Scott_ Millennial Fantasies

Joan W. Scott

Millennial fantasies: The Future of "Gender" in the 21st Century At the turn of the last century when prophetic voices raised concerns about the future, a frequent theme was the relations between the sexes. Some worried that conventional hierarchies would be inverted: the "woman on top," would emerge from the sanctity of her household to command armies, practice law, or preside over parliaments, leaving men to tend the children and mend the clothes. Others, more optimistically - or perhaps desperately as war loomed on the horizon - projected the reign of the feminine principle in an era of cooperation, harmony and lasting peace. Still others imagined a world without sex, in which reproduction was handled "scientifically," and pleasure became an entirely cerebral affair. Then, and only then, they believed, would equality between women and men be possible. The very range of these fantasies suggests that shared historical moments do not necessarily generate shared opinions. And their intensely distilled quality contrasts sharply with what we know to be the complexity and messiness of social and political experience. That alone ought to caution us against giving too much credibility to millennial forecasts, our own as well as those of our contemporaries. History always seems to exceed whatever explanatory structures we try to impose on it. Having recognized the limited predictive value of millennial fantasies, I must nonetheless admit that I have one - a nightmare scenario, in which biological determinism returns to regulate gender. Gender, of course, is exactly the term coined to resist the reduction of social relations to physical sexual differences. There was a moment not long ago, when feminists thought "gender" would be an invincible barrier against biology. The sex/gender distinction would analytically separate the physical body from the social body; it would then no longer be conceivable that anatomy was destiny. Gayle Rubin, writing the classic article on the sex/gender system, allowed herself to dream of the elimination of obligatory sexualities and sex roles. "The dream I find most compelling is one of an androgynous and genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one's sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love." 1 In my nightmare, "gender" is revealed to be feminism's Maginot Line, impotent to stop the return of the kind of reasoning that led the Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes to warn those agitating for female suffrage in the 1880's about the futility of their quest. Geddes insisted that a dual pattern of cell metabolism accounted for differences between the sexes: "the hungry, active cell becomes flagellate sperm, while the quiescent, well-fed one becomes an ovum." From this it followed that "What was decided among the prehistoric Protozacan not be annulled by act of parliament." 2 Although no longer questioning women's right to vote or, for that matter, to participate in public, professional activity, there is today a strong current of scientific opinion that, like Geddes, extends theories of biological evolution to the social/political realm. Known as sociobiologists in the 1970's, today's "evolutionary psychologists" deduce conclusions about universal differences in behavior and emotional character between men and women from their different reproductive functions. Of course, the science is far more sophisticated than Geddes', and genes have replaced cells as the fundamental unit of the transmission of inherited traits. But the argument has a disturbingly familiar ring to anyone who has read the nineteenth century pronouncements: Men seek to sow their seed widely, it is said, to insure their genetic transmission, while women are more discriminating and more 1

"relational" or "associative" because of the investment of time and energy required to bear and nurture a child. Since, it is further asserted, these evolutionary adaptations secured human survival, we can infer from them "the basic ways we feel about each other, the basic kinds of things we think about each other and say to each other..." 3 I have heard evolutionary psychologists extend their reasoning about reproduction to the behavior of five-year olds on playgrounds (boys fight, girls bond) and to the patterns of intellectual conversation among university undergraduates (men show off to women, women create groups among themselves). The New York Times carried a story recently about the research of two scientists who argue that rape is not about violence and power, but about procreation, driven as it is by male adaptive interest. 4 A recent book advertises its "evolutionary view of women at work," attributing the glass ceiling and other gender inequities in contemporary labor markets to "evolved differences between the sexes." 5 There are self-described feminists who celebrate the political potential of women's genetically driven relationality or sociability. 6 And even so strong a critic of evolutionary psychology as Steven J. Gould has granted that "differing Darwinian requirements for males and females imply distinct adaptive behaviors" that "probably...underlie some different, and broadly general, emotional propensities of human males and females," 7 while warning against too rigid an application of these ideas to all of human cultural activity. Closer to home for me is the most recent special issue of the journal History and Theorydevoted to "The Return of Science: Evolutionary Ideas and History." It contains eight articles, most of which gush (with an enthusiasm reminiscent of the brief turn to quantitative history in the 1970's) about the possibility of achieving, through a marriage of biology and history, not only a "science of human nature", but - that fantastic dream of the scientist as God - "unity of knowledge." In a phrase I'll leave it to psychoanalysts to interpret, the editor of the volume notes that "science is pressing on history." 8 And one of the contributors concludes his essay with a sentence that combines wish and prophecy in a most striking fashion: "The Darwinization of historical studies would be a paradigm shift of Copernican magnitude."9 As I was writing this paper I received an e-mail from a colleague, who used to work on the social history of American politics, inviting me to join him and E. O. Wilson on a panel at the next meeting of the American Historical Association on "Biohistory." Among the questions to be discussed are : "Why are historians so afraid of Darwin?" and "If history is entirely 'constructed,' what are the building materials?" And, this question added, I'm sure, with me in mind: "Does the admission of innate tendencies into the discussion of history mean that women will be considered inferior?" Those of us who thought that "gender" had helped defeat sociobiological claims about the inevitable translation of anatomical difference into social behavior, those of us who thought that the widespread use of the term gender was an important indicator of the acceptance of our views, are astonished to see sociobiology triumphantly returned now as evolutionary psychology. Closely tied to the evolutionary theories that drive molecular and neuro- biology - the sciences that, we are told, will displace the hegemonic reign of physics in the 21st century - evolutionary psychology is in a powerful position to set back, if not reverse, 100 years of feminist critical work. Like all millennial forecasts (and like many fantasies), that last statement is hyperbolic. It seriously reduces a multiply-contested field to a manichaean struggle in which feminism and neo-Darwinism face off for control of the future meaning of sexual difference. And it denies the ways in which random and contingent developments influence both natural and human social history. Still, there is a use for such thinking: it identifies issues we need to consider and act on in the present and it does so in an urgent way. The 2

