HISTSEX ARCHIVES: July 2000
© Lesley Hall and list contributors
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 04:35:49 EDT
Subject: Re: playing the chicken
Tim, your endless insistence on the total oppression of the "she" is inclined
to produce facetious responses from me, but I'll try and address your point
in the spirit in which it was made.
While I agree that genitals do not a chicken make, by implication your fox
remains immutably male/masculine, as destructive hunter of the chicken, a
role seemingly for which females/"she" need not apply.
You note that "gender hierarchy is a reified construction". There are at
least two questions raised by this. Firstly, is gender hierarchy inevitable,
regardless of who is on top? And secondly, with the grim note you repeatedly
strike, what would need to change in order to produce the societal conditions
for chickens and foxes to metamorphose into turtle doves?
But my main response is that I do not recognise the world you are describing.
"And if willing objects (whose consent has been manufactured
in the social process of the reification of gender
hierarchy) aren't available, or if the would-be subject has
become anxiety-ridden from the sensation of cognitive
dissonance of asserting a subjectivity that's supposed to
feel "natural," and only ends up feeling empty, then the
game gets rough in one way or another."
While I would in no way deny the institutionalised oppression of women,
their/our economic disadvantages, and the historical weight of a thousand
formulations of women's innate inferiority, your formulation seems to me to
participate in, reproduce that inferiority by casting "she" as the inevitable
victim of her history and the legacy of social construction. And in doing
this you utterly remove any capacity for resisting agency on the part of
"she". As someone who teaches Gender and Women's Studies, as well as multiple
courses on women's writing, I am much more struck by the insight, wit,
stroppiness and "micro-resistances" of women in their understandings of
constructions of "she" than I am by their consciousness of being perpetual
and inevitable victim. Are we all deluded? Do you know better?
Written in genuine interest,
Chris White ("she"?)
___________________________________________________________________From: "hvalp" <hvalp@rhk.dk>
Subject: Re: playing the chicken
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 14:18:51 +0200
> No; it can work even if they switch, because gender
> hierarchy is a reified construction, and in order to
> maintain it, the subject has to possess an object in order
> to experience subjectivity--over and over and over again.
> And if willing objects (whose consent has been manufactured
> in the social process of the reification of gender
> hierarchy) aren't available, or if the would-be subject has
> become anxiety-ridden from the sensation of cognitive
> dissonance of asserting a subjectivity that's supposed to
> feel "natural," and only ends up feeling empty, then the
> game gets rough in one way or another. The fox really needs
> a chicken, and so just takes one--or more.
- So even if they for a moment "switch" social roles, it seems the true subject-object relation
is eventually determined by the hierarchy of teeth and feathers?
Lars Kolind
Teeth but no feathers, guess I´m pretty foxy then!
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 01 Jul 2000 13:31:42 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Re: playing the chicken
Chris White:
>While I agree that genitals do not a chicken make, by implication your fox
>remains immutably male/masculine, as destructive hunter of the chicken, a
>role seemingly for which females/"she" need not apply.
David Harley:
Perhaps we should consult a cockerel about its love of being attacked by a
vixen. There are always profound dangers of reproducing and naturalizing
our unexamined prejudices, whenever we move into species/gender analogies.
Aesop's Fables and Just So Stories tell us more about those who tell and
repeat the stories than they do about the similarities of inter-species
relationships to the way our society is, might be, or must be.
___________________________________________________________________
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 14:57:31 EDT
Subject: playing with chickens
Hi Tim
Loads of food for thought there.
I guess I'll kick off my responses by saying I'm a lot less convinced than
you are in the existence of a sex-class. If I'm a Foucauldian of any kind
it's a pretty weird one. I would label myself a marxist-feminist with
Gramsci-ist leanings and thus seek to elude definition as a liberal of any
species. (Liberalism I translate as mere self-interest politics.) I have a
hard time viewing women as the kind of homogenous class of being where
their/our sex transcends all other classifications. I don't regard sex/gender
as the fundamental organiser of societal interaction/identity/life-chances.
Race, disability and what we in the UK call class (in a marxist sense) seem
to me at least as fundamental as sex/gender, and in any case no category of
classification can be ripped free from the materialist conditions at any
given historical moment. No classification is transhistorical or
transcultural, although possibly the Golden Arches may give the lie to that
if they are not (hopefully) some aberrant fad of colonialism like tiffin. One
of the problems is that social construction is a mobile and flexible beast,
and many aspects of social being can be made to serve the interests of the
dominant powers.
Beyond this, I want to take issue with a couple of specific points in your
argument. You say "some women learn how to do more than just get
by; they learn how to eroticize the manipulation of the
cultural constituents of gender hierarchy into new
variations on the theme, to _gloss_ gender."
One can 'gloss' gender through many more means than eroticism, but eroticism
is also one way amongst others where one can produce an active lived critique
of gender constructions. How do you view men who through eroticism are
glossing masculinity differently?
You say "real force, which can be pretty
difficult to distinguish from the kinky kind, if you've ever
been as poor as I have been, and had the sadistic
supervisors I've had. They really got off."
While I'm really sorry your supervisors have been unpleasant and manipulative
people who got off on the abuse of power, I really must take issue with such
a sloppy use of the word 'sadist', deleting from it all its social and
cultural complexity. But more importantly, if something kinky is going on
which is not easily distinguishable from real force, then that isn't kinky,
it's abusive. Kinkiness is consensual, even when it may *look like* real
force, it's an elaborate game with power, identity and sexuality. It is not
real force.
And David, do the initials SOH and the word 'metaphor' mean anything to you?
Chris White
___________________________________________________________________Date: Sat, 01 Jul 2000 11:57:38 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: N.B.:Problem of delayed posts
Chris: the post that appeared on the list overnight is out
of sequence--I wrote it a couple of days ago, so it's not a
response to your post of yesterday, which is forthcoming.
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, Tim Hodgdon wrote:
> Histsex:For historians of sexuality - http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
>
> Hi Chris
>
> Perhaps I can clarify. No, I didn't mean
>
> << If you're standing in an "adult" video store, or a
> high-art gallery dedicated to the male-supremacist
> canon, it's a distinction without a difference. >>
>
> with any irony at all. So, where _does_ that leave "women
> who get pleasure from the products of both kinds of
> establishment"? It doesn't leave them with "false
> consciousness." Rather, it leaves them with _gendered_
> consciousness. We live in a gendered culture. Not
> surprisingly, some women learn how to do more than just get
> by; they learn how to eroticize the manipulation of the
> cultural constituents of gender hierarchy into new
> variations on the theme, to _gloss_ gender. So, when you
> ask, "why such shyness in allowing women any form of
> agency?" I'm more than happy to grant such women (and, in
> fact, any woman who learns how to get by in gender
> hierarchy) gobs of social agency. Gender is made, not born;
> here we find women industriously engaged in remaking,
> reforming gender. And yes, it does render some of them a
> pretty close approximation of liberalism's autonomous
> individual, both analytically and experientially. While
> orthodox liberals reject polymorphous sexual individualism,
> they do so only because it doesn't turn them on. They have
> no compelling analysis for why it isn't a valid form of
> liberalism.
>
> But in distinguishing agency from power, I meant power in
> the fullest sense: the collective self-determination of
> women as a sex-class. (Right: I'm not a Foucauldian, so
> we'll have to agree to disagree on the validity of
> constructions such as "sex-class.") I'm not convinced that
> any form of liberal individualism, including that of the
> sexually enterprising and self-actualizing woman whom you
> describe, leads women as a sex-class to the power of
> collective self-determination, just as I'm not convinced
> that liberal free enterprise is "freedom" for all. Liberal
> (sex-)class mobility promises freedom, yet always already
> presupposes the existence of (sex-)class, high and low,
> according to one's capacity to accumulate capital by
> extracting value: in capitalism, by appropriating the value
> of the work of the laborer; in sex-class through the
> objectification and possession of those whose sexual
> labor-their socially constructed sexuality-reifies the
> masculine. Sexual free enterprise can and does liberate
> some women, but only at the cost of the substantive freedom
> of others. There's so much shit-work to do when it comes to
> reifying class identities, and free enterprise of all sorts
> subordinates whole classes of individuals to make sure that
> it always gets done. This requires, at the bottom line, a
> willingness to use force--real force, which can be pretty
> difficult to distinguish from the kinky kind, if you've ever
> been as poor as I have been, and had the sadistic
> supervisors I've had. They really got off.
>
> Maybe that's why I find much more compelling the argument
> that sex-class--gender itself--has to be destroyed, not
> played with. Not a popular argument these days, but then
> again, it never was. It's a much more demanding political
> task, one that cannot be accomplished in our lifetimes. No
> wonder so many people place their bets on liberal
> alternatives: who wants to live their one and only life in
> the state of being oppressed, and conscious? It's not false
> consciousness to judge that to be a painful condition, and
> to want to avoid it. Still, the hard question remains: how
> does avoiding it, change it?
>
> Lastly, and briefly, you observed that "much of this debate
> seems to me to rest upon a version of female sexuality as
> cuddly and romance-bound." Well, I'd suggest that the point
> of view I find more persuasive remains unpopular partly
> because it is not in any way sentimental about men, or about
> the ugliness of sexual politics in the context of gender
> hierarchy. This ought not obscure the fact that such an
> unsentimental sexual politics actually springs from hope:
> that human beings can, somehow, come to an agreement that
> the best way to achieve sexual justice is to eliminate
> gender, and thus eliminate the forced sexual labor of
> reifying gender. That would amount to an agreement that the
> very real pleasure that humans can derive from actualizing
> the subject position of gendered sexuality--or, put another
> way, from consuming the product of forced sexual
> labor--isn't worth the price. But, having reached that
> agreement, it wouldn't be just "female sexuality" that would
> be "cuddly." If that sounds repulsively "vanilla" to anyone
> out there, then so be it. But it sounds like a genuinely
> better world to me, one that I regret I will never live in.
>
>
> Tim Hodgdon
> Ph.D. candidate
> Department of History
> Arizona State University
> Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 01 Jul 2000 12:02:44 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Re: playing the chicken
> - So even if they for a moment "switch" social roles, it
> seems the true subject-object relation is eventually
> determined by the hierarchy of teeth and feathers?
More accurate to say that it inheres in the "roles"
themselves.
>
> Lars Kolind
> Teeth but no feathers, guess I´m pretty foxy then!
We've never met, so I'll take your word for it!
