This blog today is going to be relatively long (I will try to identify sections so you can skip to the parts you like), disorganized (it is a huge controversial subject that in hindsight I have only begun to explore)and both very personal in fits and spurts while still very “academic” in tone.
To begin with: this year I have watched fights over who can go into which bathroom(objections raised by both arch old fashioned conservatives and some radical feminists); fights over who is more oppressed, woman or transfolks, as if those are naturally and always distinct categories. I have seen women erased as a category both by mainstream pols ranging from the Trumpies who would take all maternal healthcare out of the healthcare bill while preserving money for Viagra research (at least in the first draft), and eliminate both abortion and birth control funding to name just one or two things. On the left, it wasn’t only mainstream Joe Biden, one of women’s big defenders in the past, who stood in front of the cameras and railed against racism, class and transgender oppression (so far so good, but what happened to women?) I have also been to at least three left conferences and read numerous articles in which the word "woman” was not on the agenda except regarding access to abortion and violence against women -- a very individualistic bourgeois solution to women's reproductive control. What happens after the young woman –straight or gay- gets a little older, gets married and decides to have a child –is it the third world nanny who is her caregiver?. I was also at the Left Forum where a panel on the capitalist industry’s use and abuse of the medical establishment in regard to transwomen was summarily cancelled because it was “transphobic” (I was also at the radical feminist conference a year earlier where the issue first came up and I did raise the issue of transphobia because one of the women speakers, among other excellent speakers, was somewhat transphobic when she made the comment –“you know you can always tell” As a lesbian feminist I defy her to justify that –it was just like when lesbians first started coming out in the women's movement—our stereotypes as to who was and who wasn’t were seriously challenged. For radical feminists to hold the conversation about a group of which they were not part and often highly critical of, did seem, to put it mildly, a little strange. Why didn’t they just make it about all women since it is a problem for all women trying to fit into the BarbieDoll/Superman stereotypes? True transgender has certainly got different aspects than a nose job, but if it does need its own workshop, shouldn’t transgender people lead it? But to arbitrarily cancel it without a discussion when it had some actual progressive content? If we cancelled every sexist or racist panel at Left Forum that was done by men about women, we wouldn’t have a Left Forum. Finally, I seen my lovely lesbian feminist community morph, since the legalization of gay marriage, into very straight nuclear monogamous couples with 2.5 babies strapped to their chests in Gerry packs. There is much to talk about.
Point of personal disclosure, I have been in the LGBT cohort (before there were letters)for about 40 years – and trust me – I have experienced the full range of sexuality (in multiples and traditional two-by-two) both by choice and social conscription. Just the other day I was at function in my ethnic schmatta &earrings when the wind blew my hair away from my face and a five year old child I was talking to, with the innocence of children, told me I looked like a man.I told her I had been mistaken for a man before. She, with childlike innocence, accepted that without judgement as fact. And yet, in this currently charged climate I have variously been called a TERF which stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists – women who think transgendered women should not be allowed in all women’s spaces for historical, biological and ideological reasons. This term, incidentally is the worst sin a person could commit, accompanied by garlic and stakes. My 20 something roommate with a straight girlfriend, called me this. At the same time some of my feminist friends feel that transpeople should not use women’s bathrooms because it is dangerous for women and little girls My response is that my little boy, and all people, have the right to 1)go to the bathroom (I remember segregated bathrooms by race in the South) and 2)to be safe in those spaces.
I do not want to dismiss the issue of the erasure of women as an oppressed category to bathroom issues, however, as our seven thousand year history of oppression as women due to our reproductive, historical and material circumstances cannot be wished away by parties interested in maintaining certain biases, sexist or otherwise. On the other hand, if history teaches us anything, it is that nothing lasts forever, the world changes and who is to say that, with all the changes in technology and society, Noah’s Ark is the only model of sexuality (and that includes the gay form). Last point in my introductory rant (though I could do many many more), is that whenever people are forced into new situations by the changing dynamics of society, they tend to react in conservative ways and some of us on both sides of the argument will act like idiots. In defense of the natural emotional frailty of all people in times of crisis, I hope we can forgive each other our mistakes in the interests of trying to find a real solution to a very difficult, long standing issue.
So, if anyone still wants to discuss these issues, I am offering three perspectives:1)Empirical data from main stream economics without analysis – you can do that on your own as the analyses vary widely and I grant that there is still some bias in these stats (i.e., they are mainly formal labor stats and do not include informal work statistics which generally effects excluded groups such as people of color and women to a much greater degree). But they do give us a place to start as to the extent of changes in the last century in terms of male/female relations in the sphere of reproduction, especially since the advent of the digit revolution and globalization. 2)A Marxist Analysis which includes the effects of technology and human agency (Marx’s dialectic of the objective and subjective)on these changes which coincidentally run parallel to the global changes in production (i.e., increased mobility and decentralization, the need for less human labor of all kinds, the break down of the nuclear family which is the reproductive equivalent to the breakdown of the nation-state in the larger capitalist sphere, etc.) and 3)a Post Modern analysis of these changes based on the agency of language and literary concepts of gender (i.e. The “cis” “binary” folks). One last, mea culpa --for many reasons, the articles I have used have not been changed very much1)because they were so good as is and 2)I am presenting them more as a teacher would present information to her students rather than as a writer. Also they are not well referenced because 1)some of them did not have the author, and2)except for the empirical stats which can easily be verified, I am presenting them more as food for thought, not a coherent decisive argument for one point of view or the other and 3)ran out of time. Hopefully, I will be able to add more references in the next two days.
Empirical Data
GENDER INEQUALITY
The transformation of gender relations since the beginning of the 20th century is one of the most rapid, profound social changes in human history. For the more than 7,000 years of human history since settled agriculture and early states emerged, male domination has characterized the gender relations of almost every human society
In the United States, ignoring the role of working women, men and women were generally viewed as occupying sharply different roles in society: a woman’s place was in the home as wife and mother; the man’s place was in the public sphere. Men had legal powers over the lives of their wives and children (until the mid-19th century, women could generally not own property and legally were considered their husbands property, wife beaters were rarely punished (Up until 1900, the law said that a man could not beat his wife with anything thicker than his thumb).To be sure, critics of patriarchy – rule by men over women and children – had emerged by the end of the 18th century, and the movement for the right of women to vote was well under way by the end of the 19th century, but well into the 20th century the legitimacy of patriarchy was taken for granted by most people and backed by religious doctrines that saw these relations as ordained by God.
Given the recent spate of conflicts that have arisen is this realm, ranging from the serious to the ridiculous and sublime, its important to try to establish some factual data (I’m still a believer in scientific facts over alternative facts) about the realities of gender relations in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century. While all sorts of gender inequalities continue to exist, they exist in a completely different context of cultural norms, political and social rights, and institutionalized rules. Male domination is on the defensive and its foundations are crumbling.
