Integral Voices on Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Critical Inquiries

Sarah E. Nicholson, Vanessa D. Fisher, Sarah E. Nicholson, Vanessa D. Fisher

• Éditeur: SUNY Press
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438452203
• Sujet: Psychologie
• Sous-sujet: Psychologie transpersonnelle

This volume takes a unique approach to the question of what it is to be a gendered, sexual self in a postmodern world, offering insights informed by the Integral paradigm of theory and practice. With the inquiry into sex, gender, and sexuality having become so broad and diverse within both academia and popular culture, the Integral approach can help sift through and make sense of the cacophony of theories and agendas that seek to stake their ground in this collective conversation. Informed by the work of thinkers such as Sri Aurobindo, Gregory Bateson, Jean Gebser, Ervin Laszlo, and, most directly, Ken Wilber, the Integral approach acknowledges and works with multiple and contradictory experiences, theories, and realities. Dealing with a variety of topics, including feminism, the men's movement, sexual identity, queer history, and spirituality, the work's contributors speak from across the spectrum of personal and political backgrounds, academic and practitioner orientations, and male and female perspectives. The combination of voices aims to bring forward a more complex and integrated understanding of what it means to be woman, man, human.

1

Defining Woman

From the First Wave to Integral Feminism

Sarah E. Nicholson

Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was the Sphinx. Oedipus said, “I want to ask one question “Why didn’t I recognize my mother?”

“You gave the wrong answer,” said the Sphinx.

“But that was what made everything possible,” said Oedipus.

“No,” she said. “When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man. You didn’t say anything about woman.”

“When you say Man,” said Oedipus, “you include women too. Everyone knows that.”

She said, “That’s what you think.”

—“Myth,” Muriel Rukeyser

Volumes upon volumes of human history have been filled with the glorious deeds of Man. Both in act and philosophy he has defined what it was to be human for us all.

Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Myth” illuminates a matter of central feminist concern with a simple eloquence. Placing the recognition of Woman at the center of the riddle of the Sphinx, Oedipus’s inability to recognize her as a subject becomes the key to his undoing. The riddle of gender is fundamental to who we are. It is so potent that it stands in front of and is completely entangled with, life’s perennial questions: “Who am I?” “What does it mean to be human?”

To open an exploration of the question of what is it to be a woman this chapter follows, in brief, the history of feminist thought, in particular examining how various feminisms have attempted to define woman. Woman has paradoxically been both the symbol feminists have gathered around as well as a place of deep critical and political unrest (Braidotti 1994, 9–10, 14).

To best understand the discourses of feminism, they must be framed within the broader developmental trajectory of feminist theory itself. Thus, I begin with the first wave and broadly follow the evolution of feminist thought, exploring how successive waves of feminist theory have framed, explored, and complexified the question of what it is to be a woman. Feminism is, in this context, correctly understood as the study of women, as well as an advocate for women to flourish and become full human subjects.

I conclude by examining what gifts Integral Theory offers both the feminist inquiry into womanhood and the broader conversation between men and women about gender liberation. I also reflect on the ways in which Integral Theory has to date failed to offer a genuinely Integral approach to sex and gender.

The First Wave of Feminism

In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women in England, laying out the core concerns of first-wave feminism. Her powerful response to the conditions of her day contested the idea that women had a sexually different, and lesser, mind and envisioned Woman as an autonomous political subject. She argued that women, given appropriate educational opportunities, had the potential to be the mental equals of men: “Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority that chains such a weak being to her duty” (vi). Wollstonecraft argued that women must be emancipated, educated, and given equal social status and political rights so that they might fulfill their potential to make great contributions to society (Stanlick 1997, 17–83).

In the 1800s, on the other side of the globe, paraphrasing the American Declaration of Independence, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal. … The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward women, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her” (Stanton and Mott in Lerner 1971, 83). Mott and Stanton, who had worked with the antislavery movement and in Christian women’s organizations for reform and welfare, formed the first wave of Anglo-American feminism. With firm roots in a liberal ethic of autonomy and emancipation, they demanded equal rights under the law for women. Their early petitions for laws granting women property rights and the right to divorce created the women’s suffrage movement. Beginning with New Zealand in 1893, first-wave feminism bore the fruit of voting rights for women, which then became established across the majority of the globe by the end of World War II.