urgency can have the effect of mobilizing feminists to redouble our efforts to refuse biological determinism and it can lead us to critically reassess the ways in which we have been announcing that refusal. It is this second path I want to explore today. If, in a Freudian vein, we can take a nightmare to express a wish - one too horrible or too difficult to acknowledge as such - then it might be concluded that what I wish to argue (against a fairly widespread feminist consensus - hence the difficulty) is that gender may no longer be the useful category it once was, not because the enemy has prevailed, but because it does not have the power to do the work we need it to do now. The weakness of gender for countering the extreme claims of evolutionary psychology lies precisely in what was once taken to be its virtue: its refusal to deal with corporeal sex. The sex/gender distinction (borrowed by feminists in the 1960's from endocrinologists and psychoanalysts - John Money and Robert Stoller are key names in this area) insisted on the fact that sex roles were human contrivances, naturalized by reference to physical bodies, but not determined by them. The point was to study the ways in which "social construction" occurred, to document its variety and mutability, to expose its operations as a system of power, and to offer examples of alternatives or resistances to normative prescriptions. This was enormously productive work and I don't want to disavow or underestimate the importance of its impact. (Nor do I want to associate myself with the views of Camille Paglia or some queer theorists who maintain that attention to gender and neglect of sex constituted a form of feminist puritanism. I do want to associate myself-more forcefully than I have in the past-with so-called "French feminism," always a minority position among American feminists, but which questioned social scientific uses of 'gender' in the name of psychoanalysis. These feminists, anxious to stress both the indeterminacy of sexed subject positions and to emphasize inequalities of power, preferred to talk about sexual difference and "les rapports de force de sexe.") The sex/gender distinction, as developed by the majority of American feminists both left aside and left in place, as somehow "natural" and therefore uninterrogated, the bodies on which these constructions were being built. As a result, sex continued to undermine the clarity that "gender" was meant to provide. Here is the usage note at the entry for "gender" in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (3d ed., 1992): Traditionally, gender has been used primarily to refer to the grammatical categories of "masculine," "feminine," and "neuter"; but in recent years the word has become well established in its use to refer to sex-based categories, as in phrases such as gender gap and the politics of gender. This usage is supported by the practice of many anthropologists, who reserve sex for reference to biological categories, while using gender to refer to social or cultural categories. According to this rule, one would say The effectiveness of the medication appears to depend on the sex (not gender) of the patient, but In peasant societies, gender (not sex) roles are likely to be more clearly defined. This distinction is useful in principle, but it is by no means widely observed, and considerable variation in usage occurs at all levels. (754) The last sentence here is crucial, both as a reminder of the futility of insisting upon precise linguistic usages and of the difficulty feminists have had in separating social designations from their physical referents. No matter how insistently feminist theorists have refined the term gender, they have been unable to prevent its corruption. In popular conversation, the terms sex and gender are as often used synonymously as oppositionally; indeed, sometimes it seems that gender is simply a polite euphemism for sex. And judging from the number of scholarly books and articles that take gender and women to be synonymous, academics are not much better than the general public at maintaining the distinction between the physical and the social that the introduction of gender was meant 3

