Gender and Ideology
For a Marxist critique of gender ideology
Abstract: The purpose of this
paper is to discuss the issue of gender ideology in a critical and Marxist
perspective. Criticism of the gender ideology is now a must, as well as present
their social roots and their relationship to a particular historical period.
Based on the critical analysis of the work of Joan Scott and his inspiring
sources, especially Bourdieu, it seeks to show the ideological roots of gender
conception.
Keywords: Gender, Ideology,
category, Marxism, Poststructuralism, domination, sex.
The present paper aims to discuss
the issue of gender ideology. We won’t do an archeology of genre term, as some
have done (Stolke, 2004), nor will pursue its etymological roots, nor its past
uses, but only its recent use and its ideological character. The critique of
gender ideology is, nowadays, a necessity as well as present its social roots
and its bond with a certain historical period.
Before we begin, let’s clarify
what we mean by ideology, since this is a polysemic term. Here we use the
Marxist conception of ideology (Marx and Engels, 1991), according to which it
is a systematization of false consciousness, that is, a illusory thinking
system. Ideology is a systematic way of false consciousness produced by the
ideologists. What we term as gender ideology is the conception that places the
construct
“gender” as a fundamental term of the analysis of the issue of women and even
of society as a whole.
We won't present here the most diverse
works that discuss and use the construct “gender”. We will elect one of the
most cited and influential works on this issue for analysis, although other
references are made throughout this text. It is the text of the historian Joan
Scott (1986), Gender: A Usefull Category
of Historical Analysis. Joan Scott presents in her text an overview of
different conceptions of feminist thought and of the use of the construct
(which she denominated category) genre. The various concepts are presented descriptively,
with superficial observations, and the author's point of view is presented
peripherally, with a minimum contribution to the discussion around the issue
that is proposed to treat. In fact, this defect to take long descriptions of
feminist conceptions, consisting of all or almost all of the text, is quite
common and is repeated in Scott's article. She states that the term gender in
its most recent use occurred among American feminists, “who wanted to insist on
the fundamentally social quality of distinctions based on sex”. This use was
aiming to reject biological determinism that would be implicit in the use of
the terms “sex” and “sexual difference”. The term gender would present a
relational view and would present men and women in reciprocal terms, preventing
the separate study of both. But the author points out that more important than
that is that gender “was a term offered by those who claimed that women’s
scholarship would fundamentally transform disciplinary paradigms” (Scott, 1986,
p. 1054). A new methodology and epistemology would be with the term gender,
giving it meaning. However, this position did not come right away:
For the most
part, the attempts of historians to theorize about gender have remained within
tradicional social scientific frameworks, using longstanding formulations that
provide universal causal explanations. These theories have been limited at best
because they tend to contain reductive or overly simple generalizations that
undercut not only history’s disciplinary sense of the complexity of social
causation but also feminist commitments to analyses that will lead to change
(Scott, 1986, p. 1054).
After that, the author criticizes
the descriptive uses of those who use the term gender, as well as analyzes the
feminist conceptions starting from the perspective of the origin of patriarchy,
of Marxism, until reach the post-structuralism and the American and British
approach of “relation of object”. She makes some pertinent criticisms of some
of these conceptions, but is rather superficial and does not connect more
effectively with her own conception. However, what interests us here is
precisely Scott's position. In this context, it is crucial her definition of
gender:
My definition
of gender has two parts and several subsets. They are interrelated but must be
analytically distinct. The core of the definition rests on an integral
connection between two propositions: gender is a constitutive elemento of
social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and
gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power. Changes in the
organization of social relationships Always correspond to changes in
representations of power, but the direction of change is not necessarily one
way (Scott, 1986, p. 1067).
