals; it would be difficult to decide on any one defining feature of women. Most often, attempts at any such definition would resort to biology and indeed women as a group do share things because of their biology, or rather, and this is important, because of how their biology is treated within patriarchy. Women as a group, not every individual woman, but women as a group, share the capacity to give birth for example. This raises the potential of unwanted pregnancies, which gives rise to concerns around access to free, safe, legal and non-stigmatised abortion. Pregnancy and child rearing can also be a common site of experience between women, both positive and negative. Women as a group, not every single individual woman, but generally, women also share menstruation for example, which is stigmatised within patriarchy. Women are also subject to misogynistic attacks on their bodily integrity, such as sexual violence or female genital mutilation. However, as has been explored already, biology is not always so simple a marker. Many women cannot give birth for example, and there are women who do not have wombs, or ovaries or breasts, not every woman chooses pregnancy or experiences pregnancy and not every woman menstruates. Women’s bodies take many diverse forms and change throughout a lifetime. Perhaps the only thing that women share beyond doubt or question is the lived experience of being treated as women in a society where that means second class; and that includes how our bodies are treated. In a sense then, the only thing that unites us as women in all our diversity is our shared experiences of resisting and surviving sexism in its many and changing forms, however conscious of that process we may be. I am then asserting that women and men are two distinct groups, but that this is a political, rather than a biological divide.
There will be many women who are loathe to think of themselves as belonging to a political group or social class purely by nature of their sex; this is also anathema to many contemporary queer activists who view such a dichotomy as simplistic and deterministic. Yet, I would argue that this understanding of sex class is a prerequisite for feminist identification, for feminist action and for change. As Kate Millett has argued, ‘the emergence of a positive collective identity proceeds revolutionary awareness and marks the difference between it and pointless uprisings which only spin back into further reaction’ ([1969]1972:355). This is also a key requirement for all identity-based social movements of course, not just feminism, but Black civil rights movements, lesbian and gay movements or disability rights movements for example. Social movement scholars have studied what they call collective identity or class identity in such uprisings, a feature which obviously relies upon individuals considering themselves part of a class or identity in the first place.
Statistics evidence women’s inferior position compared to men around the globe. This is therefore a structural inequality which does exist and which has not gone away. This unequal sexual status quo benefits men, not every man as an individual, but men as a group. The status quo does not benefit women, not every woman as an individual, but women as a group. Wherever you look in the world, this hierarchy between men and women is present. Amongst poor and oppressed peoples, women in those groups will be poorer. Amongst the uneducated and the displaced, women will be there in higher number than men. In times of civil war or other conflict, women will make up high numbers of those displaced. Women are also highly represented in casualties and fatalities of war, though they are less likely to be fighting themselves as combatants, much less making political and economic decisions to go to war. Women and children also face sexual violence in war, such as the use of rape as a weapon, and they can then face further problems such as accessing health care or safe legal abortions. In countries and cultures where education is hard to come by, girls will often be the ones most likely to be denied an education. Even if you look at the higher echelons of society, if we look at the gender pay gap in banking in the UK for example, we find that privileged educated women are still being paid thousands of pounds less compared to their male colleagues. Women are not equal to men. This probably seems an uncontroversial claim, but what many rarely do is move on from that to conclude that women are unequal because of men. The workings of patriarchy, which is made up of the actions of men as a social class, oppress women as a class - that is precisely how patriarchy rules and has done so for so long.
Women are then in the peculiar position of not being a minority, yet being oppressed in a way we commonly associate with the treatment of minority groups. Oppressed may seem a strong word, many may associate this term more with political repression, for example the treatment of certain ethnic or religious groups in dictatorial or unstable regimes. When I use the term, like most feminists I refer to the common dictionary definition. Last time I checked in my Oxford English, the term ‘oppression’ referred to prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or exercise of authority. I believe it is not a misuse of the term then to suggest that women as a group have been subject to cruel and unjust treatment for millennia, simply for being born female, under the exercise of male authority. This oppression is not good for women; obviously, oppression is not good for anybody, it has an effect on the oppressed and that effect is not pretty. In studies of inequality, the effect of being oppressed, usually applied to minority groups, leads to something called minority group status – an inferiority complex, an internalised belief in the lies the ruling group tells you about yourself. This is basically the playing out of what the sociologist Robert Merton called a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, if you are given a particular label replete with certain expectations and treated accordingly, eventually you will start to act exactly as that label defines.
Millett points out that with the label of woman, the expectations and beliefs of that label are mediated to us through every area of our lives from birth.
