FINAL PRE-PUBLICATION VERSION 1 Ways of Talking Cranny-Francis, A., Waring, W., Stavropoulos, P. & Kirkby, J. (2003) ‘Chapter 1 Ways of Talking’ in Gender Studies: Terms and Debates. London: Macmillan, pp. 1-41. ______________________________________________________________ This chapter focusses on a number of the terms people use when they talk about gender. Many of these terms, such as ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’, seem self-evident and we tend to think that such terms have always existed. It's often surprising to discover how many of the terms we take for granted are relatively new terms, coined only in the nineteenth century. Somehow their Greek etymology (‘heterosexual’ using the Greek heteros meaning ‘other, different’; ‘homosexual’ using the Greek homos meaning ‘same as’) makes them seem much older. In this chapter we explore many of the terms which recur in our discussions of gender and sexuality, to discover what their actual history is and how this history reflects and shapes attitudes and values. We also begin to look at how subjectivity is formed, and provide some of the initial terms that you will need to navigate through the complex terrain of the various hypotheses on what processes govern the formation of the self. To think about gender is to think about the self, or the subject, in formation. Let us start with the most obvious term: gender. Gender Gender divides humans into two categories: male and female. It is a system which organises virtually every realm of our lives; whether we are sleeping, eating, watching TV, shopping or reading, gender is at work. Yet because it is everywhere, it is sometimes difficult to see it in operation. Imagine trying to escape the division of gender in your daily life --- without the birth certificate which records your gender, you could not get a passport, or driver’s licence (which would also record your gender). But say you’d managed to get by without paperwork. Every trip to a public toilet would demand that you declare which gender you were as you chose ‘your’ door. Every human body in modern societies is assigned a place in a binary structure of gender. Not only does the system of gender divide the human race into two categories, it privileges the male over the female. Gender operates as a set of hierarchically arranged roles in modern society which makes the masculine half of the equation positive and the feminine negative. We can trace this way of dividing up the world as far back as the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in western European history (see Synnott (1993)). In his Metaphysics Aristotle summarises what he calls the Pythagorean table of opposites and it shows clearly how these divisions work. On the one side are terms such as Limit, Odd, One, Right, Male, Resting, Straight, Light, Good, Square; on the other side, Unlimited, Even, Plurality, Left, Female, Moving, Curved, Darkness, Bad, Oblong (Aristotle 1968-9). Aristotle sets one series of nouns against another, sorting them into ‘opposites’, where the ‘obviously’ opposite pairs reinforce the oppositionality of the merely ‘different’ pairs (Male is to female as an oblong is ‘opposite’ to a square?) Aristotle took his curious set of binary oppositions even further in his Economics where he states that men were stronger, women weaker; men courageous, women cautious; men the outdoors type, women domestic; men educate children, women nurture them (Aristotle 1968-9). Examine the TV ads during an evening of viewing, and you’ll see that ancient Greek philosophy continues to have its influence centuries later. Beer commercials show men shooting dangerous rapids, while women are pictured elsewhere decorating the home. Even our language is gendered: nouns which are feminine in English (as in many other languages) more often than not have negative connotations. A buddy (a word derived from brother) is a good thing to have, but no one wants to be a sissy (derived from sister). This binary division of gender can take several forms. The two halves can be seen to be equal but opposite, in a complementary relationship, as in the Ying/Yang symbol of Chinese philosophy. However, often the two halves will be typified as opposite and with the female in the inferior position. An example of this can be found in the nineteenth-century work of Paul Broca, who weighed male brains against female ones, and came up with some rather dubious conclusions about male superiority based on his findings. Another formulation of the binary division has it that the two halves are opposite and the female is naturally superior. The pioneer of education, Maria Montessori, held opinions which would exemplify this view: she saw women’s superiority in their guardianship of human morality, affectivity, and honour (for a longer discussion and more examples, see Synnott (1993)). We have here several ways of configuring the relationship between the two sides of gender (equal but opposite; opposite but female-negative; opposite but female-positive; and so on), but while these formulations might reflect different political agendas, and different ways of understanding the world, they all share the view that human gender is binary, is made up of two halves, which each define the other. The male side of the equation is generally coded as the positive one, and so becomes the standard by which all others are judged; in effect it becomes the norm. This privileging of the masculine is generally the case in western societies. When ‘gender’ is used in feminist analysis, it is traditionally defined in relation to ‘sex’: gender as the cultural or social construction of sex. As a sociological or anthropological category, gender is not simply ‘the gender one is’, i.e. a man or a woman, but rather a set of meanings that sexes assume in particular societies. The operation of gender in our society takes up these sets of meanings, organises them as masculinity or femininity, and matches or lines them up with male and female bodies. Received opinion about gender would have it that a female body produces feminine behaviours, a feminine identity. Cross-cultural research from anthropologists like Margaret Mead (1949) has often been used by feminists to show that if sex is a biological given, gender is a social construct (see also ‘sex’). This research has also made clear that a particular behaviour which is coded as masculine in one society may be coded feminine in another. A man holding hands with another man in public is interpreted as feminine behaviour in many western nations. In countries in the Middle East, however, this activity would be coded as acceptable masculine behaviour. Moreover, in the nineteenth century in England, a man would often stroll arm and arm with another male friend without this being coded as effeminate. This allows us to consider the historical and cross-cultural constructedness of femininity and masculinity, of gender itself. Many socialist feminists and theorists like Christine Delphy (1984) maintain that sex roles became part of our bodies, not because they expressed masculinity or femininity, but because of a hierarchical division of labour which initiated the elaboration of hierarchies. For Delphy, gender came into being to reinforce an already existing dichotomy between workers and owners. For other theorists, gender and sex are overlapping constructs that differ in emphasis, where our understanding of biological sex is likely to be shaped by our culture’s notion of gender. And some other theorists argue that there is no body, no biological sex, outside of gender; that in becoming human, one is always already ‘gendered’. Feminist psychoanalysis in particular has looked very closely at this question of where gender begins. How, they ask, does one become a boy or a girl? Looking at two different answers to this question gives us a sense of the debates about the cultural construction of gender, and the two different notions of the ‘subject’, or the self, and its relation with gender. Is gender acquired in the course of socialization and the internalization of norms, or is gender part of a linguistic network that precedes and structures the formation of the ego and the linguistic subject? For the most part, Object relations theory (a school of thought associated with the work of Melanie Klein (1963), and taken up by US feminist psychologists like Nancy Chodorow (1978a; 1978b)) would say that the first possibility is the case; these theorists tend to argue that gender is a set of roles and cultural meanings acquired in the course of ego formation within family structures, and that significant changes in child-rearing practices and kinship organization can alter the meaning of gender and close the hierarchical gap between the genders of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ (Chodorow 1978b). For Freudian-derived French Lacanian psychoanalysis, the second answer is the attractive one. Theorists re-working this Lacanian tradition tend to refer to ‘sexual difference’ not ‘gender’; using this term ‘sexual difference’ reflects their conviction that in order to become speaking subjects, we must be ‘sexed’. ‘Sexual difference’ is a process, rather than something which is acquired. Whereas other theorists of gender presume a subject who takes on a gender in the course of its development, the Lacanian view insists that the subject itself is formed through a subjection to sexual difference. So these two schools show us two possibilities: in one, gender appears to be a cultural determination that a pre-existing subject acquires; in the other, sexual difference appears to constitute the very matrix which gives rise to the subject itself. And finally, let us end with one more possibility for how gender comes to work in society, which comes through recent work by Judith Butler (1990; 1993). She argues that gender is the process of embodiment which results from the repeated performance of acts of gendering, and that this debate over which comes first, gender or sex, nature or culture, is a red herring. Gender is one of feminism’s most central categories of inquiry, and it intersects with many other social systems (race, sexuality) which are also governed by binary opposition. Gender studies pays particular attention to how these markers of difference work to constitute and reinforce individual and social subjectivities. Gender is the culturally variable elaboration of ‘sex’, as a hierarchical pair (where ‘male’ is superior and ‘female’ inferior). Sex While the debate over which comes first, gender or sex, may be a red herring, a discussion of how people have understood what ‘sex’ is would seem to be crucial to a discussion of gender. We all know what sex is, don’t we? It’s easy to demonstrate. You point to someone’s body to prove they’re a man or woman, a boy or a girl. The idea of sex is so naturalised that it is hard to see it at work. Of course sex is natural. Men and women ‘fit’ together, don’t they? As only one chromosome out of 46 determines sex, human beings are biologically, or genetically, more similar than we are different. Yet this idea of sex, of a natural biological coupling and equivalence, is part and parcel of the establishment in certain western cultures of a ‘battle of the sexes’, of a ‘binary opposition’, which makes this distinction and mutual exclusiveness between men and women appear natural. To start thinking about what ‘sex’ is then, we must first concentrate on its ‘naturalness’. We believe that proof of the existence of two sexes is on the body, in the body; it is the body. Yet biologists are not necessarily uninfluenced by their own cultural beliefs about what is ‘natural’. The anatomist Herophilus of Alexandria, who assumed that women were imperfect men, dissected cadavers and found the proof for his theory; he thought he saw testes and seminal ducts connected to the neck of the bladder, using the male body as template (see Synnott 1993). Of course, what he saw were ovaries and Fallopian tubes, which do not connect to the bladder. We began with the naturalness of sex, and now move to its binary quality. Common knowledge has it that there are two sexes. How do we know? Administrative forms ask us to tick male or female, doors to public toilets make us choose one or the other, the birth of a new baby is invariably greeted with the question, ‘Boy or girl?’ Many psychologists, biologists, and medical practitioners in particular rely on definitions of sex which refer to a person’s biological maleness or femaleness. When, in modern societies, a child is born with ‘ambiguous’ genitalia, parents are asked to make a difficult decision: which of the two sexes will they choose for the ‘sex of rearing’? And this decision is framed by medical ‘expertise’, made largely on the basis of the reproductive possibilities of the infant or its ‘real’ genetic sex. In our highly medicalised modern societies, the ‘resolution’ of ambiguous sex reveals how our bodies are rigorously policed into two sexes --- male or female. Sigmund Freud (1925; 1931; 1933), the ‘Father of Psychoanalysis’ who developed his theories quite early in the twentieth century, didn’t think that the little boys and girls growing up into proper mothers and fathers was the only possibility (although he did think it was the only sane one). He imagined that this sexual distinction could be upset, and reviewed the possibilities of other developmental trajectories, such as various forms of homosexuality (‘inversion’) and modes of anatomical hermaphroditism. But in our society it is increasingly difficult to think outside of the frame of male and masculine, female and feminine. What then is the relationship between gender and sex? There have been quite important and consequential formulations of the distinction between sex and gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1972) --- ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ --- and in cultural anthropology where gender does not reflect or express sex as a primary given, but is the effect of social and cultural processes. The ‘sex/gender system’ is a term feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin (1974) coined to explain the variable ways that kinship organizations produce gendered beings out of sexed bodies. In 1974, she argued that all societies had a sex/gender system, and that this system produced social conventions on gender from the biological and anatomical ‘raw material’of human sex and procreation. Rubin’s essay argues with the work of anthropologist Claude Levi-Stauss and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Rubin questions Levi-Strauss’s analysis of the universality of kinship relations. Levi-Strauss believed that universal structures required every human to submit to the incest taboo in order to enter into kinship and into the cultural