Structures, positions and people
If womanhood is typically thought of as a reified property contained in each female individual, the tools of critical realism allow for a radically different understanding. According to the critical realist perspective, people exist only by virtue of the relations and forces that constitute them, through the medium of structural positions. For Douglas Porpora,
[s]ocial structures arc systems of human relationships among social positions which shape certain structured interests, resources, powers, constraints and predicaments that arc built into each position by the web of relationships and which comprise the material circumstances in which people must act and which motivate them to act in certain ways.
(1998, pp. 343-344)
Because of their enabling, constraining and motivating power, our structural positions make us able and inclined to act in specific ways and likely to suffer certain things. The position as woman will make its occupant apt to act in ways commonly understood as feminine and experience things that males do not tend to experience. She will tend to earn less than her male colleagues, since those who decide her wages arc in positions motivating them to discriminate against women, and in order to promote her short-term interests she will be motivated to dress in feminine clothes. Breaking with these structural tendencies is likely to cause suffering in the short run (Porpora 1998).
However, and importantly, people’s actions and experiences are not predetermined by or reducible to the tendencies inherent in their positions. Thus, stating that women share a common position as women is not the same as maintaining that women are the same. The reason is twofold. Firstly, people have a certain amount of freedom vis-à-vis their positions in virtue of their reflexivity: ‘we can interpret the same material conditions and statements in different ways and hence learn new ways of responding, so that effectively we become different kinds of people’ (Sayer 1992, p. 123). This is what makes it possible for us to act back upon and change the constellation of relations of which we are made up. Secondly, as intcrscctional theorists point out, women and men as concrete individuals arc never simply women and men. We exist only by virtue of our positions in an array of overlapping structures on different levels of reality. It is through these multiple determinations that we become unique and complex individuals. The important and simple point that I want to make is that this multiple positioning is not the same as no positioning. Although women and men arc more than women and men, they are still women and men.9
Conceptualising women as those who occupy the position as woman is thus very different from reifying, homogenising and esscntialising accounts of women. From this perspective, instead,
[t]o speak of what women and men are is ... actually to speak about the social conditions in and on which they act. Thus, the attempt to conceptualise what women and men arc docs not necessarily imply any kind of mysterious cssentialism or biological rcductionism.
(Jônasdôttir 1994, p. 220)
It is crucial to note, however, that although the identity and experience of a woman cannot be reduced to her position as woman, the relation between the gendered position and its occupant is not one of disconnection and arbitrariness, as Mohanty suggests (2003, p. 19). The womanhood or ‘womanness’ emerging from the position as woman is a real feature of women, whether they wish it or not. This is because people are what they are by virtue of the assembly of relations - biological, economic, cultural - that constitute them. In this sense, as put by Mikael Carlchcden, ‘[t]o find one’s identity is to be able to relate to one’s historical situatedness’ (2003, p. 57). Although I have not chosen my position as woman, I can only be the one I am by means of this position (amongst others). This is why it is so problematic not to recognise the reality of women’s ‘womanness’, however much we disapprove politically of the gendered structure by virtue of which we emerge as women. Through collective struggle we may be able to change the very structure of which our position as women is part, but without a category that can take this positioning into account, such a struggle will not be possible. The problem with the poststructuralist tendency to downplay the rcalness of ‘women’ as collective category is that it rules out conceptualisations of the material relation between a woman’s life and her structural gender position. As opposed to Mohanty, who distinguishes between ‘“women”’ as a discursively constructed group and “women” as material subjects of their own history’ (2003, pp. 22-23; emphasis added), from the critical realist point of view the group of women has just as material an existence as individual women, in so far as the people belonging to the group arc intrinsically tied to a common position in a materially (and discursively) constituted gender structure.