First-wave feminism drew relationships between women’s political rights and access to education, women’s social roles, their property rights, the conditions of marriage, work, and overall public sphere participation. The primary goal of this early liberal feminism was the full acknowledgement of woman’s shared humanity. Women’s bodies, while acknowledged as offering a particular and unique experience of embodiment, were fundamentally considered a constraint on her access to the public sphere and thus to social equality. In unwitting agreement with patriarchal thought, first-wave feminism believed that while Woman possessed a sexually neutral mind her oppression was, in part, due to her the limits of her (maternal) body (Grosz 1994, 16).¹

The Second Wave of Feminism

Second-wave feminism was characterized by its praxis of social activism. This breaking wave produced myriad subsets of feminist thought including radical, Marxist/Socialist, cultural, ecofeminist, constructionist, and (French) psychoanalytic. Second-wave feminism with its emphasis on social activism firmly established key objectives of political reform, such as “women’s control over women’s bodies.” Their wide-ranging examination of historical, literary, and social frameworks identified the value hierarchies inherent within them that, being male dominated and controlled, placed men and those things associated with the masculine first. To counter this, they began an ongoing search for women’s cultural presence and expression in history. At the same time they developed space for women to gather for the transformative “consciousness raising” sharing of women’s experience and voice, for in this second wave, feminists asserted that the personal was political.

With the focus of their analysis on the differentiation between the public and private spheres and the technoeconomic base of production, Marxist/Socialist feminists explored the manner in which the patriarchal system and the capitalist economic system were intertwined. Marx and Engels had identified two interlocking spheres of work: production and reproduction. With the development of industrial capitalism, these two spheres had been separated into the public and private arenas, and through complex historical processes women became largely relegated to the private domestic sphere.² Socialist feminists argued that the key to women’s emancipation was to be found in “the demise of capitalism” (Chafetz 2006, 9), along with the movement of child rearing from the purely private to the public domain, which would allow women to enter and fully participate in the productive (Nielsen 2002, 4).

Ecofeminists and cultural feminists responded to the joint devaluation, repression, and exploitation of women and nature with the belief that women’s essential biological differences should be celebrated, viewed in many ways as superior, and reclaimed through positive identification. The reclamation and celebration of the connection of woman’s body and her relation to the earth “in a woman/body/earth hating society” was, they asserted, an act of profound revolution (Caputi 1992, 434). They argued that women were less valued because they are more closely connected to the processes of the natural world through menstruation, childbirth, and child rearing: “by virtue of biological connections between women’s menstrual cycles and the phases of the moon, pheromones which create menstrual synchrony among us, and our physical connections to the next generation via umbilical cords and lactation, women are more ‘in tune’ with ourselves as part of, rather than distinct from, ‘nature’” (Ginzberg in Bianchi 1999, 51). Through this connection, Women, they argued, are inherently more peaceful, more ecologically sensitive, and more spiritually connected to the earth, as can be evidenced in “the everyday subsistence production of most of the world’s women” (Mies and Shiva 1993, 19). Women’s liberation, they asserted, could only occur in conjunction with the reestablishment of an imminent spiritual engagement with the planet, and in conjunction with ecological liberation (16).

Another subset of the second wave, radical feminists, shared fundamental beliefs with ecofeminists. Espousing women’s inherent superiority, and identified firmly with their biological nature, radical feminists are vociferous in their opposition to patriarchal social constructions of femininity: traditional norms that include “compulsory” heterosexuality and the institution of motherhood within the nuclear family unit. They assert that the hierarchies of patriarchy need to be dismantled through institutional reforms and a cultural revolution of gender roles as men assert dominance and physically oppress women through the institutional perpetuation of sociocultural roles. Radical feminists advocate the elimination of all “concepts of hierarchy” (Rowland and Klein 1990, 276). Ironically then, a characteristic fundamental to radical feminism is its separatist ideology, which inverts the power dynamic that values men and the masculine first, and calls for the establishment of women-only spaces in all arenas (Intemann 2001).

