Sex and Gender

Gender before Modernity

Gender is, today, usually associated with our social and constructed identity, but
historically genders are kinds or ways of ordering the world into distinct types. Gender is
usually opposed to our material or biological being.

Today we tend to think of matter as what is ultimate real or substantial, and think of
language, ideas or concepts as somehow less real or supplementary. Prior to the
revolutions in science and philosophy of the seventeenth century the reverse was the case.
Indeed, the idea that there might be something like a natural biological being which
determined our nature or which gave us our essence was completely alien. Essences were
immaterial, and biology as a distinct science did not yet exist. When scientists studied the
life of the body they did so in relation to a cosmological order. Man’s body was
analogous to the order of the cosmos; it did not have its own life principle or biology.
Matter was insubstantial, the mere stuff required for forms or kinds. Forms or kinds were
eternal and unchanging, and required matter only to be actualised. We can think of this in
three key figures. The first is from Plato’s Timaeus, which describes the genesis of the
world. The fathering principle is active, disembodied and gives form to matter, which in
itself has no being and only comes to be when it takes on form.

And we may liken the receiving principle to a mother, and the source or spring to a father,
and the intermediate nature to a child, and may remark further that if the model is to take
every variety of form, then the matter in which the model is fashioned will not be duly
prepared unless it is formless and free from the impress of any of those shapes which it is
hereafter to receive from without. … Wherefore that which is to receive all forms should
have no form … Wherefore the mother and receptacle of all created and visible and in
any way sensible things is not to be termed earth or air or fire or water, or any of their
compounds, or any of the elements from which these are derived, but is an invisible and
formless being which receives all these things and in some mysterious way partakes of
the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible

(Plato 1963, 1177-1178 [Timaeus 50d-51c])

Plato’s image can be likened to many creation myths, which describe the interaction of
male (active) and female (passive) principles. In Genesis the universe is created through
the word or light of God the father, which gives form and being to matter. Matter is
therefore only potential being, a chaos waiting for paternal ordering, forming and
inscription.

The second example we can think of are Shakespeare’s comedies, such as Twelfth Night
or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where characters can cross-dress and take on different
genders, or where sexual desire can run rampant and be thoroughly at odds with the
social order of marriage or genders. This is because in Shakespeare’s time matter or
sexuality was fluid, chaotic, inessential and mutable, while male and female kinds were
the timeless form of social order. The comedies play on the disjunction between a natural
sexuality, which is disruptive and is only potentially capable of being ordered, and social,
hierarchised being, which is distinctly divided into male and female roles which have
their place in a cosmic order that is other than brute nature.

A third example is Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Milton describes each being in nature
as tending towards it own form, becoming what it ought to be. This occurs both in his
general description of nature and in his description of Adam and Eve. What this shows is
that the relation between men and women is reflective of, and dependent upon, a general
order of kinds, and that male and female bodies express a cosmic order. Male and female
are principles reflected across the cosmos and that can be expressed in matter; they are
not material determinants.

O Adam, one Almighty is, from whom

All things proceed, and up to him return,

If not depraved from good, created all

Such to perfection, one first matter all,

Indued with various forms, various degrees

Of substance, and in things that live, of life;

But more refined, more spirituous and pure,

As nearer to him placed or nearer tending

Each in their several active spheres assigned,

Till body up to spirit work, in bounds

Proportioned to each kind. So from the root

Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves

More airy, last the bright consummate flower

Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit

Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed

To vital spirits aspire, to animal,

To intellectual, give both life and sense,

Fancy and understanding, whence the soul

Reason receives and reason is her being,

Discursive or intuitive; discourse

Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours,

Differing but in degree, of kind the same.

(Milton 1971, 286-87 [5.469-90])

Sex without Gender

All this changes with the new attitude adopted to nature in the eighteenth century. As we
have seen in our lectures on the enlightenment, writers like Hume refused to accept any
pre-given or transcendent order and insisted that what was true and real ought to be
grounded in experience. One could not see nature as the expression of some prior order,
but needed to see how order is generated from nature. More specifically, something like
‘sex’ or ‘sexuality’ comes into being. Instead of seeing one’s body as aspiring towards
order and form, one ‘has’ a sex or biological reality that might then explain one’s social
being. Writers tried to explain the emergence of hierarchy from material forces, such as
how the stronger enslave the weak, rather than assuming that there simply was some
eternal hierarchy. Male and female were now seen to be bodily forces, and the relation
between men and women could be explained physically. For this reason, in the spirit of
enlightenment, gender relations could also be altered. Mary Wollstonecraft argued that
just because women may have once been dominated due to their physical weakness, this
was no justification for their sustained oppression in an age or enlightenment and
freedom from necessity. In short, Wollstonecraft argues that sex ought to be irrelevant to
our social being; she imagines something like a gender-neutral humanity, with the one
power of logical reason. We should not see each body as expressive of some eternal kind
or essence. Rather, our social being and what we can become through education should
be liberated as far as possible from our bodily being. Woman can continue to be domestic
child-rearers, but they can also aspire to becoming rational. Reason is no longer grounded
in a supernatural or ideal order which man can come to recognise; reason is a formal and
human logic, nothing other than a power of calculation; it has no content or object outside
powers of perception, synthesis and recognition.