The concept of “gender” vs. biologically determined characteristics in sociological terms is critical to this discussion to explain what it means to talk about gender inequality and the transformation of gender relations, backed up by a broad empirical description of the transformations of gender in America since the middle of the 20th century. Not our beliefs or philosophical arguments but verifiable data as to where we are today. It is only then that we can discuss the idea of social change which, I will posit is the result of the interplay of unintended changes in the social conditions which people face and conscious, collective struggles to change those conditions.
GENDER, NATURE AND THE PROBLEM OF POSSIBLE VARIATION. At the core of the sociological analysis of gender is the distinction between biological sex and gender: sex is a property of the biological characteristics of an organism; gender is socially constructed, socially created. This is a powerful and totally revolutionary idea: we have the potential capacity to change the social relations in which we live, including the social relations between biologically defined men and women. Sometimes in the media one hears a discussion in which someone talks about the gender of a dog. In biological terms, dogs don’t have gender; only people living within socially constructed relations are gendered. This distinction raises a fundamental question about what it means to say that something is “natural”. Gender relations are generally experienced as “natural” rather than as something created by cultural and social processes. Throughout most of history for most people the roles performed by men and women seem to be derived from inherent biological properties. After all, it is a biological fact that women get pregnant and give birth to babies and have the capacities to breastfeed them. Men cannot do this. It is biological fact that all women know that they are the mothers of the babies they bear, whereas men know that they are the fathers of particular children only when they have confidence that they know the sexual behavior of the mother. It is a small step from these biological facts to the view that it is also a fact of nature that women are best suited to have primary responsibility for rearing children as well, and because of this they should be responsible for other domestic chores.
The central thesis of gender relations is that these biological facts by themselves do not determine the specific form that social relations between men and women take. This does not imply, however, an even stronger view, that gender relations have nothing to do with biology. Gender relations are the result of the way social processes act on a specific biological categories and form social relations between them. One way of thinking about this is with a metaphor of production: biological differences rooted in sex constitute the raw materials which, through a specific process of social production, get transformed into the social relations we call “gender”. Now, this way of thinking about sex and gender leaves entirely open the very difficult question of what range of variation in gender relations is stably possible.
We know from anthropological research that in human history taken as a whole there is enormous variation in the character of social relations between men and women. In some societies at some points in history, women were virtually the slaves of men, completely disempowered and vulnerable. In some contemporary societies they must cover their faces in public and cannot appear outside of the home without being accompanied by an appropriate man.
In other times and places, women have had considerable autonomy and control over their bodies and activities. So, one thing is for sure: there is enormous empirical variation which we can observe.
What is much less clear is what sorts of variation are possible, and what sorts of possibilities that have not yet occurred could nevertheless be stable over time. For example, in all societies women have historically had primary responsibility for early infant care; in no society has it been the case that the prevalent social norms backed the principle that fathers should be as involved in the care of babies as mothers. As a generalization from this empirical observation, therefore, we might conclude that strongly egalitarian norms about parenting of babies are not possible. Such a conclusion would be unjustified. Since this observed universal has occurred in a world characterized by certain specific technological, economic, political and cultural properties, the universality of this “fact” does not mean that this is simply a “natural” reflection of biology. Until the very recent past, for example, birth control was relatively ineffective; now it is reliable. Until the last one hundred and fifty years or so, most people had to spend most of their time producing food. This is no longer true. Until recently, because of relatively high infant mortality women needed to have many children in order to insure that there would be surviving adult children. For most people, this was essential if they hoped to have anyone to take care of them when they were old. All of these are historically novel developments of the past few centuries. What we do not know, then, is what new forms of gender relations might become possible and stable given these dramatically altered technological, economic, cultural and political conditions. In particular, we do not know whether or not under the dramatically altered material and cultural circumstances of the United States and similar countries in the 21st century, fully egalitarian gender relations are possible.
Equally important, even if we decided for some reason that it was indeed “natural” for women to specialize in taking care of infants, this would not actually resolve the question of whether or not it was desirable for there to be a cultural norm telling women that they should do most of the caregiving or whether or not egalitarian norms could never become dominant. Just because something is “natural” – in the sense of reflecting some underlying biological characteristics of people – does not mean it is desirable and untransformable. It is perfectly natural for a person to die from smallpox: our biological system is such that this infection often kills us. No one feels that this makes it undesirable to develop vaccines. even if this could somehow be convincingly demonstrated – does not prove that egalitarian relations are impossible, let alone undesirable. A final issue in play in thinking about possible transformations of gender relations concerns variations among men and among women in underlying biologically-rooted dispositions. It may be that because of genes and hormones, men are, on average, more aggressive than women and, on average, have stronger instinctual proclivities to dominate, and that woman because of genes and hormones are on average more nurturing and have stronger dispositions to engage in caregiving activities. But whatever the “natural” dispositions of the average man and woman, there is a tremendous overlap in the distribution of these attributes among men and among women. There are many women more aggressive than the average male and many men more nurturing than the average female.
Whatever the behavioral differences between genders that are generated by genes and hormones, society and culture exaggerate these differences because of the impact of socialization and social norms on behavior. You can’t take the simple empirical observation of the existing differences in distributions of these traits between genders and infer anything about what is the “true” biological difference under alternative conditions.
II. THE TRANSFORMATION OF GENDER RELATIONS IN AMERICA: What follows below is a brief descriptive tour through some of the major changes in patterns of gender inequality during the last decades of the twentieth century.
1)Legal Rights: before 1920 women in the United States did not have the right to vote. This was justified on many grounds: they were not as rational or intelligent as men; they were not really autonomous and would have their votes controlled by the men in their lives; Women were not really full political citizens until the third decade of the 20th. In the 1930s, married women were not allowed to travel on their own passports; they had to use their husbands. Until World War II, formal and informal “marriages bars” were in place in many parts of the United States, prohibiting married women from many clerical jobs and public school teaching. Not until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 that discrimination against women in jobs, pay, and promotion was made illegal. Even though in the 1970s a Constitutional Amendment to guarantee equal rights for women – the Equal Rights Amendment – failed to pass the required number of states, by the end of the 20th century, virtually all of the legal rules which differentiate the right of men and women had been eliminated. Women now do, effectively, have equal formal rights to men.