status of the human subject. Only through subjecting incestuous impulses to this taboo do ‘subjects’ emerge. In other words to have the status of a person, to be able to say ‘I’, everyone must first be positioned within kinship, i.e. become a daughter, sister, brother, son. The individual is prohibited from desiring or becoming members of their own kinship group (family or clan) --- the incest taboo. So human subjects emerge on the condition that they are first gendered through kinship relations. Now Rubin goes on to explain that the law of kinship produces human subjects, by prohibiting not only incest, but also homosexuality; gendered subjects are thus produced through a series of prohibitions which regulate not only sexual behaviour, but sexual desire itself. One is a ‘man’ to the extent that one does not desire other men, but desires only those women who are substitutes for the mother; one is a ‘woman’ to the extent that one does not desire other women (the spectre of that desire has been transformed into an ‘identification’, into wanting to be like that woman rather than wanting that woman) and desires only those men who are substitutes for the father. For both Levi-Strauss and Lacan, it is only through being subjected to this process of heterosexualised gendering that viable or coherent human subjects are produced. So, ‘one’ is not a one, that is, a speaking, human subject, except through ‘subjection’ to this heterosexual imperative. For Lacanian-based feminist psychanalysis, this doesn’t quite measure up. If feminists take Lacan seriously, then gender cannot be said to be the cultural construction of sex, for ‘sex’ is established through the linguistic effect of sexual difference, and this effect is coextensive with language, and hence, culture as such. The initiation into language is the primary process by which sexual difference is required and constituted. If this scheme is right, gender cannot be overthrown, and the very wish to do so is a fantasy which is inevitably thwarted by the constraints of language itself. Such a view has critical implications for any effort to consider ‘gender’ as that into which one is socialised, for the ‘one’ is always already marked by sexual difference; constituted in culture as a sexed being before the process called ‘socialization’. Understanding how the sex/gender system establishes not only the sex of bodies, but also the kind of desires they can have is very important. The way that some kinship systems make all homosexual practices taboo, and others do not, is important for thinking about the ways in which heterosexuality is made natural by culture. Feminism has argued that these gendered, heterosexual positions are not as stable as some might have us believe. Some feminists think that our unconscious fantasies threaten the stability of the structure, or that these are historically specific ideas about becoming human, and so may be different in other cultures, and subject to change in the future. Informed by feminist and gay cultural movements, the future of kinship relations could lead to the de-stabilisation and ‘overthrow’ of gender itself. Imagine the world with five sexes, say, lesbian, man, hermaphrodite, woman, cyborg. This would be a project which would involve reinventing everything which surrounds us, language, architecture, painting, advertising, and most of all, ourselves. Sex is a theory about human beings which divides them into two biologically based categories --- male or female. Sexuality What is clear about the definitions and discussions of gender and sex is that ideas about sexuality are so intimately tied up with gender, that it is sometimes difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. To begin with, the hierarchy that privileges the male in dualist systems of gender, also gives the structure for how sexuality works in western society. Female sexuality is marked as ‘naturally’ masochistic, narcissistic and passive; male sexuality is inscribed as ‘naturally’ aggressive, sadistic and active. Traditional notions of women’s sexuality make it virtually synonymous with her reproductive function. Motherhood is seen as the ‘natural’ expression of female sexuality. The ‘myth of the vaginal orgasm’ (i.e. the belief that an organsm triggered by vaginal rather than clitoral stimulation is superior and normal for women) for example, is caught up in this notion that pleasure and desire in women will be tied to child-bearing. (This myth is one of Freud’s less laudable contributions to thinking on gender and sexuality, and is one reason why his theories has been viewed with some suspicion by feminist theorists.) According to this way of seeing theworld, the clitoris, because it has no reproductive function, has no sexual function. And so sex (doing ‘it’) is conflated with sex (which toilet door you choose). To give an example of how this affects the working of society we might look at legal cases of personal injury, where injuries to the penis are often amply compensated. Courts in Australia have even considered awarding men who are seriously injured the services of a ‘masseuse’ to provide for their sexual gratification. For women, if penetration has become difficult due to an accident, some compensation might be awarded. But generally, damage to functions which affect women’s sexual pleasure --- loss of feeling, touch, or difficulty in other associated sexual functions (painful menstruation, for example) --- has gone uncompensated. As for lesbians, one wonders how a conservative legal court would deal with pleasure without penile penetration.... (Well, if they don’t really ‘do it’, then how can compensation be awarded?!) In this way, legal decisions reveal how deeply entrenched is the idea that normal sexuality be organised around intercourse, around a penis penetrating a vagina. Feminists have contested the naturalness of this version of (hetero)sexuality just as they have questioned the naturalness of gender roles. They have pried apart the automatic link between dominance and the male, and submission and the female. They have also argued that ‘the personal is political’, that our most personal experiences are shaped by their location within social divisions and histories. This distinction between what can be discussed openly and what should be hidden takes us back to Aristotle’s Pythagorean table in the section on gender: men are on the side of the public; women hidden. We can identify now a real paradox. On the one hand, as we saw with the court cases regarding compensation, a certain kind of male heterosexual desire defines what counts as ‘real’ sex; on the other hand, women, paradoxically, are ‘the sex’, they stand in for, they come to represent, sex. Thus heterosexuality is not just a choice of partners. Its construction through the binary oppositions of gender helps it produce the hierarchies which systematically organise the oppression of women. For some, this system of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (a term Adrienne Rich (1993a) developed in 1979 which we will soon discuss) is so deeply implicated in women’s oppression that real social change will involve challenging this norm. Other feminists have argued that to overturn patriarchal oppression, the link of female sexuality to motherhood must be severed. The demands for women’s right to control their own sexuality, to determine whether and when to have children, was targetted this system of compulsory heterosexuality. For Shulamith Firestone (1970), the elaboration of new contraceptive devices and the promise of reproductive technologies was that they would uncouple mothering from the female body, and so lead to new sexualities and new configurations of gender roles. For other theorists, lesbian separatism provided an escape route from the patriarchally dominated institutions of sexuality (e.g. Daly, 1978). But to change something, we must understand it. How is sexuality constructed? In trying to understand where desire comes from, how sexuality works, a variety of theories have been advanced to explain these (relatively recent and western) rigid categories of human sexuality. Until the gay liberation movement of the 1970s encouraged gays and lesbians to theorise their own existence, scientists and psychologists generally explained homosexuality and bisexuality as either exceptions to or aberrations from the norm of heterosexuality. Currently, theories on sexuality range from sexual identity to sexual activity, from pathology to preference. On one end of the spectrum, your sexuality could be seen to be a part of an essential you, with a biological basis --- genetic and prenatal hormonal factors have determined your sexual orientation. Here it assumed that sexual orientation is ‘set’ early in life. You may have tried to repress the ‘real (gay, lesbian, male heterosexual, female bisexual) you’, but eventually you will no longer be able to deny your true self. This is one way of telling the story --- that there is an ‘essential’ core which is the identity with which you are born and which will take you to your grave. At the other end of the spectrum of sexual orientation is social constructivism: that events, or the environment made you who you are (and formed what and who you want!). Here the particular development of your sexual orientation is based on social and cultural factors. The overwhelming predominance of heterosexuality in society would under this theory be attributed to the compelling social pressures which are exerted on men and women, to the ways in which ‘real men’ and ‘real women’ only properly exist within the strictures and structures of heterosexuality, and as part of the ‘natural’ fit between ‘male’ and ‘female’ bodies. Sexuality is a set of social processes which produce and organise the structure and expression of desire. The modern subject Several times in the first three sections of this chapter we have used the word ‘subject’ rather than the word ‘individual’ or even ‘self’. You may have noticed in your reading that other writers refer not only to the self, or the individual, but at times to the subject, and subjectivity. Much of the work that we will do together in this book will consist of suggesting ways to think about how we come to be who we are. We will be bending ourselves to the task of analysing what it means to be human. In focussing on gender, sex and sexuality, we are focussing on ‘the subject’. For some analysts of what being human involves, gender is a supplemental category --- like the optional extra of air conditioning in a flash car. For those who think it is a bit more crucial (the wheels? the chassis?) it then becomes important to choose appropriate theories of being human. When we think of our ‘self’, our ideas are formulated not only by our original insights into what it means to be, but also in part by what prominent philosophers have speculated about the self over the last few centuries. We will be gradually introducing you to this concept of the subject and subjectivity and its importance throughout the book, and we will start here, by discussing what we understand by the word ‘individual’ and what some of the major differences are between it and the modern subject. When we speak about the self, we often imagine the individual, someone who knows their own mind, acts on their rational assessments of situations. For example, a friend decides to move cities to take a new job. When you ask them why, it is likely that they will present a series of reasons --- that the money is better, that the work is more challenging. You, in turn, willl likely accept that this is an appropriate way to talk about the situation. You will assume that someone acting in the world can take it upon themselves to make such a decision, to act autonomously. You are unlikely to hear from them an explanation that as their childhood was troubled, they neurotically move from place to place; that they have seen a vision from god which initiated their departure; that their boss has commanded that they do so; or that their parents have insisted. Of course, these are possibilities, but when people represent their actions to others, they generally like to show themselves as reasonable, and the source of their own decisions, i.e. autonomous. ‘Yes, my boss was very insistent, but finally, I am the one who made the decision.’ The model of the self, or subject, which is being used in this scenario, is one of the individual --- an autonomous being who acts and thinks rationally, for whom flights of fancy, madness or spirit are aberrant, not part of a properly functioning self. Like many of the concepts we review in this book, this one is also not as natural as it seems at first glance. It comes to us from early modern European philosophers, and can be most clearly seen in Rene Descartes’ treatise on scientific method (1979). Descartes, a seventeenth-century French philosopher and scientist, is generally acknowledged in western thought to be the founder of modern scientific method. His famous dictum ‘cogito ergo sum’ --- ‘I think therefore I am’ --- establishes the rational individual as the centrepiece of a variety of interlocking practices of knowing. This thinker is self-defining, and self-sufficient. Coded as male, he is fully conscious to himself, in control of his actions, thoughts and meanings. The Cartesian method also sees ‘knowledge’ or ‘science’ itself as universal, available to all who follow the appropriate rules of investigation. This implies that the idea of mind is a disembodied universal. Knowledge, particularly rationality, is imagined as the universal property of human being. Not only does the thinking subject transcend its own corporeality in this model of knowledge, but it also sees itself as a neutral observer. This transcendent subject --- the one which establishes itself by announcing, ‘I think, therefore I am’ --- also is capable of neutral observation. This is the self upon which much of liberal politics is based. The self which acts as a citizen is in this humanist political philosophy is a liberal self, one for whom individual rights are secured. This kind of humanism assumes that the individual, ‘Man’, has individual free will, and is autonomous (i.e. that individuals can define themselves independently of the social structures and physical relations of which they are a part). Autonomy, free will, rationality --- these capacities are defined as natural to humans. You may be asking yourself: what’s wrong with being rational, self-controlled and neutral? Well, in a nutshell, if certain qualities such as rationality are seen as coming naturally to certain kinds of humans (white European heterosexual men), then it doesn’t leave much space for women and other people who don’t fall into those categories to see themselves as human. Two thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century