We can see this new awareness of sexuality and materiality as real and determining in
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where Shelley’s monster describes how bodies enter into
relations and form hierarchies:

A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt at he
same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the
operations of my various senses. By degrees, I remember, a stronger light pressed on my
nerves, so that I was obliged to shut my eyes. Darkness then came over me, and troubled
me; but hardly had I felt this when, by opening my eyes, as I now suppose, the light
poured in on me again …. No distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused. I felt
light, and hunger, and thirst, and darkness …. I began also to observe, with greater
accuracy, the forms that surrounded me, and to perceive the boundaries of the radiant roof
of light which canopied me.’

(99-100)

Shelley traces all perception back to an original awareness of material opposites,

opposites from which the social world of kinds and genders are then formed. In this
sense, we can see Shelley as a proto-theorist of the sex/gender distinction. We may have a
biological sex – male and female – but this is quite distinct from the social meaning we
grant to that sex – all the hierarchies of gender and their concomitant inequalities.

Gender without Sex

Late twentieth-century feminists have been critical of the sex/gender distinction, arguing
that it retains far too much material determinism or essentialism. If it is the case that
matter is now seen as what is ultimately real and determining, then the very idea that
there are two distinct sexes (male and female) which are then socialised as masculine and
feminine still leaves an unquestioned conceptual binary in place. Recent feminism has
challenged the supposed reality of sex on a number of grounds:

First, there is the problem of language. According to Judith Butler, we imagine sex as that
which exists before all the ideas and concepts of gender. However, we can only think of
this ‘before’ language through language. Butler argues, therefore, that gender is
performative. It is not that we have a sex, which we then express through language.
Rather, it is in speaking as a certain gender that I imagine that there must have been a real
sexual subject before the act of speech.

Second, there is the problem of biology. The sex/gender distinction was used initially to
free women from the concept of biological determinism. It may be that we have a sex, but
this has nothing to do with our socialised gender. So, we should concentrate on gender as
mutable and transformable, and deny the determination of sex. However, this distinction
repeats an age-old mind-body dualism, which itself has sexist overtones. The body is
unimportant and formless, and takes on identity only through cultural gender. Moira
Gatens (in Imaginary Bodies) has therefore argued that we need to see biology neither as
determining nor irrelevant, for each culture makes sense of the body in its own way.
Indeed, it is Western culture with its privilege of mind, language and form over matter
and the body that has also denigrated embodied women at the expense of rational men.

Third, there is the problem of difference. Even if we accept that gender organises male
and female bodies into distinct cultural kinds, can we reduce the difference of bodies into
two simple biological kinds? If we look closely at biology it is actually more fluid,
dynamic and malleable than the genders through which it is viewed. In many ways, the
modernist focus on perception aimed to free materiality from the enlightenment notions
of matter is a mechanically consistent and uniform substance. Pre-linguistic life is fluid,
dynamically creative and – far from being undifferentiated and formless – is the site of
forms that the intellect can only grasp in limited form. Virginia Woolf, like Lawrence,
was therefore highly critical of the notion of men and women occupying two clearly
bounded genders or sexes. According to Virginia Woolf, ‘Poetry ought to have a mother
as well as a father … Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the
woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of
opposites has to be consummated’ (Woolf 1977, 99 [1929]). She saw male and female as
polarities or opposites operating in interaction throughout life, and she also saw
perception as located within life, not set over against life. Material life was dynamically
different. To the Lighthouse can therefore be read as an allegory that moves from gender
to sex, from the hierarchical world of Mr and Mrs Ramsay to a world of fluid perceptions
and un-self-conscious creativity.

… while the sun poured into those attics, which a plank alone separated from each other
so that every footstep could be plainly heard and the Swiss girl sobbing for her father
who was dying of cancer in a valley of the Grisons, and lit up bats, flannels, straw hats,
ink-pots, beetles, and the skulls of small birds, while it drew from the long frilled strips of
seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds, which was in the towels too, gritty
with sand from bathing

(To the Lighthouse p13).