Playing with Categories
Day 6

On building arguments and honing concepts as tools...

Usefully, Ortner lays out her argument about the apparent universality of women's subordination with explicit attention to how she is conceptualizing "the problem" and imagining the ingredients necessary for an "answer."

The 3 levels of the problem as she sees it:
1. the universal fact of culturally attributed second-class status - what is the evidence for this, and how is it to be explained?
2. specific ideologies, symbols, structural arrangements that are variable
3. observable on-the-ground activities, that may contradict ideology (p. 22)

She also asks: what would constitute evidence that women are everywhere inferior?
Elements of cultural ideology (explicit); symbolic meanings that implicitly cast women as inferior; social-structural arrangements (p. 23).

NB she claims here that any of these kinds of evidence on its own, or in combination, would be enough to "prove" the subordination of women in a given society....this seems like pretty shaky logic.

See her subsequent autocritique in later article: she admits that her earlier mistake was to play up elements of male domination too much, to seize on them to label a society "male dominant" (p. 175). Suggests that we may need to work on being able to recognize egalitarianism in various forms. Elsewhere ("Gender Hegemonies"), she has suggested that there may be contradictory trends- i.e., male dominant and egalitarian - simultaneously at play in different contexts of the social life of a group, so that there is no one answer to the question of whether it is "really" a male dominant society or not.

Still, she seems to stand by much of her argument; the critiques force her to explain her original logic in subtler ways (remember Anne's discussion of "mutual metaphorization").

Rosaldo:

--original piece closely paralleled (and incorporated) Ortner's: part of the same edited volume, Woman, Culture, and Society, M. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., 1974.

--she develops the dichotomy of "public/domestic" as the cultural but universal explanation for women's subordination. Women's roles of childbearing and breastfeeding create a division between the domestic and public. Aspects of the problem include:

-- space: women stay close to home, men can roam (hunting, politics)
-- authority: men distanced from intimate domestic life --> associated with control, sacredness, integrity
--achieved (men) vs. ascribed (women) status
--personality: women nurture and care for specific individuals, men's roles emphasize abstract rights and duties
--nature/culture (Ortner)
--women as anomalies: may have "informal" power but seen as witches, bitches!

Rosaldo's update is more "contrite" than Ortner's...

-- including the influence of the "Victorian precedendent" (401-409)
[see also Is There a Family? New Anthropological Views / Jane Collier, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, Sylvia Yanagisako]

--public/domestic assumes too much of what we should be trying to understand in any given context. Gender no more "primordial" than class, etc.

"I believe that gender is not a unitary fact determined everywhere by the same sorts of concerns, but instead, the complex product of a variety of social forces. The most serious objections to my 1974 account have demonstrated-with good cause, I think-that various measures of women's place do not appear to correlate among themselves, and, furthermore, that few of them appear to be consistently related to an isolable 'cause'." We need to ask how differences are created rather than assuming their existence." (401)

And while we are talking about "mutual metaphorization," anthropologist Sylvia Yanagisako points out one of the problems with applying the "public/domestic" dichotomy indiscrimately across cultures: it is a mixed metaphor.

"...a socio-spatial metaphor of authority [mixed] with a labor-specialization metaphor of differentiated functions" (1987: 111).

My point with all this is that, as Anne quoted Levi-Strauss, the debates around nature/culture and domestic/public have been "good to think." Provocative (if flawed) arguments spurred productive critiques and moved the conversation on to different planes. Earlier arguments were the building blocks of future - less ethnocentric, essentializing? - ones.

But wait -

Alonso is annoyed with people who call Rosaldo's work "essentialist." Why?
What do we think of these arguments?

Your postings:

Flora:I think I had always had a sort of existentialist view of the world, as I understand it from Anne. I thought that people really could make choices.

Samantha:I do not see how ... females and males, really have a choice/freedom (these words are so LOADED) in how their gender impacts their lives?...Rosaldo continues with a conversation about biology and I hope that we could consider this a bit more when discussing gender inequalities and where they come from.

Em: there is something in me bucking, shying away from what i see as the metal bit offered to me in some of these essays and ideas: anatomy is destiny. no no no. i don't want to be defined by my hole.

Kathryn: focusing on how women are constantly thrust in the domestic sphere and whining about women having to give birth and having to be the primary care givers doesn't seem very productive to me

Anna: Why is... the place where your children...are raised - looked down upon? It is quite probably one of the singlemost important jobs and yet we do not smile on it.

Alex: i would like to talk about alonso's closing statement in class, because i found it to be quite profound, but i didnt fully understand it: "a crippling split has emerged between feminists who believe in women and those who do not."

III. Anne re-metaphorizes the "split" as a series of ...

• Three Waves of Feminism:
  • male-identified ("get what they got"--BMC)
  • female-identified ("celebrate what we got--w/ an emphasis on embodiment, sexuality, motherhood)
  • postmodern (unidentifying/unessentializing)

• Alonso
  :"...what motivates the abuse of essentialist as a gatekeeping label employed to silence...embodied [ways of knowing]?....Privilege...underpinned this stance...those...who can find credible the 'reverse discourse' that biology is just someone's bad idea and that 'woman' is a category with no referent....Less privileged women...are much more aware of the materiality of the body...Yet such diversity should not preclude the recognition of women' s forms of commonality and commensality organized around the body and the senses" (222-223).

  (echoes here of Satre/deBeauvoir/Ortner, on the difficulties of "transcendence"....?
  and of a reverse "gate-keeping," by "the body feminists"?)

• Rosaldo:"We have been pursuing something of a ghost...."(401)
  "This is an article about questions...We have plenty of data...What is needed...is..questions..." (389-390)

  "To look for origins is...to think that what we are today is something other than the product of our history....Quests for origins sustain..a discourse cast in universal terms....our search for origins reveals a faith in ultimate and essential truths...(392-393).

