Abstract
In this chapter I offer an interpretation of Judith Butler’s metaphysics of sex and gender and situate it in the ontological landscape alongside what has long been the received view of sex and gender in the English speaking world, which owes its inspiration to the works of Simone de Beauvoir. I then offer a critique of Butler’s view, as interpreted, and subsequently an original account of sex and gender, according to which both are constructed—or conferred, as I would put it—albeit in different ways and subject to different constraints.
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Notes
- 1.
Whether or not Butler herself considers herself to be doing metaphysics is not the issue. Theorists can have a metaphysics even if they don’t consider themselves to be doing metaphysics. Thanks to Helen Longino for this point.
- 2.
In the French Le Deuxième Sexe (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1949).
- 3.
She did not coin terms for the categories of sex and gender, but by insisting that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman, she can be read as implicitly drawing such a distinction.
- 4.
I take the social sphere here to have political, economic, legal, cultural, and religious dimensions.
- 5.
This might raise a worry about on what grounds we consider this the same concept, but let us leave that aside for now.
- 6.
Modulo evolutionary changes, taking place over a long time.
- 7.
That is independent of our thought and practices.
- 8.
One might think that this is a weak kind of constructivism, but the key point is that the proponent of this view is committed to there actually being some joints of nature. Butler seems not committed to that. Nor does she seem to deny that, perhaps because she thinks that making claims about how the world is independent of us is not justified.
- 9.
See also “Contingent Foundations” 17.
- 10.
This is not to say that we can choose which ideal we strive for.
- 11.
See also Gender Trouble 6–7: “The radical splitting of the gendered subject poses yet another set of problems. Can we refer to a ‘given’ sex or a ‘given’ gender without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And what is ‘sex’ anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such ‘fact’ for us? Does sex have a history? Does each sex have a different history, or histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a genealogy that might expose the binary options as a variable construction? Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced by various scientific discourses in the service of the political and social interests [false taxonomies?]? If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”
- 12.
Cf. Gender Trouble 17: “…the question here will be: To what extent do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internal coherence of the subject, indeed, the self-identical status of the person? To what extent is ‘identity’ a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience? And how do the regulatory practices that govern gender also govern culturally intelligible notions of identity? In other words, the ‘coherence’ and ‘continuity’ of ‘the person’ are not logical or analytical features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility. Inasmuch as ‘identity’ is assured through the stabilizing concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality, the very notion of ‘the person’ is called into question by the cultural emergence of those ‘incoherent’ or ‘discontinuous’ gendered beings who appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined.”
- 13.
Cf. Gender Trouble 8: “Bodies cannot be said to have a signifiable existence prior to the mark of their gender; the question then emerges: To what extent does the body come into being in and through the mark(s) of gender? How do we reconceive the body no longer as a passive medium or instrument awaiting the enlivening capacity of a distinctly immaterial will?”
- 14.
Cf. Gender Trouble 33: “To expose the contingent acts that create the appearance of a naturalistic necessity, a move which has been part of cultural critique at least since Marx, is a task that now takes on the added burden of showing how the very notion of the subject, intelligible only through its appearance as gendered, admits of possibilities that have been forcibly foreclosed by the various reifications of gender that have constituted its contingent ontologies.”
- 15.
Cf. Gender Trouble 16: “It would be wrong to think that the discussion of ‘identity’ ought to proceed prior to a discussion of gender identity for the simple reason that ‘persons’ only become intelligible through becoming gendered in conformity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibility.”
- 16.
Cf. Bodies 8: “Paradoxically, the inquiry into the kinds of erasures and exclusions by which the construction of the subject operates is no longer constructivism, but neither is it essentialism. For there is an ‘outside’ to what is constructed by discourse, but this is not an absolute ‘outside,’ an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse; as a constitutive ‘outside,’ it is that which can only be thought—when it can—in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders.”
- 17.
For example the race game, the class game, the ethnic game.
- 18.
Here I draw on my “Essentiality Conferred”. In that work I did not include Tracking as an integral aspect of the account, but now think it helpful.
- 19.
Again, this may not be Beauvoir’s own view, but rather that of feminists influenced by her for whom sex is a biological category and gender the social interpretation of sex.
- 20.
My aim is not to settle that question here.
- 21.
Sally Haslanger prioritizes this for the purposes of her analysis. Cf. e.g., “Gender and Race”.
- 22.
It is easy to think of anecdotes that fit the various context descriptions. My friend, Agustín Rayo, told me a nice story of going with his mother, Julieta Fierro, a famous astronomer and public figure, to a genderly rigid gathering of extended family in Mexico. Apparently the expectations were such that the women would get together early in the morning on Sundays to start cooking the meal, and the men would gather and drink beer and chat. Later the men would be seated at the table and the women would wait on them while they ate. Only after the men were done eating would the women eat the leftovers. While Agustín’s mother was a bad fit in each company, she ended up sitting and eating with the men. There was never a repeat of that family experiment. The way I analyze this example is that it is not that Julieta Fierro counted as a woman or a man in that context. This was precisely the kind of context where there was no gender available to her. She was treated as an other. While she ended up conversing and eating with the men, the fact that she ceased to partake in such family gatherings suggests that there was not a comfortable “third gender” category available in the context.
- 23.
This is why in some contexts lesbians don’t quite count as women, and that in some contexts butch lesbians are more challenging than femmes as they very obviously trouble the assumption that all of the gender-stereotypical properties inhere in the same person.
- 24.
Consider, e.g., being an actor on stage and attempting to warn a theater audience that there is a fire in the theater by shouting “fire!”, where the audience continues to laugh. See Ishani Maitra’s “Silencing Speech” and “Silence and Responsibility”.
- 25.
In giving this account of the conferral of sex, I want to leave it open that the sex categories may change in the future. In fact, perhaps the intersex movement has precisely started to trouble the idea that the legal category of sex is the most helpful societal category tracking sex-stereotypical properties.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the following colleagues and friends for comments on earlier drafts of parts of this chapter or conversations about it; of course, none of them is responsible for the views expressed herein or any errors of judgement or interpretation: Jennifer Church, Jeanna Eichenbaum, Sally Haslanger, Kattis Honkanen, Jennifer Hudin, Ada Jaarsma, Colin Koopman, Francesca Lattanzi, Jamie Lindsay, Helen Longino, Fiona Macpherson, Ishani Maitra, Rebecca McLennan, Uma Narayan, Jeffrey Paris, Elizabeth Potter, Dennis Rothermel, John Searle, Alice Sowaal, Jacqueline Taylor, Brian Thomas, Shelley Wilcox, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Charlotte Witt, Sigríður Ϸorgeirsdóttir, and my students in my classes on Social Ontology and Metaphysics at San Francisco State University.
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Sveinsdóttir, Á.K. (2011). The Metaphysics of Sex and Gender. In: Witt, C. (eds) Feminist Metaphysics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3783-1_4
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