___________________________________________________________________Date: Sat, 01 Jul 2000 14:41:24 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Re: playing with chickens
Chris White:
>And David, do the initials SOH and the word 'metaphor' mean anything to you?
David Harley:
I presume SOH is related to the e-mail acronym LOL, as cause and effect. I
don't know that any of my friends or readers would regard me as notably
strait-laced. I am somewhat notorious for making people laugh during
seemingly serious conference presentations. A careful reader will find no
shortage of jokes in my published articles.
As for metaphor, I would suggest that this trope, like all our other
rhetorical devices, shapes the way we think. It needs to be examined, like
our conceptual categories, rather than being regarded as merely ornamental.
That surely was the whole point of your query concerning the apparent
maleness of the fox and the femaleness of the chicken, with which I was
agreeing by suggesting that the metaphor had a tenuous connection with
barnyard realities.
___________________________________________________________________From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 15:59:43 EDT
Subject: Re: playing with chickens
David, I agree with you completely about the cultural basis of conceptual
categories. In my defence, I did not begin the chicken metaphor (said she
rapidly in self-defence), but if I have been brusque and humourless, I
apologise.
Tim, I look forward to your next in this interesting dialogue :)
CW
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: Interesting book review
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 23:13:08 +0100
Review of Vernon A. Rosario. _The Erotic Imagination: French =
Histories of
Perversity_. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
x +
243 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00
(cloth), ISBN 0-19-510483-8,
by Christopher E Forth of the Australian National University, is at
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=3D22433962403473
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Sbject: Christies sells condoms
Date: Sun, 2 Jul 2000 18:38:19 +0100
3 eighteenth century sheep gut condoms with silk ties, the longest 9 =
inches, recently realised a price of GBP881 at Christie's in London in =
a sale of 'Scientific and Engineering Works of Art'. A paper slip =
discovered with the lot was inscribed "CONDOMS (French Letters or =
Cap-Anglais) DISCOVERED BY LADY SALMONG AMONGST SOME 18th Century =
DOCUMENTS."
The Lot notes do not seem particularly well informed about the history =
of condoms, referring to the mythical Col Cundum and dating the =
invention of sheepgut condoms to 1700. The Dudley Hoard condoms, datable =
to over 50 years earlier than this, were recently exhibited as a =
National Science Week event.
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 01:47:10 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Re: Chicken ethics (long)
Hi Chris
I appreciate your invitation to respond. Here in Arizona,
one of the more conservative areas of the U.S., the
opportunities to discuss these ideas are quite few, and it
is precisely this kind of discussion that I need in order to
further my training. I hope that it holds some equivalent
value for you.
As I see it, there are five interrelated themes in your two
previous posts: (1) that my perspective presents male
supremacy as a system of absolute male power and absolute
women's submission, against which there can be no meaningful
resistance; (2) that the concept of sex-class posits a
reductionist homogeneity among women (and among men), and
that my perspective subordinates all other inequalities to
the primary contradiction of gender; (3) that not only does
this perspective reduce the differences among women within
Euro-American industrial society in the present to
epiphenomena, it also ignores the historicity and, more
generally, of sexual cultures and the diversity of human
cultures; (4) that this perspective simply dismisses not
only women's critical appropriation of gender as false
consciousness, but also the role of mutual consent in
distinguishing the appearance of sadistic dominance in
ritualized sexuality from genuine sadism; and (5) leaves
unaddressed the question of how gay and queer men's sexual
transgressions, like those of women, might destabilize the
rigidities of gender hierarchy, transforming gender into a
democratic, politically neutral cognitive resource available
for all to use as they see fit in the pursuit of the
pleasures of sexual subjectivity.
A detailed response to any of these questions goes well
beyond the scope of an email message to a discussion list.
There are good reasons why such a response might be
worthwhile, especially if it could be reasonably expected to
change someone's mind. But I don't post to the list with
that unrealistic goal in mind. To put it mildly, people
take the politics of sexuality personally, such that
changing one's mind also involves rearranging one's personal
life on a rather extensive scale. It can, and does happen,
but probably wouldn't happen here, for a simple reason: the
themes of your posts replicate in microcosm a debate that's
already gone on out there in the published literature; like
me, readers have heard these assertions many times. My goal
is more modest than "conversion." For the sake of those who
might be "lurking" on the list, and for the sake of those
who might consult these threads at a later date as part of
their research, I simply want to make a case for the
legitimacy of a viewpoint on a radical sexual politics that
runs quite at odds to the perspective that predominates here
on the list. Somebody ought to do it, and I guess that I'm
that person for now.
So, in order perhaps to intrigue lurkers and future
researchers to check out what an alternative perspective has
to offer, please allow me to respond in a general way to
these five interrelated themes.
First, I contend that the practice of gender hierarchy in
the service of male supremacy is _pervasive._ That doesn't
mean that it's _absolute._ If it were absolute, I and the
feminists from whom I draw this perspective could not speak
about, or perhaps even think about, male dominance as a
social reality in the first place. No resistance would be
possible--and what would be the point, anyway, if nothing
could change? Of course that's not the case. Like you, I
admire "the insight, wit, stroppiness and
'micro-resistances'" of radical feminists (though if you use
the latter term, you probably do so to mean something
different). That's what inspired me to study their work in
depth. I still marvel at how some radical women managed to
put together so many small fragments of devalued personal
experience to reach the conclusion, in the early 1970s, and
again in Minneapolis in 1983, that _gendered sexuality
enforces gender hierarchy._ That perspective is called many
inaccurate names; "anti-sex" being one of them. But I see
it as one of the most hopeful and constructive insights that
human beings have yet articulated. From that insight we may
derive a liberatory politics: if gender is a reified
construction, then human beings have the option of dropping
it altogether. It's not essential to our existence; and
while people can derive intense pleasure from the experience
of reified subjectivity, the social costs are much too high.
(Below, I'll attempt to explain why I think "consent," the
model of sexual social relations that I call sexual freedom
of contract, is wholly inadequate as the basis for social
justice.) What's more, the insights we derive from attempts
to reach social consensus to drop it, may well offer new
approaches to address the reified, pseudo-biological
hierarchy of race. (Already have: see Mari J. Matsuda et
al., _Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive
Speech, and the First Amendment_ [Boulder, Colo., U.S.A.:
Westview Press, 1993]. Many other works profit from
rereading in light of this perspective: in addition to the
works by Lockridge that I cited in a previous post, see
Kathleen M. Brown, _Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious
Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia_
[Chapel Hill: Univ. of N. Carolina Press, 1996].)
As these citations may suggest, I don't see the perspective
I'm advancing as dismissive of differences among women, or
as promoting the unsustainable viewpoint that gender
constitutes the sole oppression of women, or as suggesting
that gender hierarchy is the linchpin to all other forms of
oppression, to which other oppressions become subordinate.
I honestly do think that the world is more complicated than
that. Now, let's approach that same idea from the opposite
direction: the concept of sex-class does not require
homogeneity among women. Did Marx and Engels (or, for that
matter, their more sophisticated latter-day interpreters)
ever say that all proletarians were alike? No; they
stressed the _relational_ aspect of class, even as they held
that material conditions constructed consciousness. Both
sex-class and social class turn out to be contingent on the
particular situations in which human beings relate to one
another. The rules aren't always the same in every time and
place. "Contingency" refers to one property of human
culture: while participants in culture almost never
articulate their culture's first principles as such (it's an
awfully demanding task), they dispute the contingent
interpretation of those principles all the time. Most
day-to-day conflict takes this form; thus, multiple meanings
of cultural first principles constantly compete for
legitimacy.
This gets particularly convoluted, so an example is in
order: In their public stance vis a vis one another, Larry
Flynt (prominent U.S. pornographer) and Jerry Falwell
(prominent conservative U.S. evangelist) hate one another
intensely. (Never mind that men like Flynt sometimes turn
out to be Protestants; never mind that a good many prominent
evangelists practice exactly what they preach against.
That's another level of this same argument.) They hate one
another, yet they both militantly defend the first principle
of male supremacy: the one interpreting masculine privilege
as the freedom to fuck whenever, wherever, whomever, and
however; the other demanding that men observe the
constraints of the Christian double standard of compulsory
heterosexuality in order to preserve its privileges (when
men "fall," it is always a woman's fault).
Neither of these guys gives a hoot what women think, as long
as women are thinking and saying the word "yes." There are
more sides to this debate than two, but to save space I
won't try to describe others.
Thus, the level of conflict over interpretations of first
principles (should men be free to fuck at will, upholding a
single standard of "sexual freedom," or should men's first
obligation be to other men and defense of the legitimacy of
the double standard; or, what is a man, anyway?) that leads
postmodernists to question the stability of dominant
categories (and the veracity of analytical categories
derived about them and from them), leads me to conclude that
these same categories prove quite stable, because they're
flexible. Below, I'll distinguish what I'm calling
contingency from subjectivist relativism; for now, I'll just
say that I don't believe that contingency invalidates the
concept of sex-class. Like Somer Brodribb, I don't think
that social subordination boils down only to an "identity"
based on an "idea" that one may subvert by exposing its
foundational contradictions through a "performance" that
"plays with" the contradictory fragments (Somer Brodribb,
_Nothing Mat[t]ers: A Feminist Analysis of Postmodernism_
[North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex, 1992]). If I read
your response to my use of the word "Foucauldian" correctly,
then the latter is not entirely your perspective;
nevertheless, I include it here because it's one of the
common perspectives from which these themes emanate.
If the concept of sex-class proves sufficiently elastic to
admit to deep divisions in the sex-class, "women," then I
see no reason why it should not prove sufficiently elastic
to accommodate historicity and cultural relativism. We
probably will never know just how far back in human
(pre)history gender hierarchy extended; of all the
historical human cultures of which I have heard, it would
seem that they exhibit a wide range of conceptions of
gender, but I know of none in which gender is absent, or
that gender relations prove equal or complementary.
Anthropologists debate this as a question; I just don't find
the June Nash school of neo-Engelsian argument (gender
inequality emerged from the invention of private property,
sans Engels' outdated belief in the world-historical defeat
of "matriarchy" [Irene Silverblatt, _Moon, Sun, and Witches:
Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru_
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)]) persuasive.
We can, I think, agree to disagree over the applicability of
sex-class here, but I would still insist that it's not the
kind of reductionist concept it's often made out to be.
The fourth point has to do with the concept of "false
consciousness"--a concept that, as one who rejects the
mechanistic perspective of functionalism, I find repugnant.