Sex versus Gender

A split in second wave feminism saw the broad development of two schools of thought. Constructionist feminist thought problematized discourse arising from cultural and ecofeminism that advocated a positive reclamation of the connection between woman, body and earth. The constructionists posed this discourse as ‘essentialism,’ in that it posed an essential connection (a connection pre-existing culture or gender)—between women’s biology, nature and her gender characteristics. For constructionists, this position denied the fundamental role of culture in producing and reinforcing gender norms, therefore, they emphasized the distinction between sex and gender.

The theorem of gender as the cultural overlay of sex is famously espoused in de Beauvoir’s statement in The Second Sex that, “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one” (de Beauvoir 1972). Constructionist thought stresses that the female body (alone) does not make a woman: “there is nothing ‘natural’ about gender itself” (Elam 1997, 1). They argue that biological factors are reworked into gender through the construction and maintenance of intersubjective cultural patterns and representations. They critiqued cultural, radical and ecofeminists for clinging to an essentialist view of woman’s nature through the “glorification of the feminine in biological terms” (Joy, O’Grady and Poxon 2002, 86). This, constructionists argued, continues to reinforce and play into the hands of traditional binary divisions, which associated Woman with the (negative, lesser valued) binaries of nature and the body, while man was associated with mind and culture.³

Constructionist thought argues that gender traits could be transformed through socialization, such as the social reorganization of child rearing. Nancy Chodorow’s Reproduction of Mothering (1978), for example, combines object relations theory with Freudian ideas in an examination of existing parenting relations. She suggests that deep structural differences are built into the psyche during early socialization, and she stresses the importance and intensity of the child-mother bond during the pre-Oedipal⁴ period in the “socio-psychical transmission of ‘gender roles’” (Rowley and Grosz 1990, 190). Chodorow’s research argues that gender differences “in structures of consciousness are the outcome of the child’s development of self in gendered social arrangements” (Sprague and Kobrynowicz in Chafetz 2006, 30).

According to Freudian theory, to develop as a man within the current social order, the male child must differentiate himself from his fusion with the original female self of the mother and in the process “reject, derogate, and negate all things feminine” (Nielsen 2002, 10). Boys learn that they are other than women, while girls remain attached to and reproduce the identity of the mother. As a consequence boys and girls develop different relational capacities that are fundamental to the construct of gender: “girls grow into women whose primary concern is with interpersonal connection and nurturance, while boys mature into men who focus on individuation, deny affect, and strive to prove themselves through social achievement” (Chafetz 2006, 19). The solution to what Chodorow poses as an inherently structural problem is, she suggests, the restructuring of gender stratification particularly with regard to the division of labor around parenting, such that both parents are “equally responsible for child rearing from birth on” (Nielsen 2002, 10), thereby repairing the gendered split between connected women and individuated men.

Psychoanalytic and Poststructural Feminism

The call for a new discourse around maternity was also articulated by the feminists who formed the group Psychanalyse et Politique in the wake of the revolutionary events in Paris in 1968. This group of psychoanalytic feminist theorists used psychosexual analysis to examine the question of how Woman might be defined.

The work of poststructuralist theorists such as Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault were fundamental to the development of the feminist theory that emerged from this group of French feminists. Poststructuralism is characterized by the breaking apart of systems of representation and the rejection of singular interpretative meanings and grand narratives. Deconstructing dualisms and binary structures, their focus rests on the text’s struggle for meaning: expressed in slippages, repetitions, absences, marginalities, the multiple, the ambiguous, and the contradictory (Humm 1995, 111). Working from this base, these poststructuralist feminist theorists (such as Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva) examined the failure and inconsistency of language, particularly the way in which women’s difference was represented through hierarchies of binary opposition.

Although the phallocentric foundations of some feminist psychoanalytic work, such as Kristeva’s, have been critiqued, Juliet Mitchell argues for the viability of feminist work based in theoretical frameworks such as Freud’s or Lacan’s. Freud’s Oedipal theory, for example, can be read not as a static, prescriptive, and universal analysis of gender development (as he presents it), but rather as a detailed observation of psychosexual relations situated within one specific historical and cultural (patriarchal) period. Mitchell, while acknowledging that Freud was caught in the “concept...