to achieve. I think this confusion of the two terms is symptomatic of a number of related problems, all of which stem from the way in which sex/gender replicates the nature/culture, body/mind oppositions. In each case "nature" is considered an entity outside or apart from human consideration; it is something we must learn to know that is not created by our knowledge. If gender is the use we make of our bodies, our bodies themselves cannot be understood entirely in terms of social construction. Gender thus does not replace physical sex in discussions of sexual difference; but in the end, it leaves sex in place as the explanation for social construction. When gender depends on sex in this way, nothing can prevent its being identified with (or as) sex itself. What seems then to be conceptual and terminological confusion, is in fact an accurate representation of the interdependence of the two terms: if sex is not entirely natural, neither is gender entirely social. Yet another reason it has been difficult to maintain a clear distinction between sex and gender has to do with the universalizing impulses of both feminism (a political movement originating in the West at the moment of its eighteenth-century democratic revolutions) and social science (whose origins are roughly contemporaneous with feminism). The universalizing impulses of feminism and social science have operated to produce a view of women (across time and cultures) as fundamentally homogeneous by taking as self-evident the fundamental difference of women from men. Even when national and/or cultural differences are acknowledged, these are treated as second-order phenomena, so many variations on a universal theme in which gender always means the same thing: an asymmetrical, if not antagonistic, relationship between women and men that organizes the different functions of each into separate activities and spaces. But if gender - the unvarying fact of sexual difference - is universal, what, other than biology, can finally explain its universality? If gender means the social forms imposed on existing physical differences between women and men, then nature (bodies, sex) is left in place as the determining factor of difference. If the study of women automatically leads to "gender analysis," then a form of essentialism is driving the investigation: the presence of physical females is taken to mean that a system of difference - already known to us - is in effect. When "gender" assumes the prior existence of physical sex differences, indeed becomes a synonym for these differences, then sharp conceptual distinctions between sex and gender are difficult to maintain. Furthermore, the historicizing operation that gender was supposed to perform on sex is undone because biology is understood not to have a history. The fixity of the male/female opposition - its lack of history - is, of course, an axiom of evolutionary psychologists. Although the world 'evolution' seems to imply change over time, in fact (as Richard Lewontin and Joseph Fracchia point out in the issue of History and Theory I referred to earlier) there is all the difference in the world in this discourse between 'evolution' and 'history' - the one referring to a "lawful process of selection and adaptation," the other to contingency, contextual specificity, and historicity 10 . Evolutionary psychologists posit an originary moment when time stopped for the species. Hence MIT psychologist Steven Pinker (defending President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal) wrote: "Most human drives have ancient Darwinian rationales...A prehistoric man who slept with fifty women could have sired fifty children, and would have been more likely to have descendants who inherited his tastes. A woman who slept with fifty men would have no more descendants than a woman who slept with one. Thus, men should [notice how the tense shifts here from the conditional past to the future imperative] seek quantity in sexual partners; women, quality." 11 The fantasized scenario fixes human traits in ancient pre-history with seeming scientific precision but takes no account of centuries of changing 4

environments and the strategic adaptations they might require. (It is ironic - or perhaps entirely predictable - that this insistence on tying men's social/sexual behavior to reproductive imperatives comes at a moment when new technologies threaten to make men - though not their sperm - unnecessary for procreative acts.) This theory of evolution which removes human activity from its time-bound contexts has not been adequately addressed by arguments about "cultural constructions" of gender, for at least two reasons12 . The first I've already alluded to: while gender is given a history, biological sex is not. The second is related to the first: theories of cultural construction have been used by feminists to delegitimize science and often to prevent our engagement with those aspects of biological knowledge that might usefully historicize anatomical sex. We have analyzed the politics of scientific discourses that legitimate social inequalities between women and men and we have insisted on the empirical inadequacies of certain categorical descriptions of women, but (with the exceptions of trained scientists like Anne Fausto Sterling and Donna Haraway) we haven't grappled with the epistemic authority of biology itself13 . Donna Haraway noted a dozen years ago that in the effort "to remove women from the category of nature and to place them in culture as constructed and selfconstructing social subjects in history, the concept of gender has tended to be quarantined from the infections of biological sex."14 Having described science (with its claims of objectivity and the transparency of nature) as "socially constructed" has somehow impugned its authority and the necessity to engage it, in its own terms, as a serious form of knowledge. To the list of oppositions sex/gender, nature/culture, body/mind, has been added that of science/feminism. The whole chain of association reverses the usual male/female opposition that posits mind and masculinity against sex and the feminine, but it grants sex to science and places women outside that field. 15 Feminists can then denounce the political bias of evolutionary psychology's strong claims about the biological bases for gender, but we can't dispute the concrete science of evolutionary genetics that informs it, nor find within that field those whose research might help articulate a different position. This has the effect of abandoning the very terrain on which we need to work and of allowing models (fantasies?) of scientific knowledge as coherent and unified to stand as representatives of what is, in fact, a contentious and conflicted field. 16 Science is a form of knowledge, the organization of which also has a history - not a narrowly conceived political history (which treats science as simple reflection of social prejudice) - but a history of contending concepts and organizing principles that represent nature to us. (Within the field of biology, for example, there are major differences - 'civil wars,' according to one account - about what counts as scientific explanation.) 17 If this is the case, it might be that the conflation in ordinary usage of sex and gender can be considered a correction of the "mistake" that treats sex and nature as transparent entities outside of "culture"; instead, both gender and sex have to be understood as complexly related systems of knowledge. Of course, the achievement of the sex/gender opposition has been precisely to treat anatomical sex as a form of social knowledge, but it has also overemphasized the external social determinations, neglecting the autonomous aspects of the history of scientific ideas. (Genetics, for example, can't be reduced to a reflection of class or gender struggle in late capitalism.) I agree with the neuro-psychologist Elizabeth Wilson that feminist attention to gender and a narrow focus on women has prevented our engagement with the biological sciences and I agree, as well, that "feminism needs to engage with scientific authority not simply at those sites where it takes women as objects, but also in the neutral zones, in those places where feminism appears to have no place and no political purchase." For her, this means taking up not research about sex 5

