Inventing Sex: Medical Science as Discourse

I’m going to begin my blog post this week by reminding you of what the syllabus says this course on feminist and queer theories of sex, gender and the body is all about:

This 3-credit course examines the diverse and historically varying relationships forged between biological sex, culturally formulated discourses of “masculinity” and “femininity,” and the gendered body (which is never only gendered). Through our course materials, class discussions, activities, and projects during the semester, we will (1) explore the development and consequences of the sex/gender binary that so heavily informs modern Canadian society and, indeed, the world, and (2) learn about the various arguments made by feminist and queer theorists against the sex/gender binary with the goal of expanding contemporary human rights discourse to include all bodies (3345 syllabus, p. 1).

And on p. 2, I list the broad questions that have guided our inquiry all semester:

• By what means are bodies, inherently influenced by race/skin color, economic and class issues, religious affiliation, and sexual orientation, socially constructed into “masculine” and “feminine” bodies, and what are the consequences?
• In what ways do gendered body practices perpetuate and reinforce extant social hierarchies of power and privilege?
• How, why, and under what circumstances do gendered bodies tend to be shaped, used, and abused?

As is evident every day on the news, from stories of gay bashing to the continued use of men’s violent sexual assault of women as weapons of war, to the masculinist “bigger, better, faster, longer” mentality of neoliberal economics and the global arms race, the consequences of the SEX/GENDER SYSTEM are overwhelmingly negative, most obviously for those bodies that, for whatever reason, do not conform to it. As Pascoe’s concept of the “specter of the fag” demonstrates, the binary TWO-SEX MODEL and the GENDER/IDENTITY/POWER SYSTEM (Bornstein, p. 42-45) means that “deviant” bodies pay a great, sometimes fatal, price for their noncompliance.

Where we’ve been

As you know, in Parts 2 and 3 of our course, we focused on the means by which NORMATIVE FEMININITY and HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY are constructed and maintained to create the SEX/GENDER SYSTEM. We based our analysis of these processes on feminist theorist Sandra Bartky’s theory of DISCIPLINARY PRACTICES to make sense of all the socio-cultural forces that work individually and in conjunction with each other to discipline bodies into either “acting like a lady” or “being a man,” with very little room in between. And we’ve discussed the largely negative consequences of transgressing these gender norms.

As we’ve read about and discussed all semester, the SEX/GENDER SYSTEM is a hierarchical binary that allows only two choices: You can be either a masculine man or a feminine woman. There are no other options. In the SEX/GENDER SYSTEM, sex = gender, and the normative characteristics of one gender (masculinity) are significantly valued over those of the other (femininity).

Of course, we know that this equation is wrong—and not only because I keep telling you it is! You know from your own experiences of trying to conform to the gender that’s “appropriate” for your biological sex that FEMININITY and MASCULINITY are always performances (whether intentional or not) that exist on a spectrum of fluidity and multiplicity; gender, to quote Pascoe, is a “constellation of behaviors” (166) that are not necessarily linked to biological sex.

Sex is socially constructed, too?!

So, we understand that GENDER is largely a SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION via (1) a myriad of social institutions (such as religion, school, families, popular culture, and so forth) and (2) three basic types of DISCIPLINARY PRACTICES (see Bartky’s article).

And, up to this point in the course, I have encouraged you to understand SEX as biological/physiological and, thus, “natural.” This is how beginning Women’s Studies students are taught to conceptualize these two terms:

SEX = biological, physiological, natural

GENDER = socially constructed

But, as I’ve alluded to all semester, it’s not quite as simple as that. SEX, which everyone believes is immutable and unchangeable and based on scientific “fact,” is also a social construction! This is based largely on the notion that science, itself, has been socially constructed; science is a DISCOURSE (to use POSTMODERN THEORIST Michel Foucault’s term) that has changed and evolved over the centuries. We’ve seen this, for example, in The Waiting Room: Victoria is diagnosed with a medical condition (“hysteria”) that no longer exists and is treated for that condition using 19^th century “cures” that are considered “outdated” by contemporary medical science. And we see it again this week in the way that medical science has long participated in the construction of SEX through its use of both language (i.e., the terms “male” and “female”) as well as surgical technologies that, quite literally, allow (mostly white, male) doctors and medical researchers to create “boys” and “girls” from babies that are born INTERSEXED (intersex activists call this Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM)) and, most recently, to create “men” and “women” through sexual reassignment surgeries.

We end of semester-long exploration of gender as a social construction with the realization that so, too, is sex!

Medical science as discourse

DISCOURSE is a dialogue, a conversation, sometimes a debate, a way of talking, thinking and writing about something. It is created by LANGUAGE; it is, quite literally, created by the individual words we use to describe things. DISCOURSE can include popular media, images, textbooks, scholarly articles, and a conversation you have with friends at the bar on a Saturday night. 