When in any group of persons, the ego is subjected to such invidious versions of itself through social beliefs, ideology, and tradition, the effect is bound to be pernicious. This coupled with the persistent through frequently subtle denigration women encounter daily through personal contacts, the impressions gathered from the images and media about them, and the discrimination in matters of behaviour, employment, and education which they endure, should make it no very special cause for surprise that women develop group characteristics common to those who suffer minority status and a marginal existence
Millett, [1969]1972:55
The category of woman does indeed matter therefore. There is a justifiable need for a politics around this category, a politics around this mystery that is woman which philosophers struggle to define. It is striking of course that while all these academic and theoretical debates unfurl, our enemies seem to have no problem defining us. Despite our postmodern pondering, somehow women in their billions all over the world are still successfully distinguished from men and earmarked for lower pay, fewer legal rights, male ownership and a denial of bodily integrity. I suggest then that we accept that the binary gender system is a social construction, but also appreciate that it is a construction with ancient and still strong foundations. The effects of it are real. As long as it exists, there will be many individuals committed to chipping it away, to changing it and, like many feminists, to demolishing it altogether. But, to emphasise once again, our paying attention to this system, contrary to the challenges from queer theory outlined earlier, does not mean that we built it or that we seek to maintain it; quite the contrary. To blame feminists like that is just a case of shooting the messenger. As the wonderful and inspiring radical feminist writer and activist, the late Andrea Dworkin summarises so passionately,
[t]o be a feminist means recognising that one is associated with all women not as an act of choice but as a matter of fact. The sex-class system creates the fact. When that system is broken, there will be no such fact. Feminists do not create this common condition by making alliances: feminists recognise this common condition because it exists as an intrinsic part of sex oppression.
1983:221
Earlier I pointed out that Butler has argued that deconstructing woman could be a positive project, but this has by no means been seen as inevitable by many feminists. Incidentally, this is not just a concern for feminism, but for all social movements which are mobilising around a particular identity. It is a concern because we are all then uprising politically around a category that also limits and oppresses us, a category we are seeking to challenge. These were the dangers pointed out in the discussion earlier by theorists such as Butler and Spivak. But some feminists have argued that while we can acknowledge the limitations of the label of woman and challenge what it represents within patriarchy, deconstructing the category woman may be far from exciting or liberatory. There is a danger looming, the danger that we could get lost in such a project, and that it will only become confusing and all consuming, without presenting any challenge at all to patriarchy. As feminist commentator Croson warns in an article on the importance of women-only organising, ‘deconstructing woman is of absolutely no help in deconstructing male power’ (2001:9). It is the latter which I assert is, or should be, the project of feminism – by which I mean all feminism/s. This is a project which did not create gender categories, but which arises as one response to them. It is a political response to a social structure where power and privilege is accorded to one half of humanity over another, based purely on their assigned sex and attached gender at birth.
To conclude then, mobilising around the category of woman does not mean that feminism has been blinkered to the constructed nature of this category. In fact, feminism generally, and radical feminism in particular, has been extremely progressive in its analysis of gender as a social construction. This is highlighted not least by the important radical feminist analyses of male violence as political rather than biological; it can also be seen in the understanding of patriarchy as political rather than biological. The aim to continuously interrogate and challenge social divisions and markers like sex and gender is indeed an important project; it is an important project today for queer theorists, but it has always been so for radical feminism.
Returning to the classics
In the early radical feminist publication The Dialectic of Sex for example, written by the late Shulamith Firestone in 1970, gender, as in masculinity and femininity, is not presented as biological. Nor is patriarchy presented as biological, inherent or immutable. Firestone is most commonly known amongst feminists for having argued the case for so-called mechanical wombs, to free women from the biological burden of childbirth. Her argument is in fact far more subtle than this crude summary which abounds about her work. Her focus on reproduction was perhaps also misplaced, as childbirth does not have to lead to childrearing necessarily. Society could easily decide to organise childcare and childrearing quite differently to what we do currently. There is nothing inherent in reproductive capacity which lends itself to oppression of course. Early revolutionary and radical feminists actually emphasised this when they explained the importance of considering sex as a political class and this was fundamental to their theory. This is illustrated in this quote from papers on women and sex class, printed in the Second Wave journal Scarlet Women in 1977 and written by now famous names like Sheila Jeffreys and Jalna Hanmer. ‘It is not our biology that oppresses us, it is the value that men place on it . . . Our biology oppresses us because of the value men place on it, per se it is not oppressive’ (Hanmer et al., 1977:9).
The point about patriarchy being political rather than biological is argued most persuasively in the work of pioneering radical feminist theorist Kate Millett. Millett’s Sexual Politics, published in 1969, still stands as one of the most extensive and thorough exposés of the long history of the workings and effects of patriarchy. It was also impressively forward thinking in analysing gender as a cultural construct, and in exploring the emerging work on gender and sexed identity by well-known researchers such as Robert Stoller, and the far less renowned John Money.