2) Labor force participation In 1950 only about 10% of married women with children under 6 were in the paid labor force; 90% were stay-at-home Moms (Figure 15.2) Even when the youngest child reached school age, at the mid-point of the twentieth century over 70% of married women were still full time homemakers. This was clearly the cultural standard, at least for white women. For black women the norm was always weaker, although it was still the case in 1950 that 64% of black women with children over 6 did not work in the formal paid labor force. -- By the beginning of the 21st century the situation had dramatically changed: Over 60% of mothers with children under six and nearly 80% of mothers with children in school were now in the paid labor force. Continuous labor force participation with, at most, brief interruptions with the birth of a child, has become the new cultural norm. This change in the relationship between women and the labor market is more rapid than the change in employment patterns that occurred during the industrial revolution.
3) Occupational Structure and earnings The dramatic increase in female labor force participation has been accompanied by a significant change in the economic opportunities of women both in terms of the occupations women fill and the earnings they receive. In certain occupations that were previously almost entirely male, women have made substantial headway In 1930, only 1.5% of Police officers, 1.5% of architects, 2.4% of lawyers, and 5.1% of doctors were women. By 1960 these figures had increased modestly to 3-7% across these categories. By 2007, the change was dramatic: woman were17.8% of policemen, 25.9% of architects, 31.7% of physicians, and 33.7% of lawyers. The future of the gender composition of a profession, is the rate of increase of women who enter training program. In the 19491950 academic year, 7.2% of students in medical school and 2.8% in Law school were women. This increased to 7% and 9% in 1969-70, and then took off, reaching 47% and 49% in 2006-7. However, a selection of occupations that are heavily sextyped remain. Aalthough, in 2007 it was still the case that over 96% of secretaries, 97% of kindergarten and preschool teachers, and 97% of dental assistants were women and constituted only about 5% of airline pilots and just under 2% of carpenters and automechanics, women have also made significant progress in earnings: the relative pay of women increased from 63% of male median hourly earnings in 1973 to 82% of male earnings in 2005.
Still, even when you control statistically for experiences levels, education, skills and other factors, a pay gap remains between men and women and reflects the large differences in pay that continue to exist for jobs that are identified with women compared to jobs associated with men: parking attendants typically earn more than pre-school teachers, for example.
4)Power Gender Inequalities in the Public Sphere. The United States ranks 20th among developed democracies in the proportion of women in the national legislature. Sweden is first with 47%. Other Northern European countries are all above 30%. Even among the English speaking countries, which are generally lower than other European countries, only Ireland has fewer women in the national legislatures than does the United States.
5. Transformation in family structure: At midcentury almost 80% of all people lived in households in which there was a married couple. Many adult children lived with their parents until getting married, or only lived on their own for a very short period. Other household forms were considered either deviant or transitional.
By 2008 only half of all households consisted of a married couple. Households of a single person living alone increased from under 10% of all households in 1940 to almost 30% in 2009. The remaining households consisted of cohabiting unmarried couples (including same-sex couples), households headed by a single parent and households of single people with roommates
In 1960, only 7% of women aged 30-34 had never married. By 2007 this had increased to over 27% In the early 1950s, people who go married had only about a 12% probability of getting divorced within ten years. By the early 1980s this figure was nearly 30%. This very high rate of divorce for marriages in the 1970s and 80s meant that demographers estimate that eventually somewhere between 45-50% of these marriages will end in divorce. “14% of white women who married in the 1940s eventually divorced. A single generation later, almost 50 percent of those that married in the late sixties and early seventies have already divorced. Between 1940 and 1960 less than 5% of all births were to unmarried women. The percentage rose steeply from the 1960s to the 1990s, reaching 33% by the end of the decade. By 2000 only 55% of children aged 15-17 were still living with two biological parents.
6) Domestic division of labor within the family At the beginning of the twentieth century, the average woman between the ages of 18 and 64 did around 46 hours of domestic work in the home per week, while the average man did only about 4.Between 1965 and 1975 men hardly increased their involvement in housework labor at all, while women decreased theirs quite a bit. In 1965 mothers spent 23 times more time cleaning house than did fathers. This declined to 13.5 times more in 1975, because mothers on average decreased the amount of time they spent cleaning house from an average of around 19 hours a week to just over 12 hours a week. In both periods fathers typically spent less than 1 hour a week on routine housecleaning. By 2005 the ratio had declined to 4.3:1, but this time much of the change came from a doubling of fathers’ housecleaning labor.
7. Sexuality
A majority of people in the United States believe that women should have the right to abortion. In 2009, only around 20-25% of people believe that abortion should be illegal in all cases, and a clear majority believes it should be legal in most or all cases. Until the mid-1970s rape was a defined as a crime only if the perpetrator was not a spouse. By the first decade of the 21st century half of the states in the United States had completely removed the marital exemption from rape laws, and the remaining states treated it as a crime, but of lesser severity than rape outside of marriage. Perhaps the most dramatic transformation of sexual norms concerns homosexuality. In the case of homosexuality the prevailing attitudes, norms and the laws have changed in fundamental ways. In the 1950s homosexuality was a criminal offense in all states in the United States under the rubric “sodomy laws,” even if the statutes were only erratically enforced. There were periodic police raids on gay bars and being revealed as a homosexual was grounds for loosing a job.. In 1961 Illinois became the first state to repeal its sodomy Law. By 2003 such laws had been repealed in throughout most of the United States except for Southern States and a few others. In 2003 the Supreme Court ruled that such laws were unconstitutional and that the state cannot restrict the right of adults to engage in consensual sexual activity.
By the beginning of the 21st century, laws criminalizing homosexuality had been ruled unconstitutional and the public acceptance of homosexuality as simply a variation on human sexuality has become fairly widespread. Discrimination in employment and housing against homosexuals is broadly viewed as illegitimate, and as of 2009 in many states it is illegal under anti-discrimination statutes. Even in the military, homosexuality was tacitly accepted under the awkward “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy adopted in the Clinton Administration, and it is very likely that by the second decade of the century formal restrictions on homosexuality in the military will be dropped. By 2009 a majority of the public favored giving all of the substantive rights associated with marriage to same sex couples under the rubric civil partnership, even if a majority still opposed the use of the word “marriage” to designate these legal arrangements Among younger cohorts, while only 20% of people 65 and older do so. In the 2000s, this has already happened in a number of Western European countries – the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Britain – and most others have formalized full civil unions with all of the legal rights of marriage
Rules of the technology game we are playing:
1. In times of abrupt and deepening changes in society, people --because of alienation-- desire absolute and unchanging qualities to define their worlds, their lives and their motives in reconnecting to others in unfamiliar situations.
2. As technology becomes more automated, we have to become more intelligent and think systemically to prevail. Systemic thinking means we connect the dots of cause and effect to examine and evaluate the consequences of new technologies.
3. Technology or craft, as an extension of human physical capacities is part of a class called "learned behavior," or acquired, as opposed to inherited traits
4. As technology has minimized the disparity in skill between the genders, quite often the cultural insistence has provoked a widening between those jobs assigned to women and often higher paying jobs designated as "mans work," and reserved for men. This is referred to as the Paradox of Automation with respect to gender in the workplace.