According to Scott, this
definition involves four related elements: 1) the culturally available symbols
evoke symbolic representations; 2) there are normative concepts that present
interpretations regarding the meaning of the symbols, in order to reduce and
contain their metaphoric possibilities; 3) the new conception task is to
overcome the notion of fixity and timelessness of the binary gender
representation, revealing its connection with politics, with the institutions
and social organization; 4) The subjective identity or the “gendered
identities” are built, and it's needed to relate it to “a range of activities,
social organizations, and historically specific cultural representations”
(Scott, 1986, p. 1068). She reveals the key to her conception (Scott, 1986, p. 1069):
The first part
of my definition of gender consists, then, of all four of these elements, and
no one of them operates without the others. Yet they do not operate
simultaneously, with one simply reflecting the others. A question for
historical research is, in fact, what the relationships amont the four aspects
are. The sketch I have offered of the process of constructing gender
relationships could be used to discuss class, race, ethnicity, or, for that
matter, any social process. My point was to clariy and specify how one needs to
think about the effect of gender in social and institutional relationships,
because this thinking is often not done precisely or sistematically. The
theorizing of gender, however, is developed in my second proposition: gender is
a primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated. Gender
is not the only field, but it seems to have been a persistent and recurrent way
of enabling the signification of power in the West, in Judeo-Christian as well
as Islamic tradicions.
Thus here we have a particular
ideology of genre that will be widely used by researchers of various human
sciences and become a great reference, both in academic thinking in this area
as of feminist thought. Thereby, this ideology arises of the refusal of
biological determinism, of essentialism, and ends up proposing a paradigmatic
transformation, presenting gender as a cultural construction and is in the
founder field of power relations. This conception is ideological, that is,
false, although, like every ideology, has moments of truth.
The refusal of biologism is
important and necessary, however, when extrapolating this and presenting a
rejection of “biological” (we would say, of corporeality and its importance) –
although this was not explicitly stated, but it was practiced in the rest of
the speech –, we have an ideological production. The social status of women in
modern society is not exclusively derived from its physical/organic
constitution and this is true, but is false from there to deny its existence or
relation to this process. Obviously this will be the starting point for other
ideologies even more misleading and bordering the absurd.
The criticism of biologism, with regard to women's issues, moreover, is nothing
new as it was born with Simone de Beauvoir (1978) in the 40s of the 20th
Century and contemporary references add nothing and not go beyond the level
presented by her, unless in a retrograde direction.
What she denounces in the other
approaches is precisely what she does. She provides a universal causal
explanation and held “reductive generalizations” and “overly simple”. The
determinism of gender is an ideological creation not only simplistic, but
dogmatic, as it does not question and reflect on its own fundamentals. It is a
determinism and a reductionism. And it is nonetheless revealed the disregard of
historical materialism or, as is common, reduce it to more simplistic and dogmatic
formulations, ie exchange it for what it's called “vulgar Marxism”, far short
of Marx.
However, the most problematic
element of Scott's conception is in her pursuit of paradigmatic transformation,
which is based on the idea that gender is the primary way to give meaning to
the relations of power. The basis of such a theory is not held anywhere. References
to Eve and Mary (Christian tradition), or any stereotype of women, outside the
context in which it occurs, not establish nothing. The quotes of thinkers
considered representatives of conservative thought, contrary to the French
Revolution, as Burke, Bodin, among others, can not be generalized, if only
because it is a critique of the Enlightenment and the bourgeois revolution of
pre-bourgeois point of view. And it is nonetheless interesting as several women
authors derive their ideas in the speeches of other women authors (or men authors,
in rare cases) and not in concrete reality (Scott, 1986; Stolke, 2004; Butler,
2003). These conceptions are based on a unquestioned and
unquestionable, that is, a dogma, which reveals a metaphysical abstraction and
that does not explain anything. Taking the specific case of Scott, we have
gender as “primary field” in which or through which “power is articulated”. In
addition to the statement, no justification, other than a brief reference to
the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The genre here is a priori unquestioned, a dogma, without any justification.