In many ways, the notion of "false consciousness" derives
from the least imaginative conception of Marxist class: the
celebration of objectivity as the viewpoint from nowhere.
This standpoint also had its adamant defenders in the early
days of U.S. radical feminism, in the debates between those
who advanced the "social conditioning" thesis. The response
of those advocating the "pro-woman line" was equally
adamant: at its logical extreme (and of course, most
"pro-woman line" feminists weren't out here on the tip of
this limb), this amounted to an answer of absolutist
subjectivity to the conditioning-thesis argument of
absolutist objectivity. One of the things I admire about
radical feminism is that, in a relatively short time, the
argument faded, as it became clear that each perspective
turned out to offer something of value and neither proved
sufficient of itself. But these days, we seem to be
reinventing the wheel. I see postmodernist subjectivity and
relativism--the basis for its claim to "subversive" power,
as similarly absolutist and insufficient: it is the reverse
side of the Enlightenment's epistemological coin, the view
from everywhere. I prefer MacKinnon's approach: to end
gender hierarchy, one must reject the subject-object
distinction itself, which is the basis for masculine
authority and masculine subjectivity through the knowing of
self--especially, but not solely, through gendered sexual
intercourse--as not-that-object-which-is other. She holds
that the method for this politics lies in
consciousness-raising. ("Method and Politics," chap. 6 in
_Toward a Feminist Theory of the State_ [Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1989].) Not surprisingly, this is not a
popular idea among those for whom women's endless
differences carry more weight than anything they might have
in common. Again, I'm sure I cannot convince you of this;
only you can do that. To your question about whether I
"know better," and whether I think you're "deluded," the
answers are "no," and "no." I'm simply making a choice
among feminist theories, something I have to do, since they
contradict one another. My choice carries no special
authority. What I seek, given that a politics is not an
empirical, falsifiable proposition, not reducible to "true"
and "false," and thus a matter of scholarly judgment, is
respect for the alternative point of view that I find most
convincing.
This perspective problematizes the notion of consent to a
considerable degree, given the pervasiveness of gender
hierarchy and the impossibility of harmonizing the interests
of sexual subject and object under conditions of gender
hierarchy. If "no" doesn't mean "no," what does "yes" mean?
The result, however, is not a stark resolution of social
life under gender hierarchy into absolutes of black and
white, but profound ambiguity, many shades of gray.
"Consent" isn't meaningless; rather, it is far more
problematical than the theory of sexual liberalism holds it
to be. To a degree that discomfits any thinking and feeling
person, this perspective requires that we contemplate the
degree to which sexual consent can be manufactured.
Radicals have no difficulty seeing this possibility in news
media (Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, _The Manufacture of
Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media_ [New York:
Pantheon, 1988]) or through the wages theory of value, in
which the worker formally "consents" to sell labor for a
fraction of its worth. Liberal theory calls these
phenomena, respectively, freedom of the press and freedom of
contract; radicals have convinced me that this formal
guarantee of equality led directly to substantive inequality
in practice. It's not accidental that the male-dominated
labor movement has always understood this relation in
gendered-sexual terms: their movement being the "manly
defense of the rights of the workingman"--from getting
screwed. When sexual liberals extend the doctrine of
freedom of contract to sexual relations--for example, as a
defense of prostitution as women's liberation--I still have
to wonder: workers "consent" to work for a host of reasons,
including avoidance of hunger and homelessness; wives
submit to sex that they do not want, and learn to want the
sex that men want to have, for an equally broad range of
reasons. Is "consent," then, sufficient of itself to
guarantee substantive equality? I'm skeptical of
liberalism's guarantee of the collective good through the
defense of individual self-interest, so I have to say no,
even as I hold that even liberal consent is not nothing: it
demarcates one of the many gray positions on a continuum of
sexual coercion that runs from near-white to truly black.
Same with sadism: my wording of the earlier post did not
indicate that I don't regard the sadism of my former
employers and the sadism of sadomasochistic ritual as
identical; rather, they are points on a continuum of sexual
politics. They are not identical, but they are related,
because they derive their meaning, and the pleasure of
sexual subjectivity, from an eroticization of hierarchy.
What about men? Just as male power and privilege are not
absolute by virtue of being pervasive, so to masculinity, as
a reified construct, does not represent the totalized human
nature of men. Human beings are social beings. Beyond the
material needs of the human biological organism, social and
emotional bonds sustain everyday life. Men's powerful
allegiance to gender identity does not preclude at all times
most men's capacity to respond humanely, to at least some
degree, to others, in ways not absolutely determined by
gender. This goes for sex, too; even the pervasiveness of
gendered identity does not make what one might call "sexual
communion" impossible. What I think it does mean, sadly, is
that it's a much more rare experience than it could be, and
much more rare than the culture of romance promises, because
the emotional distance and distinctiveness of a sexual
subjectivity constructed in opposition to that of a sexual
object is about the best way to kill the possibility of
"communion." To say, at this juncture, well, maybe
"communion" is not what some men and women want, that it's
too vanilla, it's not transgressive enough to be sexy--to
me, this begs the question that Michael A. Murphy raised
(though he didn't intend its use as I am here): in whose
sex-class interests is this? The fundamental question here
is whether freedom means the freedom to pursue the reified
sexual subjectivity so far reserved for the genitally male,
or whether freedom means freedom _from_ what I see as the
necessary consequences of that reified subjectivity: the
enforcement of gender hierarchy.
So, I don't regard "what about men's 'glossing' of gender?"
as really a distinct question. If we want a world in which
men can love men openly without fear of assault or
ostracism, we have to work toward the end of gender as a
fundamental principle of social organization, just the same
as if we want a world where women don't have to fear being
raped or beaten, or being taken and used. In my view,
trying to create a "sexual freedom" in which some women gain
sex-class mobility, in which some women get to be "men" and
some men get to be "women," doesn't address the reality that
this conception of freedom, like all liberal conceptions of
freedom, depends on the unfreedom of others in order to
function. (On the racial foundations of American liberal
democracy, see Edmund S. Morgan, _American Freedom, American
Slavery: The Agony of Virginia_ [New York: Norton, 1975].)
For every woman who might avail herself of the privileges of
manhood-however much switching from role to role there might
be--many more would have to remain behind in order for those
categories to maintain their erotic charge, their
distinctive meaning. It may not look like a liberal club,
since so many orthodox liberals, like our "pal" Jerry
Falwell, oppose it so vehemently. But it's a liberal club,
with the difference being the contingent sexual rules.
So I find more compelling the politics of women who, rather
than demanding access to the club, are trying to shut the
whole thing down. They don't resign themselves to the club
as the best of all possible worlds before we've had a chance
to see what a world without the club might be like.
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 13:56:29 EDT
Subject: Re: Chicken ethics (long)
Hi Tim
Glad this is contributing to your work :) You seem now to be opting for a
devil's advocate role, tho', rather than saying what you really think....
A couple of corrections to your reading of my response:
In referring to the stroppiness and wit of students, I wasn't talking about
'radical feminists', rather about women who would not/do not identify as
feminists, but who have incorporated into their identities ideas and
practices I would call feminist.
Gender as a 'democratic, politically neutral cognitive resource'? If that's
what I seemed to be saying, God help my articulation! Gender is as
politicized as any other arena of human interaction. What I'm arguing is that
it be less 'special', less of a totalizing explanation for the world's ills,
and in part -- *in part*-- a tool of political/social opposition and
resistance.
Beyond that, there are things you say that I would not dispute, so I'll stick
to the disputes <g>
You say "if gender is a reified
construction, then human beings have the option of dropping
it altogether. It's not essential to our existence; and
while people can derive intense pleasure from the experience
of reified subjectivity, the social costs are much too high."
The idea that gender is straightforwardly dispensible with is, I fear,
something I neither believe in nor like. At the risk of eating my own words,
not so long ago there was a vigorous debate here about biology and its role
in gender construction. While still clinging to my social constructionist
position, biology does play a role in the construction of gender. A woman who
chose (or did what was expected) to have children would be unlikely to have
the time and energy to do what I'm currently doing. The same does not apply
to a man 99% of the time. However constructed the meanings grafted onto sex
may be in the form of gender, there will always be meanings grafted on to
sex, call it what you like. It is the form which can vary, not its very
existence.
The second part of this I find almost alarming in its sucked-dry of fun and
games formula. Yes, reified gender construction comes with high prices for
men and women, and it is those parts, which precisely connect to construction
of class, race etc, that need doing away with. (By the by, does anyone
believe race and class are social constructions that could be dispensed with?
I have that wretched song 'Melting Pot' playing in my head....) Economic
conditions, wages, housing, legal questions, sexual violence, are not sources
of intense pleasure as far as I can see. But at this point in history, in the
privileged West, one way of opposing the oppressive effects of gender
construction is through 'play', taking pleasure in exaggerating, twisting,
inverting the status quo. Not the only reason, since it is a chicken and egg
thing (groan...) as sexual pleasure and its forms are determined by the given
social conditions in history.
I got very bogged down with your reading of ideological processes and how
change is produced. It would perhaps help to clarify your position if you
were to source your use of the word 'reification' -- which version are you
deploying? I keep wanting to read it as Lucaksian, but I may be wrong....
You imply that 'sexual communion' is antithetical to sadomasochistic
pleasure, and once again I have to insist on the difference between the
economically disempowered woman who must accomodate her man's domestic and
sexual demands or risk violence and/or poverty, and the temporary and
fictional adoption of a role of sexual and physical and domestic submission
within an agreed contract between two people (of any gender). They may look
similar on occasion, but they share nothing but a set of gestures, the latter
being performed on the basis of assumed identities in a theatrical space.
And, moreover, there is less likely to be any *real* abuse of power in such a
scenario. No may not mean No, but the safeword means No, Stop now, and it
will mean a very emphatic 'no'. I'm not claiming a hierarchy of sexual
'liberation' with vanilla at the bottom, but I'm less than convinced that sex
without an element of power is even conceivable. You blithely contradict the
'anti-sex' agenda of certain brands of feminism. I have to say, from
experience, that there was a very vigorous anti-sex campaigning brand of
lesbianism around in this country in the 80s (may still be for all I know)
and I have some lousy memories of just how violent that could get. And I mean
physically violent.