differences in cognitive abilities, but research about "the nature of cognition itself." 18 For dealing with evolutionary psychology, her approach would mean, I think, arguing less about whether or not all women are relationally inclined, and more about how bodies register their history. Or it might mean turning to the "epigenetic" research of Shirley Tilighman, who insists that "genetic expression" is contextually and complexly - that is, in some sense, historically - determined. 19 Gender is not a particularly useful category for thinking along these lines. Wilson finds in "connectionist" psychology dynamic theories of cognition that challenge simplistic notions of biological determinism. Brain function and consciousness, she maintains, are far more complex than can be explained by reductive notions of genetic programming. Instead, she points out, research shows that cognitive patterns are established differently in the course of individual histories. Elizabeth Grosz, in a more utopian vein, suggests that study of the body might provide some of the ammunition feminists need: Isn't it even more interesting to show, not that gender can be at variance with sex...but that there is an instability at the very heart of sex and bodies, that what the body is capable of doing, and what anybody is capable of doing is well beyond the tolerance of any given culture? 20 If some of you hear an echo in this of those last enigmatic pages of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I I think you are right. Those of us intent on combating essentialism in the name of gender anxiously pondered the meaning of these words of Foucault: We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no power [this was the argument against the idea of sexual liberation-the book had shown that sex was not a natural force outside history, but an effect of ideas about sexuality];...It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim - through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality - to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex/desire, but bodies and pleasures.21 I now understand that Foucault wasn't resorting to a transparent body outside its conceptualization, but to a material entity that Wilson deems "biocultural." "It is the body as it is lived and as it lives a specific set of biocultural and biopsychical parameters."22 The aim of feminist science, for Wilson, is to produce knowledge of the body as interacting with and also exceeding the possibilities of the physical parameters within which it operates. In her view of it, the body is produced by contingent impressions (radically individualized) that mix sensory responses and unconscious fantasies (registered neurologically) in ways that make nonsense both of genetic determinism and mind/body separations. It's interesting, and probably not surprising, that Wilson links her work to psychoanalysis, finding useful for her own neurologically-oriented research psychoanalysis's attempts to historicize the body and to refuse the mind/body opposition. (Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology is particularly important to her for this reason, but so is a long-standing thread of feminist theorizing associated with pyschoanalysis and deconstruction.) It may be that my own attraction to some psychoanalytic theorizing is a perverse response to the recent attacks on it (the controversy over the Freud exhibit is just the tip of the iceberg), but it's also the case that nothing else addresses questions about sexual identity and sexual behavior as directly as psychoanalysis. I find, with Wilson, that it is helpful to have accounts of human development that understand drives and desires not as innate pressures, but as products of individual histories. Take for example Freud's discussion in Three Lectures on the Theory of Sexuality of how the nursing baby comes to 6

experience sucking not only as a means of satisfying his/her hunger, but also as a source of oral pleasure. Independent of the need for food, the mouth and lips become erogenous zones, motors of corporeal desire that preceed conscious thought. Those children for whom sucking early provided great sexual satisfaction, Freud wrote, may in later life "become epicures in kissing, [or] will be inclined to perverse kissing..." 23 The point (made differently and with more intricacy by Lacan) is that these oral drives-like other drives associated with vision, hearing, the genitals-are not purely biological. Physical experience, remembered unconsciously, invests the body with significance beyond that which can be explained by purely physical need. 24 This kind of formative developmental process (this individualized history) produces desires that don't fit neatly into behaviors deemed masculine or feminine and that can't be read back to genetic determination. The process continues as individuals confront, adapt to, and resist historically specific social rules and expectations. The sexed individuals (with their drives, desires, and bodies) who live this process, are the products neither exclusively of "gender" nor of biology. For Freud, the challenge was to analyze the interactions between individual variation and social categorization that evolutionary psychologists prefer to ignore. "In human beings," he wrote, "pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or a biological sense. Every individual on the contrary displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to his own and to the opposite sex; and he shows a combination of activity and passivity whether or not these last character-traits tally with his biological ones."25 (This is not a Freudian account of sexual difference, but an attempt to problematize what are often taken to be natural differences between the sexes.) 26 In addition, there is no guarantee that children will identify with the parent of their physical sex in their journey to adulthood. Instead, a complex process of identification marks an individual's assumption of masculinity or femininity, and it, too, resists easy correlations between anatomical sex and socially constructed gender, as Judith Butler (critically using psychoanalytic concepts for the study of sexed identities) so nicely points out: What happens, [she asks] when the primary prohibitions against incest produce displacements and substitutions which do not conform to [cultural models of heterosexuality]?...[A] woman may find the phantasmatic remainder of her father in another woman or substitute her desire for her mother in a man...[I]f a man can identify with his mother, and produce desire from that identification...he has already confounded the psychic description of stable gender development. And if that same man desires another man, or a woman, is his desire homosexual, heterosexual, or even lesbian? 27 These questions about individual identity and the role of phantasmatic identification in securing it, assume that the categories 'man' and 'woman' are ideals established to regulate and channel behavior, not empirical descriptions of actual people, who will always fall short of fulfilling the ideals. They assume further that social and political institutions offer the possibility and the pressure to fulfill normative ideals of masculinity and femininity. And that terms like 'man' and 'woman' are, like all signifiers, meanings which are not fixed and absolute, but established differentially in relationship to one another. Historians and anthropologists interested in collective identities have shown how variable these normative ideals have been; how, for example, imperatives to marry and reproduce have depended upon ideas about, say, the importance of kinship for transmitting property and power, or about how the size of population signifies the strength of societies or states. Needless to say notions of masculinity and femininity differed in different "reproductive regimes." 28 Reproductive behavior, in other words, is context-dependent, as are the bodies that reproduce-it only complicates matters, as they should be complicated, to add that these 7