Millett refers to patriarchy as a form of social government and to sex roles as a product of this ‘nakedly oppressive social system’ ([1969]1972:343). One of the critiques of feminism that I looked at earlier is the suggestion that it universalises patriarchy. Is this true then in Millett’s classic analysis? Millett does indeed define patriarchy as universal, asserting that male supremacy is a feature of societies worldwide. ‘Perhaps patriarchy’s greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity . . . While the same might be said of class, patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature’ (Millett, [1969]1972:58). Here she is stressing that it is precisely because of its longevity and universality in fact, that patriarchy increasingly resists challenge by presenting itself as natural. As the famous philosopher John Stuart Mill, whom Millett refers to in her book, argued much earlier in his 1869 treatise on The Subjection of Women, ‘The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural’ (1984:270). The longer the system endures therefore, the more it will be defended on the grounds of its apparent suitability and naturalness.
As Millett points out though, assertions that things have always been this way can only ever be assertions, because studies of social organising in pre-history remain largely speculation. The historian Gerda Lerner, introduced earlier in this book, argues that male supremacy appears as a constant throughout available histories, across the globe, therefore highlighting the universality of patriarchy. To defend this position, Lerner asserts that in contrast, female supremacy has never existed anywhere.
There is not a single society known where womenas-a-group have decision-making power over men or where they define the rules of sexual conduct or control marriage exchanges . . . when that power includes the public domain and foreign relations and when women make essential decisions not only for their kinfolk but for the community.
1986:30
It should be possible then, to acknowledge that patriarchy is universal; though to do so does not, and should not, entail homogenising the form that patriarchy takes in different cultures and communities around the world. It seems that it is the latter, rather than the former, that leads to critiques of feminism, particularly of its analysis of patriarchy. Of course, patriarchy looks different in different countries and cultures; that does not mean it does not exist. Radical feminists were far from unaware that gendered and sexed relations and dynamics take different forms globally and culturally – it would be patronising to suggest they were so unaware and so unrealistic. But the global shifting, adapting and fracturing forms of patriarchy throughout history and space in no way preclude the identification of the continuing dominance of male supremacy and female subordination as a system of social organisation and governance.
Millett ([1969]1972) argues that without the sex-class system of patriarchy, sex would no longer matter as a marker, so sex and gender roles would cease to exist in their present state at least. Women can therefore be seen as a product of patriarchy, not only politically, but bodily too. With similarities to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus (1986), Millett explains how women’s physicality is inscribed on them, a process whereby their bodies are literally fitted into the requirements of their sex role, as patriarchy acts on and shapes their bodies. JS Mill mentioned this too in his 1869 treatise when he spoke of women of the upper and middle classes being treated like greenhouse or hothouse plants, being confined in pots, trimmed, kept indoors, trained to grow in a certain way and kept sheltered from the weather. His point was that girls are grown to be the fairer sex and that if boys were treated in the same way, they may well be fairer, gentler and less physical and muscular. We can see habitus in the way that women take up space for example, or not, often taking up less space than men do. To give a very simple example, I often see women sitting on the bus with their legs crossed, while men take up almost a whole seat with their legs spread apart. Women sometimes walk differently to men, taking shorter strides and keeping their bodies more contained. The point here is that this is not due to biology; the bodies of women and men have just been trained in certain ways. ‘The heavier musculature of the male, a secondary sexual characteristic and common among mammals, is biological in origin but is also culturally encouraged through breeding, diet and exercise’ (Millett, [1969]1972:27). Thus the gender system does not just affect our minds, as I said earlier, it actually affects our physical bodies too – men as well as women. In her classic text Millett therefore troubles the presumed naturalness of gender and sex roles, highlighting that appearance, mannerisms, physique, attitudes and behaviours are in fact socially constructed and manipulated in patriarchy’s image.
To summarise, the category of woman can arguably be seen from a radical feminist analysis as a political rather than biological category. ‘The patriarchal mentality has concocted a whole series of rationales about women . . . And these traditional beliefs still invade our consciousness and affect our thinking to an extent few of us would be willing to admit’ (Millett, [1969]1972:46). Feminism generally, and radical feminism in particular, invokes this identity in the process of founding a resistance movement to the oppression attached to the category; that does not mean we are wedded to the category. It does not mean we see the category as immutable. As a movement based on identity, feminism has indeed emphasised the borders of that identity, but those borders are rarely based on biology. More often, as stated earlier in this section, they are based on shared experiences of oppression for those marked as female and as women, within male supremacy.
To conclude then, I propose that radical feminist theory is in fact fully congruent with a Butlerian understanding of gender as a social construct and is certainly far from the essentialist project it is often accused of being. How then do all these theoretical, political and academic debates play out in the actual organisation of feminist activism today and just how relevant are they? I shall now turn to look at the work of contemporary feminist activists themselves, and highlight how such debates influence and shape their motivations and practice.