Читать книгу Gender and Sexuality - Stevi Jackson - Страница 27

By introducing sociological analyses of ‘sex’, second wave feminism developed the concept of gender to challenge prevailing assumptions and politics about the naturalness of women’s inferior social status. As in first wave feminism, however, there remained some distinct strands of feminist thought which focused on the fundamental difference that women’s ‘sex’ entailed. Remember that many first wave feminist campaigners were part of religious movements that viewed women in traditional Christian terms, and that religion was the dominant framework for understanding human nature, social order and morality for many centuries, until its gradual decline in the industrialized era of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The campaigns for moral reform around prostitution exemplify this religious essentialist view of women, arguing as they did that women’s naturally refined and weak natures need to be protected from the corrupting influence of male sexuality, and sexual pleasure itself (see Ch. 1). This essentialism was based on (admittedly contradictory) ideas of women’s natural difference, whether that is characterized as their potential for moral superiority – being naturally more refined and less prey to sin – or their potential for susceptibility to moral weakness. These early ideas of women’s ‘difference’ were not only contradictory, but also based on assumptions about both psychological and biological ‘essences’. Given that these forms of essentialism are so problematic for women, it may be surprising to see them resurface during the period of second wave feminism, but in the sense that our culture remains focused on psychological and natural explanations of human nature, it is perhaps not wholly unexpected. Having said that, second wave feminists who proposed explanations of women’s subordination based on biological or psychological differences also argued that these could be challenged through social action. Perhaps the best known example is Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1972), in which she puts forward the view that women’s role in biological reproduction has provided the basis for their social subordination and that this will remain the case until reproductive technology replaces child- bearing, and collective social responsibility replaces child- rearing in family units. However, she also pays considerable attention to the historical variability of family forms, and while she sees women’s reproductive capacities as the root of their subordination she insists on ‘the relativity of the oppression: though it has been a fundamental human condition, it has appeared in different degrees and different forms’ (1972: 73, emphasis in original). Thus her essentialism is tempered by a degree of social constructionism.

Moving away from biologically based arguments, some feminists developed psychological arguments, particularly drawing on Freudian ideas, to suggest that children’s early relationships within the family reproduce dominant masculinity and subordinate femininity at a psychological level. However, even in these cases, writers such as Juliet Mitchell (1975) acknowledge the potential for change, in her case calling for a ‘cultural revolution’ to transform femininity and masculinity. A more radical variant of psychoanalysis places the emphasis on women’s essential difference. The most famous proponent of this ‘difference theory’ is the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray (1985), who rejects what she sees as the masculinist form of knowledge underlying the main psychoanalytic traditions. She argues that women’s specificity, based on their bodily difference, has been masked and denied by a patriarchal order that has defined them as lacking in relation to men. But again she envisages the possibility of change through recognizing and revaluing women’s specificity and bringing into being a form of femininity that has heretofore not been allowed to exist.