bodies sometimes reproduce under psychological, if not physical, duress. I don't want, in this paper, to elaborate a full-scale response to evolutionary psychology's reductive pronouncements. My aim was to begin an exploration of the limits of gender as an analytic category and evolutionary psychology provided one avenue of exploration. But I'd already become uneasy about the term, even before I became aware of the resurgence of biological explanation. That was because gender seemed to have become routinized, contributing to, rather than unsettling the stability of the man/woman opposition. I got tired of finding myself cited in books and articles that simply took for granted the transparency of physical differences between the sexes, that raised gender to the status of a theory, when in fact it served merely as a synonym for the uninterrogated categories 'women' and 'men.' My own use of gender depended (still depends) on what has been called "the linguistic turn;" I have been dismayed to see that theory evacuated by the thematization of "gender." This is not to deny that the term was once extremely useful. In the 1970's and 80'sthe heyday of feminism's embrace of gender-the limits of gender were apparent to some critics (Donna Haraway in the U.S., Luce Irigaragy in Fraqnce-to name only two), but the concept still performed important theoretical and political work. It enabled us to separate biology from culture (detrimentally, perhaps in the long run, but usefully at that moment), to agree with Simone de Beauvoir (against functionalist social science) that "one is not born a woman," and to justify change in the relations between the sexes as an aspect, not of dangerous social engineering, but of historical process. In addition, the word gender itself was jarring-transposing as it did a grammatical concept (even though it came by way of medical discourse) to the arena of human social and sexual identity. I don't know how many courtly older scholars expressed great disturbance (and a certain malicious pleasure) at having caught me misusing the term. "Isn't that a grammatical reference?" they would politely inquire at the end of a lecture. 29 But the question gave me the chance to explain what I was up to and to call into question an entire world view that denied women (and the relations between women and men) a history. There was a delicious mischief, too, in the use of a grammatical term to talk about sexual difference. In grammar, gender is understood to be a way of classifying phenomena, a socially agreed upon system of distinctions rather than an objective description of inherent traits. This was exactly the point of using gender instead of sex in our discussions of the roles and behaviors of men and women-they were not natural, but ascribed or assigned. (And there was, too, the possibility for questioning heterosexual presumptions opened by the fact that in some Indo-European languages gender involves not two, but three categories: masculine, feminine and neuter.) In history and the social sciences, gender pointed the way to what might be called social studies of sexual difference. We asked under what conditions different roles and functions had been defined for each sex; how regulatory norms of sexual deportment were created and enforced, how issues of power and rights played into definitions of masculinity and femininity, how symbolic structures affected the lives and practices of ordinary people, how sexual identities were forged within and against social prescriptions. In the context of the AIDS epidemic and with the explosive intervention of queer theorists, the view long held by psychoanalytic feminism came into greater prominence: heterosexuality itself was redefined as a normative, not a natural system. There was a heady sense that we were addressing our own situation by unmasking "gender" as a relationship of power; in that sense we were practicing what Michel Foucault called "the history of the present" in our analyses of the past. And there was a great deal of new empirical information produced about many varieties of social and cultural practices. Even the tensions among feminists 8

about whether or not to historicize the categories men and women were fruitful for a time because they allowed us to debate the political implications of the radical historicizing project. Did Denise Riley's attempt to produce a Foucaultian genealogy of "women" inevitably undermine the feminist political project (as Tania Modelski argued it would in Feminism without Women), or did it carry our critique of essentialism to its ultimate conclusion?30 Was there a stable female subject whose story we could tell despite the different contexts within which she lived? Were we producing that subject through our research and writing, or did she preexist our interest in her? When gender was taken to be an open question about the ways in which sexual difference was conceived, it served as a provocative category of social, cultural, and historical analysis. In addition, gender enabled feminists to participate in a broader constructivist discourse that was challenging the predominance of structuralism and functionalism in the biological and social sciences. I don't think it operates that way anymore, at least not in the United States, where the increasing prominence of neurobiology, microbiology and information technology, the excitement about the Human Genome project, and the search for genetic explanations for all physical and social conditions have posed strong challenges to constructivism-at least to simple notions that this kind of science is only "social" and that its substance can be dismissed for that reason. As the discussion extends to biological sex (is there a gene for homosexuality? do female hormones and reconstructive surgery make once-aggressive men nicer-as Donald/Deirdre McCloskey maintains? 31 are diseases sex-linked?) and the body looms large as a causal factor, constructivist arguments-at least as we once used them to insist on the overwhelmingly social and narrowly political origins of scientific knowledge-seem weak. (Gender may still provide a critical wedge in other countries, where there have been fewer feminist inroads in politics and the academy, particularly where there is no exact translation for the word. As a foreign import, often left untranslated, gender serves as a point of contestation for a whole range of issues (about biological and cultural causation in the field of sexual difference, as well as about Western theoretical influence) among feminists and between feminists and their allies and/or foes. 32 But, for the most part, gender has acquired exactly that allure of social scientific neutrality that is meant to distinguish it from the politically engaged project of feminism and that guarantees its academic respectability. It has become a way of taking (or not taking) a position on the question of feminism, which is the contested term these days. Gender can be a means of distinguishing one's work from the special pleading associated with feminism, or it can serve to disguise the explicit feminist aims of scholarly projects - in either case it is feminism, not "gender" that is at issue. Even as "gender studies" programs proliferate in many places, notably the countries of the former Soviet bloc, I would argue that "feminism" has replaced "gender" as an incitement to international controversy. Is feminism a Western import? An international movement? Who are the women who form its constituency? Is there a common ground for the women's movements of the world? Is feminism a global or a local phenomenon? Who speaks in the name of women? These are, at present, matters of intense debate within many countries and across the borders of nation-states, religious movements, and human rights organizations. Gender does not pose comparable controversy.)33 The contentious forum of feminist international politics provides an illustration from another perspective of the former strengths and current weaknesses of gender as a category of critical intervention in political and academic debates. "Gender" was a controversial term at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in 9