There's a lot more I could say, but I'll leave it there for now, and await
the next move :)
Chris White
___________________________________________________________________Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 09:28:34 +1200
From: "Walter Cook" <Walter.Cook@natlib.govt.nz>
Subject: Re: Chicken ethics (long)
Tim, From one of your lurkers. I follow this debate to be forewarned of what ghastly "Genevas"
future "Calvins" have in store for the likes of me.
___________________________________________________________________From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 18:58:45 EDT
Subject: Re: Chicken ethics (short)
The likes of.....? Walter, my interest is piqued. Well if you will delurk!
CW
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 17:19:48 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Re: Calvin, Geneva, and the future of gender
On Wed, 5 Jul 2000, Walter Cook wrote:
> Histsex:For historians of sexuality - http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
>
> Tim, From one of your lurkers. I follow this debate to be
> forewarned of what ghastly "Genevas" future "Calvins" have
> in store for the likes of me.
Walter: I do wonder what kind of "geneva" would be "a world
in which men can love men openly without fear of assault or
ostracism." Certainly not the literal kind, as I'm sure that
ol' Mr. Calvin is currently spinning counterclockwise after
having been associated, even though metaphorically, with
such a vision.
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 18:35:34 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Re: Chicken ethics (long)
Chris: No, I'm not opting for a devil's advocate position; I
am telling you what I think. The perspective that I'm
writing from is quite marginal, both on this list (where
it's labeled "anti-sex," a label the inaccuracy of which
will be apparent to anyone who follows my earlier citation
of Stoltenberg's _End of Manhood_ to the source) and in the
world at large, where its social constructionism generally
registers, among the "experts" whom mass media tend to
consult, not only as anti-sex, but anti-family, anti-church,
and/or anti-nature. That's why they generally prefer not to
allow it to register at all. "Free" speech is very, very
expensive, and so I see my contribution as, at minimum,
trying to preserve this perspective for the long term, so
that it won't simply disappear from the historical record.
To your point that "While still clinging to my social
constructionist position, biology does play a role in the
construction of gender. A woman who chose (or did what was
expected) to have children would be unlikely to have the
time and energy to do what I'm currently doing." Yes, and
so gender justice, not to mention the redistribution of
wealth, requires a radical restructuring of work and a
redistribution of value among the diverse forms of social
labor that constitute culture. To your point that "the same
does not apply to a man 99% of the time," I'd say, that's
exactly what has to change. To "however constructed the
meanings grafted onto sex may be in the form of gender,
there will always be meanings grafted on to sex, call it
what you like. It is the form which can vary, not its very
existence," I'd say that the meanings humans attach to
sexuality and reproduction don't have to be gendered: that
is, calling into existence distinctive social personae, with
corresponding subject/object positions. There are
biological differences or variations among human beings that
haven't served as the basis of such categorical
distinctions, so I don't see the existential necessity of
sexual dimorphism as being one such. That's why calling it
gender really matters: it names the distinction as a
politics of hierarchy.
To your aside, "By the by, does anyone believe race and
class are social constructions that could be dispensed with?
I have that wretched song 'Melting Pot' playing in my head,"
I advocate nothing like assimilation. Assimilation presumes
to end conflict by integrating opponents to the status quo
into the status quo--on the status quo's choice of terms.
The redistribution of wealth, and the redistribution of
social value, that I advocate can hardly be called
assimilationist. As for the reification of race, I refer
to the process by which "race" became a significant social
distinction despite the absence of any sort of scientific
basis for the category's existence. As some geneticists
have pointed out, there is more genetic diversity within
single African villages than in the whole of North America
or eastern Asia; human beings have simply lived there
longer. Still, the fact that colonialists treated "race" as
if it were real, and enforced it as a social difference,
means that it is now a real difference, even if it isn't
ontologically true. My view is that the only way to end
racial hierarchy is to work toward the elimination of the
reality of race as a social category; insisting on the
equivalence of "races" as the end-goal of politics neglects
the force and injustice that it takes to maintain the
distinction. Sound familiar? :)
Lastly, this is perhaps the opportune moment to say that I
can't provide you with a detailed citation for my
understanding of reification, because I don't know exactly
where I learned it. Probably the best place to look is at
Andrea Dworkin's essay, "The Root Cause," in _Our Blood:
Prophesies and Discourses on Sexual Politics_ (New York:
Harper and Row, 1976). I apologize for the convoluted
nature of my discussion; it was the best I could do within a
relatively short time. I sent it out knowing exactly what
it's like to read something of that sort, especially via
email, where it's difficult to flip pages back and forth. I
appreciate your willingness to wade through. Still, I hope
that I've been able to make at least some of my process more
familiar, and thus to at least some degree less threatening,
to those who are open to that possibility. For a very
different, poetic voice, I strongly recommend that members
of the list look at Pat Parker, "Bar Conversation," in
_Jonestown and Other Madness: Poetry by Pat Parker_ (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1985), 11-14.
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 04:31:29 EDT
Subject: One chicken's marginality...
Hi Tim
I'm about to leave for a conference (to continue propogating my theories of
fetish porn) so this will be a sketchy response (as ever). I'm going to go
away and ponder further your notions on the abolition-potential of gender. A
slight pause for rethinking, even :)
So a couple of points to respond:
I would argue that the notion of 'reification' is so fundamental to your
ideas of gender, that some much better theoretical basing is required. It is
not the transparent term you seem to continually be invoking. What does your
term actually mean?
<< The perspective that I'm writing from is quite marginal, both on this list
(where it's labeled "anti-sex," a label the inaccuracy of which will be
apparent to anyone who follows my earlier citation of Stoltenberg's _End of
Manhood_ to the source) and in the
world at large, where its social constructionism generally registers, among
the "experts" whom mass media tend to consult, not only as anti-sex, but
anti-family, anti-church,
and/or anti-nature. That's why they generally prefer not to allow it to
register at all. "Free" speech is very, very expensive, and so I see my
contribution as, at minimum,
trying to preserve this perspective for the long terrm.>>
I accept that the ideas you're propounding are your own, but I'm intrigued at
your consciousness of being so marginal and so far outside of current
orthodoxies. As far as I can see, your version of sexuality, albeit with a
more developed social critique than one would often see attached to it, is
much more akin to the current societal and certain substantial feminist
orthodoxies about the healthy, mutual, power-free ideal of sex. Which sounds
like saying "I'm more marginal than you, so there!" but I suspect I may be. I
may find out on Friday :)
More anon
CW
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 12:11:22 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Chortling chickens, Batman!
Chris
Now it's my turn to retort that your endless contention that
"As far as I can see, your version of sexuality, albeit with
a more developed social critique than one would often see
attached to it, is much more akin to the current societal
and certain substantial feminist orthodoxies about the
healthy, mutual, power-free ideal of sex." Let's see: in
the U.S., those societal orthodoxies of "power-free" and
"mutual" would include the double standard; 96% of women in
one study reported unwanted sexual advances, ranging from
verbal harassment to rape, during the course of their
lifetimes; a marital rape exemption that has only recently
been overturned when feminists embarrassed male-dominated
legislatures enough to goad them into passing laws (with no
substantial effort to make them genuinely enforceable);
endemic date-rape; and -- well, let's turn now to ideas of
"healthy sexuality," in which merely glancing at the table
of contents for the famous Masters and Johnson _Human Sexual
Response_ gives one the veritable blueprint of sexuality
designed to reify masculinity, i.e., the weary ritual
trinity of erection, penetration, and ejaculation; booming
sales of Viagra to prop up genital function that does not
live up to male-supremacist ideals of manliness; dainty
television ads for products addressing the "problem" of
"occasional personal dryness" in women (maybe HIS insistence
on compulsive erection and penetration is the problem?); and
-- but let's turn now to best of all: the title of
Stoltenberg's book, _The End of Manhood._ Now, _there's_ a
social orthodoxy for ya! That one unites everyone from the
Promise Keepers, the Catholic priesthood, the political
parties and corporation presidents to sexologists (the
professionals whose motto might well read: Keep It Up!),
pornographers (whose product is popular only among the
marginal few who still support manhood in one way or
another), the Civil Liberties Union, and those among my
women undergraduate students who positively deplore the
"man-bashing" of those radical feminists.
Chortling chickens, Batman! I have not only the whole
society, but God Himself on my side. Who woulda thunk it?
As for "feminist orthodoxies," well, I would only point out
that it was radical feminism's refusal to ignore the
discovery that "sex" and "violence" were not the discrete
categories that male-supremacist propaganda made them out to
be that led them to quit trying to conform feminist theory
and practice to masculinist politics: liberalism (and its
marginal academic/bohemian variant, postmodernism) and
socialism. Hasn't made 'em popular, especially in academia.
Now, regarding the superficial similarity between the
liberal ideal of harmonious, apolitical gendered sexuality
and the radically ungendered ideal of nonhierarchical
sexuality, supported by a culture dedicated to gender
justice, I think that we can adapt socialist-feminist poet
Marge Piercy's words to elucidate the distinction between
my view and that of substantive liberal orthodoxy ("they"):
Watch who they beat and who they eat,
watch who they relieve themselves on,
watch who they own
The rest is decoration.
Cheers! :)
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: And on the subject of reviews...
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 19:23:13 +0100
My review of Chris Nottingham's The Pursuit of Serenity: Havelock Ellis =
and the New Politics, is now available on-line, with Chris's response, =
on 'Reviews in History' on the Institute of Historical Research website, =
at
http://ihr.sas.ac.uk/ihr/reviews/lesley.html
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: Review of book on the Russian Skoptsy
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 19:19:49 +0100
Reviewed by Irina Korovushkina Paert of
Laura Engelstein. _Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom. A
Russian Folktale_. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999.
xviii + 283 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index.
$29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8014-3676-1
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=3D8038962120646
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Charles Moser" <docx2@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Chicken ethics, a different perspective
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 00:02:56 -0700
Dear Mr. Hodgdon:
I have a different perspective on this discussion. My professional
career has been devoted to the study of S/M and S/M practitioners. As such,
I have come to know these individuals and their problems. Unfortunately,
many S/M practitioners have lost jobs, their homes, custody of their
children, and other basic human rights. Often the rationale for this
discrimination is the "feminist" belief, that the private acts in which
these consenting adults engage hurts others and the society. The hurt that
S/M practitioners feel does not seem to enter into the discussion.
You said that you have no hope of changing anyone's mind, I have no hope
of changing your mind. It is futile to try to change someone's religious or
political beliefs. Nevertheless, these beliefs have been used throughout
history to justify oppression and even genocide. Hopefully, people who are
fighting for their freedom, would not believe it is necessary to oppress
others.