Gender: what it means?
From the word genus to be born or bring forth, grow, develop or be kin of or akin to: genes, genetics.
A somewhat arbitrary classification in grammar for the ending of words.
The apparent distinct, but variable, condition affected by at least four variables:
1: chromosomes: the presence of a "Y" (actually a deficient "X") chromosome is referred to as male.
2: hormones (proteins): the estrogen and androgens (actually an estrogen derivative) that influence shape and character of external and internal reproductive apparatus.
3: fetal development: the precise timing and exposure inuteri of the fetus to internal hormones and external conditions of the birth mother.
4: social expectations: how people are raised, influenced by schools, media, experiences and reward systems.
Gender is the product of both inherited and acquired traits.
Humans are, by custom, the product of sexual selection, as opposed to natural selection in that the choice in partners is made on the basis of certain traits the opposite gender finds of value.
Appearances are not as definitive as we would like in:
1. defining gender is a cultural construct undergoing constant social alteration.
2. assigning work or performance roles to different genders.
3. of approximately 1 in 1000 births the gender classification is ambiguous and is assigned by the attending physician based on morphology (appearances) .
Men's versus women's work has been altered by mechanization, industrialization and automation:
18th century; 1720s-60s -- mechanization
increasing number of prenuptial pregnancies, though fewer children in urban families.
19th century; 1820s-1890s -- industrialization
Lowell mills (Mass.) and other textile plants employed women and children as cheap labor and a docile labor force. Women often worked during depressions as men we laid off. Families were larger, but were dramatically declining in size (by 1/2) and were producers.Birth control devices proliferated, despite social, religious and moral sanctions.
20th century; 1920s-1980s -- automation
During waitress (much of the century), women worked in factories to replace men
who were conscripted for military service. High male mortality rates led to women filling men's roles, such as women physicians and engineers in the Soviet Union.
The home became mechanized by intruding appliances and families became consumers. Today there are more women in the workforce than men. Each stage of mechanization, industrialization and automation, made the differences between men's and women's work less and less distinguishable.
False dichotomy:
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Males
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Females
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Object - oriented or thing centered - I
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People centered - humane and human interested - Thou
Marxist Analysis
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Marx on Gender and the Family: A Summary Heather BrownHome › 2014 › Volume 66, Issue 02 (June)
Many feminist scholars have had, at best, an ambiguous relationship with Marx and Marxism. This is especially relevant to current debates, since a number of feminist scholars have criticized Marx and Engels for what they see as their economic determinism. In recent years, there has been little discussion of Marx’s writings on gender and the family, but in the1970s and ‘80s, these writings were subject to a great deal of debate.
Elements of Marx’s overall theory were merged with psychoanalytic or other forms of feminist theory by feminist scholars such as Nancy Hartsock and Heidi Hartmann who viewed Marx's theory as primarily gender-blind and in need of an additional theory to understand gender-relations as well. However, they retained Marx’s historical materialism as a starting point for understanding production. Lise Vogel has attempted to move beyond dual systems towards a unitary understanding of political economy and social reproduction.
The dual-systems theory of patriarchy and capitalism which was a common form of socialist feminism in the 1970s and ‘80s was viewed as a failed project by many in the 1990s and beyond. In any event, the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe probably had a negative effect on the popularity of socialist feminism. dual-systems theory was inadequate since it was based on two very different theories of society—one involving the historic dynamic development of society, primarily social, economic and technological, and the other based on a static psychological view of human nature.
These two theories are very difficult to reconcile because of these vast differences. However, their critiques of what they viewed as Marx's determinism, gender-blind categories, and emphasis on production at the expense of reproduction
Marx’s work contained elements of Victorian ideology, but there is much of interest on gender and the family scattered throughout his work. As early as 1844, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx argued that women’s position in society could be used as a measure of the development of society as a whole. He was certainly not the first to make a statement such as this—. Marx was making a dialectical argument directly related to his overall theory of society. In order for society to advance beyond its capitalist form, new social relations would have to be formed where Human beings would have to become able to see each other as valuable in themselves, rather than as only worth what one individual can provide to another. Thus, men and women would have to reach a point of development where an individual is valued for who they are, rather than any abstract category of man, woman, etc. Women would be especially significant in this regard, since they have tended to be a marginalized group within most, if not all, societies.
Moreover, Marx appears to point in the direction of gender as a dynamic rather than static category. Certainly, Marx never directly made this claim: however, in the 1844 Manuscripts and in The German Ideology, he provided a strong critique of, and alternative to, traditional dualistic views of the nature/society dualism. Instead of nature and society existing as two distinct entities that interact with each other without fundamentally changing the essence of itself or the other, Marx argues that the two are dialectically related. As human beings interact with nature through labor, both the individual and nature is changed. This occurs because human beings exist as part of nature, and the labor process provides the means for such a temporary unity. Since both nature and society are not static entities, Marx argued that there can be no trans historical notion of what is “natural.” Instead, a concept of “natural” can only be relevant for specific historical circumstances.
Although one should not draw too close a parallel between the nature/culture dualism and the man/woman dualism—to do so could lead to a reification of these categories that we seek to transform—the sort of dialectical thinking that Marx evinces in regard to the nature/culture dualism is also evident in Marx and Engels’s discussion of the gender-division of labor in The German Ideology. Here, they point to the division of labor in the early family as something that is not completely “natural.” Instead, even in their brief discussion of the development of the family, they point out that this division of labor based on gender is only “natural” for very undeveloped productive relations, where women’s different biology would make it difficult for them to carry out certain physically demanding tasks. The implication is that women’s supposed inferiority in these societies is something that can change as society changes. Moreover, since a social element is involved, more is needed than technological development: women will have to work themselves to change their situation.
Evaluating Marx’s Work On Gender and the Family For Today
One of the most important aspects of Marx’s work for understanding gender and the family is Marx’s dialectical method. Marx’s categories came from his analysis of the empirical world, seen as dynamic and are based on social relationships rather than static ahistorical formulations. Thus, these categories could change as society changes.
This could potentially be valuable to a feminist analysis. Marx never directly addressed gendered dualisms and categories, but he leaves some room in his theory for change within these categories. This is especially true in regard to two dualisms: the nature/culture dualism and the production/reproduction dualism. In both cases, Marx points to the historical and transitory nature of these formulations. Nature and culture are not absolute opposites: they are, instead, moments of the whole. Labor, as a necessary activity for survival, mediates humanity’s relationship with nature in very specific ways, based on the particular mode of production in question. Moreover, in terms of the production-and-reproduction dualism, Marx is normally careful to note that both are necessary to humanity, but that these will take different forms based upon the technological and social development of the society in question.