began to challenge these ideas of the individual, and their challenges had a lasting impact on the ways we imagine that our selves function. In the nineteenth century Karl Marx articulated a powerful vision of the way that humans in capitalist society are shaped and determined by their work, by whether, how, to whom they sell their labour, by the kinds of work they do, and their relations to what he called the mode of production. For Marx, whether you worked in a factory, or owned the factory made a big difference to what kind of self you might have. Marx argued that consciousness is determined by social and economic systems rather than the other way around. This puts paid to the idea of the sovereign individual who’s running the show. For Marx, the economic system of capitalism makes the worker in our scenario a mobile one, and not his individual decisions. Certainly, such decisions are important for that person, but as a model for understanding the motivations and functioning of selves, Marx needed a theory of the subject that would take into account people acting collectively, and being acted upon collectively. The collective subject, the idea that based on the subjective shared experience of material circumstances we develop a collective identity, is one that we can trace to Marxism. A second prominent thinker also upended these common notions about how people might develop. Psychoanalyst and philosopher Sigmund Freud undertook a detailed elaboration of the functioning of the human mind and the mental mechanisms by which it becomes adapted to the world. Two important innovative ideas are central to Freud’s new perspective. First, that sexuality can be a source for somatic (physical) illness for both sexes at all ages, including children; second, that sexuality is linked to unconscious processes. Freud posited that all subjects have areas and activities of the mind not accessible to consciousness --- repressed material including infantile aggressions, resentments, traumas and fixations too painful or conflicted for consciousness to bear that nevertheless informs human actions, language and thought. He called this ‘the unconscious’. This had enormous implications for concepts of subjectivity. Whereas since Descartes the individual had been conceived as autonomous, rational, and ‘masterful’, Freud emphasised the structuring role played by the unconscious. The psychoanalytic concept of the subject, in opposition to the humanist term ‘individual’, implies that subjectivity is more than and goes beyond, even eludes, the conscious self. For Freud subjectivity is a laborious and endless process, in which the subject is torn back and forth between desires and drives on the one hand and cultural and social demands on the other. Freud developed a model of the psyche which breaks it into three parts, and which reflects the fragmentation of the subject into dynamic components: the unconscious (the id), the conscious personality (the ego) and the cultural and symbolic image of the self (the superego). You might imagine the ego as a kind of maitre d’ in a restaurant, keeping control of the tables; the id, which is linked to the unconscious, is what goes in the backroom, and under the tables. It is a reservoir of psychical energy, drives and desires. And finally, the superego would be our restaurant critic, a censor who sits in judgement. Although there are many critiques that can be made about Freud, and we will survey some of them, his work is interesting for feminists in that he is one of the few ‘big theorists’ of the modern age who tries to understand why men end up men, and women, women. Psychoanalysis is specifically interested in the formation of masculine and feminine identity at the level of the unconscious. Feminists interested philosophy, in literary criticism, history, fine art, theatre, film, and so on have all taken up Freud and his ideas. These new formulations of the subject also inform what we think of nowadays when we think of the self. Our society is imbued with psychoanalytic practices; you might say that we speak Freud without even being aware of it (Turkle 1992). Using Freudian psychoanalysis to think about the ways in which selves come into being has in some ways become as natural to us as the Cartesian individual acting rationally. And Marx’s elaboration of the self in relation to production is with us too, in the ways in which we think about class division, and the collective struggle of embattled groups. We readily talk of Freudian slips, repressed desires, or wonder whether the actions of a friend are spurred on by some peculiar neurosis which is the product of a childhood trauma. We also use Marxist notions of collective struggle quite readily: we read the impact of social and economic forces into the narratives of the lives around us. Heroic films of groups of people battling against the wheels of industry are not that uncommon. Of course, it is unlikely that Marx would have imagined Sally Fields as the embodiment of the collective subject of proletariat struggle. For him, the collective subject was more like the idea of a group identity --- think perhaps of the Black Panthers in the 1960s. In a movie like Coal Miner’s Daughter, we can see two ideas of the subject --- the individual and the collective --- merged together in a rather strange marriage! But incoherent or not, they’re both there. These kinds of reading practices are specific to modernity, to our capitalist, patriarchal epoch. (See Chapter 3 for more on reading practices.) We believe that we can read deep meanings from surface manifestations, like dreams and banal actions, the trace of the unconscious on our conscious lives, or the manifestation of the underlying base of material production in the superstructure our daily lives. What’s on top hides what lies beneath --- the nervous tick, the faceless bureaucracy are linked to deep structures: a neurosis developed in childhood, the capitalist system of production. In fact, the very idea that we can ‘read’ humans, that we can analyse ourselves, is part of our modern moment. An idea without which you wouldn’t be reading this book! We will take up this question of the self, the subject, and the individual again. We’d like to go on now to look at a series of terms around sexuality, as a way of thinking about the subject in formation. Institution In the discussion of the term ‘sexuality’, we mentioned the ‘patriarchally dominated institutions of sexuality’. Let us give you an idea of what we mean by these terms. By ‘institution’ we mean a set of relationships and/or practices which are expressions of mainstream social values and beliefs: for example, relationships such as the family, practices such as parliamentary democracy, the legal system and general education. In each case a specific form of the institution is given broad social approval and support --- rhetorical and/or material. So in the case of the family contemporary western societies tend (in most cases) to favour the bourgeois nuclear family --- and so ‘family’ comes to mean that specific formulation: heterosexual, discrete, isolated, constituted on the basis of patrilinearity. Now this is not the only family structure to be found in contemporary western societies; however, it is the structure which is assumed in government policy, and so receives the benefit --- rhetorical and material --- of government and its ministries. When a particular set of relationships and practices attains the status of an institution, therefore, a number of consequences can be seen: i. a specific formulation of this set of relationships and/or practices is not only identified with the institution, but as the institution --- with the consequent exclusion of different formulations ii. the institution effectively positions all individuals within the society as either part of it, or potentially part of it --- with the consequent disapprobation of those who cannot or will not participate iii. that formulation of the institution, which is the institution, is supported not only by general (though not unanimous) approval, but also by economic and other institutional advantage Taking the family as our example, once again, we might trace these consequences in its operation. For example, because the family assumed in government policy and in many of the cultural productions of western societies is the bourgeois nuclear family, it is very difficult for other family formations to be granted legitimacy and the material and other support which make it possible to operate. For example, a family comprising a same-sex couple frequently encounters difficulties with regard to issues such as bank loans, workplace acceptance of the same-sex partner, sick leave to attend a same-sex partner, spousal allowances of many kinds (government and workplace). A family comprising same-sex partners with children encounter many of these issues as well as issues specifically concerning the children: who to contact in the case of illness, availability of sick leave to attend children, custody issues in the case of separation. Because this family arrangement is not socially legitimated (via policy arrangements and general social attitudes), its members encounter difficulties, and they are excluded from both the material benefits and social reinforcement offered the institutional (bourgeois nuclear) family. The coercive power of the institution in relation to individuals can be seen in the pressure on women and men to ‘settle down and have a family’. For those whose inclinations --- sexual or otherwise --- do not necessarily dispose them to this lifestyle (and note again that family here implicitly means bourgeois, nuclear, patrilineal family), then social disapprobation is expressed in many ways; at its least virulent in slighting references to the individual’s sexuality, fertility and/or social responsibility. While this may have minimal effect on some people, for others it may be a constant reproach, a source of insecurity and even self-loathing. And as stated above, the family which is not the bourgeois nuclear patrilineal family may find it impossible to access the kinds of material benefits which society offers the ‘correct’ family; for example, in taxation allowances, sick leave entitlements, insurance payments. Alternative family structures also do not receive the social approval expressed in cultural productions such as advertisements, television programs, film, and, in fact, often finds itself defined negatively by contrast with the institutionalised ‘family’. An institution is a set of relationships and/or practices which are expressions of mainstream social values and beliefs, and have the support --- explicit and implicit --- of other social and cultural institutions. Patriarchy The institution which is likely the most talked about in feminist theory is patriarchy. The concept and widespread use of the term patriarchy grew out of feminist debates about gender in the 1960s and 1970s. ‘Patriarchy’ replaced the earlier term sexism, emphasising the importance of institutions in gender oppression, rather than individual prejudice (Edley & Wetherell 1995). It is still used as a shorthand to indicate a social system in which maleness and masculinity confer a privileged position of power and authority; where man is the ‘Self’ to which woman is ‘Other’. It was taken from anthropology where it referred to a kinship system in which the eldest male, sometimes literally the father or patriarch, was invested with authority over other men and over women. In this model of patriarchy, which continued in apprentice crafts in the early modern period, old men held authority, younger males were subservient, and women were excluded. Early feminist theorists used the term strategically to highlight men’s dominance of women in the private (the family) and the public (work, politics, culture) spheres. Now, however, it is generally used to refer to the systematic structural differences in the cultural, economic and social position of men in relation to women. Patriarchy is a social system in which structural differences in privilege, power and authority are invested in masculinity and the cultural, economic and/or social positions of men. Under a patriarchal regime women are, by definition, excluded from positions of power and authority --- except where that power and authority worked to support individual men or the social system as a whole. So a women might be authoritative towards her children in the home, in order to provide a calm and supportive environment for her husband. She might be authoritative as a teacher, in order to reinforce the values and attitudes constitutive of the social system. When writers refer to ‘the patriarchy’ or to ‘patriarchal values’, then, they indicate a set of values and beliefs which positions the male and masculine as the site of authority and power in society. Women are excluded from this power and authority unless it ultimately serves the ends of that social system --- and then its actual status as power and authority may be challenged. However, ‘patriarchy’ has become a controversial term; it has been critiqued for its monolithic construction of men and masculinity as the enemy and the oppressor; for its lack of precision and its inability to account for complex social processes and cultural dynamics. For example, a working-class man may be subservient to a wealthy woman in social interactions, illustrating that the factor of class is one of the processes involved in the dynamics which some uses of the term ‘patriarchy’ overlook. When 1970s feminism spoke of ‘patriarchy’ as the master pattern in human history, the argument was overgeneralised. But the idea well captured the power and intractability of a massive structure of social relations: a structure that involved the state, the economy, culture and communications as well as kinship, child-rearing and sexuality (Connell 1995). While many feminists are now wary of using the term, scholars of masculinity have retained the term but used it in conjunction with more detailed considerations of the relation between patriarchy and capitalism, patriarchy and male hegemony, in an attempt to understand the multidimensional and historically and culturally specific forms of male dominance. And as Judith Allen has wryly pointed out, it is the only concept in which ‘the man question’ or ‘the man problem’ can be raised. In almost all other social theories the issue of gender is raised in terms of ‘the woman question’ or ‘the woman problem’. Recent studies in a wide range of disciplines (sociology, social psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, history, cultural studies) have focussed on the importance of thinking structurally rather than personally about the issue of gender oppression. Contemporary