On Thu, 25 Nov 1999, Rob Schaap wrote:
>
> >I gotta jump in here. Do really believe that giving birth or menstruating
> >are necessary preconditions for being a woman in our society? C'mon,
> >think about this for two minutes. In Kessler & McKenna's book
> >Gender: An ethnomethodological approach, they point out that no one
> >characteristic is an infallible indicator of whether you're
> >male/female. The only way that we are able to identify people as
> >male or female is through social interactions. In practice,
> >the male/female distinction is a social one, just like race.
>
>
>
> Hi Miles,
>
> I do reckon someone who's giving birth or menstruating is not a man. And
> although we necessarily endow all we discern with historically contingent
> meaning, this does not mean there are not materially significant,
> meaning-independent differences between men and women that might not
> pertain between whatever 'races' are. Is this view really so rare on the
> left? I honestly can't imagine thinking anything else ... can't even
> imagine anyone else thinking anything else, actually.
>
But note that this does not definitively distinguish men from women (not everyone who isn't menstruating is a man). If you can't imagine thinking of gender as a social category, that simply reflects how effective the socialization into the "two gender world" is. We could easily create a society in which there are three, five, or sixteen different genders, just as with race. "But the biological distinction is simply there," you say; but for the distinction to be socially real to us, we have to engage in social relations that make a certain interpretation of the biological distinctions real to us.
The biological differences among women as a group and men as a group are substantial (e.g., higher testosterone levels for women in some societies than in others). Why not distinguish genders by degree of body hair? interest in bearing, raising, or having nothing to do with children? Here's the thing that interests me: we could define as many gender groups as we think are useful to us, and if we integrate those definitions into our everyday life, our social identities, our social institutions, they would be real gender categories for us, and they might even be related to biological distinctions (e.g., one gender group might be distinguished by lack of hair on their heads).
So we're not limited by biology here; we're limited by our own imaginations and our socializations into "gender apartheid" (to use an dramatic term). As others mentioned, Making sex is a great book relevant to this whole point.
Miles