You said that you were sorry that you would never live in a gender-free
world. I am sorry that I will never live in a sexually free world. I
support your right to live your life anyway you choose. I hope you can
create a gender free community, to live as close to your ideal as possible.
I hope that you will give S/M practitioners and other sexual minorities the
same consideration.
Take care,
Charles Moser, Ph.D., M.D.
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 09:22:14 -0400
From: Sheila McManus <smcmanus@yorku.ca>
Subject: Re: historiographical/review article suggestions
Hi everyone,
As much as I hate to interrupt the heated 'chicken ethics' discussion, I
need some suggestions for British or European historiographical or review
articles on the history of sexuality. I'm teaching a 4th year seminar this
year and the first week is on the historiography of the history of
sexuality. I've got Maynard's article on Canada and Freedman's on the
United States, and I'd like to find something comparable for Britain or
Western Europe.
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Sheila McManus
* * * * * * * * * *
Sheila McManus
Ph.D. Candidate and Sessional Instructor, Department of History, York
University
smcmanus@yorku.ca
___________________________________________________________________Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 07:34:14 -0700
From: Karen Duder <kduder@UVic.CA>
Subject: Re: historiographical/review article suggestions
Hi Sheila.
You might have a look at Valerie Traub's article "The Rewards of
Lesbian History," Feminist Studies 25, no. 2 (summer 1999), 363-394.
Traub discusses a number of recent works covering a wide period, from
the early Christian era to the eighteenth century.
Karen
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karen Duder PhD Candidate
Department of History Dept. Phone (250) 721-7382
University of Victoria Dept. Fax (250) 721-8772
P.O. Box 3045 Email kduder@uvic.ca
Victoria, B.C. V8W 3P4
CANADA
"Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer.
There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only
measurement relative. Relative to what is an important part of the
question." Jeanette Winterson, _Gut Symmetries_
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2000 17:54:48 EDT
Subject: Re: Chortling chickens, Batman!
Okay, Boy Wonder, nice to see you can match me for facetiousness, but that
last is more revelatory of you than current sexual politics. You remind me of
the character of Mr Mybug in Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm who saw
phallic symbols in everything everywhere. If I were a man of any intelligence
I would be mortally offended at being lumped into your unholy conspiracy of
cock-led automata who dedicate their lives to screwing women, in every sense
of the word. You deplore the status quo but throw up your hands in defeated
resignation at the uneducability of the male species. Yes, the world can be a
vile and dangerous place for women (but men too are on the receiving end of
violence engendered by masculine idiocy) but if one were to follow your
programme, all women and men should stay indoors and weep at the state of the
world instead of trying to change whatever they can change. And as a
long-term fan of Piercy, I suggest you go back and read some of her other
poems which celebrate sexual pleasure and sexual love, rather than co-opting
her to your genital-less agenda.
And Charles, beautifully put. Yours is a version much closer than Tim's will
ever be to a world in which *all* people are free to articulate a full range
of sexual and non-sexual relationships.
Chris White
aka Catwoman
___________________________________________________________________Date: Fri, 07 Jul 2000 16:18:40 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Rummaging around among the sale books at the campus bookstore, I found a
copy of Rictor Norton's The Myth of the Modern Homosexual, nestling among
the piles of pious Catholic devotional works. Since I am currently looking
for suitable readings for a course on Sex, Bodies and Families, in Europe
and the US, 1600-2000, intended for non-historians, I snapped it up with
alacrity.
I also wanted to read his critique of social construction, voiced sometimes
on this list. It seems to me that Rictor's real objection is to the sort
of top-down, text-based social construction that is often found among the
works of cultural historians and historians of science, rather than social
construction per se, but perhaps Rictor would like to elucidate a little.
In any event, I can warmly recommend it as a good read to any list members
who have yet to come across it. All of us are likely to have favourite
stories, not all of which make it between his pages, but it seems to me a
good general coverage. [I would have liked to see something about the
lutenist Arabella Hunt, who married a woman in 1680. And I was sorry he
didn't talk about the use of bona polari by Kenneth Williams and Hugh
Paddick, on the BBC radio show, Round the Horne, but that was doubtless
before he arrived in the UK. Two BBC tapes available, Rictor!]
More generally, however, I wondered if anyone has any thoughts on
collections of primary texts and introductory general textbooks that would
be suitable for an undergraduate audience, especially one composed of
non-historians with very limited acquaintance with the issues concerned.
David Harley
Dept. of History
219 O'Shaughnessy
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame IN 46556
219-631-7313
___________________________________________________________________From: "Histsex:For historians of sexuality" <histsex-owner@listbot.com>
Subject: List downtime
Message received from Listbot administration:
'ListBot will be temporarily down for planned maintenance between 11:30PM
PST July 8 through 5:30AM PST July 9, 2000. During this time, users will
not be able to log in, nor will the system send or receive mail. If
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We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause and thank you for
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Lesley
histsex-owner@listbot.com
___________________________________________________________________From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2000 15:04:19 +0100
Re a general texts reader - I think I recently suggested Bob Nye's Oxford
Reader on Sexuality. Includes primary and secondary texts and excellent
editorial contextualising.
Recent historical studies (slight blow of own trumpet):
The two volumes Eder, Hall and Hekma, Sexual Cultures in Europe (National
Histories and Themes in Sexuality) Manchester UP
and perhaps a bit too nationally and chronologically specific for your
purposes, L Hall, Sex Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880,
written as a textbook.
Details of these volumes can be found on my website
http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah/nwsflsh.htm
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 10:49:52 +0100
From: Cristina Santos <cristina@sonata.fe.uc.pt>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
At 16:18 07/07/00 -0500, David Nicholas Harley wrote:
>More generally, however, I wondered if anyone has any thoughts on
>collections of primary texts and introductory general textbooks that would
>be suitable for an undergraduate audience, especially one composed of
>non-historians with very limited acquaintance with the issues concerned.
I would highly recommend you to read basically any book from Jeffrey
Weeks. His last one, published early this year, is called Making Sexual
History, and gives a wonderful and straight-to-the-point contextualisation
of how sexuality came to be such an important issue of public discussion,
and its implications in our daily lives.
You could also take a look at that book from Steve Seidman (1997),
Queering Sociology (I'm not sure if this is the exact title, but anyway it
should be pretty close), which reflects upon how and why sex became
gradually a matter of study in social sciences. I bet your students will
enjoy both readings!
All the best,
Cris
Ana Cristina Santos
Centre for Social Studies
Apartado 3087
3001-401 Coimbra - Portugal
Phone 00 351 239855583
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 08:31:45 +1200
From: "Walter Cook" <Walter.Cook@natlib.govt.nz>
Subject: Re: Chortling chickens, Batman!
Chris, Here here !!!!
Walter
___________________________________________________________________Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2000 17:40:49 -0700
From: Jennifer Evans <be82312@binghamton.edu>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
David,
I am trying this text out for the first time this summer but think it
should be very accessible for an undergraduate class. It is the
english translation of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf's autobiography I Am
My Own Woman: The Outlaw Life of Charlotte von Malsdorf, Berlin's
Most Distinguished Transvestite (Cleis, 1995). It is an excellent
primary source documenting her life experiences in both Nazi and GDR
Berlin and can easily be coupled with Rosa von Praunheim's film of, I
believe, the same name.
Hope this helps,
Jennifer
--
Jennifer Evans
Department of History
SUNY-Binghamton
be82312@binghamton.edu
___________________________________________________________________Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2000 06:09:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: technotoy <technotoy@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
If you're interested in something on 18th-century
Germany, I can suggest my own book, "Warm Brothers:
Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe", which just
appeared with the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Especially the first couple of chapter might be of
interest to your undergraduates. Later ones deal more
specifically with texts from German literature.
Robert Tobin
Conrad-Blenkle-Str. 58
10407 Berlin Germany
(030) 4280 3109
___________________________________________________________________Date: Fri, 07 Jul 2000 21:43:13 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Final thought from Boy Wonder: Chortling chickens, Batman! (short)
Chris
"Boy Wonder"--toucher! Well done. But I notice that all
you could do with the rest of my post is mischaracterize its
substance, since I don't regard male-supremacist sexual
culture as a conspiracy against which resistance is futile.
If I thought that, I'd join 'em rather than trying to
preserve some way to try to beat 'em over the long haul. But
I've learned a lot from this thread -- not the least, here
at its end. It was perhaps a tactical error on my part to
resort to satire -- not wise on my part to play to the
gallery, when the gallery is yours. An important lesson for
surviving in academia. But I take away than that. And I
hope that there may be those of you out there who will hear
this side of the debate in a slightly different way, the
next time you hear it. If you do, then I've accomplished
something. If you don't -- well, I tried.
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 03:44:10 EDT
Subject: Final thought? Would be a shame....
Hi Tim
Ah, now you have me regretting the tone of my last. Written perhaps in
intemperate haste.... Having read back what we have written, I willingly
concede that I have mischaracterised your attitude to social opposition and
its worth, for which I apologise. My characterisation of you as 'Boy Wonder'
was not wholly satirical (tho' you gave my the riposte on a plate <g>) since
you are so d**n articulate and have forced me to exercise grey cells I'd
forgotten existed.
To address a more substantive point: perhaps at the root of this is a
fundamental disagreement not so much about gender, as about ideology. While
neither of us subscribes to a crude top-down model of dominant power, there
is a significant degree of difference of emphasis in our understanding of the
level of homogeneity of dominant power. If I am a Foucauldian of any kind, it
is in that the operation of power is flexible, variable, even localised, and
thus resistance to dominant ideology needs to be the same. Altho' this to my
mind derives from Gramsci more than any original thinking of Foucault. Thus
my repeated harping on the term reification as requiring a proper theoretical
and political grounding.
To what extent does your version of reification leave the individual with
agency, and if so, what kind of agency? If social construction is such a deep
and thorough process, where do we get the capacity to critique the status
quo? It seems to me that an understanding of this will go some way towards
extrapolating the extent to which we are merely reproducing dominant
structures and ideas, or what room we have for developing other, oppositional
structures.
I would regret it if I have succeeded in silencing you. The gallery may be
mine, but the floor is still open to you.
Chris
___________________________________________________________________Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 02:46:45 -0700 (PDT)
From: technotoy <technotoy@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Charlotte von Mahlsdorff
I love both the book and the Rosa von Praunheim film,
which by the way is the Praunheim film that has
appealed to my American students the most, but I do
suspect one might have to take a lot of the anecdotes
with a certain grain of salt.
