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[taimatsu]

I have just had my first lecture of the year - the introductory session for Women's Writing 1. This involved defining feminism, mostly, and the horrible but not unexpected discovery that about six of the 60 predominantly female people in the room defined themselves as feminist. Gaaaaah!

Also Gaaaaaah was the thing where the lecturer was talking about an essay on basic feminism which discusses the terms 'feminist' 'female' and 'feminine', and dismissed biological sex - 'female' - as binary 'apart from a few hermaphrodites and things'. I was so cross. I know a variety of people who are women but for whom the biological clues to 'sex' are not straightforwardly female - whether that's because of a chromosomal disorder, or physical intersexedness, or being transsexual/transgendered. The lecturer has no idea if one of those people is in the room, and I was cross that she made them invisible and used what I suspect is rather an inappropriate term for the biologically different. She's my seminar leader so I might be able to tackle her about it tomorrow, though it's tricky when I'm not in that group myself.

Similarly, she was talking about the prevailing image of feminism as all about 'hairy humourless lesbians'; while it's *true* that that's what people think, what if I *had* been a hairy lesbian? It really sounded very dismissive, and her talk didn't make any compensatory mention of the contributions lesbian community has made to the women's movement.

I think I sound way too 'right-on' here, but then the whole point of the lecture was to make the girls who go 'eww, I'm not a feminist!' think again. Maybe it ought to make me think again about saying 'erk, I'm not one of those radical queer folks!' (Actually, I think I'm not, but I get the feeling if I make the fairly basic points above about sex and gender non-hegemony, I'll be thought of as one.)

It makes me nervous to think of saying any of this in a seminar, but I want that to be a safe(r) space where I can talk about, you know, lesbians and queer politics if it's relevant without being afraid to come out. *sigh*

Thoughts most welcome. Anyone got any experience with feminist literary criticism or feminist writing in general? I'm making this public so I can link to it in a community.

Comments

[thinkstoomuch.livejournal.com]

I'd guess it comes down to how she said it. It could have been unhelpfully or even insultingly dismissive, but from what you have described, it could have been meant in a number of other inoffensive ways. So, be careful when you talk about it with her - which I think is something worth doing. You tend to be very polite and well reasoned, so I expect you were always intending to be careful, and I didn't need to say that at all :)

Re lists of traits, I think we are mostly agreeing, but I'm guessing I mean much closer to 100% with "vast majority" than you do with "expect". I don't think, in any historical period, that you could have written a list of masculine traits that would be as frequently adhered to as a list of bio. sex male traits. Eg, there were/are cultures where male poets would still normally be expected to be emotional/sensitive even when other men would not. So, emotional/sensitive would be on the F list yet a significant subset of men would have that trait, in a socially acceptable way. With biological sexual traits, it's pretty easy to make useful lists of traits where the number of people having 100% of the traits on one list and 0% on the other is very high; much higher than gender traits.

However, with gender in general, I suspect we have different opinions. Firstly, "social construct" to me is a bit hazily defined. To me it is kind of the "nuture" in Nature vs Nuture. Does that make sense? If so, we might strongly disagree here... You imply with "there's still some way to go" that gender should be, or is, entirely independent of biological sex (I may well be reading too much into this!), and I don't think that will ever be the case unless it is forced, which I find undesirable. There's strong evidence that *some* traits which I've heard given as part of gender are very strongly linked to biological sex. Of course, this might mean that these shouldn't be considered gender traits, but I don't think that's a common argument. From what I understand it to mean, gender does seem to be undeniably *partially* a social construct, but equally not wholly one.

[taimatsu]

Yes, you're right that the sex-trait list is much more rigid than the gender-trait list. :)

I don't think that gender is *entirely* independent of biological sex - but I think that we are still in a situation where many people feel prevented or are prevented from doing things because they are the 'wrong' gender, and I think that is not right. Clearly there are physical differences between men and women, and our minds and our bodies are not independent and so we would expect that men's and women's minds and tendencies might differ along gender lines too. But this is to generalise, and people are individuals; what I would like to see is a society in which people can do what they like and what they are best at and be equally treated, regardless of what their gender or their sex is, because there are always individuals who do not fit the generalisation.