The futures of feminism

Valerie Bryson

• Éditeur: Manchester University Press
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526138521
• Sujet: Sciences sociales
• Sous-sujet: Féminisme et théorie féministe

This book makes the case for an inclusive form of socialist feminism that puts women with multiple disadvantages at its heart. It moves feminism beyond contemporary disputes, including those between some feminists and some trans women. Combining academic rigour with accessibility, the book demystifies some key feminist terms, including patriarchy and intersectionality, and shows their relevance to feminist politics today. It argues that the analysis of gender cannot be isolated from that of class or race, and that the needs of most women will not be met in an economy based on the pursuit of profit. Throughout, the book asserts the social, economic and human importance of the unpaid caring and domestic work that has been traditionally done by women. It concludes that there are some grounds for optimism about a future that could be both more feminist and more socialist.

1

The sex/gender distinction and the language of sexual violence

MY FIRST THREE chapters are underpinned by three linked beliefs: that the language we use and the concepts available to us can be of profound political importance; that man-made language and concepts cannot adequately express women’s experiences and needs; and that these experiences and needs are not the same for all groups of women. I begin with a brief general discussion of the political importance of concepts and vocabulary and how these relate to knowledge and power. I then discuss some developments in feminist terminology since the 1960s, arguing that these can help bring overlooked aspects of society into sharper focus and help us to see, analyse and challenge injustices. I also identify potential problems with a number of terms, and warn against their casual or simplistic use. In particular, readers should note that many of the ideas discussed in the first two chapters are part of what is effectively white feminist theory, reflecting the marginalisation of ‘other’ feminist voices in white-dominated class societies.

It is of course impossible to address everything at once, but many ideas and concepts that at first seem straightforward rapidly spiral into complexity when examined in detail or applied to new situations. These opening chapters therefore raise more questions than answers, and I have postponed full discussion of some important issues until later in the book.

Knowledge, power and feminist ‘naming’

As a number of social and political theorists argue, our understanding of the world around us is not direct, but mediated by the language, concepts and ideas available to us. These do not simply describe ‘reality’ but help construct our picture of it by drawing our attention to some things and ignoring or concealing others, affecting both what we see and how we see it. They can be used to illuminate, but they can also be used to manipulate or mislead, and if we have no way of expressing a perception, an experience or an activity, it is difficult or impossible to recognise it. For example, if we have no word to describe what a woman looking after small children is doing all day, we may see her as economically unproductive and expect her to look for paid employment; if ‘rape’ is always understood to mean a violent attack by a stranger, a woman whose husband forces her to have sex has no way of articulating what he has done; if jokes that sexualise or denigrate women are seen as ‘harmless banter’, it is difficult for a woman to object without being portrayed as a puritanical killjoy; and how we see a cluster of cells may become very different if it is described as ‘an embryo’, rather than ‘an unborn child’. Even when we think we have an adequate vocabulary, meanings are often shifting, slippery and context-dependent, so that perfect communication is never really possible. And all of this is often bound up with power, with the perspectives, interests and ideas of dominant groups reflected in the mainstream of politics, culture and education, while less privileged viewpoints are marginalised or actively repressed.

The examples that I give above reflect issues around childcare, sexual violence and pregnancy that reflect many women’s interests and experience, but that have not attracted the attention of the male theorists who have dominated the analysis of ideology, knowledge, language and power. To take perhaps the most notable and influential of these theorists: in 1845 Marx famously claimed that in any society the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class; nearly a century later, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci expanded on this to analyse the ways in which the capitalist state ‘manufactures consent’ through ideology, so that the ‘battle of ideas’ can be a crucial aspect of class struggle and resistance; and from the late 1960s the French writer Michel Foucault was writing about the relationship between knowledge and power, arguing that knowledge and culture form patterns or ‘discourses’ that organise our understanding of society, with dominant discourses reflecting the perspective of the most powerful groups.

By the twenty-first century, many feminists were drawing on and developing these analyses, and there is also a long and separate history of women seeking both to expose the partiality of man-made knowledge and to develop new forms of knowledge based on their own experience and perspectives. As Mary Astell wrote in the late seventeenth century, we already know how men see the world and their place in it: ‘Histories are writ by them, they recount each others great Exploits and have always done so’ (quoted in Perry, 1986:3). In contrast women’s perspectives have not generally been allowed public expression, and when they have attempted to express their views women have often been trivialised, ignored, silenced or forgotten. As the classicist Mary Beard argues, ‘When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice’, and she traces a direct line between ancient examples and the online abuse and violent threats received by female politicians and other women, including herself, who speak out today (2017:xii).