Robert Tobin
Conrad-Blenkle-Str. 58
10407 Berlin Germany
(030) 4280 3109
___________________________________________________________________From: "Dr Gail Hawkes" <G.Hawkes@mmu.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 14:08:52 +0100
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
I wrote and have used my 'A Sociology of Sex and Sexuality' (Open
University Press:1996 ) with my undergraduates from a variety of
disciplines on my 'Sex Course' at MMU for past five years. They seem
to find it OK, she says tentatively..
Best wishes
Gail
Dr Gail Hawkes
Department of Sociology
Manchester Metropolitan University
Tel: +44 (0) 161 247 3464
Fax. +44 (0) 161 247 6321
___________________________________________________________________From: "Barb Marshall" <bmarshall@trentu.ca>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 11:23:53 -0400
I, too, have used Gail Hawkes' text with my 3rd year course in sexuality (in
a sociology department) and can say less tentatively that they find it more
than OK! I still think the most accessible introduction is the now-dated
(and I wish he'd do a new updated edition) 1986 Jeffrey Weeks' "Sexuality"
in the old Tavistock "key concepts" series.
***************************************
Barbara L. Marshall
Associate Professor
Sociology and Women's Studies
Trent University
Peterborough, ON
K9J 7B8
phone: (705) 748-1334
fax: (705) 748-1630
bmarshall@trentu.ca
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 13:22:50 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Thanks for help with textbook query, a further note
Many thanks for all the suggestions so far, which have been filed for
future reference. Any more will be gratefully received.
However, as is perhaps unsurprising on this list, all the suggested texts
principally concerned sexuality rather than the construction of bodies or
the shaping of the family over time. I wonder if anyone has come across a
text that combines at least two of these three themes, as I am inclined to
see them as having very close connections, at every level from the
psychohistorical to the social and political. I hope to be able to put
together a survey course that will address not only gender and sexuality
but also the social institutions that shape them, and it seems to me that
family structures and learned emotions should not be omitted.
If necessary, I will just have to put together a package, containing
extracts from books such as Vol.2 of A History of the Family, ed. Andre
Burguiere et al., but students seem to prefer having complete texts for
their secondary reading, on the whole.
Less creditably, since this is a Catholic university, a course with
"Family" in the title would sell better, enabling me to lure in large
numbers of unsuspecting students and therefore to be able to team-teach it
with a modernist! I'll do anything to avoid having to do too much thinking
about industrial society!
David Harley
Dept. of History
219 O'Shaughnessy
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame IN 46556
219-631-7313
___________________________________________________________________Subject: Re: Thanks for help with textbook query, a further note
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 16:37:56 -0500
From: "Michael J. Murphy" <mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu>
David-
I just read Joanne Finkelstein's The Fashioned Self (Temple, 1991) which
is out of print but offers an interesting thesis about the perseverance
of physiognomic knowledges about the body over time. Seems to offer many
of Butler's idea about the social construction of the body in a more
digestible language. The introduction would be particularly thought
provoking in any discussion of vision, gender and fashion.
Also the anthology Writing on the Body (Conboy, Medina, Stanbury) is
still in print and offers some great pieces, difficult to easy, but all
thought provoking.
I don't know if you're into the visual at all but Tamar Garb's latest
book Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siecle France is
highly commendable, quite accessible in language, and covers a great
scope from juste milieu to avante-garde visual culture.I have certain
minor problems with her underlying theoretical apparatus about the body
(she doesn't have a stable one) but for undergrads I'd use it for it's
integration of body-knowledges and visual-knowledges (of course enver
mutually exclusive pace Merlaeu-Ponty, Lacan, et al.)
I still find the chapter on panopticism in Foucault's Discipline and
Punish very approachable and eye-opening (pun intended? see for
yourself!) Also volume one of The History of Sexuality might be a little
difficult but the family plays a prominent role in both books as a
disciplinary agent and an institutional site of power-knowledge.
Good Luck!
Michael J. Murphy, M.A.
Doctoral Student, Dept. of Art History and Archaeology
Washington University, St. Louis
mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu
********************************
Any victim of queer-bashing will describe how the bashers came in a group
and were all armed with baseball bats or knives--straight men have
*enormous* respect for the homosexual male. --Mark Simpson
___________________________________________________________________From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 09:12:41 +0100
Yes, David, I agree that "Round the Horne" is delightful (though I never
heard the original), and I have a copy of the BBC tapes to keep me cheerful
on long road journeys. And I'm glad you're enjoying _The Myth of the Modern
Homosexual_, serendipitously discovered on the rubbish tip of history, as it
were!
On the subject of social constructionism, you're right that I object
particularly to the structural/post-structural linguistics branch of this
school of thought. For example, I do not believe for one minute that
sexuality (or sexual orientation, or even gender identity) is merely a
textual construct mediated by ideological discourse. Far too many objective
realities preclude the possibility of treating gender as a "text" (menarche,
ovulation, menstruation, child-birth and menopause to name but a few). Of
course I appreciate that sexuality is often constrained by surrounded
discourses (notably the law and religious morality), but I do not believe
that fucking in itself is a discursive practice. Most academics work in a
scholastic tradition and are besotted with words, which is why they have
fallen into the trap of thinking that a study of anti-homosexual texts (as
in the law) is equivalent to the study of homosexuality. They have
mistakenly conflated homophobia with homosexuality, which is perhaps the
basic error of all social constructionist thinking.
But my objections to the social constructionist position go much further
than disbelief at postmodern relativism. It seems to me that the social
constructionist position is reductionist; ahistorical; theory-led rather
than evidence-based; doctrinaire; scientifically ignorant; philosophically
lacking in rigour; often unfamiliar with any history before the
mid-nineteenth century; and too politically committed to be altogether
trustworthy as good history. Of course during the past 25 years social
constructionism has successfully entrenched itself as canonical orthodoxy --
the hegemonic discourse, no less -- and it is heresy to deconstruct it. But
as Michael Young observes in his rigorously scholarly book on _King James
and the History of Homosexuality_ (2000), speaking of the conventional
wisdom propagated by the social constructionist historians of homosexuality
Alan Bray, Jeffrey Weeks, and Alan Sinfield, no matter how often their
alleged truisms are repeated, they are not true. But the tide is turning.
I should perhaps hasten to add that I am fully aware that social constructs
do indeed exist and that they play a role in socialization. I recognize, for
example, that women are often encouraged to shoe-horn themselves into
culturally defined roles. Mary Wollstonecraft's analysis of the
infantilization of females in _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ is an
excellent example of the insights offered by this understanding. But
Wollstonecraft never questioned the existence of a natural category of
woman. I don't have a great argument with social constructionists who take
this soft approach to the issue, and who do not privilege these fairly
superficial *roles* as if they were radical *constructs* for which no *basic
category* or *nature* existed. My main argument is with hard-line social
constructionists who claim that sexuality in itself and sexual orientation
in itself and gender identity in itself are nothing more than social
constructs having no basic in objective reality, and who claim that the
repression/suppression model is unusable because there is no basic nature to
be repressed/suppressed. I find this position untenable.
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
Some Fallacies of Social Constructionism:
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/extracts.htm
___________________________________________________________________Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 09:40:07 -0500
From: "Michael J. Murphy" <mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu>
One of the problems I have with the general thesis of Rictor Norton's
last book lies in the following sentence.
>Far too many objective
>realities preclude the possibility of treating gender as a "text" (menarche,
>ovulation, menstruation, child-birth and menopause to name but a few).
In his appeal to an 'objective reality' of the body there is a rhetorical
slippage between material reality and cultural meaning.
I don't believe that any post-modernist/structuralist is arguing that
discourse *cretaes* the material reality of the body. I mean really,
that's silly. Even Judith Butler, a radical's radical, maintains the
matter of the body in her work. However, to my mind, the Posties are
concerned with how material reality is a product of social discourse in
that all our perceptions of 'objective reality' are *mediated* by
discourse. However would we recognize an objective reality that has not
already become cultural meaningful? Is not even the notion of, and the
search for, 'objective reality' a cultural discourse? Who decides and how
is it decided what constitutes the 'objective reality' of the body? What
instruments are used to perceive it? The eyes, hands, nose, ears,
fingers? The camera? We know that these have variously been situated as
objective instruments but are nevertheless thoroughly conditioned by
social knowledge.
Rictor wants to posit a transhistorical body. Fine. On its material
reality I'll concur. But he must concede that the very form and function
of that body has changed over time, alterations which can often be traced
through social discourse. But more important, knowledge about the body
has contributed to the shaping and forming of that body. While ovulation
has probably occurred for many women for eons, the term is a relatively
recent one. How does the naming of that process alter our understanding
of the ovulating body, and ultimately lead to its potential alteration? I
find it interesting that the only transhistorical bodily processes Rictor
names are those traditionally ascribed to females; I'm sure this was not
conscious, but his unconscious invocation of a transhistorical female
body concerns me. Mary Wollstonecraft did not question the 'natural
category of woman' (Rictor: did you really type that?) because there *is*
no natural category of 'woman.' Nevertheless, she was firmly situated
within discourses in which the category of 'woman' and her 'naturality'
were unquestionable. We're not.
According to his post, "fucking is not in itself a discursive practice"
as though fucking, like menses in his schema of the transhistorical body,
were an inevitable and unalterable function of the body! Or that there is
ever, or ever could be, 'fucking' as objective reality prior to
discourse. Only a man, for whom fucking is rarely if ever an involuntary
act, could have written this! On the contrary, fucking is nothing but
discourse. Perhaps he wants to render homosexuality as merely fucking.
I'd prefer not to. It is how, by whom, in what ways that (homosexual)
fucking becomes cultural meaningful (or certain kinds and situations of
fucking becomes homosexual) that are the interesting questions. We should
not confuse the temporal perseverance or superficial similarities of
certain relations of the body with the continuity of historical meaning
associated to those relations.
Michael J. Murphy, M.A.
Doctoral Student, Dept. of Art History and Archaeology
Washington University, St. Louis
mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu
"In episode #228, who or what is 'Foucauldian'? We have enclosed a
self-addressed stamped envelope for your convenience."
