An Introduction to raceSEXgender

1. An Introduction to raceSEXgender Dr. Brad Elliott Stone AFAM/WNST/PHIL 398 Summer II 2013 July 2, 2013

2. raceSEXgender PART ONE Philosophical Problems

3. The Problem of“Equality yet Difference” • Tina Chanter (p. 23) poses the following two conflicting demands held by feminists: • a desire for equality  “there is the desire to be treated as man’s equal, and the accompanying unstated presupposition that all significant respects women are either already, or potentially, similar to men” • a desire for difference  “there is a demand to have women’s special needs recognized, and the implicit acknowledgment of the uniquely female character of these needs” • How do these demands play out in terms of raceSEXgender?

4. Theory vs. Practice • Grosz (1995, p. 45) poses the following two conflicting demands held by feminists: • the demand for intellectual rigor  “[feminism] is a self-conscious reaction to the overwhelming masculinity of historically privileged knowledges” • the demand for political commitment  “[feminism] is a response to the broad political aims and objectives of feminist struggle” • How do these demands play out in raceSEXgender?

5. Vs. Theory • From the intellectual standpoint, feminist theory faces a two-front assault (p. 46): • from masculinist academia  “[f]rom the point of view of masculine conceptions of theory evaluation, including notions of objectivity, disinterested scholarship, and intellectual rigor, feminist theory is accused of a motivated self-interest, of developing a ‘biased’ approach, in which pregiven commitments are simply confirmed rather than objectively demonstrated” • from feminist activists  “from the point of view of (some) feminist ‘activists,’ feminist theory is accused of playing male power games, of participating in and contributing to the very forms of male dominance feminism should be trying to combat” • How do these assaults play out in other “minority” theories?

6. Essentialism? • One of the major issues in feminist theory is “essentialism,” the claim that there is “a fixed essence to women” (p. 47). • Grosz describes three aspects of essentialism (pp. 47-49): • biologism  “women’s essence is defined in terms of biological capacities” • naturalism  “may be asserted on theological or ontological rather than biological grounds” • universalism  “the commonness of all women at all times and in all social contexts” • How does essentialism and its forms play out in raceSEXgender?

7. Consequences of Essentialism • Grosz (p. 49) gives four serious consequences of a commitment to essentialism: • “they refer to necessarily ahistorical qualities” • “they confuse social relations with fixed attributes” • “they see these fixed attributes as inherent limitations to social change” • “they refuse to take seriously the historical and geographical differences between women” • How are these consequences confirmed in raceSEXgender?

8. Sex vs. Gender • One way to resolve the consequence that essentialism “confuse[s] social relations with fixed attributes” would be to connect “sex” to the fixed, essentialist attributes and “gender” to the relations constructed by society about one’s sex. • Chanter (p. 25) describes sex vs. gender this way: • sex  “women and men are considered to have stable, fixed identities, empirically established by reference to the body, which thus serves as a kind of unchanging ground” • gender  “a result of processes of learning, social expectations, peer pressure, local and family values” • This clearly does not work in the area of race … or does it?

9. Vs. the Sex/Gender Divide • Chanter wants to be an anti-essentialist about not only “gender,” but “sex,” too. • “not only gender but sex too is a socially defined category of analysis” (p. 43) • “once feminism acknowledges that the categories of sex and nature are historically specific, and that neither concept can be treated as if it were a stable or universal concept, a reexamination of the relation between sex and gender is called for” (ibid.) • In other words, “[i]f sex is always already gendered, it is equally true that gender is always already sexed” (p. 44) • Can one be anti-essentialist about race in the same way?

10. raceSEXgender PART TWO Corporeal Feminism (Grosz 1994)

11. Philosophy vs. the Body • Grosz’s goal in Volatile Bodies is to correct the fact that “[t]he body has remained a conceptual blindspot in both mainstream Western philosophical thought and contemporary feminist theory” (p. 3). • This is because of the fact that “philosophy has established itself on the foundations of a profound somatophobia” (p. 5). • The mind/body distinction in Western philosophy sets up a dichotomous binary that symbolizes many other dichotomous distinctions.

