Topics Gender

Question I was reading an article where constructivist feminist views on gender were being discussed, and an example was given on how gender was constructed, how being a boy or a girl had nothing to do with physical bodies, and how physical bodies themselves are constructed by society. The text is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves discursively constructed: they are the way they are, at least to a substantial extent, because of what is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are classified. Sex assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative. When the doctor calls a newly born infant a girl or a boy, s/he is not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act. In effect, the doctor's utterance makes infants into girls or boys." Isn't this kind of thinking somehow flawed? Surely, if the child was born with male genitals and the doctor said "It's a girl!", the parents would be briefly confused, perhaps ask the doctor what he means, and then go on happily considering the child a boy. Even if not, there have been many cases of parents trying to raise a child as a member of the opposite sex, and these efforts, correct me if I'm wrong, have never really led to a child being totally and completely a "typical" member of the intended sex; rather, there always seems to have been conflict, resistance. What's more, if the doctor is the originator of the child's boyhood, how does the doctor decide to pronounce the child into boyhood in the first place? How can the physical body, or even understanding of it, be totally constructed if the doctor is able to see the male genitals without knowing whether the child is a boy or a girl? More broadly, how can the physical world be constructed by society's and individuals' perception? Unless, that is, the physical world is all the dream of a single person - but surely most social constructivists don't take metaphysical solipsism as their base assumption.

Accepted:
October 7, 2010

Comments

Most constructivists think that assigned sex has something do with physical bodies; but how physical/biological information is incorporated into gender categories can vary depending on cultural, historical, pragmatic etc interests.

Genitalia are one way in which we assign gender, but not the only way; we recognize, for example, that genetic males can have external genitalia indistinguishable from those of "normal" women (Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome), and that genetic females can have masculinized genitalia (Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia). There are also true hermaphrodites (individuals with both ovarian and testicular tissue). And then there are transsexuals who look one way and yet are "gendered" another way. There have been some cases of parents/doctors choosing the gender of an ambiguous infant, and sometimes the gender identification takes, sometimes it does not (we do not all have an inborn gender identification that resists change, although many of us do, and for most of us it coincides with physical sexual characteristics).

Some interesting reading on these topics--Alice Dreger's work on intersex (you can find it at www.alicedreger.com) , Anne Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the Body and Joan Roughgarden Evolution's Rainbow.