Gender and the Self

I've been meaning to upload this for ages. This essay, which I wrote about two years ago, is what totally changed my view on the world with regard to gender and sexuality. Unfortunately I can't find the version which has my in-text references in, so bear with me, please!

So...what is gender?

Historically, humans have categorised themselves by assigning “gender”, defined as a social construction, to bodies “sexed” by biology. I believe that the self is not only a fragile entity, but a constantly changing one – a “fluctuating identity” – and sex and gender function like any other variable in the way they affect us. We are aware of the physiological differences between men and women, just as we are aware of the physiological differences between people of African or Asian race, and so I think that assigning gender to selves is similar to assigning race. Both have foundations in nature, then are built up by society. Gender strengthens selves, firstly by allowing them to exist under the guise of permanence, secondly by creating the sense of community. Paradoxically nevertheless, it can potentially take power from selves, since “community” implies superior status for those within it, and inferior status for those excluded. Any category creates restrictions upon the self, limiting the ways we can move about within it, and thus we are at risk of becoming trapped by unjust assumptions generated by the gender stereotype. Although to say that gender is an inherent property of the self is to discount our transience and individuality, to say that gender does not affect the self at all is to suggest that the self is disconnected from the body altogether.

Our body is “the locus of a disassociated self” which has merely “the illusion of a substantial unity”. For this reason, separating human beings based on the sex of their bodies is nothing more than an attempt to make the self appear coherent and enduring. Most people remain either male or female throughout their whole lives, which allows them to find constancy in their self-concept by clinging to a gender definition. April Ashley was distraught because he felt that his self was fragmented, a female mind in a male body. When he was able to reconcile gender and sex, he was content, because he had found the semblance of stability. It is not until puberty that male and female bodies begin to change to become sharply distinct; we become aware of our gender, identifying ourselves as men and women, labels which seem more permanent, in response to those changes. This is why Greer’s “stereotype” has lasted; it is proven through the continuing success of Mills and Boon novels. Embracing the generic stereotype of the romantic heroine can help women come to terms with the disharmony and discord in their lives and selves. Moreover, Oakley in Sex, Gender and Society describes how our feeling of security as adults, indeed, our “mental health” can only be preserved by “staying within the boundaries” of gender, which proves that gender is similar to ethnicity, which is also based on genetic variation. In Looking for Alibrandi, a popular modern novel, Josie’s Italian heritage becomes a rock for her to hang onto during her tumultuous adolescence, because it has been “nailed” into her. Therefore, our selves may find permanence, forgetting the temporality and malleability of our existence, in linking physical appearance and gender, just as they do by linking it with ethnicity.

Gender is part of the matrix of beliefs within which we construct our selves. We exist in “a field of overlapping social and cultural identities”, one of which is whether we are male or female, and through “intersubjective recognition” we make our selves whole. Identification with others was the reason why April Ashley “longed to be a woman”. He shared the trappings of gender – “jewels, fur, make-up” – with the group sectioned off by society as “women”. Once he could belong, he felt “resplendent” from the sense of fellowship and completeness of self. Men are renowned for their “old boys’ clubs”, while women in mainstream media such as Sex and the City also form cliques, finding safety in numbers. Although concepts such as the “Byronic Hero” seem to undermine this, as women find security in a domineering male figure, I believe this is dependence, rather than companionship. We can see that gender behaves like race, another social construction based on biology, as people who share a similar racial background tend to gravitate towards each other, forming mini-communities within a large one. Even in multicultural Sydney, areas such as Leichhardt and Cabramatta are famous for a particular culture. We also observe Josie finding fellowship “with other confused beings” as an Italian. Greer claims that this movement towards others of our own kind is based on “narcissism”, and works to bolster our self-esteem. We can make our selves feel strong and stable by linking them with others, through common threads such as gender.

However, the sense of community also paradoxically implies exclusion, because a community is not only defined by who is in it, but who is not in it. In this way, gender can empower or disempower individual selves. The feminism movement emerged because of indignation at the separation and oppression of the female sex and accused the patriarchy of attempting to use gender as a tool to turn women into inferior selves. The self-images of men had been reinforced, while the self-esteems of women were fairly dismal, as shown by de Beauvoir’s sad reflection on the subjugation of women. Even an ordinary man “behaves at home like a minor god”, empowered by the gender rift. Greer goes even further, to suggest that women have been “castrated”, turned into “eunuchs”, the mere property of men, by the social expectations placed up on them by the gender stereotype. However, I think that men are as victimised by gender as much as women are; they are forced to conform to their own stereotype of the “castrator”. Part of gender’s darker side is that it brings into existence a universal battle, because dichotomy creates a “power struggle” between the two sides. This is just like when we separate humans from the rest of nature, such as through the notion of “stewardship”, and “domination and destruction” of nature then occurs. Gender therefore delegates different powers to selves – de Beauvoir names them “masculine logic” and feminine “magic”, as any form of separation creates conflict between different sides.