In the context of the ongoing silencing and/or marginalisation of women’s experiences, developing a vocabulary and concepts to name and understand them is not simply an academic exercise but a critical part of feminist politics. As Cynthia Enloe has argued, ‘Concepts are not merely abstractions. They have consequences. They can galvanize’ (2017:142; see also Krook, 2019). Political ‘naming’ was therefore an important part of the feminist activism that erupted in many western nations from the 1960s, and this period ‘is full of accounts of revelations about oppressions that were not previously named or described and of the joy in recognizing even oppression: diagnosis is the first step toward cure and recovery’ (Solnit, 2017:56).

For one group of apparently privileged women in the US, this revelation occurred when Betty Friedan’s best-selling book The Feminine Mystique, first published in 1963, identified ‘the problem that has no name’: that is, the unhappiness and depression experienced by a generation of housewives who had been taught that their fulfilment lay solely in domesticity, and that if they yearned for something else they had failed in their role as women (1963/1986:17). These women had no words to describe their situation, and many said that their lives were changed by reading Friedan’s book. One wrote to her saying that, after reading it, she wanted to rush into the streets and cry ‘To arms, sisters! You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners!’ (quoted in Horowitz, 1998:203); The Feminine Mystique is widely credited with kick-starting an important strand of mainstream, equal-rights feminism in this period.

Meanwhile, other women were developing new concepts and a language to analyse what Friedan only described, and to push her concerns in more radical directions. By the early 1970s, one important starting-point seemed to be the distinction between sex and gender.

Gender and the sex/gender distinction

In 1949, the pioneering feminist French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that ‘One is not born but rather becomes a woman’ (1949/1972:297). She argued that there is nothing natural about femininity, and identified the ways in which this was manufactured in her society. By the late 1960s, many feminists were formalising and extending this position to make a distinction between our biological sex (male or female) and the gender (masculine or feminine) that is ascribed to us by society. According to this analysis, we need to expose and challenge the artificial, hierarchical and damaging nature of the gender roles and attributes that restrict and damage our lives, and that are widely seen as ‘natural’. This sex/gender distinction has since been complicated by some developments in feminist theory and by wider awareness of the experiences of trans people. Today, ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are often used loosely and interchangeably both in everyday and official use and by some feminist writers. This section traces these developments; I conclude that, although the distinction may not be as straightforward as it once seemed, it remains politically important to retain it.

The sex/gender distinction and feminist analysis

The idea that sex is about our bodies and gender is about our social roles and behaviour did not originate with feminists, but with medical researchers in the US who were investigating and treating intersex conditions in the 1950s. These ‘experts’ argued that in cases when a baby’s sex was unclear, their adult gender identity would depend on whether they were raised as a girl or a boy. They therefore argued that, if a baby were born with a micro penis, ‘corrective’ surgery should be used to give them a female anatomy; this would be supplemented by hormonal treatment when they reached puberty, and they could successfully be raised as a girl. In other words, a child’s biological sex could be changed, and their learned gender would be central to their identity (Davis, 2015).

Such medical interventions are widely condemned today, and the evidence on which they were made was decidedly weak. However, many western feminists developed the idea that gender is an artificial product of society rather than a ‘natural’ outcome of female biology, and used this to reject restrictive assumptions around ‘appropriate’ female behaviour. Feminist writers also drew on anthropological findings to show that the attributes, social roles and patterns of behaviour associated with women and men are widely variable – for example, in some societies it is men rather than women who are preoccupied with their appearance and self-adornment; here Ann Oakley’s 1972 book Sex, Gender and Society was particularly influential. From this new feminist perspective, there was nothing natural or inevitable about how gender was organised and experienced in the west; this could therefore be challenged and changed.

Gender, as many feminists understood it in the 1970s, was not just about men and women playing different social roles, it was also about men’s power over women (although Oakley now says that her own book failed to explore this adequately: 2016:10). This means that gender is about much more than individual characteristics, opportunities or identities; rather, it is a basic principle of social organisation through which men, collectively, constitute a dominant group that is privileged in all areas of life. Making the distinction between sex and gender enables us to see that this domination is not inevitable, and that there is no biological reason why men should monopolise positions of power and influence while women take care of the home. From this perspective, women’s ability to give birth is a natural outcome of their biological sex, but their ability to change a nappy is learned gender behaviour – or as the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2018) put it: ‘I don’t think I’m more inherently likely to do domestic work, or childcare … It doesn’t come pre-programmed in your vagina, right?’