studies of masculinity have turned their attention to several sites --- capitalist work practices, the division of labor, the family, the state, colonialism, empire, rationality, sexuality and culture --- as important patriarchal structures. In Understanding Masculinities, Martin Mac an Ghaill (1996) is concerned to build up a more complex model for understanding masculinity and male domination as cultural and social practices that are part of large-scale social structures and processes. Yet while Connell (1996) points out that ‘the main axis of power in the contemporary European/American gender relations’ remains ‘the overall subordination of women and dominance of men --- the structure Women’s Liberation named “patriarchy”’ (p. 74), the phrases ‘male hegemony’ or ‘hegemonic masculinity’ are used by some instead of the term ‘patriarchy’ in reference to the widespread domination of men in the social, economic and cultural spheres. ‘Male hegemony’ or ‘hegemonic masculinity’ refers to the widespread domination of men in the social, economic and cultural spheres. The concept of ‘hegemony’ refers to ‘the cultural dynamic by which a group claims and sustains a leading position in social life’ and is borrowed from Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of class relations (Connell 1996, p. 77). Hegemonic masculinity consists then of the current practices and ways of thinking which authorise, which make valid and legitimise, the dominant position of men and the subordination of women. This hegemony exists through institutions like the family, like corporate business, or government and the military. Connell uses the phrase ‘patriarchal dividend’ to refer to the ways in which all men benefit from patriarchal privilege without personally being engaged in direct acts of aggression or oppression of women. There is, he suggests, a widespread ‘complicity with the hegemonic project’ even among men who are never violent toward women, who do their share of the housework and make extensive compromises with women rather than exercising naked domination or uncontested displays of authority. (This does not to imply that violence is not used in the maintenance of masculine hegemony, as statistics on domestic violence suggest.) David Buchbinder (1994; 1998) suggests that patriarchal social structures are not positive for men either. In addition to the subordination of women he points out that in modern western patriarchal societies there is also ‘a differential power relationship among men’, access to power depending on ‘physical build, and strength, age, (official) sexual orientation and prowess (even if only rumoured), social class and advantage, economic power, race of the individual, and so on’ (1994, p. 34). Throughout their lives, boys and men find themselves under the supervision and surveillance of other males. Under these conditions many men come to feel that they may be publicly humiliated and deprived of status as men. As a consequence of this, they may strive for ‘an excessive masculinity, whether signified by a huge, muscular body, an impressive sexual scorecard’, ‘a powerful car or a high-flying job’, or ‘acts of violence toward women and children, and other men, especially gays as an attempt to assert their masculinity in the eyes of their fellows’ (p. 36). This rivalry toward other men which is also a feature of masculine hegemony leads to men’s demands for unequivocal emotional support from women which in turn leads to domestic violence if the woman is unable or unwilling to give it. Patriarchy remains a contested term. But whether one speaks of patriarchy or masculine hegemony, conceiving of gendered differences in power and authority as structural allows scope to both men and women to work for changes in social policy, for child-care provisions, for flexible working conditions and working hours, for policies that monitor the abuse of power and violence. Heterosexuality Perhaps another of the most prominent institutions in the study of gender is heterosexuality. Heterosexuality is defined in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as ‘pertaining to or characterized by the normal relations between the sexes’; what the SOED does not specify is what ‘normal’ means. The implication of such a definition is that the meaning of ‘normal relations’ is so apparent that it needs no definition, and any doubt on the part of the reader is a reflection on the reader her- or himself. Reading the Dictionary in the context of contemporary western society, which privileges heterosexuality in its institutional practices (more on this below), we can deduce that ‘normal relations’ here means men having procreative sex with women and vice-versa. The other implication we might make from this definition is that heterosexuality is a universal and transhistorical concept, again because of the use of the term ‘normal relations’. The concept of ‘normal’ closes down any suggestion that understandings might once have been different, or that such understandings did not once exist, by its evocation of its opposite ‘abnormal’ or ‘pathological’. If we try to think differently about gender and sexuality, about a time perhaps when the term ‘heterosexuality’ did not exist, the definition implies that we are outside the realm of ‘normal relations between the sexes’. So it is interesting to note that the term ‘heterosexual’ is relatively recent. Heterosexuality, the dictionary tells us, was devised after (i.e. following, or ‘in the style of’) the term, homosexual, which had itself been coined some four years earlier in 1897. So heterosexuality, a term which many might assume to be a term with a long history, which was used to describe relations between the sexes, is in fact quite a new term. The obvious question we might ask after this revelation is ‘why?’ Why did English develop a term to describe ‘normal relations between the sexes’ only in 1901? The most obvious answer is that the term was developed, as the Dictionary indicates, as the obverse of homosexuality. Yet even that explanation begs the question: why did it take so long for these terms to be generated? Was there no flexibility in human sexual relations before this time, so that terms such as heterosexual and homosexual were unnecessary? Or, is it the other way around, that there was so much flexibility that such defining and delimiting terms were irrelevant? The unspoken assumption here might be that before this time all human relations were heterosexual. Yet historians and archeologists among others will tell us that the behaviour defined by the SOED as homosexual clearly existed before this time. Perhaps it had taken until the early twentieth-century for the ‘normal’ to be defined? Another approach might be to ask why the terms homosexual and heterosexual were defined at this time. And here there is an answer: both ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ were used by Charles Gilbert Chaddock in his 1892 translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Forensic Study. This is the representative quote from Krafft-Ebbing given in the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘The object of post-hypnotic suggestion is to remove the impulse to masturbation and homosexual feelings and impulses, and to encourage heterosexual feelings with a sense of virility.’ In other words, sexuality (whether heter- or homo-) was perceived not as a way of describing particular acts or behaviours, but as an element of the individual’s emotional life and, subsequently, of her or his sense of identity. Furthermore, ‘heterosexual’, it appears, is both desirable and manly, in apparent contrast to ‘homosexual’. So ‘heterosexual’ was part of a regime --- a medicalised or psychoanalytic regime --- whereby sexuality was not only located within the identity of the individual subject (rather than, for example, being located in the sexual act itself), but was also assigned a disciplinary or regulatory function, with one sexuality (hetero-) identified as positive and another (homo-) as negative. In the early twentieth century, as Gayle Rubin claims, sexuality became ‘a vector of oppression’ (1992); that is, it became a way of classifying human beings --- normal or abnormal, inside society or outside it, acceptable or unacceptable. The theorist whose work has most influenced the contemporary revaluations of sexuality and gender is Michel Foucault. His four volume work The History of Sexuality argues convincingly that sexuality is socially and historically, rather than biologically derived. From this perspective, heterosexuality is not a biological state or orientation, but is a socially and historically constructed category which positions some people as good and others as bad. Furthermore, since sexuality is positioned as the critical point of contact between the genders, it is used to regulate them also. The genders ‘male’ and ‘female’ are themselves constructed by reference to socially and historically constituted definitions of heterosexuality --- the positively coded sexuality. ‘Male’ behaviour equates with heterosexual masculine behaviour; ‘female’ with heterosexual feminine behaviour. Gender and heterosexuality can, therefore, be seen as categories which regulate (and create) individual subjects, according to how they are prepared to perform their sexuality. At the same time, their performativity is clearly revealed; these are not categories to be, but to perform --- as Judith Butler (1990) argues in her influential book, Gender Trouble. This recognition that neither gender nor sex are inherent, biological features but are socially and culturally constructed is fundamental to our current revaluation of ‘heterosexuality’ as a term which constructs, rather than simply classifies, human sexuality and the gendering of individual subjects. When Adrienne Rich first used the phrase ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, this is the coercive power of heterosexuality to which she refers: ‘I am suggesting that heterosexuality, like motherhood, needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution. . . .’ (Rich 1993, p. 232). Heterosexuality, she argues, is not just an innate biological function or practice, as had been previously assumed. Gayle Rubin refers specifically to this assumption as ‘[s]exual essentialism’ which she notes is ‘embedded in the folk wisdoms of western societies, which consider sex to be eternally unchanging, asocial, and transhistorical’ (Rubin 1992, p.9). When a sexual practice is perceived or constructed as ‘essential’, it then has the power in turn to construct those who do not practice it as aberrant, as ‘non-essential’ in all senses of the word; that is, as not possessing the innate or essential capacity to be viable human beings, and so as ‘non-essential’ to human society. For Rich, then, heterosexuality is rendered ‘compulsory’ for all who would participate in human society. The power of compulsory heterosexuality is that for those whose lives conform to its demands, it acts as a constant reinforcement and regulatory mechanism, producing its compliant readers as viable social subjects and regulating any thoughts they might have about alternative gender roles or sexual choices. For those who do not conform to its demands, on the other hand, compulsory heterosexuality acts as a mechanism of exclusion and oppression, because it consistently constructs them as outsiders, as aberrant and bad. The term heterosexist is used to describe the society in which 'heterosexual' operates as a defining and regulating principle. The negative connotations of the term refer to the proscriptive function of (compulsory) heterosexuality. Heterosexism describes social or personal structures which are defined and regulated by exclusive and compulsory heterosexuality. To be heterosexist is to assume that every person and every practice is heterosexual and, by implication, to elide or silence all who are not heterosexual, and to devalue every practice which is not heterosexual. Another term used to describe this assumption of heterosexuality is heteronormative. The value of this alternative term is that it captures the coercive power of this assumption --- its normative or regulatory power. So heterosexuality is a powerful conceptual tool or category which has been mobilised in the twentieth century to define and regulate not just sexual behaviours, but the ways in which we define gender. As a result it plays a critical role in determining who is regarded as an acceptable social subject. For this reason Judith Butler uses the phrase heterosexual matrix to refer to heterosexuality: ‘to designate that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized’ (Butler 1990, p. 151). Judith Butler’s phrase ‘heterosexual matrix’ refers to a grid or frame through which cultures make sense of the ways that our bodies, genders, and desires seem to appear ‘naturally’ heterosexual. Butler’s term captures the power of ‘heterosexuality’ to make particular practices and behaviours seem ‘natural’ and others ‘unnatural’ --- and it also identifies this term as ‘cultural’ or social, not biological. Butler acknowledges also the work of Monique Wittig (1992), who uses a similar term, heterosexual contract, to capture the regulatory function of the term, heterosexuality. So heterosexuality is a late nineteenth- and twentieth-century concept, used to delineate --- and so to regulate --- the nature of contemporary sexual relations. It is not simply a biological category, as often assumed; indeed biology developed for many years as a scientific study without the use of this term. Instead it is a social construct which has the power to regulate and (re)inforce not only particular kinds of sexual practices, but also the gender categories based on them. Heterosexuality is the concept which determines whether a man is recognised as a viable male subject, a woman as a viable female subject. Homosexual As noted above, ‘homosexual’, meaning ‘having a sexual propensity for person’s of one’s own sex’ (SOED), came into general usage following the 1892 translation of Krafft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. Some earlier usages have been recorded: Swiss doctor Karoly Maria Benkert used the term ‘homosexual’ in a response to German anti-homosexual legislation in 1869 to describe an ‘inborn, and therefore irrepressible, drive’ (Plummer 1981, p. 142). Foucault also records the use of the term in an 1870 paper, Archiv für Neurologie, by Carl Westphal to describe ‘less . . . a type of sexual relations than . . . a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself’ (Foucault 1981, p. 43). However, the 1890s marks the general adoption of the term by writers such as essayist J. A. Symonds and theorist Havelock Ellis. Like Benkert all of these theorists were involved in a debate about