11. Gender & Body: Sex vs gender?

Welcome to Section 11 of Culture, Body, & Mind an upper-level undergraduate anthropology course. This week we consider anthropological critiques of the concept of "biological sex".

Revision: Sex & Gender

In section 10, we treated gender as cultural and sex as real. For instance we read Nanda (p.3), who defines "gender" as follows: "gender refers to the social, cultural, and psychological constructions that are imposed upon the biological differences of sex". So Nanda implies that imagined gender is fastened upon the reality of sex.

In other words, my wife has a baby, I see it has a penis, that is the baby's real sex. So I identify the baby as "boy" and as "he" grows up so I give "him" blue shorts to wear. Pretty soon "he" starts identifying himself as a boy too as do others. In this way an imagined quality "male" is applied to biological reality (the baby with a penis and y-chromosome).

In this view, sex is biologically determined: xx chromosome = woman; xy = man. Gender
 is the socially constructed ‘bits’ we add on top of sex. For instance, men should be strong, women demurring. This week we question whether sex is real.

Is sex real?

We read Sharyn Graham in Section 11 on the Bugis five gender system. Graham explained this in terms of male and female. But as she points out in a later publication, there is no need to view sex as real. Discussing a US court case in which "a judge in Oregon allowed a person to legally choose neither sex and be classified as “nonbinary,”" Graham writes:

For many thinkers, such as gender theorist Judith Butler, requiring everyone to choose between the “female” and “male” toilet is absurd because there is no such thing as sex to begin with. According to this strain of thinking, sex doesn’t mean anything until we become engendered and start performing “sex” through our dress, our walk, our talk. In other words, having a penis means nothing before society starts telling you that if you have one you shouldn’t wear a skirt (well, unless it’s a kilt). Nonetheless, most talk about sex as if everyone on the planet was born either female or male. Gender theorists like Butler would argue that humans are far too complex and diverse to enable all seven billion of us to be evenly split into one of two camps.

One theorist who has applied this idea is Helliwell.

Helliwell

 In Western understandings of rape, women’s genitalia and sexuality are frequently understood as inherently vulnerable and subject to brutalization, while men’s are inherently brutalizing and penetrative. Do the Gerai, a community in Indonesian Borneo share this conception? One night a man broke into a woman’s room through a window and, laying his hand on her shoulder, told her to “be quiet”. What happened next? Was this understood as an attempted rape? Why? Why not?

Read Helliwell, C 2000, ""It's only a penis": Rape, feminism, and difference", Signs, v. 25, no. 3, pp. 789-816 and find out.

Trigger warning: This reading explores ideas of genitalia and rape and might be traumatic. Contact me to arrange alternative reading if you're worried.

Example of the anthropological perspective

I now want to digress and return to the theme of the anthropological perspective.  Can you see how  Helliwell's article "It's only a penis" applies the anthropological perspective? The analysis is based on a story of how, one night a man broke into a woman’s room through a window and, laying his hand on her shoulder, told her to “be quiet”. The women of the village thought this set of events was laughable. Helliwell describes how, for the Gerai, penises are not weapons that deflower innocent virgins. Rather they are vulnerable, almost pitiable, appendages. You can see the principles applied as follows:

*Relativism: Helliwell was initially shocked at what she viewed as an attempted rape; but she surrendered her Western perspective of the events temporarily. 

*Understanding (verstehen): This relativism allowed her to understand that the Gerai understand an unwelcome nocturnal sexual advance could not be equated with rape.

*Reflexivity: This understanding caused her to critique the contemporary Western understandings of sexuality and rape; even to critique her own feminist principles.

* Ethnocentrism:  Helliwell avoided see the actions from the Western perspective.

* Holism: Helliwell drew on larger notions of procreation and agriculture to explain local understandings of the penis.

* Qualitative : Helliwell used very few stats, instead drawing on local Gerai understandings.

* Fieldwork. Helliwell lived with Gerai for over one year, learned their language, participated in everyday life etc. 

*Comparison: Helliwell used various anthropological concepts like "discourse" and "difference" to approach another culture.

*Essentialism: Helliwell does not say that the Gerai are a developing or backward people; she avoids cliches and stereotypes in describing their culture.

OK so that's an example of the anthropological approach applied to a specific context.