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Lawrence: You don't like or trust academia. We get it. Care to tone it down a bit? Out of interest, do you have the same distrust of the also-recent airy-fairy academic discipline of quantum physics?
Todd: The "Americans" thing was a gag, in reference to Lawry's statement that most Americans, at least, determined gender by sex. I enjoyed the idea of America as a bastion of decency in a polygendered world. Plus, of course, the irony that up until a few centuries ago many Americans understood perfectly well the idea of a third gender, before the Europeans turned up and wiped them out, thus placing L's insistence that actually these third genders weren't genders at all at the end of a long history of civilisation. No disrespect was meant to actual Americans.
Lots of meaty questions here - makes me wish I was a gender theorist, really.
1.) "often arbitrarily?" when is gender not arbitrary, given your arguments above? You certainly seem to discount the possibility of their being any "essence" ( a dirty word, I know, but more, below) to gender. What's a non-arbitrary gender?
Well, in terms of second-order gender ascription to the sea (she), because it possesses "feminine" characteristics - turbulent, irrational, zoetrophic; you could say that the gender ascribed there is clearly not arbitrary.
In other cases, gender is not ascribed arbitrarily because of rules of grammar. In Latin, if a word is second declension, it will be masculine. That's just a rule, which is simultaneously systemic and arbitrary. Likewise, abstract nouns ending in "tion" in French, IIRC, tend to be feminine, so one being feminine, while arbitrary in broader terms, is non-arbitrary within the construction of the language. (Note - I think a lot of confusion here is because there is an assumption that English is not gendered because it is not inflected. Worth thinking about).
As for non-arbitray assignations of gender outside language structures - well, see below...
2.) "...gender is a set of ideas, processes and performances surrounding terms such as "masculine", "feminine" and "neuter", among other possibilities, which are themselves outcroppings of formal grammar." - This sentence, as well as the use of "cultural overlay", implies to me that you believe that grammatical gender precedes gender roles. By modifying "grammar" with "formal," you also seem to take the weird position that the codifying of grammar also codified gender roles.
Not what I meant to get across at all (which means I am going to skip most of your discussion of Saussure as not strictly relevant, I fear). Sorry.
My point was that gender, used non-grammatically but in a meaning growing from the menaing of "gender" in formal grammar (which does not mean "proper" English, or anything else - if we were being Saussurean, the grammar would be langue and all instances of speech parole regardless of "properness") represents the ideas, processes and performances associated as "masculine", "feminine", "neuter" and so on, *those terms* being grammatical. (and you can have grammar without grammarians - in retrospect, "formal" may be causing unnecessary ambiguity there".
Therefore, gendered pronouns did not precede gender roles. I still don't entirely understand what "gender roles" means in this discussion. Nor did they precede gender, at least not for our purposes. Since some languages understand a difference between man and woman without necessarily having gendered pronouns (did somebody mention Hungarian? I think perhaps some Creoles also), I think we can assume that the two do not exist in that relationship.
Otherwise...I'm not an ur-philologist. I have no idea whether the concept of gender came into language before the gendered pronoun (or indeed gender inflection, which is rather more important - *every* noun or adjective in many language has or takes an inflected gender. This gender may be arbitrary (for example, the Ancient Greek word "patria", meaning a clan, is clearly derived from "pater", meaning "father", but is itself feminine) or may be decided according to whether it is "masculine" or "feminine". Search me how this threw down at start of play, but I think we can say with confidence in these latter days that sports cars are called "she" because women are called "she".
Now, clearly we can observe certain characteristics and behaviours that appear to be sex-based in our animal brethren. So, male gorillas have penises, and are larger than female gorillas, who have vaginas, menstruate and lactate. Male dolphins and female dolphins differ physically in various ways. Male dolphins and female dolphins also adopt different roles and perform different tasks (actually, I have no idea what dolphins do for kicks, but let's go with it). The problem lies when we start trying to work from, say, chimpanzee behaviour to human behaviour, or possibly, depending on what either term means, from sex roles to gender roles, because the question of what is "natural" and what is "constructed" becomes more and more complex. Female chimpanzees, for example, have menarche, but I doubt anyone would say of a chimpanzee undergoing menarche that they were "becoming a woman". Likewise, there was a Victorian scientific theory that women were not physically able to learn as men did - their brains were *naturally* unequipped for it, and another that homosexual men were in fact another sex. But the process of menarche has become socially and culturally contructed by humans in many different ways.
And, just as gender is now seen (although not perhaps by "most people", before L. jumps in) as no obstacle to voting, or working, or for that matter staying at home and raising children, the cultural and social (and, due to a better understanding of biology and advances in medical tech, the physical) associations of gender are undergoing a process of reevaluation, as they periodically do (see the Europeans arriving in the New World, or the vote going to women in Britain, or Roe vs Wade, perhaps).
So, long story short, gender roles (whatever they may be), social roles, physiology, language, culture, history, and so on. All things that feed into the construction of gender, with none as chicken *or* egg.
As for what gender is for....well, that's an awkward one. Back in the day, of course, it was vital for working out who could own property or vote, and is still used as a distinctor of suitability (remember the Australian activist arrested for using a women's toilet? Anyone got that link?) For example, although Lawrence seems to believe that the only thing Niles Crane and Rambo have in common is their biology, they are also both able to enlist to face frontline combat in the US military, whereas at present neither Nancy Drew nor Buffy the Vampire Slayer could. Whereas Nancy and Buffy would be more likely to be assigned custody of the children after a divorce, if Niles or John challenged that ruling they woudl be statistically more likely to prevail. They could also be full members of the Savages Club in London. A century ago, Niles and John would be able to vote, and Nacny and Buffy would not be able to own property after marriage. A few centuries hence, gender as a way to categorise people may be utterly hopeless, forcing us to fall back on distinction of hair colour or height (and making the Potuses of the Brave New World ask "What of you go home with a tall redhead, and they turn out really to be a brunette with a wig and stack heels? How would you feel?" if we want to identify someone.
This is, after all, one possible reason why transgendering/transvestism and other such maters are apparently more open and/or widespread - until fairly recently, the entitlements to which being a man or woman allowed access were so distinct that it would be very hard to provide a convincing case that adopting the trappings of another gender was *not* intending to defraud.
As this difference is (hopefulyl) elided, the legislative status of being a man or a woman might also, just as (theoretically) the US justice system recognises no distinction between black or white defendants (another binary distinction, and another one that seems ill-equipped in many ways to apply equally and with equality to the many different possible setups - anyone want to have a go at "passing"?). At that point - where there is no vested interest in gender as a differential construct - things might get interesting. |
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