The term gender is a metaphysical
abstraction when seeking to transform it from category to concept,
and so loses all its value. And this is even more serious when one want to put
it as the determination of power relations. Obviously, no substantiated reasons
is given for such priority to “gender” while instituting concept of social
reality and power relationships. The author is content to appeal to Bourdieu
and his reflections. Bourdieu condemns the non-historicity (“naturalization”,
that is, make natural, something that is history), and at the same time does it.
This is due to the fact that he never performs an analysis of the concrete
reality of capitalist society, but purely presents his metaphysical
abstractions about symbolic power, accompanied by his empiricism or its
ideology of “fields” which serves as a model to think the “masculine domination”
(Bourdieu, 2002), an undue extrapolation. In Bourdieu's approach, the
metaphysical abstraction meets the empirical that comes to confirm it, creating
a dichotomous but homologous vision where isolated incidents of all serve as
examples of metaphysical abstractions of symbolic violence and the like.
One can not think man (male
gender) and women (female gender) as arbitrary cultural constructions. The
representations, real or illusory, according to Marx (Marx and Engels, 1991), are
given from concrete social relations. Everyday representations and ideologies
about female gender (and male gender), are not arbitrary products of “culture”
or “power”, these two metaphysical entities that dominate the anthropological
contemporary discourse or post structuralist, whereas both culture and power of
this ideology appears as something non-historical, indeterminate, asocial. The
perception of the female gender consists historically and socially, but it's
needed to discuss in which historical period and social context it occurs, as well
as understand what is the class position of whom presents it. Let's see what
Bourdieu says:
The divisions
constitutive of the social order and, more precisely, the social relations of
domination and exploitation that are instituted between the sexes thus
progressively embed themselves in two different· classes of habitus, in the
form of opposed and complementary bodily hexis
and principles of vision and division which lead to the classifying of all the
things of the world and all practices according to distinctions that are
reducible to the male/female opposition. It falls to men, who belong on the
side of all things external, official, public, straight, high and
discontinuous, to perform all the brief, dangerous and spectacular acts which,
like the sacrifice of the ox, ploughing or harvesting, not to mention murder or
war, mark breaks in the ordinary course of life; women, by contrast, being on
the side of things that are internal, damp, low, curved and continuous, are
assigned all domestic labour, in other words the tasks that are private and
hidden, even invisible or shameful, such as the care of the children or the
animals, as well as all the external tasks that are attributed to them by
mythic reason, that is to say, those that involve water, grass and other green
vegetation (such as hoeing and gardening), milk and wood, and especially the
dirtiest, most monotonous and menial tasks (Bourdieu, 2002, p. 30).
This quotation can be an example
to analyze Bourdieu's procedure and its risks. First, we have a generalization:
on one side “men”, on the other, “women”. Men, according to Bourdieu, are on
the official side, of the right. All the men? The proletarians? The lumpen
proletarians? The peasants? And women are all on the other side, thus there is
no woman who holds power, that is in the state, etc. Women often are left with
the dirty work, they take care of children. The women of the bourgeoisie do
this? They do not hire other women to do it for them? In this approach, it
seems like domestic workers work only for men, and the women of the bourgeoisie
care for children, working in “monotonous and menial tasks”. We do not know
which country and epoch refers Bourdieu. He refers to an abstract-metaphysical world
that does not exist concretely. “Women”, in the plural and in general, has as
task the “invisible, shameful” work, such as child care. Ora, Only from certain
values that caring for children is "shameful", as well as other
examples cited by Bourdieu, ie, humility, shame, etc., is not an attribute of
activities but a valuation or devaluation of activities.
In Bourdieu's analysis, phenomena
such as social classes, values, capital accumulation, class struggle, etc., do
not exist. The capitalist domination and the mercantile, competitive and
bureaucratic world also do not exist in his approach. The “masculine domination”
to Bourdieu has a structural homology to the various “camps” that he says exist
in reality (artistic field, political field economic field scientific field etc.)
and so has the same fantastic isolation and similar logic, since Bourdieu was
able to invent a “male illusio”.