whether desires and behaviours described by the term, ‘homosexual’ were innate or culturally acquired. Writing about this debate Foucault notes: ‘The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology’ (Foucault 1981, p. 43). Listing these attributes Foucault alludes to the various kinds of studies of ‘the homosexual’ undertaken in the nineteenth century: biographical (a personage), historical and archeological (a past), medical (a case history), psychological (a childhood), anthropological (a type of life), biological (a life form), psychoanalytic/medical (a morphology), moral (an indiscreet anatomy) and forensic (a mysterious physiology). Foucault’s point is not that homosexuality was first discovered or observed in the nineteenth century, but rather that, in the nineteenth century, sexuality, and particularly aberrant sexuality, ‘was implanted in bodies, slipped in beneath modes of conduct, made into a principle of classification and intelligibility, established as a raison d’être and a natural order of disorder’ (Foucault, 1981: 44). In other words, Foucault sees the classification of homosexuality as part of the development of a regime of power which operates by means of its sexual classification of individuals. To accomplish that classification this regime must first create those individuals, those identities --- the homosexual, the heterosexual, the perverse of various kinds --- and the structures of pleasure, histories, biologies, moralities, personalities, psychologies which characterise them. Before the nineteenth century, we might argue, various kinds of sexual acts were performed; they were not necessarily used to classify the individual who performed them. During and after the nineteenth century, however, sexuality was inscribed in the individual as a function of her or his sexual practice. Further, all sexualities were not considered equal. The Oxford Dictionary definition of homosexuality (above) seems relatively non-judgmental, but the textual examples it provides of the use of the term suggest otherwise: ‘he had been free from homo-sexual inclinations’ (Psychopathia Sexualis). If we substitute ‘heterosexual’ for ‘homo-sexual’, it is clear, by contrast, that this statement is a negative reference to homosexuality. The debate around use of the term ‘homosexual’ in the nineteenth century was stimulated by the proposal and passing of laws against acts associated with homosexual men. As historians of sexuality such as Jeffrey Weeks have argued, before this time there were laws against acts such as sodomy, but little distinction was made between sodomy between man and man, man and woman, man and beast. However, in 1885 in England the Laboucherie Amendment to the Criminal Law Act effectively outlawed all forms of homosexual male sexual activity. Following the passing of this Amendment a number of scandals and trials followed, most famous of which was the prosecution of Oscar Wilde. And it must be noted that there is a causal relation between the scandal and the legal definition; that is, the legal act itself can be seen as having created the scandal by creating the conditions for it to happen. The Wilde trial and associated debate revealed a great deal of indeterminacy about the meaning of ‘homosexual’, stemming in part from the basic issue of whether homosexuality was regarded as innate or learned behaviour. Yet in posing the question in that format, the debaters assumed that sexuality was somehow already innate. It was not that heterosexuality and homosexuality were both seen as possibly learned or culturally produced, but rather that homosexuality might be some sort of culturally produced perversion or inversion of ‘normal’ hetero-sexuality. The terms inversion and invert also became popular in the nineteenth century, to describe same-sex behaviours and individuals who engage in same-sex sexual activities. The negative construction of homosexuality at this time is evident in the use of these terms; further, its legal realisation was primarily masculine. ‘Inversion’ and ‘invert’ are popular nineteenth century terms to describe same-sex behaviours and individuals who engage in same-sex sexual activities. The acts outlawed by the Laboucherie Amendment are specifically masculine (e.g. sodomy, oral sex between men). Weeks records that the major sanction on sexuality before the ninteenth-century was directed against ‘non-purposive’ or non-procreative sex; the inspiration being Judeo-Christian ethics which claimed that sex was meant for procreation. Following from the same ethical base, male sexuality was targeted by these sanctions, with lesbianism virtually escaping any legal sanction whatsoever. The reason for this seems to be that women’s role in procreation was not recognised in Judeo-Christian ethics as active; women were merely receptacles for the male sperm which were the source of procreation. Lesbians, according to this view, could not be charged with interfering sexually with procreation. The focus on masculinity in the new laws seems to derive not only from the Judeo-Christian ethic of the past but from a model of male sexuality as undifferentiated and uncontrollable. From Foucault’s perspective, we might here recognise a legal construction or production of male sexuality, which can then be used to regulate and discipline male behaviours. The reasons for the development of this model have been related to concerns about the stability of the family, required for the maintenance of bourgeois society --- though a single explanation for such a complex phenomenon is unlikely to be completely sufficient. The Wilde trial, for example, has been seen as a rejection of Wilde’s anti-bourgeois behaviour --- his flamboyance and overt rejection of bourgeois society --- rather than simply (or only) of his sexuality (Marshall), though his homosexuality became emblematic of what was seen as his corrupting influence. The question remains whether that corruption was primarily sexual or social; was Wilde’s crime to be homosexual or was it to be an intelligent, socially critical, anti-bourgeois Irishman? For the history of ‘homosexual’ as a term and an identity this question is important because it signifies its social and cultural derivation and use. It was not clear at the end of the nineteenth century whether homosexuality was to be considered natural or cultural; after all, how did one classify ‘homosexual’ acts performed by otherwise apparently heterosexual people? As Foucault noted (1986; 1988), the various domains of knowledge which characterised nineteenth-century society --- e.g. law, medicine, psychology, anthropology, biology, ethics --- were all involved in the production of rules of viable sexual conduct. ‘Homosexual’ had a role in the production of sexual identities and behaviours which might be used to regulate and discipline members of society. Paradoxically perhaps, while that identity was negative, it nevertheless enabled self-recognition among those who felt excluded by or outside the evolving definitions of ‘normal’ (hetero-)sexuality; in other words, it was also the genesis of homosexual liberation movements (see below). Homosexuality While it may seem redundant at this point to deal separately with homosexuality, it is important to note the genesis of homosexuality as a concept and the great variety of sexual behaviours and identities to which it originally referred. As the discussion above indicates, debates about homosexuality focussed on the status of identities which could not be defined by a normative concept of heterosexuality (see above). Terms such as invert and pervert evolved to differentiate between those who might be seen as innately non-heterosexual (invert) and those who choose to engage in behaviours which are outside the parameters of ‘normal’ (normative) heterosexuality (pervert). Both terms were negative, however, and their functionality eventually called into question even by those who would police sexual behaviours (after all, how was it possible to tell one from the other?). The point here is that ‘homosexuality’ as a concept was so broad that it was not only of dubious value in a variety of fields (medical, psychological, judicial), but it also lumped together a range of behaviours which have no necessary relationship --- for example, homosexuality, transvestism, transsexualism, bisexuality, pedophilia. The most disturbing correlation of sexual behaviours in our contemporary society is homosexuality and pedophilia. It is striking that in a society in which child sexual abuse is overwhelmingly heterosexual (predominantly committed by men on girls), the focus of so much moral panic is abuse by men on boys --- which is then sometimes identified as homosexual. On the same grounds, heterosexuality would have to be identified as fundamentally pedophilic, with homosexuality a pale copy. This conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia has also been related to the nature/nurture argument surrounding homosexuality. If homosexuality is constructed as a learned behaviour unlike heterosexuality, then perhaps it can be taught to young people by older people. As the discussion of compulsory heterosexuality above indicates, having learned homosexuality, those young people will then be unable to take their place as acceptably gendered social subjects. This kind of argumentation has been associated with the reviling of homosexuality as corruption which can be found in many discussions, and played a major role in the Wilde trial. The metaphorical production of homosexuality as an infectious virus (still evoked around the material reality of the AIDS virus) followed. This is not to devalue the concern with pedophilia, but rather to identify what has been, and continues to be, an ongoing issue in definitions of homosexuality; that the breadth of the term and its imprecision contribute to the negative connotations it still has in many contexts. Moreover, from a Foucauldian perspective we might argue that its imprecision and breadth have granted the term a wide efficacy in regulating the behaviours of anyone who strays in any way from the heterosexual norm. That is, if the connotations of the term ‘homosexual’ are so negative, then it was all the more useful as a threat. This is the kind of threat identified by the term 'homophobia'. ‘Homophobia’ is often taken to mean a negative view of or bias against homosexuality, and specifically against people who are identified as homosexual. Often homophobia is experienced in exactly that way, however, in view of the arguments above, we might consider a slightly different understanding of it. Given the role of heterosexuality in producing the accepted versions of masculinity and femininity, so allowing men and women to identify as male and female subjects, any threat to heterosexual identity can be read as a threat to not only an individual’s sexuality but also to their gendering --- and so to their status as viable or acceptable social subjects. Homophobia can then be seen not only as a hatred of homosexual subjects, but also as a disciplinary strategy employed against all social subjects. G. K. Lehne wrote in his study of masculinity that ‘[h]omophobia is a threat used by homosexist individuals to enforce social conformity in the male role, and maintain social conformity’ (Lehne in Marshall, 1993, p. 154). In this formulation homosexist refers specifically to anti-homosexual attitudes and homophobia to the threat to transfer the negative connotations of ‘homosexuality’ to any individual/man who refuses to conform to compulsory heterosexuality (as interpreted by the homosexist). Homophobia is not only a hatred of homosexual subjects, but also a disciplinary strategy employed against all social subjects to ensure that they comply with society’s preference for heterosexuality. Conformity, therefore, means not just the refusal of same-sex sexuality, but an embrace of the (sexual) masculinity and (gendered) maleness sanctioned by heterosexuality; in other words, conformity to the abuser’s conception of maleness, which is quite likely to be a patriarchal masculine stereotype (see Chapter 4). Lehne notes that homophobia is used ‘against the 49% of the population which is male’, not primarily against homosexuals, because its function is to enforce ‘certain types of male behaviour and to define the limits of “acceptable” masculinity’. Homophobia depends for its effect on the negative construction of homosexuality and the maintenance of heterosexuality as guarantor of acceptable gendering. So Lehne notes that homophobia is mobilised consistently against all men as a mechanism of social/sexual control. Homophobia is also experienced by homosexual women or lesbians (see ‘lesbian’ below) as a more or less explicit construction of them as outside ‘normal’ femininity --- as unwomanly --- and so as unacceptable female subjects. Anti-lesbian homophobia receives less attention in the press and in public forums because it seems less often to result in overt violence against homosexual women, and its deployment as a threat against heterosexual women is also less overt. Lehne notes that the taunt, ‘What are you, a fag [or pansy or poofter, etc]?’ is commonly used as a disciplinary mechanism with men. Among women the gendering is sometimes less overt: for example, it may refer to a woman’s inability to get or keep --- or even want --- a male partner, or it may be directed at a childless woman. Essentially, however, the threat --- of exclusion from ‘correct’ gendering --- is the same and it proceeds from the same homophobic premise. Lesbian One of the terms used to describe women who are perceived in heterosexist culture as not ‘correctly’ gendered is lesbian. While the word has an older use as the adjective derived from the name of the Greek island of Lesbos, its use in the context of gender and sexuality is relatively recent. The SOED gives as its secondary meaning ‘Lesbian vice, Sapphism’ and records its first use as 1908. The term Sapphism is defined in the SOED as ‘Unnatural sexual relations between women’ and is traced to ‘the name of Sappho (see SAPPHIC), who was accused of this vice’; the dictionary records its first use as 1890. The value judgments implicit in the use of terms such as ‘unnatural’ and ‘vice’ are quite clear. When used pejoratively (and its definition suggests that it is implicitly pejorative), lesbian does not simply refer to sexual difference or to homosexual specificity; it is used to attack the woman’s womanliness --- her gendering as a viable social subject. A woman who is a lesbian is, under this (heterosexist) regime, not a woman. While there are now many projects devoted to reconstructing lesbian history and identity, it is also the case that the contemporary heterosexist conception of lesbian is relatively recent. As the discussions of homosexual and homosexuality (above) indicate, contemporary understandings of gender, sex and sexuality can be traced to the nineteenth century and the production of a heterosexual discourse which pathologises non-heterosexuals. Nineteenth-century writings about lesbians tended to favour the term ‘invert’ (see above), which continued to be popular well into the twentieth century: for example, it is the term used by Radclyffe Hall in The Well of Loneliness (1982, first published 1928) to describe the sexuality of her protagonist, Stephen Gordon. However, as noted above, invert carries the negative connotations reflected in its more usual, everyday meaning: to turn upside down. An invert, then, is one in whom the ‘normal’ is turned upside down --- a definition which conserves, rather than challenges, the social practice of heterosexuality. That is, by representing ‘inverts’ as having ‘upside down’ sexuality, the term ‘invert’ preserves the idea that heterosexuality is the ‘norm’ from which non-heterosexuals stray, by choice or (un)natural inclination. Hall’s anguished examination of lesbian life, The Well of Loneliness, continues to be a very popular novel; it was recently reissued in a new edition by Virago Press. In view of the public censure against homosexuality, this seems rather surprising and it speaks to the ambiguities within which lesbianism operates. On the one hand, it might be argued that lesbians have never suffered the same degree of overt persecution as homosexual men, who are also ungendered by heterosexism. The instances of legal persecution of lesbians as lesbians seem to be confined to situations in which women masqueraded as men, committed sexual misdemeanours as men (e.g. using a substitute penis), or somehow gained benefits as if they were men (e.g. pension). In other words, the sexual behaviour of lesbians seems not an issue in a heterosexual order which defines sexuality in terms of male sexual performance. On the other hand, it may be that the persecution of lesbians is more covert, that it is implicit in the culture of heterosexism. Without arguing a parallel, we might suggest that it would be naive to think that in a white supremacist society, a Black person can only be seen as persecuted if or when legal sanctions are used against them. Instead we have to recognise that discrimination and harrassment often takes place at an almost subliminal level --- through what people say or don’t say, through assumptions made, various behaviours. Lesbians experience covert discrimination of this kind, as well as institutional discriminations in a whole range of areas, including banking, credit, adoption, child custody, travel allowance, immigration, health care, insurance, wills and taxation. So, on this ground alone, it seems invalid to do as many studies have done, which is to regard lesbians as just like homosexual men --- except that they are women (Faraday 1981). In her analysis of social science research about lesbians, Annabel Faraday criticizes the assumption that lesbians and gay men share certain characteristics because of their same sex relationships: ‘What is not recognized is that while both lesbians and gay men are not ‘heterosexual’, heterosexuality itself is a power relationship of men over women; what gay men and lesbians are rejecting are essentially polar experiences’ (Faraday 1981, p. 113). From this perspective, lesbians commit the unforgivable crime of not being attracted by and to men as both sexual partners and the locus of power and authority, whereas homosexual men do, at least, appreciate the appeal of the masculine. Along with writers such as Adrienne Rich and Monique Wittig, Faraday argues for the specificity of lesbian experience; that is, that it must be seen as an experience specific to women. Adrienne Rich, in her famous essay, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1993a), makes the same point that to ‘equate lesbian existence with male homosexuality because each is stigmatized is to erase female reality once again’ (p. 239). Rich uses a number of terms in this essay to describe lesbian and/or female reality, which have had a continuing influence on attempts to (re)conceptualise lesbian experience. For example, the term lesbian existence is used to describe both ‘the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence’ (p. 239). In other words, Rich acknowledges that ‘lesbian’ is a term in a contemporary debate about female existence, for which she also provides a historical trajectory not determined or limited by heterosexual assumptions. Another term, lesbian continuum, is used to describe a range of what Rich terms woman-identified experience, which may or may not include sexual experience with another woman. The notion of the lesbian continuum is a controversial one in both lesbian and heterosexual communities. For conservative heterosexual women it suggests a sexualisation of their female friendships which is threatening and disruptive; for some lesbians it suppresses the specificity of their nonheterosexual experience and sexuality. However, it may be that both ‘lesbian continuum’ and ‘woman-identified’ derive their power and value as much from their rejection of heterosexist constructions of femininity as from their description of particular female friendships or experiences. A common heterosexual characterisation of women is that they are engaged in an ongoing war among themselves over men. So women are seen incapable of sustained friendships, gossip about each other, and are generally nasty to each other, especially when men are around. Novels such as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977) explored this construction in some detail, noting its disastrous effects on women who were thereby silenced and prevented from forming mutually supportive groups and communities. The counter-strategy of many feminists in the 1960s and 1970s was to encourage women to share their experience of heterosexist society, including their relationships with men in order to provide a supportive environment in which to explore the nature of contemporary society. Rich’s ideas of the lesbian continuum and of women-identified experience continues this interrogation of heterosexuality and its constitution of the feminine. Rich’s essay might also be seen in the context of the 1970 essay, ‘The Woman-Identified Woman’ in which a group of lesbian feminists, identifying themselves as Radicalesbians, argue that what identifies the lesbian is her rejection of the female role constituted for her by her society. Subsequently the term woman-identified woman has been used to refer to a woman whose frame of reference was not that of the heterosexist feminine, but who may or may not be a lesbian. That is, it describes the woman who refuses the stereotypical femininity assigned to women by compulsory heterosexuality --- competitive (with other women), gossipy (about other women), nasty (to other women). Conversely, the term male-identified woman is used to refer to women who adopt stereotypical (patriarchal or heterosexist) feminine behaviours. The use of a term developed by lesbian feminists to describe the experience of both lesbians and women who do not identify as lesbians indicates the social critique implicit in any rejection of stereotypical femininity; both non-stereotypical heterosexual women and lesbians make a socially critical choice to behave as ‘woman-identified’. As Rich’s ‘lesbian continuum’ suggests, the experience of heterosexual women and of lesbians cannot be separated as clearly as heterosexist discourse claims. This interrelationship reinforces the notion that lesbianism is a specifically female experience, not just a female version of male homosexuality; however, it does not help to explain the specificity of lesbianism. Acknowledging the work of Rich and others in deconstructing the assumptions of what she calls ‘heteropatriarchy’, Shane Phelan (1994) writes that lesbianism is less a state of being than a becoming. As we discussed above in relation to homosexuality and heterosexuality, identities based on a particular conceptualisation of sexual behaviours and relationships are based on an implicit acceptance of the parameters of the definition which constitute one position (heterosexual) as normal and others as aberrant. And although taking pride in one’s aberrant positioning may be a form of rebellion (see ‘gay’ below), it can also be read as preserving the normal vs. aberrant schema (which Rich’s continuum, for example, works against). For this reason Phelan argues against fixed notions of lesbian identity, which tie lesbianism into heterosexuality as its defining opposite. Phelan argues that an individual ‘becomes lesbian or not with the choices one makes’ (p. 52), noting that these choices are essentially about recognizing the sociocultural specificity of heterosexuality and choosing whether or not to comply with it. She argues for a politics in place of an identity: ‘I do not need epistemology to justify my desire, my life, my love. I need politics; I need to build a world that does not require such justifications’ (Phelan 1994, p. 55). Phelan quotes Teresa de Lauretis’s description of lesbianism as ‘a space of contraditions, in the here and now, that need to be affirmed but not resolved’ (p. 56); from affirmation may come the strategic alliances which enable the rigorous interrogation of heterosexuality, but not the resolution which implicitly affirms the position of (heterosexual) ‘normalcy’. Gay One such strategic alliance of homosexual men and women in the twentieth century was formulated around the identity, gay. ‘Gay’ has had a number of meanings and mapping them is an interesting deconstruction of its contemporary usage. Its earliest use is defined as ‘full of or disposed to joy’ (SOED), describing a particular attitude or temperament. This was also glossed as ‘airy, off-hand’, not quite so positive a term, and later (in 1802) was also ‘applied to women, as conventional epithet of praise’ (SOED). The gendering of the word seems significant here, given the binaristic logic which has characterised thinking about men and women, and about masculinity and femininity. If a term is conventionally applied to women, we might wonder what is its conventional masculine opposite. The trajectory from joyful to airy and off-hand to a conventional feminine epithet is a negative or downward one, from a state suggestive of spiritual exaltation to one of cynicism or moral vacuity to feminine vagary. This seems to accord with another early meaning (fron 1637): ‘addicted to social pleasures and dissipations’ and ‘of immoral life’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). So ‘gay’ carries the apparently contradictory meanings of joyful exaltation, on the one hand, and immorality and sensuality, on the other --- along with a gendering which reinforces that contradiction. That is, in a society and language characterised by the negative definition of the feminine (in contrast to the positive definition of the masculine), a quality associated with the feminine is immediately suspect; if not indicative of spiritual, ethical or intellectual weakness, it will certainly be associated with the physical --- and perhaps with the sensual or carnal. It is not surprising to discover, therefore, that in the ninteenth century ‘gay’ was used to refer to immoral women --- prostitutes and other ‘fallen women’. So the other secondary meanings of ‘gay’ such as ‘bright or lively looking’, ‘showily dressed’ and ‘brilliant, attractive’ can also be read ambiguously as either positive or negative, depending on the context of use. By the early twentieth century, then, ‘gay’ had accumulated a number of meanings with nuances which range from the spiritual to the ethical and intellectual to the sensual. It was also (conventionally) gendered to reflect that spectrum of nuances, with the negative aspects of the word associated with the feminine. Yet it was used quite unselfconsiously well into the twentieth century to reflect a sense of spiritual uplift and personal well-being, which suggests that its euphemistic references to ‘immorality’ were not well-known and so did not compromise its use. The non-technical terms used to refer to homosexuality by the early twentieth century included ‘gay’, but it was not so commonly used, especially among the heterosexual community. The more common terms were ‘queer’ (see Chapter 2), fag, faggot, fairy, and so on --- all essentially terms of abuse outside the homosexual community. Terms such as these were used throughout the twentieth century, which has been a time of great persecution of homosexual people. The Laboucherie Amendment discussed above lay the groundwork for a series of scandals in the late nineteenth century, culminating in the trial of Oscar Wilde which had interesting parallels with the trial of Socrates --- both reviled as corrupters of youth, both actually guilty of an acute analysis of their own society. The legal persecution of homosexuals, defined by that trial, continued throughout the twentieth-century, which also saw the Stalinist persecution of homosexuals in Russia and the Nazis’ imprisonment and brutalisation of homosexual people in their notorious Death Camps. In the Camps homosexual prisoners were identified by the wearing of a pink triangle, which now is often used as a symbol of gay pride and rebellion. After World War II, during the McCarthyite period in western societies (the 1950s and early 1960s) when those suspected of communist sympathies were hounded from their jobs and homes (in the US by a Senate Subcommittee presided over by Senator Joseph McCarthy, in other countries by conservatives who followed that lead), homosexuals were also targeted as a potentially subversive group and persecuted on those grounds. During this time societies and organisations were formed to provide support for homosexual people and to fight against this persecution: for example, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was founded in Berlin as early as 1897 (later suppressed by the Nazis). The production of the category homosexual was, therefore, not only an occasion for public identification --- of homosexuals by others, but of public self-identification --- of homosexuals by themselves. This recognition of identity can be seen both positively and negatively; positive in that it enabled homosexuals to work together against social alienation and persecution, negative in that it was an implicit acceptance of the categories of heterosexual and homosexual (see ‘queer’ in the next chapter). Still, at a time of public persecution, mutual support was obviously more important and empowering for individuals than esoteric discussions about the power of categorisation. Where such discussions became important was in the internal politics of homosexual organisations, as they debated how to relate to the newly defined ‘heterosexual’ mainstream. The Mattachine Society (named after a medieval court-jester who expressed unpopular truth from behind a mask (Adam 1995, p. 67)), established in Los Angeles in 1951 had intensive internal debates about the relation between themselves and the non-homosexual community. This society had a clear agenda of support and education: • ‘TO UNIFY’ those homosexuals ‘isolated from their own kind . . .’ • ‘TO EDUCATE’ homosexuals and heterosexuals toward an ethical homosexual culture . . . paralleling the emerging cultures of our fellow-minorities --- the Negro, Mexican, and Jewish Peoples . . . • TO LEAD: the ‘more . . . socially conscious homosexuals [are to] provide leadership to the whole mass of social deviates’ and also • to assist ‘our people who are victimized daily as a result of our oppression.’ (Adam 1995, p. 68) Yet under the stress of the McCarthyite period Adam reports that the leadership of the Mattachine was to adopt an assimilationist politics which ‘insisted that gay people are just the same as heterosexuals except for what they do in bed’ (Adam 1995, p. 69). This politics moves away from the liberationist strategy suggested by the society’s original ‘Missions and Purposes’. And it was not until the police raid of the Stonewall bar in Greenwich Village, 27--28 June 1969, that ‘gay pride’ was able to be openly demonstrated. Throughout the twentieth century homosexuals had been harrassed in public places, either openly through police raids of gay bars or through covert entrapment practices (in which police officers posing as homosexuals invited sexual advances which then became the basis of prosecutions). The raid of the Stonewall bar was just another example of police harrassment --- except that this time the bar’s clientele fought back. Various accounts of the events of this evening exist, but the salient point is that the people in the bar refused to be intimidated by the police action. Several days of police harrassment in the area followed, which was met with collective --- sometimes violent --- resistance from the gay community. In the months following this pivotal incident, ‘gay’ took on its most popular contemporary meaning, which unites the sense of joyous exaltation with an acknowledgement of social disapproval. Rather than being overwhelmed and defeated by that social disapproval, as in pre-Stonewall times, homosexual activists wore that disapproval as a badge of honour --- because it was also an exclusion from the oppressive and authoritarian forces in society which codified and repressed not only homosexual citizens, but the whole of society. Gay Liberation was a powerful voice in the 1970s, arguing against ‘the conventional arrangements that confined sexuality to heterosexual, monogamous families’. Adam explains that, for gay liberation, ‘there was no ‘normal’ or ‘perverse’ sexuality, only a world of sexual possibilities ranged against a repressive order of marriage, oedipal families, and compulsory heterosexuality’ (Adam, 1995: 84). In other words, the Gay Liberation movement of the 1970s worked from a similar premise to many contemporary gender theorists in that they recognised in the definition or delineation of ‘normal’ sexuality, the means by which men and women are both gendered and judged socially acceptable, or not. Since the 1970s the gay community has gone through periods of relative quiet and through renewed activism around the issue of AIDS --- demanding funding for research into the disease and help for those who contract it, as well as attempting to combat the homophobia which pervades many discussions of the AIDS virus in the west. The gay community has also been through periods of intense self-examination in relation to its own politics, and this will be discussed more fully in Chapters 2 and 4. In defining the history of the term, ‘gay’ it is important to note the context in which the word acquired the meanings it has today --- and it is also important to note that those defined by the term are a heterogeneous group. Historical research shows that, within the homosexual community itself, ‘gay’ has had particular nuances, depending on its social context. So while it was used widely in the 1950s in the US homosexual community, in the UK ‘gay’ had a specific class inflection; it referred to the upper socioeconomic bracket; a ‘gay’ club was seen as ‘classier’ than the ‘queer’ pubs associated with those from lower socioeconomic groups. At the same time, ‘queer’ was a term widely used in the non-homosexual community, almost always with negative connotations (see Chapter 2). The use of the term ‘gay’, therefore, is an implicit rejection of the labelling applied by the heterosexual community, basically by those whose own socioeconomic status empowered them to take such a stance. At the same time, however, it signifies that the homosexual or gay community is as varied, by class and ethnicity and race and age and so on, as the heterosexual community. ‘Gay’, then, is the term around which members of the homosexual community choose at times to make strategic alliances in order to fight for common causes. An analogy might be drawn with the use of the term ‘Christian’. There are very many different kinds of Christians, from different backgrounds and cultures, following different churches, who may at times choose to forget their differences in pursuit of a common goal. In fact, the gay community is rather less internally divided than the Christian community. However, these differences exist, with ‘gay’ often still used primarily to refer to the more affluent and socially mobile members of the homosexual community. This acknowledgement should not weaken the notion of gay community, but rather should prevent any heterosexist attempt to lump all gay people together as a homogenous group --- as a function of their (heterosexually defined) sexuality. The obvious analogy here is with sexist descriptions of women which identify all women as a function of their ‘biology’, ignoring the differences of ethnicity, race, class, age and so on. As noted above, the terms which are used within and without the gay community to describe individuals --- such as gay and queer --- historically had different class connotations. To these might be added differences of gender, race, ethnicity, age, and so on; for example, ‘gay’ is less likely to be used to refer to lesbians (see above) than to male homosexuals. So while ‘gay’ is a signifier of shared concerns and interests, it does not signal a community any more homogenous than the heterosexual community. Identity In the discussion of the word ‘gay’ and the ways in which it has been used strategically by people choosing to ‘identify’ as being gay, we have opened up the question of what ‘identity’ is. The concept of identity, like that of the subject and subjectivity which we discussed early in this chapter, has undergone something of a major revision in our postmodern times. Earlier views of individuals as self-determined, integrated beings have been replaced by a more complex notion of individuals as multiple subjectivities, sometimes described as fractured or split (to make the difference from the earlier concept clear). In this postmodern revaluation of the concept of subjectivity, we might question the fate of a concept related to both subjectivity and experience --- identity. As we have seen in our discussion of the production of ‘the homosexual’ as a negative classification, identities can sometimes be turned around, and mobilised for positive political ends. For many people identity has been a very useful concept in that it enables them to discuss their common experience of the world with others whom they regard as like them; that is, others who share what they see as crucial features of their social positioning (such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and so on). The example of being gay has been extensively outlined above. This has been particularly important for those whose experience has been devalued by normative or regulatory notions of experience derived from the interrelationships of one or more groups privileged (by access to institutional power and/or force) within society. For those excluded from influence and so from the validation of their experience, the notion of shared identity --- and hence shared experience --- enabled them to move beyond an internalised sense of inferiority; a notion that they did not have the normative experiences (and behaviours, feelings and thoughts) because they were personally inadequate. Instead it acknowledged that they shared their difference with many others, who were not personally inferior, but who had a different set of interrelationships with the world. Their experience was different (from the normative) and so their world was different (from the normative), because they were different (from the normative). Their experience was not valued not because it was inherently inferior, but because they were socially and politically less powerful. By providing such groups with a way of sharing experience and discussing their differences from the norm, identity was an extremely powerful social and political tool. Cultural critic bell hooks (1990) has written of the anxiety felt by some African-Americans, therefore, at the deconstruction of identity which has accompanied the postmodern interrogation of subjectivity. She reports the response: ‘Yeah, it’s easy to give up identity, when you’ve got one’ (p. 28). And she comments that African-Americans might be wise to question the deconstruction of subjectivity and identity when it occurs just as they are achieving a socially acknowledged subjectivity and identity for the first time. Nevertheless, hooks goes on to argue for a postmodern concept of identity, one which is not based in a unitary or monolithic concept of subjectivity and so an essentialist notion of identity: ‘Such a critique allows us to affirm multiple Black identities, varied Black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of Black identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy’ (hooks 1990, p. 28). That is, hooks recognises in essentialist notions of identity a regulatory or normative force similar to that discussed in relation to experience --- even where the identity being addressed is not a socially influential one. Class theorists have noted the same problem with essentialist concepts of class. If working-class identity is equated with a particular set of characteristics, is there a point at which an individual is effectively debarred from working-class identity (for example, through education or employment)? And if education and employment can be seen as determining class identity, then does that not paralyse working-class culture, producing the kind of one-dimensional identity that hooks notes as a feature of colonialist views of Black identity? Another important feature of postmodernist (multiple, split, fractured) identity relates to its political function, and is perhaps the way past the concern that postmodernist interrogations devalue shared experience and shared identity: ‘Postmodern culture with its decentered subject can be the space where ties are severed or it can provide the occasion for new and varied forms of bonding’ (hooks 1990, p. 31). If identity is seen as fluid, rather than fixed, but as capable of points of (temporary or conditional) stasis, then its political force is not lost, but enhanced. So, for example, a working-class Anglo gay man might be able to form a temporary or conditional identification with a middle-class Asian gay man on the grounds of shared sexual identity (and despite differences of class and ethnicity) for the purpose of shared social, cultural and/or political communication and activity. The identity here is conditional --- in that neither individual will be unaware of their differences (of class and ethnicity), yet it enables kinds of sharing and activity which less flexible notions of identity would tend to devalue. In the postmodern scenario, identity is not an essentialist attribute of an individual but a strategy which individual (complex, multiple) subjects can use to create new and varied alliances. The concept of the ‘nomad’ is used by philosopher Rosi Braidotti (1994) to explore this strategic use of identity. The nomadic subject is, says Braidotti, a fiction which enables her to think about and beyond well-known categories such as class, race, ethnicity, gender, age and so on, without being confined or limited by those categories. It enables her to think of the individual subject in relation to many of these categories at once, even where they sometimes contradict: as she says, ‘blurring boundaries without burning bridges’ (Braidotti 1994, p. 4). This concept of the nomad is also prominent in the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari where it argues for the strategic alliances made possible by self-aware, conditional, socially grounded interrelationships. In other words, they argue that such alliances are only possible when people do not deny or refuse to acknowledge their differences, as normative identities would demand, but instead make the combination of differences and commonalities a positive and powerful feature of a conditional, temporary alliance. The anxiety reported by bell hooks is still there as an echo in these arguments. Is there a danger that this strategic sense of identity might be romanticised in such a way that the history and actual experiences of (some of) those involved may be lost? And if that happens is it not likely to be the experiences of those who have least social influence? An example of this kind of problem arose within the feminist movement when it was found, after the euphoria of the 1960s, that the experience and history of women who were not Anglo, not middle-class and not heterosexual (among other things) was not voiced and not validated in feminist theory. Strategic alliances had been formed often by women from varied backgrounds, but those differences had not been acknowledged. As a result the only experience and history which was theorised was that of the socially powerful groups within the movement --- predominantly Anglo, middle-class heterosexuals. The consequences of such exclusions become clear when the theory is translated as policy and the women’s movement became preoccupied with issues which related solely to the experience of that (socially privileged) group. This important issue will be taken up in Chapter 2. Identity is a concept which enables groups to come together around the articulation of shared experience. Experience Now that we have set out how our understandings of identity have changed, we need to discuss the underpinnings of experience. For if identity is