Beijing in the fall of 1995. In the weeks before the meeting convened, a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives held hearings at which Republican congressmen and delegates from right-to-life groups pointed to the subversive implications of "gender" and urged Congress not to fund the official delegation that was to be led by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. The speakers warned that morality and family values were under attack by those who believed that there might be as many as five genders (men, women, homosexuals, bisexuals, and transsexuals). (Here is an example of the confusion of gender and sex-sexual behavior and sexed identity mixed up with social roles and biological descriptions.) They also warned that the UN program for the Beijing Conference had been hijacked by "gender feminists, who believe that everything we think of as natural, including manhood and womanhood, femininity and masculinity, motherhood and fatherhood, heterosexuality, marriage and family, are only culturally created 'fixes,' originated by men to oppress women. These feminists profess that such roles have been socially constructed and are therefore subject to change." 34 Within the UN, the controversy was such that the Commission on the Status of Women had earlier set up a contact group to seek agreement on "the commonly understood meaning of 'gender,'" and to convey its conclusions "directly to the conference in Beijing." Disagreement between those who insisted on a strictly biological definition and those who wanted to refer to the "socially constructive [sic] roles of men and women" 35 led to an entirely uninformative resolution, which was nonetheless offered as an appendix to the Program of Action of the conference. The "Statement on the Commonly Understood Meaning of the Term 'Gender'" reads as follows: Having considered the issue thoroughly, the contact group noted that (1) the word "gender" had been commonly used and understood in its ordinary, generally accepted usage in numerous other United Nations forums and conferences; (2) there was no indication that any new meaning or connotation of the term, different from accepted prior usage, was intended in the Platform for Action....Accordingly, the contact group reaffirmed that the word "gender" as used in the Platform for Action was intended to be interpreted and understood as it was in ordinary, generally accepted usage. 36 What is striking about this attempt at clarification is that there is nowhere any explication of "generally accepted usage." It was as if the meaning were self-evident, free of ambiguity and all possible misinterpretation. The wording of the statement, of course, attempts to settle controversy by denying that it exists. Still, some participants at the conference felt pressed to spell out their understanding of the term. The representative of Guatemala, for example, wrote that "in conformity with the ethical, moral, legal, cultural and natural criteria of the Guatemalan people, Guatemala interprets the concept of gender solely as female and male gender in reference to women and men." 37 A similar statement came from Paraguay. Peru took matters further, anticipating the dangerous implications "gender" seemed to have by insisting that "sexual rights refer solely to heterosexual relationships."38 And the representative of the Vatican interpreted the common meaning of "gender" as "grounded in biological sexual identity, male or female." "The Holy See thus excludes dubious interpretations based on world views which assert that sexual identity can be adapted indefinitely to suit new and different purposes." Not that biology determined sex roles statically. The Pope was all in favor of "a certain diversity of roles...provided that this diversity is not the result of an arbitrary imposition, but is rather an expression of what is specific to being male and female." 39 (In other words, homosexuality was unnatural and could not be countenanced by "gender.") On the one hand, this flurry of objection testifies to the radical potential of "gender" to denaturalize sex by relativizing and historicizing it (and contradicts my earlier assertions 10

about the limits of gender analysis). Catholic spokesmen clearly recognized the danger to religious dogma posed by the argument (made by theorists such as Judith Butler-who, much to her delight and that of her friends and admirers, was specifically mentioned by the Pope as an antagonist in the days before Beijing) that sex was an effect of gender and that there was no necessary correlation among physical bodies, social roles, and sexual behavior. On the other hand, feminists could ridicule the five genders fantasy, but they did not have strong rebuttals for the assertion that the human species consisted only of women and men. More telling, perhaps, was the fact that the final report from Beijing and the statement on "ordinary usage," show that Rome's anxiety was misplaced. As the American Heritage Dictionary entry for "gender" indicated, gender had become just another way of referring to women and men. In the report, "gender equality" means equality between women and men; "gender balance" is fair representation for each sex; "gender awareness" (which is supposed to inform all policy decisions) means an awareness of how policies may affect women and men differently. The Conference calls on governments and NGOs to "mainstream a gender perspective in all policies and programmes, so that before decisions are taken an analysis may be made of their effects on women and men, respectively." 40 This means, for the most part, that statistics and statistical projections should be disaggregated by sex. The 200 or so mentions of "gender" in the Program of Action from Beijing are often simply substitutes for the word "women." "Gender" also indicates-importantly-a belief in the possibility that women's roles can be drastically altered for the better and that some measure of equality between the sexes can be achieved. It is a discreet way of endorsing aspects of the egalitarian feminist agenda. Yet the use of the term "gender," while it signaled an opening to change in some traditional roles of women and men, had none of the subversive qualities so feared by its critics. In ordinary usage, "gender" had become a synonym for the differences between the sexes, both ascribed and "natural." I think this containment of the subversive possibilities of gender was only partly the result of the triumph of conservative forces at Beijing (and elsewhere); it was also an effect of the sex/gender distinction itself, which tends implicitly to ratify a biological discourse that emphasizes the ahistoricity of physical bodies. (And which doesn't contest the essentialism that would have sex determine gender.) This is a severe limitation at a moment when, under the confluence of many factors ranging from the powerful impact of gay and lesbian movements to the prominence of evolutionary theory in the fields of cognitive studies and microbiology-sex and sexual difference have become the focus of intense political and scientific discussion. As the 1990's draw to a close, the limits of gender seem to me ever more apparent. In the United States (and in the United Nations) gender has become an aspect of ordinary usage, routinely offered as a synonym for women, for the differences between the sexes, for sex. Sometimes it denotes the social rules imposed on men and women, but it doesn't often refer to the knowledge that organizes our perceptions of nature. Books that purport to offer a "gender analysis" are typically quite predictable studies of women, or (like the Program of Action from the Beijing conference) studies of differences in the status, experience, and possibilities open to women and men. But they rarely examine how the meanings of "women" and "men" are discursively established, what contradictions trouble these meanings, what the terms exclude, what variations of subjectively experienced "womanhood" have been evident in different normative regimes of gender, what the relationships are-if any-between current scientific understandings of, say, cognition or evolution, and sexual difference. Indeed, many feminist scholars who use the term gender do so while explicitly rejecting the premise that "men" and "women" are historically variable categories. This has had the effect of reifying the man/woman opposition as foundational 11