The sex/gender distinction enables us to see and challenge the gender stereotypes that surround young children from the earliest age, because it sees these as a way of teaching children what they should like and how they should behave, rather than reflecting their innate preferences (here it is worth pointing out that pink used to be seen as a boy’s colour, derived from military red, while blue was seen as a softer, girl’s colour, associated with the blue of the Virgin Mary’s robes in western religious paintings). Feminists have long argued that gendered assumptions limit children’s potential, and some have attempted to bring up their own children in more gender-neutral ways, and/or to campaign for schools to develop more gender-inclusive policies and for retailers to stop marketing toys as suitable for ‘girls’ or ‘boys’ rather than ‘children’. Such campaigns have had only limited success. Indeed, although the concept of gender-neutral toys now exists, a casual visit to the toy area of any big store suggests that this has spectacularly failed to deliver, as the dolls, pretend cookers and pink princess outfits on one side of the aisle face the dinosaurs, construction kits and metallic spaceships on the other. Today in the UK, some new groups such as Let Toys Be Toys and Pink Stinks are challenging retailers to end such segregation (http://lettoysbetoys.org.uk/about; www.pinkstinks.co.uk), and in 2019 the Fawcett Society (a long-established feminist campaigning group) set up a ‘Smash Stereotypes’ campaign and an expert commission to examine the evidence on the effects of gender stereotyping in early childhood. Its initial literature review found that stereotypes are indeed powerful from an early age, that they are linked to educational achievement, occupational segregation and the pay gap between women and men, and that young men who believe in particularly rigid gender stereotypes are more likely to act violently towards their partner (Culhane and Bazeley, 2019).

Men and masculinity

Most of the early feminist work on gender focused on how artificial notions of ‘femininity’ restrict women, leaving maleness and masculinity as the unquestioned standard of what it is to be human. From this perspective, ‘gender research’ was often interpreted as ‘research on women’, ‘gender studies’ were a rebranded version of ‘women’s studies’ and ‘breaking down statistics by gender’ means seeing how women compare with men. However, by the end of the twentieth century there was a significant body of work on men and masculinities that explored the complex ways that masculinity is constructed and the diverse meanings that can be attached to it. This work generally found that, like women, men were constrained by artificial notions of gender and, at a popular level, there was widespread discussion of a ‘crisis of masculinity’, with many commentators in western societies concerned about the failure of boys to match the educational achievements of girls, high rates of male unemployment, the involvement of young men in crime and drug abuse, the increase in the number of families with no live-in father and the rise in male suicide.

Some more academic writers linked such concerns with ideas around ‘hegemonic masculinity’, that is, the dominant model of masculinity in the west. This portrays the ideal man as the high-earning, strong, confident, sexually experienced and heterosexual head of a household whose gender gives him natural authority over women. Such a model, some argued, is highly damaging to men as well as women, because many men will never be able to achieve it, and some will compensate for their failures with an exaggerated assertion of the aggressiveness associated with ‘normal’ masculinity. More recently, with the ascendancy of Putin and Trump, the apparently unstoppable spread of increasingly violent and extreme material on the internet and the #MeToo revelations, there has been much talk of ‘toxic masculinity’ and its damaging effects on individuals, societies, international relations and the very future of the planet. Here, it seems useful to retain the sex/gender distinction as a way of reminding ourselves that such behaviour is socially produced rather than inherent in all male bodies.

Problems with the sex/gender distinction

While it has been highly influential, the sex/gender distinction has also been heavily criticised by feminists for a range of sometimes conflicting reasons. In the 1970s and 1980s, it ran counter to the claims of a vocal minority of radical feminists who held more essentialist views: at their simplest, these seemed to say that women are naturally good and oppressed, men are naturally bad and oppressive, and that women should therefore reject all association with men, whether this be social, sexual or political. From this perspective, men were the enemy and gender differences were simply the natural reflection of biological reality. Such an essentialist position has obvious flaws (for a critical discussion, see Segal, 1987); it is not one that I argue from in this book.

A more legitimate criticism arises from the way that many mainstream feminists have unthinkingly equated their own experiences of artificially manufactured femininity with those of all women in their society. In doing this, relatively affluent white western women have unthinkingly excluded or marginalised women who are not like them. For example, when earlier generations of white American feminists insisted that, contrary to the dominant view of acceptable womanhood, they were not pure, weak and innocent creatures in need of protection from men, they failed to see that very different qualities were attributed to black women, who were widely seen as physically strong and sexually promiscuous. Moreover, because colonialism in general and slavery in particular involved equating subordinated black people with animals as a way of justifying their ill-treatment, black people were often effectively de-gendered (Lugones, 2010; Nash, 2019).

As discussed in later chapters, much feminist analysis today has moved on from treating women as a unitary group, and it is more open to analysing the complex ways in which gender intersects and varies with other dimensions of structural inequalities. However, there is still a tendency for women who are highly placed in terms of class-based and race-based inequalities to be more readily heard ...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The sex/gender distinction and the language of sexual violence
• 2 Sexism and patriarchy
• 3 Intersectionality: a dry word that can make a lot of sense
• 4 Trans women and feminism: thinking beyond binaries
• 5 We need to talk about capitalism
• 6 Liberalism, neoliberalism and feminism: contradictions and concerns
• 7 Marxist feminism: reframing the issues
• 8 Why feminists should logically be socialists (and vice versa)
• Conclusions
• References
• Index