Marx points to two different aspects of these categories—the historically specific elements and the more abstract characteristics that exist in every society. Thus, in terms of understanding women’s relationship to these dualisms, a logical formulation within Marx’s thought would be to point out that biology is certainly relevant. However, biology cannot be viewed as such outside of the social relations of a particular society. This can potentially help to avoid the biologistic and deterministic arguments of some radical and socialist feminists who essentialize “women’s nature,” while at the same time avoiding relativism since, in Marx’s view, the world is not completely socially constructed. Rather, biology and nature are important variables when viewed within a socially mediated framework.
Gender in Egalitarian Societies
by Eleanor Leacock
From Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 2nd edition, editedby Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston,1987).
Introduction
Popular images of the relations between women and men in primeval society are epitomized by the club-carrying "cave man" of the New Yorker cartoon who drags off his woman by the hair of her head. At a higher, supposedly scientific level, the writings of Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris, and the like reinforce this image.1 Behind the laughter at the cartoon, or behind whatever picture is being woven from bits and pieces of ethnographic data pulled out of context, the message remains basically the same: humans have always been aggressive and competitive, and men, being more so than women, have always been "dominant." Theme repeats, with variations, that our "primitive" or "animal nature" reflects the "law of the jungle," whereby might makes right because a fundamentally brutish human nature - so the argument runs - lies beneath the superficial gloss of "civilization," with its Golden Rule of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and the value our culture claims to place on human life and human individuality. When, however, we weigh the data of social and physical anthropology, archaeology, and primatology in their entirety, rather than selecting from them arbitrarily, they tell a different story. Sociality, curiosity and playfulness, not assertive competitiveness and aggressiveness, made it possible for a fairly small and defenseless creature to evolve into the human being that created many different ways of life around the world. Sociality, that is, an abounding desire to be close to others of the same species and an overriding interest in them, characterizes our primate relatives. Fighting and scrapping occur as subsidiary, not primary, motives. Humanity did not evolve from an innately aggressive forebear as postulated by Thomas Hobbes. By hindsight it is clear that it could not have done so. The basis for the successful evolution of human beings was the group life that both required and made possible cooperative patterns. In turn, cooperation led to and became dependent upon the development refined tools and utensils, and the elaboration of social organization.
The Analysis of Gender and Sex Through Language and Literary Analysis
My (Geminijen’s)Personal Response:
One of the ways in which we analyze our experience. hopes and concerns is through Science Fiction recreations of Utopian and Dystopian Societies. When I first heard Margaret Atwood’s Tale of the Hand Maidens was coming out as a mini-series, I was excited because I had first read it several years ago and then rediscovered a poem which relates to her dystopian world called “Half Hanging Mary” (read it if you get the chance!). When I saw the promos of the series, however, I was a little disappointed. Granted, The Authoritarian World of a Puritanical Dictator Who Took Away All Women’s Rights and made them slaves to reproduction in a society which was in a survival crisis due to a population crisis certainly felt appropriate given the Pence Fundamentalist Agenda and the subsequent Women’s uprising. In fact, it was dead on. Right down to the fact that the women’s uprising was primarily the white bourgouise women’s movement of Hillary and the Democrats. Instead of focusing on all the women’s oppression, it focuses mainly on the small class of handmaiden’s who were to reproduce for the “masters” (the CEO’s)and their barren wives. Kind of like the House Slaves vs. the Field slaves back in the day. Granted, the obvious Eurocentric class and race bias, may have partly stemmed from the fact that Atwood hails from Canada and may have reflected a different intersectional society. It certainly is worth watching and can lend to the discussion of “Our Resistence”, but this particular version of a Dystopia, while very appropriate for today, didn’t really speak to me or answer my questions. Upon checking, I found mine was not the only reaction like this:
The Handmaid’s Tale Ends As It Began — by Amping Up the Anxiety The Handmaid’s Tale Season-Finale Recap: I Have No Choice
In Atwood’s novel, black people are mentioned in only a few sentences to alert readers that they’ve been rounded up and sent to some colony in the Midwest, in a move that resembles South Africa’s apartheid. This decision feels like the mark of a writer unable to reckon with how race would compound the horrors of a hyper-Evangelical-ruled culture. Furthermore, it misrepresents how black and brown people resist in times of crisis. As writer Mikki Kendall noted on Twitter, “black people did not survive slavery, Jim Crow, and the war on drugs to be taken out by a handful of white boys with guns.” Showrunner Bruce Miller understands the troubling optics of showcasing an all-white Gilead in 2017. The show casts black actors in key roles that make up June’s strongest emotional bonds, including her daughter, her husband Luke, and her best friend, Moira (Samira Wiley). There are also black, Asian, and Latina handmaids. Miller addressed the show’s color-blind casting in an interview with Vulture, saying, “When Samira Wiley comes and auditions, you cast her. She is amazing. She was Moira. The same thing with O.T. Fagbenle, who plays her husband. Terrifically interesting actor. We were blessed to get both of them even interested in our project, so once you get to that, that also plays a role because in this landscape of TV now, it’s much more diverse.”
But the show doesn’t end up considering the racial dynamics of June’s family, or what it means to be a handmaid of color. In the end, its approach to race is just as mishandled as Atwood’s. The Handmaid’s Tale’s silence on race grows more awkward as the show goes on, particularly in light of its marketing as a politically astute salve for these troubled times, and the girl-power inflected feminism destined to launch a thousand T-shirts with clever wordplay. In reality, though, it’s more concerned with the interiority of white women at the expense of people of color who recognize that Gilead isn’t a possible horrifying future, but the reality of what America has always been.
The Handmaid’s Tale is best described as post-racial. In an interview with TVLine Miller explains this choice, saying, “The evangelical movement has gotten a lot more integrated” in the years since the book was published. In actuality, the evangelical movement continues to twist scripture in order to support virulent racism — a practice that goes back to this country’s founding, when slaves were stripped of their own practices and forced into Christianity while being barred from reading the same Bible slave masters used to assert their superiority as not just biological fact, but a spiritual imperative. More importantly, Handmaid’s post-racial view of America rings false because in times of strife, divisions don’t dissolve — if anything, they become more ingrained (which proves true for gender on the show). As Soraya Nadia McDonald posits in a piece for the Undefeated, “So Gilead is post-racial because the human race is facing extinction, and that prompted Americans to get over several hundred years’ worth of racist education and social conditioning that depicted black people as inferior and less than human?”