-Letter to Alison Bechdel, cartoonist of Dykes To Watch Out For
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Dalley-Crozier ,Dr Ivan" <i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 15:59:42 +0100
Dear Michael,
I am inclined to agree with you here, but Rictor will recall my position on
such matters from a debate from the early days of the list (on homosexuality
and its constructedness, or not). I am not too convinced, as Rictor puts
it, that 'the tide is turning'. There is surely more work to be done in the
social-constructivist turn (at least as far as medical history goes, and I
am sure that David would agree here, on the basis of his recent foray into
the topic in Social History of Medicine). Perhaps the tide is still ebbing
after all?? It should make for good fishing.
Cheerio, Ivan
============================================
Ivan Dalley Crozier,
i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk
"An entertaining essay might perhaps be
written on the sexlessness of historians;
but it would be entertaining and nothing
more: we do not know enough either about
the historians or sex."
--Lytton Strachey, 1931
============================================
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 10:57:36 -0500
From: Dar Weyenberg <dweyenbe@students.wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Dear Micheal Murphy;
I too had many problems with the previous post by Rictor Norton and was
wondering how to respond. Thank you for your response. While I could
quibble with a few of your comments (especially the conscious and
unconscious), overall I agree. Well said.
There is a wonderful little book by Denise Riley that might interest some on
this list.(1988). Am I that name?: Feminism and the cagetory of women in
history. Minneapolis: University of Wisconsin Press.
Riley explores the notion of 'womanness" over time (from a European
perspective).
She argues that that there is no one 'natural' catergory of women but an
identity that is produced as an effect of power (following Foucaults notion
of power).
Dar
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 14:49:03 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Rictor Norton writes:
I do not believe for one minute that
>sexuality (or sexual orientation, or even gender identity) is merely a
>textual construct mediated by ideological discourse. Far too many objective
>realities preclude the possibility of treating gender as a "text" (menarche,
>ovulation, menstruation, child-birth and menopause to name but a few).
David Harley:
Having recently committed the offence of an essay with both "rhetoric" and
"social construction" in the title, I am perhaps liable to be suspected of
an unduly interested position here. However, it seems to me that one does
not need to suppose that there is no "real" world out there in order to
recognize the extent to which we are unable to apprehend it without the use
of categories supplied, either by our existing culture or by our own
inventiveness. There is always a danger of retreating into the "Death and
Furniture" position, which attempts to refute social construction by citing
the Holocaust or by striking the table. The point is not that people did
not die in the gas chambers or that wooden objects do not exist, but that
our ways of thinking about such phenomena are shaped and constrained by our
concepts. Thus, the changing meanings of menstruation or menopause are
what concern us, surely, rather than the brute fact of their existence.
Rictor Norton:
Most academics work in a
>scholastic tradition and are besotted with words, which is why they have
>fallen into the trap of thinking that a study of anti-homosexual texts (as
>in the law) is equivalent to the study of homosexuality. They have
>mistakenly conflated homophobia with homosexuality, which is perhaps the
>basic error of all social constructionist thinking.
David Harley:
Rictor appears to be taking Foucauldian cultural historians for the whole
world here. Most historians do not believe that words have anything to do
with the matter. They believe that the archives are supplying them with
virtually unmediated access to the real world. On the other hand, most
social constructionists have nothing to say on the subject of sexuality,
but deal with completely different topics. As Ian Hacking has pointed out,
in "The Social Construction of What?", the expression "social construction"
is now so widely used and in so many different ways that its more rigorous
uses have been quite eclipsed.
Rictor Norton:
>But my objections to the social constructionist position go much further
>than disbelief at postmodern relativism. It seems to me that the social
>constructionist position is reductionist; ahistorical; theory-led rather
>than evidence-based; doctrinaire; scientifically ignorant; philosophically
>lacking in rigour; often unfamiliar with any history before the
>mid-nineteenth century; and too politically committed to be altogether
>trustworthy as good history.
David Harley:
I do not recognize this catolgue of offences as as a satisfactory
description of work in the social construction of scientific knowledge,
whatever problems I may have with some of the work in that field. Nor do I
see it as an adequate description of social constructionist psychology.
Rictor's argument appears to be with some writers who have adopted the
"social construction" rhetoric for the purpose of "unmasking" features of
the accustomed world for political purposes, as if showing social processes
at work somehow undermines the reality of the product of those processes.
If all our theories are social constructions, including social
constructionism itself, none of us have a sacred pinnacle from which to
throw stones.
Rictor Norton:
My main argument is with hard-line social
>constructionists who claim that sexuality in itself and sexual orientation
>in itself and gender identity in itself are nothing more than social
>constructs having no basic in objective reality, and who claim that the
>repression/suppression model is unusable because there is no basic nature to
>be repressed/suppressed. I find this position untenable.
David Harley:
This seems to be an extreme idealism based on some forms of French literary
theory rather than traditional social constructionism, which I would see as
basically neo-Kantian and therefore having rather less inclination to
dismiss out of hand the existence of something "out there" that resists our
categories. A Kantian idealism is rather more limited in its scope and
would not deny that some theories are better "fits" than others. Thus, a
social constructionist view of Copernicus would never deny the existence of
the earth we stand upon or the sun around which it rotates. A social
constructionist view of Freud would not deny that he did actually have some
patients. As far as "no objective reality" is concerned, I would suggest
that something that has been constructed socially (such as "race") is just
as real and can have just as powerful an effect in the world as anything else.
David Harley
Dept. of History
219 O'Shaughnessy
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame IN 46556
219-631-7313
___________________________________________________________________From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 23:36:06 +0100
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael J. Murphy <mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu>
To: Histsex:For historians of sexuality <histsex@listbot.com>
Date: 13 July 2000 15:46
>
>In [Norton's] appeal to an 'objective reality' of the body there is a
rhetorical
>slippage between material reality and cultural meaning.
>I don't believe that any post-modernist/structuralist is arguing that
>discourse *creates* the material reality of the body. I mean really,
>that's silly. Even Judith Butler, a radical's radical, maintains the
>matter of the body in her work. However, to my mind, the Posties are
>concerned with how material reality is a product of social discourse in
>that all our perceptions of 'objective reality' are *mediated* by
>discourse.
It is not true that all perceptions are mediated by discourse. If I want to
share my perceptions with you I will employ the facility of e-mail, as being
quite an effecient means of communication in the circumstances, but my
perceptions precede the use of e-mail and are not mediated by e-mail. I can
perceive a woman in the advanced stage of pregnancy without any discourse
mediating my perception. And more to the point, the woman will be aware of
this *objective reality* quite a lot sooner than me, and without any
mediation by discourse. In fact, a very large number of our perceptions
(unless we are academics) are sensual rather than discursive. Material
reality is not a product of social discourse. Social discourse can have an
effect on what value we may attach to that material reality, but it will not
alter the basic constituents of that material reality. A woman will continue
to menstruate regardless of whether or not her culture has a taboo regarding
the "uncleanness" of menstruating women.
> However would we recognize an objective reality that has not
>already become cultural meaningful?
By innumerable ways, experienced by us every day. I will begin to recognize
a cold (if not worse) by the first signs of a sore throat. Talking about the
weather may have cultural value, but I will recognize the coldness of an
east wind without the interposition of either culture or discourse, and I
will recognize it even without attaching any "meaning" to it because I can
recognize it as an objective reality that has no ideational content. In
fact, recognizing objective realities *before* they are determined to have
cultural meaning is one of the basic methods of empirical investigation.
> Is not even the notion of, and the
>search for, 'objective reality' a cultural discourse?
People do not normally "search for" objective reality. We simply experience
it. The experience of reality is not a cultural discourse.
>Who decides and how
>is it decided what constitutes the 'objective reality' of the body? What
>instruments are used to perceive it? The eyes, hands, nose, ears,
>fingers? The camera? We know that these have variously been situated as
>objective instruments but are nevertheless thoroughly conditioned by
>social knowledge.
>
No one "decides" what objective reality is: it just *is* whether or not we
have understood it or measured it. There are hundred of measuring
instruments and recording devices, that vary in the precision of their
measurements, and large masses of recorded empirical data can now be
analysed by computers so that we no longer have to depend upon the intuitive
fantasies of aprioristic theorizing.
>Rictor wants to posit a transhistorical body. Fine. On its material
>reality I'll concur. But he must concede that the very form and function
>of that body has changed over time, alterations which can often be traced
>through social discourse.
Bodies do evolve in the very long term, but the form and function of the
human body probably has not changed for 40,000 years, nor is it likely to
change much before we pollute the planet sufficiently to bring evolution to
an end and render the debate meaningless. Virtually all changes in the body
have occurred due to evolutionary principles (including chance mutation),
and are usually tied to increasing one's procreative chances of survival. No
alteration in the body has been caused by social discourse. (Of course one
can alter one's own body, e.g. through piercing or tattooing or whatever,
but these will not be carried over into one's offspring, and therefore
cannot be said to have altered *the* body.)
>But more important, knowledge about the body
>has contributed to the shaping and forming of that body. While ovulation
>has probably occurred for many women for eons, the term is a relatively
>recent one. How does the naming of that process alter our understanding
>of the ovulating body, and ultimately lead to its potential alteration?
The recent naming of ovulation is wholly irrelevant to either its existence
or process. The discussion of it within a scientific framework also has not
altered the lay-person's understanding of it, and is not likely to alter its
process. In earlier societies when not so many clothes were worn, ovulation
was easily recognized without a naming discourse: the pubes swell a bit and
get red, the whole body gets a bit fuller and more symmetrical (all bodies
are asymmetrical; during ovulation this assymetry is lessened, making women
look "more healthy", which is an advantage for procreation), the sex
pheromones are released and more readily smelled by males. The internal
process of ovulation temporarily (and cyclically) alters the female body to
send the clear signal to potential mates that now is the best time for a
successful impregnation. Today the whole thing is more easily observed when
cats or bitches go into heat. "Naming" has no relevance to the situation.
>I find it interesting that the only transhistorical bodily processes Rictor
>names are those traditionally ascribed to females; I'm sure this was not
>conscious, but his unconscious invocation of a transhistorical female
>body concerns me.
Actually, it was conscious, and quite deliberate.
>>"Mary Wollstonecraft did not question the 'natural
>>category of woman' (Rictor: did you really type that?) because there *is*
>no natural category of 'woman.' Nevertheless, she was firmly situated
>within discourses in which the category of 'woman' and her 'naturality'
>were unquestionable. We're not.