12. mind thought reason psychology sense outside self depth reality mechanism transcendence temporality form body extension passion biology sensibility inside other surface appearance vitalism immanence spatiality matter Philosophical Dichotomies

13. Male Masculine Paternity White Heterosexual SUPERIOR Female Feminine Maternity Non-White Homosexual INFERIOR Philosophical Dichotomies

14. Philosophical Dichotomies • The problem of dichotomous thinking is that it “necessarily hierarchizes and ranks the two polarized terms so that one becomes the privileged term and the other its suppressed, subordinated, negative counterpart” (p. 3). • “As a discipline, philosophy has surreptitiously excluded femininity ... It could be argued that philosophy as we know it has established itself as a form of knowing, a form of rationality, only through the disavowal of the body, specifically the male body, and the corresponding elevation of mind as a disembodied term” (p. 4).

15. A Return to Bodies • Grosz writes (p. 19) that “[t]he specificity of bodies must be understood in its historical rather than simply its biological concreteness. Indeed, there is no body as such: there are only bodies—male or female, black, brown, white, large or small—and the gradations in between ... There are always only specific types of body, concrete in their determinations, with a particular sex, race, and physiognomy.” • Therefore, we must ask what it means to have the particular body we find ourselves in. • For Grosz, feminism is simply the fight to return to bodies, instead of jettisoning them in favor of the mind, which is what characterizes masculinist philosophy. • With this definition of “feminism,” how could one define race theory? queer theory? whiteness studies?

16. raceSEXgender PART THREE Six Criteria for raceSEXgender Analysis (expansion of Grosz 1994)

17. Criterion #1 (pp. 21-22) • raceSEXgender theories “must avoid the impasse posed by dichotomous accounts of the person which divide the subject into the mutually exclusive categories of mind and body.” • “We need an account which refuses reductionism, resists dualism, and remains suspicious of the holism and unity implied by monism.” • How can we avoid dichotomous thinking?

18. Critierion #2 (p. 22) • raceSEXgender theories “must no longer be associated with one sex (or race), which then takes on the burden of the other’s corporeality for it. Women can no longer take on the function of being the body for men while men are left free to soar to the heights of theoretical reflection and cultural production.” • “There are (at least) two kinds of body.” • How can we avoid assigning the body only to certain people?

19. Criterion #3 (pp. 22-23) • raceSEXgender theories “must refuse singular models, models which are based on one type of body as the norm by which all others are judged. There is no one mode that is capable of representing the ‘human’ in all its richness and variability.” • There must be a pluralism of bodies. • How can we come to acknowledge the pluralism of bodies?

20. Criterion #4 (p. 23) • For raceSEXgender theories, “the body must be regarded as a site of social, political, cultural, and geographic inscriptions, production, or constitution.” • Biologism/essentialism is to be avoided. • How can we avoid essentialist, biologistic understandings of bodies in order to reach the political and philosophical uses of bodies?

21. Criterion #5 (p. 23) • Any raceSEXgender theory “must demonstrate some sort of internal or constitutive articulation, or even disarticulation, between the biological and the psychological, between the inside and the outside of the body, while avoiding the reductionism of mind to brain.” • There must be a mind/body interaction of some sort. • How can we avoid being reductionist about the mind/body issue?

22. Criterion #6 (pp. 23-24) • “[I]nstead of participating in ... a binary pair,” raceSEXgender theories must regard the body “as the threshold or borderline concept that hovers perilously and undecidably at the pivotal point of binary pairs.” • We must think of the feminine and masculine aspects of our bodies, the heterosexual and homosexual aspects, the raced and the non-raced aspects, etc. • How do we bridge the philosophical dichotomies by means of the body?