Tristan Potter

2. Gender Theory - Contemporary

Philosophy, science, and society have come a long way since the initial theories of Aristotle and St. Augestine. Simone de Beauvior critiqued the old Western men:

Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also includes hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman’s body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularizes it. “The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,” Aristotle said. “We should regard women’s nature as suffering from natural defectiveness.” And Saint Thomas in his turn decreed that woman was an “incomplete man,” an “incidental” being. This is what the Genesis story symbolizes, where Eve appears as if drawn from Adam’s “supernumerary” bone, in Bossuet’s words. Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being.¹

De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp2014

Discussions surrounding the philosophy of gender have come a long way since the days of Aristotle and St. Augustine. Although historical interpretations of gender have continued to broadly influence our culture, modern and contemporary philosophers have expanded the discipline, providing more nuanced understandings of human biology, psychology, and sociology. Looking at the works of Simone De Beauvoir, Michael Foucault, Suzanne Kessler, Wendy McKenna, and Judith Butler we will investigate:

• What is gender? Where does it come from?
• How do we understand claims of gender authenticity if there is no biological dichotomy between sexes?
• Is gender natural or constructed, and what does this mean for contemporary society?
• Do these questions even have a relevant answer in current society?

Through our investigation, we will discover that theories of gender have been varied, and that gender is viewed as a subjective experience of identity that is created by repeated performances made by individuals.

We’ve established that gender is a subjective experience that is constructed as a sustained performance, but what does this mean for contemporary society?

Revisiting our initial questions going into this exploration:

• What is gender? Where does it come from?
• How do we understand claims of gender authenticity if there is no biological dichotomy between sexes?
• Is gender natural or constructed, and what does this mean for contemporary society?
• Do these questions have a relevant answer in current society?

We still don’t have a concrete answer to some of these, but perhaps the answers are less relevant than we originally believed. How can we move forward where our ideas of each other are not informed by our stereotypes of a particular role, and be more intentional and thoughtful with our interactions?

Moving forward it is important to recognize that popularized ideas surrounding gender are a disservice to society. We as a global community can do better, and should work to bring an intersectional and progressive view of gender into more mainstream view.

A more important consideration is if we are even capable of fully investigating and changing the system. For those of us who live within the systems that we are aiming to critique, we come to the question how we can have the knowledge to critique it.

“What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable”²

(Lorde, Sister outsider: essays and speeches, pp25)

• Simone De Beauvoir - a critique of historical Western philosophy

  As we saw in the posts on the Western history of gender, philosophers largely viewed women as flawed humans, but classified men as practically divine and supremely logical beings operating beyond their mortal coils.

• Kessler and McKenna - the subjective categorization of gender

  Kessler and McKenna observed the importance of determining another person’s gender in their work “The Primacy of Gender Attribution.”

• Judith Butler – Gender as a performance

  Judith Butler builds off of previous research to build a theory of gender as a flexible and changing expression of the self, as opposed to a stable identity.

• Michel Foucault – who decides the categories?

  When discussing the power of characterization and categorization, Michel Foucault is the contemporary authority on the subject.