and fundamental (of accepting the terms of evolutionary psychology), and thus denying gender its former radical academic and political agency. For that reason, I find myself using "gender" less and less in my work and talking instead about sexual difference (a term that doesn't presume fixed differences, but studies the operations of difference) and about biological sex as an historically variable concept. This doesn't solve the problem I've been describing, since it runs the risk of being heard (especially in the current discursive context) as an endorsement of the idea that sex is a natural fact.41 Still, it seems to me necessary to look elsewhere for terms and theories that will disrupt what has become the business-as-usual of history in general, and of women's history in particular. I'm not arguing that we erase gender and the useful notions associated with it from our vocabulary. Nor do I think we should police usages of the term so that our meaning is the only one to prevail. That's not only an impossible task, but one that denies the flexibility and mobility of language, its crucial role as an agency of change. Rather, I think we need to move on, to provoke a rethinking of what have become our routinized assumptions. It is precisely when we think we know what a term means, when usage is so commonly agreed upon that meaning need no longer be disputed or provided, that new words and new concepts, or perhaps redeployments and reformulations of existing ideas, are needed. The point of feminist inquiry-and for me its continuing appeal-has always been its refusal to accommodate the status quo. Feminism has historically resisted the consolidation of 'women' into homogeneous categories, even as it has launched political appeals in the name of 'women.' Although this tension has troubled those who sought the security of a fixed identity, it has also been the source of feminism's most creative political interventions. At its most effective, feminism has caused consternation by pointing out the contradictions and inconsistencies in societies claiming to provide equality and justice for all. Indeed, it is because their claims have startled prevailing orthodoxies, because they have refused or reformulated "generally accepted usages" that feminists have been able to call attention to their cause. 42 As gender has become a word associated with a certain feminist orthodoxy, as well as with "ordinary usage", it is time to reflect on its limits, time to look for reconceptualizations of the problem of sex and sexual difference that will enable feminist inquiry to reinvigorate its research, while continuing to play its traditionally provocative and disruptive role.

Notes I'm grateful for the critical readings done by Mary Louise Roberts, Debra Keates, and Elizabeth Weed, and to Carol Lasser, Sandy Zagarell, Rosi Braidotti, and Tony Scott for their helpful suggestions. 1. Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Rayna Rapp, ed. Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210. 2. Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thompson, The Evolution of Sex (London: 1889; New York: 1890), cited in Jill Conway, "Stereotypes of Femininity in a Theory of Evolution," in Martha Vicinus, ed. Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1972), 144-46. 3. Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, cited by Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution: The 12