One by-product of The Handmaid’s Tale’s color-blind casting is that people of color are often seen on the margins of the show. Take the introduction of Commanders of color. (People of color exist in every strata of Gilead society, which ignores how racism has always been a schism throughout America, barring black people especially from finding wealth to pass on to future generations.) They appear only a few times: In the episode-four flashback detailing June and Moira’s partially successful escape from the Red Center, black and Asian Commanders are seen leaving the train that Moira boards to freedom. When June is at a clinic in the same episode, pictures line the walls showing Commanders and their wives cradling the infants that handmaids have given birth to. A few seem to be people of color, but they’re too hazily and briefly focused on to clearly make out the race of everyone pictured. In the finale, a tribunal of Commanders is gathered in order to decide the fate of one of their wayward members. One of the Commanders is black. The scene is so gloomily lit that it’s hard to make out if anyone else in attendance is a man of color. What unites these examples is the way in which they show men of color — the only acknowledgement that people of color have any power in Gilead whatsoever: All of them are either out of focus or pushed to the margins of the frame. This proves to be an unintentional metaphor for how the series treats race, as a way to earn kudos in a landscape in which viewers demand inclusivity, but is ultimately not worth direct conversation.
The presence of handmaids and Commanders of color also makes it difficult to buy the world-building of Gilead, no matter how astute Moss’s performance is or how adept certain story lines are at building tension. Are white Commanders and their wives really okay with having a handmaid of color? Is there a caste system for handmaids of color in which some are considered more desirable than others? Do Commanders of color have the same privileges as their white counterparts? If Gilead is meant to imagine a possible future for America, how could deeply entrenched racial dynamics disappear?
The Handmaid’s Tale’s uneasy relationship with race and its faux-feminist posturing come most into focus with June’s best friend, Moira. In many ways, Moira is everything June isn’t. She’s a brave, humorous queer black woman. She doesn’t hesitate to question the nature of the Ceremony when Aunt Lydia (an unnerving Ann Dowd) first explains it. She carves “Aunt Lydia Sux” into a bathroom stall, even as June warns her about punishment. “It’ll let her know she’s not alone,” Moira says of future handmaids who might see the message, in response to June’s fearful admonishment. Moira’s radicalism is a common act of survival for black women who’ve grown up learning about and witnessing resistance movements. It’s also Moira who engineers their escape attempt in episode four. While Moira is able to abscond, thanks to commandeering an Aunt’s uniform, June is returned to the Red Center for punishment. Moira is assumed dead, but since this information is relayed by Janine, whose defining feature is her madness, it’s easy to doubt. Moira is next seen when June unexpectedly encounters her working at a brothel named Jezebels.
Moira’s interiority as a queer black woman, forced to have sex with men at a brothel in order to survive, is never given focus. The narrative turn seems blissfully unaware of the Jezebel stereotype that has haunted black women since times of slavery. To place a black women in this scenario automatically makes it more fraught and complex, particularly since she’s seen with white men — a decision that feels like a clear evocation of how enslaved black women were forced to be mistresses. For a show that routinely uses flashbacks — even giving Luke an entire episode to himself — it seems odd that Moira only recounts her journey to Jezebels in a brief conversation with Offred. Even more frustrating is that Moira has sanded off her edges in order to survive, while June is now positioned as the feminist radical willing to aid the resistance movement, Mayday. These decisions are a way to avoid exploring the horror she experiences head-on, as the series has done for the white women in Moira’s orbit. Just witness the camera’s relationship with Moira versus other characters. In particularly complex emotional moments for June, Janine, and even Serena Joy, they are framed in extreme close-up, which feels like a more intimate way to communicate their point of view than even voice-over. Moira gets no shots like this. There is an emotional removal in regards to how the camera interacts with her compared to the aforementioned white women, whose perspectives become important to the narrative to varying degrees. It almost feels like a reminder to the viewer that Moira is an appendage to someone else’s story.
These dynamics aren’t lost on the people behind The Handmaid’s Tale. When asked about the absence of racism in Gilead in an interview with Vulture, Miller said, “We didn’t come upon a story where we needed to talk about it this season, but that’s not because we didn’t feel it was interesting. We think we will, but it just didn’t happen that way.” He continued, “You couldn’t get around the fact that the way the handmaids were treated had such a feeling of slave narratives in America — women who were pregnant knowing their children would be taken away from them and having no control over them. That was such a shocking metaphor that it seemed ridiculous not to have handmaids of color to play out that story on screen. But I don’t think racism has disappeared — it’s supposed to be our world, and it’s supposed to be as racist as our world, and have racial issues. So I think it will definitely come up.” Based on Miller’s comments, and how Moira’s story ends in season one — with her escaping to Canada, becoming a refugee with political asylum, and tearfully reuniting with Luke — it’s possible her arc will be given more depth in season two. But this isn’t just an artistic oversight that can be written off in hopes that the next season proves more perceptive. That the series fails to properly consider how race intersects with its discussions of theocratic rule and rank misogyny isn’t surprising, considering there are no women of color on its writing staff. While it’s easy to cast people of color in a variety of roles, it’s far harder to meaningfully evoke the ways race affects our lives — The Handmaid’s Tale is a classic example of the problem with settling for diversity that exists out of a desire to be “color-blind.”
How can you attempt to craft a political, artistically rich narrative that trades in the real-life experiences of black and brown women, while ignoring them and the ways sexism intersects with racism? The Handmaid’s Tale creates a claustrophobic reality, particularly for black viewers and the characters that mirror us onscreen. Its catchy feminist rhetoric is a mask for how it propagates the same systems it seeks to critique. The bodies and histories of black and brown women prove to be useful templates for shows like The Handmaid’s Tale, but our actual voices aren’t.
But even this didn’t satisfy my need for more future world options. Although it is a series and still in progress, it may more fully develop these aspects in later episodes, but as of now it tended to conflate race and class. Where were the working class white women like myself? Or were white women supposed to somehow be all upper middle class and all (or most— there was some class integration) black and other women of color supposed to be only from the lower classes? Also, it really didn’t address the transgressions of heterosexual sexual norms except in passing. I needed different future possibilities and warnings. So I went to look for other worlds and found the following:
The "Straight Mind" analyzes two other Utopian/Dystopian future societies which define the problem somewhat differently that Atwood’s Handmaidens Tale:
In The Female Man Joanna Russ contrasts our present-day heterosexual society with two societies that reflect current sex role values and two future revolutionary alternatives: a utopian world of women and a dystopian world of women warring with men. The Female Man, both science fiction and utopian novel, operates as what Monique Wittig in The Straight Mind (hereafter, SM) calls a literary "war machine" (69). The goal of such a war machine is "to pulverize the old forms and formal conventions through the use of language and literature.
