Читать книгу Gender and Sexuality - Stevi Jackson - Страница 21

Going several steps further than liberal feminism, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1971) detailed the multi- dimensional social aspects of male domination, or what she termed ‘patriarchy’. Millett’s was a theoretical argument developed from her analysis of literature, focusing on contemporary American male novelists’ depictions of sex. She took the broad position that literature reflected the wider cultural meanings circulating in the society of its time, and her argument was that these literary examples illustrated women’s subordination through the stories that the authors created and the language they used. For example, she says of the ‘four- letter’ ‘c’ word that reduces a woman to her vagina:

Two ideas strike me – that the four- letter word derives from a puritanical tradition which is vigorously anti- sexual, seeing the act as dirty, etc. This in turn derives from a conviction that the female is sex and therefore both dirty and inferior to the intellectual and rational, and therefore masculine, ‘higher nature’ of humanity. The error is not a matter of language but of attitude … the study of meaning leads us to understand the motives language institutionalizes. (Millett, 1971: 325)

Although Millett starts from a literary analysis, she does make the sociological point that cultural meanings – expressed in language – reflect wider social power relationships. Along with other feminists writing at that time, she used the term ‘patriarchy’ to describe these wider power relationships. Whilst patriarchy was not a new concept, having been used for some time by Weber and others to denote a power structure where senior men held authority over both junior men and women, the emphasis on patriarchy as a system in which men as a whole dominated women was new, as was the argument that this arrangement was social rather than biological. Millett’s argument ranged over social structures (including the economy and the division of paid and unpaid labour between men and women), ideology (essentialist ideas in religion, culture, media) and identities and action (essentialist ideas providing the blueprint for socializing men and women into gendered behaviours).

Patriarchy has subsequently become a contested term within academia (see Ch. 4), but its use to describe the social structural form of gender, pioneered by radical feminists like Millett, forced a significant change in how we understand gender. It also inspired new thinking on the apparently natural realm of human sexual relations, locating sexuality within the power structures of gender, and therefore making connections between sexual identities and behaviours and patriarchal structures.