DISCOURSES are meaning-making practices that tend to appear to be unified and coherent formations of knowledge and “truth.” However, POSTMODERN theorists argue that DISCOURSES are never unified or coherent and that they are meant to seem that way in order to proscribe hierarchical social relations. In other words, there’s always a politics behind the creation and apparent stability of any DISCOURSE. And our task in this class has been to disrupt the apparent stability of the DISCOURSE of the SEX/GENDER SYSTEM, of the false binary that’s been created between masculinity and of femininity and between male and female. 

So, we start this week from the foundational tenet that Western medical science, particularly the story it tells about SEX and GENDER and male and female bodies, is a DISCOURSE.

Science is one of the most powerful and ubiquitous discourses currently in existence, because it is so often assumed to be “true” and “objective” and “fact-based.” But science – and scientists – are rooted in the context of their time and place, which cannot help but inform the kinds of questions that get asked, what sorts of research gets funded, and what “counts” as scientific “knowledge.” And as a result, the discourse of science is often used to support particular social and political agendas. Who benefits from the existence of only two sexes and two genders? Why? What’s at stake?

Encountering postmodernism

Although we’ve been using it all semester without naming it as such, this week marks our first official encounter with POSTMODERNISM, which has been essential to the development of feminist and queer theories. Remember: the prefix “post-“means “after,” so POSTMODERNISM comes after MODERNISM and is, thus, a response to it.

Let me say a bit more about that and why it matters:

In basic terms, MODERNISM relies first on the notion that truth and objectivity exist and that there are immutable, uncontested “facts” to be learned. MODERNISM relies also on the notion of “progress,” the story we all tell ourselves as a culture that knowledge equals progress and that things are always improving.

MODERNISM as a school of thought reached its hey-day in Western Europe, the U.S. and Canada in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, largely because of the success (at least for some) of the Industrial Revolution and colonial projects throughout Africa and Southeast Asia. What better proof of “progress” than the invention of a steam engine that allows faster travel to faraway lands that you can then conquer and mine for their natural resources?

There’s a great line from the movie Titanic (1997) that always grounds my understanding of MODERNISM: The rich people have just finished dinner, and the conversation all evening has been about the size and speed of RMS Titanic, which at the time of its sinking in April 1912, was the largest and fastest passenger steamship in the world.  Already annoyed in this conversation by what she brashly proclaims to all in attendance as the “male preoccupation with size,” Rose whispers sarcastically to third class passenger Jack as the wealthy men get up from their seats, “Now they'll retreat into a cloud of smoke and congratulate themselves on being masters of the universe.”

For me, in an ironically postmodern way, this line, and the movie generally, are fantastic POSTMODERN critiques of MODERNISM’s unwavering faith in “truth,” “progress,” and the ability of (rich, white) men to, as Rose says, “master” the known universe via technological innovation and military conquest. In the end, for all its size and speed, the RMS Titanic sank precisely because it was too big and traveling too fast. And thousands of people (mostly third class passengers) died because the (white, male) designers and engineers had such confidence in their technological innovation that they didn’t bother to put enough lifeboats on board. So much for the “male preoccupation with size.”

POSTMODERNISM, as a response and reaction to MODERNISM, started to take shape after the violent carnage of two World Wars (1914-1918 and 1937-1945), during which it became glaringly obvious that “progress” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Academics and intellectuals throughout Europe, Canada and the U.S. began taking a long, hard look at the high death tolls caused by “new” mechanized warfare and started asking questions about how it became possible in a “modern,” “civilized” world for genocide on the scale of the Holocaust to occur. Was that “progress?” In the wake of such carnage, nothing was “true” anymore. And thus we get POSTMODERNISM.

POSTMODERNISM questions language (literally, the words we use and how/why we use them), the politics of meaning, and MODERNISM’s reliance on binaries (like the SEX/GENDER SYSTEM) and notions of “reality,” “objectivity” and “truth.” POSTMODERN theoretical approaches have made possible the development of feminist, critical race, and queer theories and have, consequently, heavily informed courses like this one. We’ve been using POSTMODERNISM all semester, but we haven’t called it that until now.

With all that historical context in mind, one of the things to keep in mind this week is how, for all its fabulousness as a theoretical perspective, POSTMODERNISM, “justifiably skeptical of the idea of a prepolitical individual, […] rejects the collectivist alternative and the idea of a ‘foundation’ for politics” (Connell 229), and can thus often get in the way of organizing for and achieving social justice. 

What if nothing really is everything?; or, playing with gender to achieve social justice

And here we come to the end of our course, and the big question of how to take all the theoretical stuff we've been reading and talking about all semester and apply it to our everyday lives. This is where the question on Worksheet #7 comes into our conversation. This is also why I asked you to watch Southern Comfort last week in preparation for this week's class. And I'll restate Q#6 from the in-class handout from last time: 

• In “Just Say Yes,” Bornstein encourages us to consider the value of no gender, of NOTHING, and in “Zen and the Art of Gender Maintenance,” she wants us to think of gender as a journey without a fixed destination. Unpack her arguments in both these chapters: How do each of these strategies work, and how do they fit together?

 This is where we'll start this afternoon, so be ready to move beyond playing with gender and brainstorm some practical strategies for