It is in this group of theorists that you will find the “cis” and “non-binary” folks, mostly somewhat upper middle class young academics who adher to the post-modern structuralist school. While I may make fun of the jargon and lack of a connection to the real world in which you actually bump your toe or millions of people die of famine, it really provides a very important aspect to the construction of gender relations that is important to our perceptions of ourselves as we move forward into a digital technologically changed world
In deploying this literary war machine, Russ critiques—in a manner similar to Wittig’s The Straight Mind and her utopian novel Les Guérillères (1969)— heterosexual institutions that regulate gender, showing two alternative worlds that further undermine the heterosexual institutions regulating gender.
I’m going to describe these other possible futures to suggest some of the concepts we might have to look forward to (or are already experiencing). Which one or ones do you relate to? Why?
Wittig, a materialist feminist, associates with what she calls "the straight mind." Wittig asserts that the straight mind "cannot conceive of a culture, a society where heterosexuality human relationships but also its very production of concepts and all the processes which escape consciousness, as well" (SM 28). For Wittig, there is one category of sex— female—and this "category of sex is the product of a heterosexual society which imposes on women the rigid obligation of the reproduction of the ‘species’"; it also "turns half of the population into sexual beings.... Wherever they are, whatever they do...they are seen (and made) sexually available to men, and they, breasts, buttocks, costume, must be visible" (SM 6-7) while “men” only exist the general universal category of human.
Wittig’s position is that there is no gender and no sex; rather, the straight mind discursively produces these categories . The category of sex, Wittig says, "does not concern being but relationships.... there is no such thing as being-woman or being-man. ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ are political concepts of opposition" (SM 29). This is another way of saying that "there are not two genders. There is only one: the feminine, the ‘masculine’ not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine but the general" (SM 60). The category of sex and the straight mind which Wittig analyzes in her essays are found in the contemporary worlds of Jeannine and Joanna, which is unsurprising because their worlds are very similar to ours. For example, this monologue by Joanna in one of the contemporary societies, illustrates some of the consequences of the straight mind:
"Do you enjoy playing with other people’s children—for ten minutes? Good! This reveals that you have Maternal Instinct and you will be forever wretched if you do not instantly have a baby of your own....
Are you lonely? Good! This shows that you have Feminine Incompleteness; get married and do all your husband’s personal services, buck him up when he’s low, teach him about sex (if he wants you to), praise his technique (if he doesn’t), have a family if he wants a family....
"Do you like men’s bodies? Good! This is beginning to be almost as good as getting married. This means that you have True Womanliness, which is fine unless you want to do it with him on the bottom and you on the top.... (§7.5:151-52)
Joanna’s monologue echoes an earlier chapter, "The Great Happiness Contest," a series of dramatic vignettes which includes the following:
FIRST WOMAN: I’m perfectly happy. I love my husband and we have two darling children. I certainly don’t need any change in my lot.
SECOND WOMAN: I’m even happier than you are. My husband does the dishes every Wednesday and we have three darling children, each nicer than the last. I’m tremendously happy.
THIRD WOMAN: Neither of you is as happy as I am.... I’m happiest in fulfilling my responsibilities to him and the children. We have four children.
FOURTH WOMAN: We have six children.... I have a part-time job as a clerk in Bloomingdale’s...but I really feel like I’m expressing myself best when I make a custard or a meringue or decorate the basement.
ME: You miserable nits, I have a Nobel Peace Prize, fourteen published novels, six lovers, a town house, a box at the Metropolitan Opera, I fly a plane, I fix my own car, and I can do eighteen push-ups before breakfast, that is, if you’re interested in numbers.
ALL THE WOMEN: Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. (§6.5:116-17)1
Of the two future worlds, Whileaway is merely a hope and Jael’s world is a parody. Janet comes from Whileaway, an all-women, anarchist society (§5.7:91). The men on Whileaway were wiped out by a plague (§1.8:14), thus, women are (naturally) lesbians and have children through gene splicing. They marry but are not monogamous and have sexual relations primarily outside the family (52, 53). They are very technologically advanced, but choose to use the technology in a way that will be ecologically sustainable and thus keep most of their land in agricultural use.
Janet’s visit to America inevitably leads to reversals that undermine the straight mind.
For instance, when Janet is interviewed on television, the M.C. presumptuously asks how Whileaway will react to the reappearance of men. Janet cannot imagine "why" men should reappear. She keeps asking "why," until the M.C. finally tells her, "One sex is half a species" (§1.7:9-10). Janet does not comprehend this, of course, because on Whileaway one sex is the whole species. This is the reversal of male universality: on Whileaway females are the universal. On Whileaway, heterosexuality is reversed as a literary tool to show the contradictions within current societies. On Whileaway women are lesbians and bear children, so they have no reproductive need for men and no concept of heterosexuality. Because of this, when the women from contemporary societies watch Jael have sex with her male robot, Davy, Janet exclaims, "‘Good Lord? Is that all?’". Although one critic suggests Janet’s exclamation shows that "sex between a person and a dehumanized object is not—and should not be regarded as being—highly significant" this interpretation ignores the obvious parallel to the possible dehumanization of women in heterosexual sex between "real men" and "real women." Moreover, Janet’s exclamation can be interpreted from the lesbian perspective that, compared to lesbian sex, "is that [heterosexual sex] all [there is to it]?" Is it over so quickly? Is it so lacking in sensuality? And so on.
Although Whileaway’s all-women (lesbian) society undermines gender relations in heterosexual society, it also raises the problem of separatism. In "Recent Feminist Utopias" (1981), in which Russ discusses feminist science fiction including The Female Man, Russ comments: "I believe the separatism is primary, and...the authors are not subtle in their reasons for creating separatist utopias: if men are kept out of these societies, it is because men are dangerous. They also hog the good things of this world" (77). The purpose of utopias, she further remarks, is to "supply in fiction what their authors believe society...and/or women, lack in the here-and-now. The positive values stressed in the stories can reveal to us what, in the authors’ eyes, is wrong with our own society" And while the all-woman/lesbian society of Whileaway is the utopia in The Female Man, it cannot evade the problem of origin. How do we get there? The men of Whileaway were wiped out by a plague that attacked only men This is obviously not a realistic way to destroy the heterosexual institutions that regulate gender. Moreover, as Butler points out, a "utopian notion of a sexuality freed from heterosexual constructs...fail[s] to acknowledge the ways in which power relations continue to construct sexuality for women even within the terms of a ‘liberated’ heterosexuality or lesbianism. As Russ admits at the end of the novel, "Janet [is one] whom we don’t believe in and whom we deride but who is in secret our savior from utter despair" Whileaway, like any other utopia, represents our hope.