These expectations compel both men and women to conform to stereotypes and maintain social order. Gender therefore defines what selves can and cannot do – whatever is deemed detrimental to the peace of the community can be restrained. Whenever men or women rebel against the roles set out for them, there is a disturbance in the community. For example, in Elizabethan England, when Queen Elizabeth rebelled against the gender paradigm by refusing to marry and bear children, this forced people to think that their contemporary view of women could be wrong. Pamphlets with oxymoronic names such as “Haec Vir” (the Womanish-Man) infiltrated the community, and assisted the emergence of a society in which “no rigid pre-existing doctrines dictated what the roles of the sexes should be”. The physical constrictions which gender has a reputation for enforcing reflect the ones placed on the psychological self; women wore corsets in Victorian society and Bantu women elongate their necks with brass rings, while Women’s Lib in the sixties often told their contemporaries to “burn their bras”. Elizabeth Gross was concerned about the “phallocentrism” which, through the “regimes of knowledge”, submerged women. Nationalism has in the past been used to “justify aggression”, being the catalyst and fuel for wars. By re-creating their own history through burying fake artefacts and uncovering them, claiming they were the remnants of an advanced Aryan race, the Nazis succeeded in not only supporting German struggles but moulding the German people to fit their specific regime. People believed their country had laid out a grand part for them to play, and in turn laid down their own lives fighting to maintain their country’s greatness. Gender, like nationality, is indeed a “conservative ideological force” because encourages the “retention” of the original mores by conditioning us.

The essentialists believe that what biology has bestowed upon us, sex, and the psychological paradigm, gender, are equivalent and superior to mundane variables such as hair or eye colour. Someone who is of the female sex will automatically be of the feminine gender, and a self will be created in the image of masculinity or femininity, because of the dichotomy of nature. But these people are neglecting to recognise that the categories based on chromosomes, XY and XX, cannot encompass all human beings, for there are people who possess the genetic codes XXY, XYY or XO. Although every society uses sex to ascribe gender, the composition of gender differs between communities. For example, William Davenport noted that in a certain Southwest Pacific society, “only men wear flowers in their hair”, and familiar gender roles were reversed. Furthermore, these definitions are not even stable themselves within one society; throughout the ages, “woman” has fluctuated. Today, April Ashley, despite being born possessing the genetic makeup of a man, is considered female, as “our sister” by Greer, who also notices that there is no “single face of the year”. Gender clearly cannot form the entire basis for the foundation of the self, since it is inadequate in describing all people. Moreover, we cannot forget that all men and women themselves are unique individuals in unique situations – “no originary, neutral and inert ‘woman’ lies there like a base”.

Those who hold the radical view that “woman is fictional” are those who hope for a postgendered world, because the intrinsic “self” behind a human being exists independently of gender or ethnic identities. They would classify “female” or “male” as socially constructed adjectives, like “left-handed” or “right-handed” (hand preference in particular, since most of the population only shows preference for one hand, yet the small ambidextrous percentage is largely ignored). But the whole reason the men differed from the women in the case of the Pacific society way was caused by a genetic difference which the community discovered and enhanced. The combination of biological variables, such as eye colour, hand preference or sex, is what, according to materialist philosophy, constitutes the whole self and gives us our unique identity. Even in dualistic terms, we cannot deny that our physical selves in some ways constitute who we are. For example, Locke proposed the self being a “single seat of consciousness”, but we now know that conscious thoughts are generated by chemical reactions in the brain, and may be manipulated physically. Evidently it is not possible to have a self which is totally unaffected by sex and gender. As Greer concludes her first chapter, “whatever else we are or may pretend to be, we are certainly our bodies”.

The biological differences between the sexes are “no more significant than those between individuals” – belonging to the male or female sex is merely another variation in the human genetic code. This is because our gender is no different to socially constructed divisions such as ethnicity, in that it assists the self to gain stability and fellowship, empowers it and at the same time, disempowers and restricts it. To say that gender is something more than ethnicity, which is also rooted in anatomy, is to overlook gender’s connectedness to history and subjective experience. But neither can we take the opposite stance to this, deconstructing the self, since it fails to notice that every “self” is different because of its uniqueness, which begins with our DNA and is polished off by our social networking. Like Josie Alibrandi who initially ran away from her culture, we cannot escape our gender. But, through introspection with an open mind, we can understand how they make us the people we are.

Bibliography

Board of Studies (1993) Philosophy: Self, Humanity and the World, Armidale: Teaching and Learning Centre, University of New England.

Greer, G (1971) The Female Eunuch, MacGibbon & Kee, London

Marchetta, M (2000) Looking for Alibrandi, Penguin Books, Australia

Oakley, A (1972) Sex, Gender and Society, Sun Books, Australia

Poole, M (1986) Idols-Ideals-Identities – Women in Society, AE Press, Melbourne

Smith, J (1998) Different for Girls, Vintage, UK