Sex and ‘race’

In arguing that gender narratives are ‘totalising fictions’, postmodern thinkers are claiming that sex is like ‘race’, and should similarly be embellished with scare quotes. ‘Race’ has been exposed as a series of constructions from disparate elements with no intrinsic significance. In social realist terms, ‘race’ is a bad abstraction, theoretically misleading (Sayer 1992; Danermark ct al. 2002). Differences in skin pigment are real enough, and so arc the other markers of ‘race’ at the level of the empirical. However, at a deeper, structural level, discrete races do not exist. The genotypical differences between them arc less significant than the differences within these groups, counter to scientific racism. ‘Race categories have far more to do with politics than they have to do with science’ (Carter 2000, p. 3). The argument against the ontological validity of race classifications is that they do impose a spurious unity on groups of humans who arc actually diverse - and do so for the worst of reasons.

Carter, a social realist, argues that because there arc no such things as races, the sociological use of the term to refer to beliefs in and discourse about races, and social relations and practices understood in terms of race, is highly misleading; preventing analysis and explanation of what is going on (Carter 2000). Analogously, post-structuralists argue that all talk about gender should be detached from ideas about sex, or alternatively that sex should be seen as a creation of gender. ‘What is really going on’ is entirely within discourse.

However, as Linda Alcoff also argues, sex is not like ‘race’ (Alcoff 2005). Unlike racial groups, males and females are natural kinds. Sexual difference is also socially significant. This significance is an emergent property of human societies, given the sorts of (sexed, mortal) beings humans arc. Means of reproduction will probably always be a salient feature of human societies, variously institutionalised but always deeply meaningful in their symbolic orders. While ‘race’ could be exploded and lose its credibility as a means of classification, this could not happen to sexual difference. It is relatively easy to imagine a world without ‘races’ and racism, but very hard to imagine a world where sex difference was socially so insignificant that there was no sex-gender order. Perhaps if humans lived to be two hundred, and their adult sexual and reproductive life lasted for only one eighth of that life span, gender arrangements might become far less significant and gender identity a temporary phenomenon, to be shrugged off at the end of the reproductive period as some workers seem to shrug off their occupational identities on retirement. It might even happen that sexual difference remained of some importance in the second hundred years because it affected vulnerability to different illnesses, but otherwise had no effect on social practices. But even such far-fetched thought experiments do not make credible a social world without sex (and therefore gender) as a partial basis for social organisation.

Judith Butler

Butler is famous for rejecting the sex-gender distinction, on the grounds that the naturalness of sex is constructed through gender. In Gender Trouble Butler argued that gender is ‘a corporeal style, an act, as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where “performative” suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning’ (Butler 1990, p. 139). Such performance is generally ‘a strategy of survival within compulsory systems’ (ibid.), but could also become liberatory through parody and ‘strategies of subversive repetition’ (ibid., p. 147). Concerned lest she had been taken as too voluntarist, in Bodies that Matter she took up the theme of the (constructed) materiality of sex: ‘“Sex” is part of a regulatory practice which produces the bodies it governs’ (Butler 1993, p. 1). In an interview in Radical Philosophy, she explained: T wanted to work out how ... we might understand the materiality of the body to be not only invested with a norm, but in some sense animated by a norm, or contoured by a norm’ (Butler 1994, p. 32). The norm here is reproductive. Butler is not denying the reality of sexual dimorphism, but is arguing that its

Sex and gender 95 framing in terms of ‘the problematic of reproduction' is a social construction emanating from heterosexual dominance. Although in her later work she admits the materiality of the body, its powers to constrain arc seen as socially constructed. For instance, in the Radical Philosophy interview, she remarks in passing that maybe a woman could not get pregnant ‘for biological reasons’, but sees her as ‘struggling with a norm that is regulating [her] sex’ because of the difficulty of avoiding feelings of failure and of finding any other ways of taking part in child-rearing. From a critical realist point of view, I would say that Butler chooses to downplay the causal powers of sexed bodies and to focus on the co-acting social and linguistic mechanisms which affect outcomes.