Jael’s world, on the other hand, more like the Handmaiden’s Tale, represents our fear. Hers is a dystopian world in which men live in Manland, separated from women in Womanland. For forty years a war has been waged between the "Haves" and "Have-nots," the men and women. Manlanders have more technology, but they have no women so they buy babies from the Womanlanders. On Manland there are real-men, the changed (men surgically changed into "women"), and the half-changed ("who keep their genitalia but who grow slim, grow languid, grow emotional and feminine, all this the effect of spirit only." Womanland has no men, but does have male robots, such as Jael’s Davy, "The most beautiful man in the world" (§8.9:185). Jael herself is part robot (a cyborg) with surgical claws and steel teeth hidden under plates that look like human teeth (§8.7:181-82).
Both Manland and Womanland are heterosexual. For instance in Manland: "All the real-men like the changed; some real-men like the half-changed; none of the real-men like real-men, for that would be abnormal" (§8.7:167). Thus, unlike Whileaway, Jael’s world reinscribes the straight mind and in Wittig’s terms, it is an unsuccessful revolution against heterosexual institutions because it merely "substitute[s] women for men For instance, after Jael kills Boss-man for relentlessly trying to seduce her ("You want me. It doesn’t matter what you say. You’re a woman, aren’t you? This is the crown of your life. This is what God made you for.... You want to be mastered" Jael thinks: Still hurt, still able to be hurt by them! Amazing. You’d think my skin would get thicker, but it doesn’t. We’re all of us still flat on our backs. The boot’s on our neck while we slowly, ever so slowly, gather the power and the money and the resources into our own hands. While they play war games.
Clearly, Womanland is a dystopia. Unlike Whileaway, it hopelessly fails to revolutionize heterosexual institutions because it merely reinscribes them. Thus, Jael’s world shows the danger of "substitut[ing] women for men" (SM 55). But it is also a parody of those heterosexual institutions, and as a parody it reveals the shakiness of those very institutions. Boss-man’s, his wife, Natalie, a changed, "clicked in with a tray of drinks—scarlet skin-tights, no underwear, transparent high-heeled sandals like Cinderella’s—she gave us a homey, cute smile...and stilted out." The women who dress like men and the men who dress like women are parodies of "an original or primary gender identity," In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency. As Jael says [Manlanders have] been separated from “real” women so long that they don’t know what to make of us; I doubt if even the sex surgeons know what a real woman looks like.
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Jael’s world undermines heterosexual institutions through parody, just as Whileaway’s lesbian society undermines heterosexual institutions by demonstrating the false nature of the categories of sex. But even the utopian Whileaway is not the final victory for women. The Female Man ultimately relies on the power of language to reappropriate the universal and thus fulfills Wittig’s criteria for a successful war machine: "It is the attempted universalization of the point of view that turns or does not turn a literary work into a war machine" (SM 75).
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so lacking in sensuality? And so on.
Although Whileaway’s all-women (lesbian) society undermines gender relations in heterosexual society, it also raises the problem of separatism. In "Recent Feminist Utopias" (1981), in which Russ discusses feminist science fiction including The Female Man, Russ comments: "I believe the separatism is primary, and...the authors are not subtle in their reasons for creating separatist utopias: if men are kept out of these societies, it is because men are dangerous. They also hog the good things of this world" (77). The purpose of utopias, she further remarks, is to "supply in fiction what their authors believe society...and/or women, lack in the here-and-now. The positive values stressed in the stories can reveal to us what, in the authors’ eyes, is wrong with our own society" And while the all-woman/lesbian society of Whileaway is the utopia in The Female Man, it cannot evade the problem of origin. How do we get there? The men of Whileaway were wiped out by a plague that attacked only men This is obviously not a realistic way to destroy the heterosexual institutions that regulate gender. Moreover, as Butler points out, a "utopian notion of a sexuality freed from heterosexual constructs...fail[s] to acknowledge the ways in which power relations continue to construct sexuality for women even within the terms of a ‘liberated’ heterosexuality or lesbianismAs Russ admits at the end of the novel, "Janet [is one] whom we don’t believe in and whom we deride but who is in secret our savior from utter despair" Whileaway, like any other utopia, represents our hope.
Jael’s world, on the other hand, more like the Handmaiden’s Tale, represents our fear. Hers is a dystopian world in which men live in Manland, separated from women in Womanland. For forty years a war has been waged between the "Haves" and "Have-nots," the men and women. Manlanders have more technology, but they have no women so they buy babies from the Womanlanders. On Manland there are real-men, the changed (men surgically changed into "women"), and the half-changed ("who keep their genitalia but who grow slim, grow languid, grow emotional and feminine, all this the effect of spirit only." Womanland has no men, but does have male robots, such as Jael’s Davy, "The most beautiful man in the world" (§8.9:185). Jael herself is part robot (a cyborg) with surgical claws and steel teeth hidden under plates that look like human teeth (§8.7:181-82).
Both Manland and Womanland are heterosexual. For instance in Manland: "All the real-men like the changed; some real-men like the half-changed; none of the real-men like real-men, for that would be abnormal" (§8.7:167). Thus, unlike Whileaway, Jael’s world reinscribes the straight mind and in Wittig’s terms, it is an unsuccessful revolution against heterosexual institutions because it merely "substitute[s] women for men For instance, after Jael kills Boss-man for relentlessly trying to seduce her ("You want me. It doesn’t matter what you say. You’re a woman, aren’t you? This is the crown of your life. This is what God made you for.... You want to be mastered" Jael thinks: Still hurt, still able to be hurt by them! Amazing. You’d think my skin would get thicker, but it doesn’t. We’re all of us still flat on our backs. The boot’s on our neck while we slowly, ever so slowly, gather the power and the money and the resources into our own hands. While they play war games
Clearly, Womanland is a dystopia. Unlike Whileaway, it hopelessly fails to revolutionize heterosexual institutions because it merely reinscribes them. Thus, Jael’s world shows the danger of "substitut[ing] women for men" (SM 55). But it is also a parody of those heterosexual institutions, and as a parody it reveals the shakiness of those very institutions. Boss-man’s, his wife, Natalie, a changed, "clicked in with a tray of drinks—scarlet skin-tights, no underwear, transparent high-heeled sandals like Cinderella’s—she gave us a homey, cute smile...and stilted out." The women who dress like men and the men who dress like women are parodies of "an original or primary gender identity," In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency. As Jael says [Manlanders have] been separated from “real” women so long that they don’t know what to make of us; I doubt if even the sex surgeons know what a real woman looks like.
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Jael’s world undermines heterosexual institutions through parody, just as Whileaway’s lesbian society undermines heterosexual institutions by demonstrating the false nature of the categories of sex. But even the utopian Whileaway is not the final victory for women. The Female Man ultimately relies on the power of language to reappropriate the universal and thus fulfills Wittig’s criteria for a successful war machine: "It is the attempted universalization of the point of view that turns or does not turn a literary work into a war machine" (SM 75).
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Epitaph: A technology growing from love -- instead of power.
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