something that we actively produce, not something which is given to us, then experience too may be something which we produce, not something which merely happens to us. ‘Experience’ then is like ‘identity’; it seems a simple term, a description of what makes up our everyday life. Experience is what we do and feel during our encounters with other people and things. It is essentially a relational concept; that is, experience occurs in relationship with others or with objects or activities of some kind --- real or virtual. And it impacts on us bodily, even if we exhibit that impact primarily in how we think and feel. In relation to the discussion of ‘the modern subject’ above, we might say that experience is what turns the abstract concept of subjectivity into a real-life concept. As individuals experience the world, they develop a repertoire of subjective positions or subjectivities, each of which is appropriate to a specific situation. They learn to do this through their experience of that type of situation; by learning what is effective and ineffective behaviour in that situation --- ‘by experience’. This all seems fairly straightforward; however, looking more closely, we discover some basic issues have not been raised. We might begin by exploring the relationship between the individual and experience: is there a pre-formed individual who ‘has’ experience, or is it experience which forms the individual? Teresa de Lauretis writes of experience as ‘the process by which, for all social beings, subjectivity is constructed’ (de Lauretis 1984, p. 159). She explains further that it is by being immersed in the realities of social life that the individual ‘perceives and comprehends as subjective (referring to, originating in oneself) those relations --- material, economic, and interpersonal --- which are, in fact, social, and, in a larger perspective, historical’ (p. 159). That is, the individual's interactions with material, economic and interpersonal realities are transformed by her/him as subjective experiences, originating in and/or referring to her/himself and in the process constitutes her/himself as a subject. De Lauretis notes also that the relations which the individual perceives as personal are actually or also social and historical, though this broader perspective may be missed by the individual. So, through her/his experience of the social world, the individual becomes a subject --- not vice-versa. Agreeing with de Lauretis's view, Joan W. Scott (1992) writes about the commonplace uses of the term ‘experience’ which locate it outside the individual. She says that such usages ‘preclude inquiry into processes of subject construction; and they avoid examining the relationships between discourse, cognition, and reality, the relevance of the position or situatedness of subjects to the knowledge they produce, and the effects of difference on knowledge’ (p. 28). This is a complex deconstruction which begins with reference to the area of subject formation. Like de Lauretis Scott notes that the commonplace use of ‘experience’ isolates it from its intrinsic part in the constitution of individuals as social subjects. Scott then adds other factors to her analysis. She argues that commonplace uses of ‘experience’ also obscure the relationships between the ways we formulate our understandings of and attitudes towards issues and social practices (discourse), the ways we think (cognition) and the material world we encounter in our everyday lives (reality). That is, they do not ask how our attitudes towards and understandings of issues and events shape and are shaped by the ways we think; nor how the ways we think shape our encounters with the everyday world; nor how our basic attitudes and understandings shape our encounters with the everyday world. This relationship is particularly important when the experience of individuals is used to validate a particular understanding of the world, as it is in the work of some contemporary historians and critics. In this context it is sometimes referred to as ‘the authority of experience’ and Scott challenges its use in this way. Her point is that, in order to do so, the experience discussed is usually unproblematically equated, in an essentialist way, with a particular social subject or identity. There is some sympathy for this viewpoint; it does recognise that different people experience the world differently, so that ‘experience’ is not a universal --- with the further implication that the experience of an elite few cannot be used as any kind of measure for the experience of others. Nevertheless, as Scott argues, the end-point of this analysis is often a kind of essentialism, which militated against the interrogation of identities. For example, consolidating working-class identity around the notion of working-class experience works against a systemic challenge to the production of class. We are led to observe the fact that people from different class backgrounds have different experiences of the world, rather than to ask why these different classes exist at all. In order to avoid this kind of essentialising of experience, and identity (see the section below), Scott argues what is a typically poststructuralist demand for the specific location of the experience and its associated identity. In other words, she argues for ‘the relevance of the position or situatedness of subjects to the knowledge they produce’ (Scott, 1992: 28). Scott glosses this by reference to the work of Gayatri Spivak and Stuart Hall, quoting from Hall's discussion of the identity, ‘Black’: ‘Black is an identity which had to be learned and could only be learned at a certain moment. In Jamaica that moment is the 1970s’ (Hall quoted in Scott 1992, p. 33). An unselfconscious use of the concept of ‘experience’ would locate in the attested experience of Black subjects what it means to be Black --- without ever asking how and when the identity ‘Black’ developed and to whom it is applied in the generation of Black subjects. Because it does not challenge the situatedness (development, being, function) of the specific identity, this unselfconscious usage naturalises it; that is, makes it seem natural or uncontrived. In the case of Black identity, we are made to feel that the identity is natural in that we can identify those individual subjects who are Black. Yet research shows that Black is an identity which has changed radically in the last two centuries (Michie 1992; Hall 1992; Cranny-Francis 1995). In England it has meant the Irish, later those from Africa and the Indian subcontinent, and more recently West Indians. So how do we identify those who are Black? As Hall observes, the identity ‘Black’ is the product of a particular set of forces at a particular time and place: ‘It, too, is a narrative, a story, a history. Something constructed, told, spoken, not simply found’ (Hall quoted in Scott 1992, p. 33). In naturalising the identity of Jamaica as a Black society, the unselfconscious use of experience takes what Hall reveals as a 1970s construction and makes it seem self-obviously true, natural and transhistorical. This not only conceals the position or situatedness of those ‘Black’ Jamaican subjects (that this is a sociocultural and political identity, not a ‘natural’ one), but also the position and situatedness of those who have generated the identity of ‘Black’ Jamaica. This identity construction is part of a ‘knowledge’ about the world which positions subjects in specific ways --- with more or less social status, for example --- so that concealing the processes by which it takes place not only validates or authorises that specific, constructed view, but also makes it seem natural and, therefore, not open to question. In this way, the ‘knowledge’ itself is protected from interrogation, along with the identities it generates. Scott notes that there ‘is no power or politics in these notions of knowledge and experience’ (p. 28); that is, the power and politics involved is not acknowledged. Scott's point about the ‘effects of difference on knowledge’ (p. 28) takes up this question of the power and politics involved in the production of knowledge. The notion of difference is discussed in Chapter 2, but suffice it to say here that recognising difference is about recognising the grounds by which different identities --- and therefore different experiences --- are generated; it is not about accepting that certain differences ‘naturally’ occur. This inevitably leads us to challenge our ‘knowledge’: whose knowledge is it? what social, cultural, political, economic practices does it validate? whom does it empower and whom does it disempower? Scott concludes: ‘Experience is at once already an interpretation and is in need of interpretation. What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, always therefore political’ (p. 37). The concept of experience has great value for us, though not perhaps always in the ways assumed. It is not that we can simply (and simplistically) use a recitation of someone's experience of the world to give us a different view. After all, as Carolyn Steedman notes in Landscape for a Good Woman (1986), the alienness of that different experience often precludes understanding. Steedman tells the story of Henry Mayhew, the nineteenth-century social observer, who is totally unable to comprehend the narrative of an eight-year-old watercress seller as she attempts to explain her life to him. The pride she takes in helping to support her family by her very hard work is read by him as pathetic and tragic, since he hears her from the position of a middle-class man with quite specific assumptions about childhood. Mayhew has sympathy for the girl, from the perspective of his own class, yet this is a sympathy which neither comprehends her life with its joys and griefs, nor is prepared to deconstruct the class system itself. However, experience can be the means by which we explore the ways in which we construct our world and the people in it. By seeing experience as a discursive construct, recognising its role in the production of subjects (rather than by subjects), and analysing its role in the generation of knowledges about the world, we can use it to explore the relationships between individual subjects and the society and cultures within which they operate. Experience is the process where a subject interacts with material, economic and interpersonal realities and transforms them into subjective experiences, interpreting and creating her/himself in the process. It is a doing and a becoming. Summary Throughout this chapter we have traced the history and meanings of many of the words which are currently used in the analysis of gender. One of the most striking findings of this study is the extent to which we are forced to reexamine our assumptions and preconceptions about sexuality and about gender. Terms like heterosexual which might assume to be quite old terms, on which terms like homosexual are based, prove instead to be relatively recent. And, in fact, it seems that the term heterosexual could not be coined before the concept of homosexual was formulated to operate as its ‘other’ or defining term. Similarly, while we might trace a history of homosexual and lesbian activity and embodiment back to the beginnings of western society, it is also surprising to note how relatively recently it was formulated in those terms. Which might prompt us to question the investment in terms such as hetero- and homosexual: what is their function and purpose? how do they operate to constitute and regulate contemporary society? how do they constitute and regulate individuals? Defining lesbian and gay raised a whole lot of issues about the nature of identities based on sexuality, not the least of which is the extent to which current conceptions are inevitably based on a rejection of heterosexist versions of identity --- which move beyond sexuality to gender. That is, the debates about what constitutes lesbianism deomnstrate the extent to which the gendering of all women takes place in relation to heterosexist norms, which assume a compliant femininity devoid of autonomous sexual desire. The early gay movement is shown battling with this same regulatory function of heterosexual society, calling for the liberation of all to practice whatever sexuality they wished, not just the versions officially sanctioned by heterosexual discourse, under its cheeky revision of the term ‘gay’. All of these terms are part of our vocabulary of gender, the terms in which we think and formulate and enact what we understand as our own gendered subjectivities. In the next chapter we examine the politics of identity, and some of the current responses to the shifting meanings of the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Recommended Reading Abelove, Henry, Michèle Aina Barale and David Halperin (eds) (1992) The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Routledge, New York and London. Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York. Hall, Stuart (1996) ‘Introduction: Who Needs “Identity”?’ in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity, Sage, London, pp. 1--17. hooks, bell (1990) Yearning: race, gender and cultural politics, South End Press, Boston. Jaggar, Alison M. and Bordo, Susan, eds (1989) Gender/Body/Knowledge: feminist reconstructions of being and knowing, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N. J.. Mansfield, Nick (2000) Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway, St Leonards. NSW, Allen & Unwin. Scott, Joan W. (1992) ‘Experience’ in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political, Routledge, New York and London. Exercises These exercises are designed to help you put the ideas in the chapter into practice. 1. How do you ‘do’ gender? What things do you do to your body to claim a gender (e.g. think of hair, clothing, etc.); how do you interact non-verbally (e.g. how do you sit, eat,move); verbally (e.g. interrupt, level of voice, etc); and what activities do you engage in (e.g., watching football = doing masculinity, etc.). 2. How is sexuality policed in your community? Imagine three or four different events (public and private-- a religious ceremony, dinner party, home and school meeting, office party, etc...) where everyone is heterosexual; where one person is the lone homosexual; where most people are homosexual. How does this change the planning for the event? The event itself? 3. In what ways do people begin marking a child’s gender after its birth? In what ways? How soon does this take place? 4. How would you specify your own identity? What features of your background, education, physical presentation, work experience, and so on do you think are important in specifying that identity. How do different situations in which you are involved influence your expression of that identity? 1