Pleasures of Pluralism," New York Review of Books (26 June 1997): 51. 4. Erica Goode, "What Provokes a Rapist to Rape?" The New York Times, 15 January 2000, sec. B, pp. 9,11. . 5. Publicity for Kingsley Browne, Divided Labours: An Evolutionary View of Women at Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 6. A recent example is Helen Fisher, The First Sex (New York: Random House, 1999). 7. Cited in James Schwartz, "Oh My Darwin! Who's the Fittest Evolutionary Thinker of Them All?" Lingua Franca (November 1999): 20. 8. David Gary Shaw, "The Return of Science," History and Theory 38 (December 1999): 9. 9. Doyne Dawson, "Evolutionary Theory and Group Selection: The Question of Warfare," History and Theory 38 (December 1999): 100. 10."The differences between these two perspectives are incommensurable, not because of disciplinary boundaries, but because they involve different conceptions about the nature of 'scientific' inquiry, different ontological and epistemological assumptions, and accordingly different modes of explanation." Joseph Fraccia and Richard Lewontin, "Does Culture Evolve?" History and Theory, op. cit., p.58. For an extended critique of the premises of evolutionary psychology, see Lewontin, Not in Our Genes (New York: Pantheon, 1984). See also John Dupre, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), and Dupre, "Scientism, Sexism, and Sociobiology: One More Link in the Chain," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16:2 (1993): 292. 11.Steven Pinker, "Boys will be Boys," The New Yorker. (9 February 1998):. For a critique of Pinker, see John Dupre's "Book Review" of Pinker's How the Mind Works, in Philosophy of Science 66. (September 1999): 489-493. See also Kenan Malik, "Darwinian Fallacy," Prospect. (December 1998): 24-30, and Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: the Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997). 12.The critique of evolutionary theory made by Clifford Geertz in the name of cultural specificities has not informed much of the work done under the aegis of gender, with the noted exception of some anthropologists and historians of science. See Geertz, "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man," and "The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind," in his The Interpretation of Cultures, chapters 2 and 3. (N.Y.: Basic Books, 1973). See also, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and . 13.Anne Fausto Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men (N.Y. Basic Books, 1985) and Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, Basic Books, 2000); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (N.Y. : Routledge, 1991) . 14.Donna Haraway, "'Gender' for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a Word," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Woman: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 134. 15.Elizabeth A. Wilson, Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition (NewYork: Routledge, 1998). 16.On the way in which fantasy imposes coherence on otherwise chaotic phenomena, see Slavoj _i_ek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997). 17.Fracchia and Lewontin, op. cit., p. 59. . 18.Wilson, op. cit., pp. 18-19. 19.Shirley Tilighman, get cite. See also, Suzanne L. Rutherford and Susan Lindquist, "Hsp90 as a Capacitor for Morphological Evolution," Nature 396. (26 November 1998): 336-342. The authors argue that, in the case of the drosophila they studied 13

there is a "complex relationship between the expression of the trait and the genetypes producing it." Various environmental factors create specific conditions that lead to "surprising" effects: the expression of "unexpressed genetic variation" where it was thought not to exist. See also Elizabeth E. Lyons, "Breeding System Evolution in Leavenworthia. II. Genetic and Nongenetic Parental Effects on Reproductive Success in Selfing and More Outcrossing Populations of Leavenworthia crassa," The American Naturalist 147. (1996): 65-85. 20.Elizabeth Grosz, "Experimental desire: Rethinking Queer Subjectivity," in Joan Copjec, ed., Supposing the Subject (London: Verso, 1994), 140. 21.Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1980), 157. 22.Wilson, op. cit., p. 64. 23.Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 48. 24.Jacques Lacan, the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, edited by Jacques-alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (NewYork: Norton, 1977). See also, Charles Shepherdson, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2000), 85-113. 25.Sigmund Freud, op. cit., pp. 85-86, n. 1. 26.Thanks to Debra Keates for this point. 27.Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York: Routledge, 1993), 99. 28.Examples of the anthropological and historical work are: Sherry Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, eds. Sexual Meanings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). 29.The current N.Y. Times usage manual still emphasizes that gender is primarily a grammatical reference, although it admits the new meanings the word has acquired in social and political contexts and in idioms like "the gender gap." In addition gender can be used "to avoid confusion with physical sex or to avert double meanings." But the experience of some Times writers suggests that copy editors prefer sex to gender whenever bodies are the subject under discussion. 30.Denise Riley, 'Am I That Name?' Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History (London: Macmillan, 1988); Tania Modeleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a 'Postfeminist' Age (New York: Routledge, 1991). 31.Deidre McCloskey, Crossing (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999). 32.I am told that the Hebrew term for gender used in Israel today is "migdar." According to anthropologist Moshe Shokeid the word has "the ring of the English term and its root is most probably in "gader", a dividing wall, fence or partition"-a man-made boundary. I am grateful to Shokeid for the reference. 33.For the flavor of some of this controversy, see Joan W. Scott, Cora Kaplan, and Debra Keates, eds. Transitions, Environments, Translations: Feminism in International Politics (New York: Routledge 1997). 34.U.S. House of Representatives. 104th Congress, First Session. Committee on International Relations. United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women" Hearings Before the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, July 18 and August 2, 1995. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996), 43. 35.Ibid, p. 107. 36.United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Report of the United Nations 14

Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II), Istanbul, 3-14 June 1996. Annex V: Statement on the Commonly Understood Meaning of the Term 'Gender.' Available at: http://www.undp.org/un/habitat/agenda/annex5.html. 37.United Nations. Report of the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, 4-15 September 1995. Chapter V, section 10(b), iii. Available at: gopher://gopher.undp.org:70/00/unconfs/women/off/a-20.en. . 38.Ibid. section 25, iii. 39.Ibid, section II, "Statement of interpretation of the term 'gender.'" . 40.Ibid, chapter IV, D, section 123. 41.I think it will be instructive to compare efforts to insist on the social construction of race. Those seeking to counter essentialist arguments did not come up with anything akin to the sex/gender distinction. Because race as a natural fact had been discredited by anthropologists in the 20's and politically after WW II. On race see Dorothy E. Roberts, "The Gender Tie," The University of Chicago Law Review 62 (1995): 209-273 and Robert N. Proctor, "Race Since Boas: The Shadow of Fascism and the Challenge of Molecular Anthropology," unpublished paper, November 1997. See also George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture and Evolution in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 42.Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to offer: French Feminists Claim the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Fuente: http://www.kcgs.org.ua/RUSSIAN/text.html (25/02/2013)

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