>
One reason for this example was to make the point that it is quite feasible
to adopt an "essentialist" view and nevertheless be fully supporting of
"women's" rights. Wollstonecraft held that in the case of women "art
smothered nature". The nature/nurture controversy was as common during her
day as during ours (and is of course still part of the
essentialist/constructionist debate). Historically, most advocates of
women's rights and women's suffrage were essentialist. Progressive arguments
for social change can be advocated by essentialists as well as by social
constructionists.
>According to his post, "fucking is not in itself a discursive practice"
>as though fucking, like menses in his schema of the transhistorical body,
>were an inevitable and unalterable function of the body! Or that there is
>ever, or ever could be, 'fucking' as objective reality prior to
>discourse. Only a man, for whom fucking is rarely if ever an involuntary
>act, could have written this! On the contrary, fucking is nothing but
>discourse.
You've lost me here.
> Perhaps he wants to render homosexuality as merely fucking.
>I'd prefer not to.
Quite true, it's not merely fucking, but it's a shame to leave fucking out
of consideration. It is also a mistake, I believe, to substitute "power" for
fucking in the analysis of sexuality. Because after the political or
cultural analysis is completed, you are still left with the factors that
make something distinctively *sexual* -- for which discourse cannot
adequately account.
> It is how, by whom, in what ways that (homosexual)
>fucking becomes cultural meaningful (or certain kinds and situations of
>fucking becomes homosexual) that are the interesting questions.
The world is full of interesting questions, and the biological constituent
of sexual orientation (including non-sexual and non-cultural factors such as
finger length ratio) is one of those interesting questions.
> We should
>not confuse the temporal perseverance or superficial similarities of
>certain relations of the body with the continuity of historical meaning
>associated to those relations.
>
>Michael J. Murphy, M.A.
>Doctoral Student, Dept. of Art History and Archaeology
>Washington University, St. Louis
>mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu
>
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 18:11:40 -0700
From: chris dummitt <cdummitt@sfu.ca>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Christopher Dummitt writes:
I find Rictor's vision of an apolitical and non-theoretical empiricism very
troubling. I would like to say 'naive' but clearly much thought has gone
into the position so 'troubling' is the more appropriate term. Empiricism
IS a theory. The notion that one can experience the world 'as it really
is' is itself a theoretical notion that is impossible to prove except by
circular logic (ie by invoking a belief in our ability to perceive the
world unmediated by cultural discourse to prove our ability to perceive the
world
unmediated by cultural discourse).
This logic is displayed in the exchange below:
Michael J. Murphy wrote:
>
>> However would we recognize an objective reality that has not
>>already become cultural meaningful?
Rictor Norton wrote:
>By innumerable ways, experienced by us every day. I will begin to recognize
>a cold (if not worse) by the first signs of a sore throat. Talking about the
>weather may have cultural value, but I will recognize the coldness of an
>east wind without the interposition of either culture or discourse, and I
>will recognize it even without attaching any "meaning" to it because I can
>recognize it as an objective reality that has no ideational content. In
>fact, recognizing objective realities *before* they are determined to have
>cultural meaning is one of the basic methods of empirical investigation.
Christopher Dummitt writes:
It seems to me that these examples - sickness and weather - could equally
prove the social constructionist argument. I wouldn't (and I don't know of
any other social constructionist who would) deny that sickness and weather
actually exist. But I would say that our 'experience' of them is not prior
to our understanding of them. The two processes occur simultaneously. You
can't separate between the event and the meaning. Take the (admittedly
extreme) comparison of a cold virus that infects both a medieval English
peasant and myself. I'm perfectly willing to admit that the virus could
be the same. But my experience of the event will be radically different
than my unfortunate predecessor - our understanding of appropriate
treatment, causes of the illnes, etc right on down the line to the feelings
of hope, despair, pain, suffering. We both experience a cold but our
experience is in no way identical. (And here the difference between similar
and identical is key. It seems to me that a major difference between social
constructionists and their critics is that the critics are quite happy with
similarities while the social constructionist seeks more precision). Both
of our understanding of colds are culturally mediated. And that cultural
mediation simultaneously, along with the virus, creates our experience of
the cold. There is no 'before' and 'after'.
I'm also perfectly willing to admit that my argument is politically and
theoretically based. What I'm not willing to admit is that Rictor's
argument is not.
>
>
Christopher Dummitt
Department of History
Simon Fraser University
off: (604) 291-3150
fax: (604) 291-5837
cdummitt@sfu.ca
___________________________________________________________________From: MillerJimE@aol.com
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 23:37:19 EDT
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
May I suggest that most of this debate is between academics with
categories and terminology so ossified they cannot possibly communicate, much
less debate profitably with each other.
May I also suggest a Darwinian model for language and categories (I hope
Darwin isn't too essentialist)? Various animals have ridiculous appendages
and displays for mating purposes, but the displays can only interfere with
survival so much before they begin to eliminate themselves. Likewise
adaptations to one environmental limitation can bend only so far before they
interfere with other necessary adaptations. Natural selection puts some
pragmatic limits on variability.
So it is with language and categories. Whatever categories we develop as
a culture, we still have a biologically and chemically determined reality
with which these categories must correspond to some degree. The categories
can depart from the realities only so far before they cause more problems
than the culture can bear.
So, when the categories are critiqued, the analysis should retain a
certain respect for them -- they survive and thrive in conditions too
rigorous for academic reconstructions. That doesn't make these categories
absolute; they can and should be critiqued. But maybe sometimes these common
categories retain some grasp of reality which academic reconstructions vainly
try to pretend away.
Maybe, huh?
Jim Miller
___________________________________________________________________From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 10:38:49 +0100
David Harley may well be correct in his suggestion that my summary of social
constructionism tars too many people with too broad a brush. It is probably
quite true that most practising social constructionists cluster at the soft
end of the scale rather than at the hard-line cutting edge. I think it is
also true that many people call themselves "social constructionists" without
really understanding the principles they are invoking by using that label.
This was true of anthropologists at the end of the 1980s, in the view of
Carole Vance:
"Although work in the cultural influence model contributed to the
development of social construction theory, there is a sharp break between
them in many respects. This different has not been recognized by many
anthropologists still working within the cultural influence tradition.
Indeed, many mistakenly seem to regard these new developments as
theoretically compatible, even continuous with earlier work. Some have
assimilated terms or phrases (like 'social construction' or 'cultural
construction') in their work, yet their analytic frames still contain many
unexamined essentialist elements. It is not the case that the cultural
influence model, because it recognizes cultural variation, is the same as
social construction theory." [basically, "construction" is a much more
radical concept than "influence") (Carole S. Vance, 'Anthropology
rediscovers sexuality: A Theoretical Comment', originally a paper presented
at the panel 'Anthropology Rediscovers Sex' at the 1988 annual meeting of
the American Anthropological Association.)
You [D.H.] claim that "most social constructionists have nothing to say on
the
subject of sexuality, but deal with completely different topics". That may
well be true. But within the field of sexuality studies, which is the
subject of this list, it seems to me that social constructionism looms
large. For instance, _Culture, Society and Sexuality_, edited by Richard
Parker and Peter Aggleton (London: Taylor & Francis/Routledge, 1999),
designed as a textbook for the British market, reprints all of the classic
social constructionist texts published in the 1980s, with the explicit
aim of promoting this approach to the study of sexuality. Parker is a
hard-line constructionist, Aggleton somewhat less hard-line and less
doctrinaire. _Conceiving Sexuality: Approaches to Sex Research in a
Postmodern World_, edited again by Richard Parker and by J. H. Gagnon (New
York and London: Routledge, 1995) did pretty much the same thing a bit
earlier, for the American market. Gagnon's social constructionist theory of
sexual "scripting" (developed in the late 1970s) is, I understand, still
quite important to the thinking of contemporary theorists of sexuality. The
most recent book on sexuality in general (as opposed to homosexuality
specifically) that I have read is _English Sexualities, 1700-1800_ by Tim
Hitchcock in Macmillan's Social History in Perspective Series, published in
1997. Most of the writers reviewed by Hitchcock are hard-line
constructionists (e.g. Thomas Laqueur), and Hitchcock himself is a very
hard-line constructionist, who regards bourgeois ideology as the sole
driving force of sexuality. I thought this book took "problematization" to
the acme of absurdity, and was pretty well worthless.
I discussed this issue on another list, and can report that Vern Bullough,
author of _Sexual Variance in Society and History_ (which was published in
1976, but Bullough is still very active and productive in the field of
sexual studies), took the sanguine view that the history of sexuality is
alive and well and its practitioners are relatively unscathed by
Foucauldianism. However, it seems to me that a great many recent historians
of sexuality -- or, more accurately, theorists of the history of sexuality --
regard Foucault's work as a "threshhold" that has "utterly transformed" our
historical understanding of sexuality. Thus Tim Hitchock, in the work I
mentioned above, asserts that "Perhaps the greatest single influence [in the
history of sexual desire] can be found in Michel Foucault's incomplete
writings on the topic. . . . By reformulating the history of sexuality,
Foucault in effect allowed historians to see sexual desire itself as a
product of a particular moment and a particular culture. . . . Foucault's
influence has been profound and universal, and . . . has created a
relatively clear new trajectory for the history of sexuality." etc. etc.
Hitchcock systematically favours the theories of social constructionist
historical theorists such as Henry Abelove and Thomas Laqueur over more
conventional historians of sexuality such as Lawrence Stone and Edward
Shorter. Laqueur in works such as _Making Sex: Body and Gender from the
Greeks to Freud_ (1990) had argued that elite medical discourse constructed
the two-body difference between men and women in an epistemic "shift"
between 1780 and 1820. But reactions to Laqueur easily demonstrated that the
two-body differentiation existed much earlier, in popular as well as elite
"discourse", so Hitchcock, who regards Laqueur as a second Foucault and
desperately holds onto Laqueur's "insights" even while he is forced to
acknowledge the flaws in his idol, has grudgingly modified this to a
"150-year shift" -- though how a 150-year period call be called a "shift"
beats me. It's absolutely fascinating to see how Hitchcock "modifies" the
hard-line social constructionist theories that have been demolished by
empiricist historical studies, without acknowledging that the theories were
no good to start with and should simply be jettisoned rather than
"modified."
In the field of gay and lesbian history (which is my main interest), it
seems to me that hard-line social constructionism still flows pretty
strongly (as Ivan Dalley Crozier suggested). One of the most recent books I
have (tried to) read in this field is _Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures,
and
Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance_, edited by J. Blackmore
and G.