  "...our desire to think of women in terms of a presumed 'first cause' is itself rooted in our failure to understand adequately that the individuals who create social relationships and bonds are themselves social creations....sexual asymmetries...are...fully social" (416-417).

  "We would do well to think of biological sex, like biological race, as an excuse rather than a cause for any sexism we observe" (400).

• Two local examples
  --on the limits of "nature" as a first causes
  In response to a question... about "whether science might ...'tease out' the influences of nature and nature so people would know which characteristics were theirs because they were born male or female," Evelyn Fox Keller said she wondered "why there should be so much enthusiasm for the idea" that people are born, not made... there is "nothing special" about birth as a line of demarcation in development, since even in the womb environment affects how genes are expressed. "When we talk about innate and acquired it is rarely clear where to draw the line...and where to draw the line is rarely stable."" (Cornelia Dean, "Evelyn Fox Keller: Scientist at Work. Theorist Draw Into Debate 'That Will Not Go Away.'" The New York Times April 12, 2005. F2.)

  --on the limits of the "public/private" divide
  "Women's Roles 'Round the World--domestic roles (in Ghana & Kenya, for example) include entrepreneurial activities to support the family

• Patricia, "Being Embodied S*cks":
  It seemed to be that I was taken at "body-value" in these situations, which lead me to believe that my experience, as a woman, is very much a trapped embodiment....I think that is something that all "feminists" are afraid to think because it places some sort of power with the men, but I feel as though it is imperative to think about for any true action to take place...

• Sarah, "Ignore It!":
  While I have had my share of fights with girls, I've never experienced such outright continual, verbal attacks as with these three males. All three of them invaded my space with no warning or provocation from me. Thorne makes one statement, a quotation from another gender theorist, that I think resonates with all three of my memories: "We do gender" (5), Thorne says. The actions of these boys are surely examples of them "doing" gender; they choose to pick on a girl, an easy target, and I ignored them, as I had been taught girls should....

  Now twenty-two, the idea of "ignoring it" is so deeply entrenched in me that I don't even think about it....But the male threat has become steadily greater over the years....At one point in her essay, Thorne says, "Aggression and sex are the dangerous desires in school, as elsewhere in the world, and these are the messages that often lurk within the lightened frames of play and humor that surround episodes of border work" (79)....

  I'm not sure where these thoughts leave me....

• Lindsay, "Easy to play, not so easy to win":
  Looking back and acknowledging that as I grew into a woman I chose dancing over fighting makes me feel like I took the easy route (well, I did). But the truth is that the other path would have been challenging not just because of the competitive nature of tae kwon do, but because we don't play in a vacuum. Even though I wore the same uniform as the boys, our ideas and feelings about gender followed us into the do jo. It was fine with everyone that I had just as much ability as any of the other students, but when confronted with a situation like sparring that would force the label "winner" or "loser" on one of us, the fact that we were not the same sex suddenly took on much more meaning. It created space for a possible shift in the traditional ideas about boys and girls that we experienced each day at school or at home.

• Amy Pennington, "A Journey in Gendered Play":
  ...I would like to complicate Thorne's notion of the factors which limit children's gendered interactions and relationships by demonstrating the ways in which individual social status further narrows each child's scope of possible gender roles and actions, past the wider defining lines of socially recognized possibilities. In other words, I hope to show how, within the set of "painfully sparse language that kids have for relationships between boys and girls," each child's potential 'vocabulary' is further limited by their status within their social group. Thus, this essay will use the term gender 'play' primarily as defined by two of Thorne's four OED defintions: as "dramatic performance," and as "scope or opportunity for action" (5).

  ...for girls especially, in early adolescence both social status and the limited number of socially recognized cross-gender relationships play limiting factors in one's enacting both of gender play and daily life. Girls of low social status, I would argue, suffer the most from these constraints, as they lie nearly helpless at the bottom of a highly imbalanced social hierarchy."

• Samantha, "Questioning Gender as a Central 'Oppressive' Force in Women's Lives":
  I titled this piece with the question of whether gender was an oppressive force in women's lives because it seems to me that it is too simple, or too easy to use gender as the sole force that can oppress women. While I agree that gender is taught or enforced in the institutions in our society, I do not think there is one single place that young people learn about gender roles. I also do not believe that we can separate gender from other aspects of one's life because I believe that there is always an intersection, always other factors that influence how they work and play or do not play with gender. Both Thorne and Lesnick provide good places to begin thinking about gender play but more should be done that does not exclude issues of race, ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic status, or sexuality from the discussion of what informs the making of an individual in society.

  Kelsey, "Gender and Sexualities Paper # 1":
  Drawing from a personal childhood experienceÉI hope to articulate gender positioning not just as a dichotomy between opposite sexes (male vs. female), but also within the same sex (female vs. female) by examining examples of how women and girls, themselves, create gender boundaries in opposition to the male sex while still remaining within their own gender realm.

  Both western academia and society tend to equate gender to biological sex; and therefore, male and female categories are developed to serve as easy foundations for gender analysis. Yet, in creating this practical binary opposition, we run the risk of limiting our analysis to that of only male versus female. In creating a gender dichotomy that contrasts women to men, the possibility of neglecting the gendered activity existing within same biological sex groups develops.

Weekend's homework:
Preface and forward to "The Order of Things," by great French philosopher/historian Michael Foucault;
an essay called "inside/out," by Princeton English prof/semiotician Diana Fuss.
By Sunday @ 5, post your responses to the readings on-line;
think particularly about their application to/extension of the essay you just handed in....

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