But here doesn't fit a general critique of Bourdieu's sociology, that we'll do
another time, but point out that his methodological procedure and his approach
to the issue of women is tied to his abstract-metaphysical building, or
ideological.
Thus, Scott complement to her
analysis appealing to Bourdieu does not hold. But it is nonetheless interesting
this appeal and how a metaphysical approach to the genre in Scott can be
supplemented with other metaphysical approach, Bourdieu's approach. The
rejection of all or reducing it to a sector of reality, arbitrarily chosen as “essential”,
since there was no justification, is a post-structuralist procedure reproduced
by Scott and by gender ideologues.
We can conclude this analysis of
the construct gender putting his abstract-metaphysical character, coming from
the culturalist fad derived from post-structuralism,
just is a word used to uses and abuses, but that does not explain anything and
does not lend itself to the struggle for social transformation because instead
of unmasking power, hides. The gender construct is a unit of an ideological
discourse. This ideological discourse or perform a fantastic isolation of
relations between the sexes or considers such relations as founders of the
social, or, as they say, power or, even, the power conceived metaphysically
goes on to explain such relations. Thus, culture and power are transformed into
metaphysical abstractions that come to explain and determine everything. In
this last case, the indeterminate (culture, power) becomes the determinant of
social relations, and this ideology that explains nothing becomes hegemonic in
certain circles. In the first case, relations between the sexes (of “gender”) are
determinant, though never substantiated the source of this determination. That's
why the work of Bourdieu is well received by some of the genre ideologues,
because the isolation of these relations is the same type as they do, however,
much is talked about “culture” or “power”, always in an abstract way.
Another characteristic that
reproduces the gender ideology is the lack of references to concrete human
beings, concrete social relations. The books of the genre ideologues are full
of references to other works, that is, we are in a bookish world in which a
book refers to several other books (not for them extract concrete social
relations, but only other theses), and a thesis refers to several other
theories, a vicious and self-referential circle of ideological world. No doubt,
there may be exceptions (Bourdieu does not enter in this group, for example,
although his approach of concrete reality is fragmentary and reversed and he is
not exactly one of the representatives of this trendency), but this is the rule
of the gender ideologies.
But what is the source of Scott
and gender ideologues? She herself reveals: “concern with gender as an analytic
category has emerged only in the late twentieth century. It is absent from the
major bodies of social theory articulated from the eighteenth to the early
twentieth centuries” (Scott, 1986, p. 1066). The use of the word occurs in a
particular historical context: “The term gender is part of the attempt by
contemporary feminists to stake claim to a certain definitional ground, to
insist on the inadequacy of existing bodies of theory for explaining
persistente inequalities bewteen women and men” (Scott, 1986, p. 1066).
This mutation occurs in a “moment
of great epistemological effervescence”:
In the space
opened by this debate and on the side of the critique of Science developed by
the humanities, and of empiricism and humanism by post-structuralists,
feminists have not only begun to find a theoretical voice of their own but have
found scholarly and political allies as well. It is within this space that we
must articulate gender as an analytic category (Scott, 1986, p. 1066).
The date of the predecessor
studies is the 60s, the time of the counterculture of the hippie movement, the
feminist movement, of Betty Friedan and The
Feminine Mystique, as well as the works of Kate Millet, Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, which already begin
to use the term gender but without the subsequent connotation. It is from the
cultural counter-revolution, Which began after the defeat of the student
rebellion of May 1968 expressed in the post-avant-garde (art) and
poststructuralism (science),
that begins the ideological production which will be the basis of gender
ideologies, such as the work of Michel Foucault, the largest poststructuralist
ideology in his “critical” tendency and the other representatives of this
ideology (Guattari, Deleuze, etc.). The ideology of gender is strengthened and
systematized in the 80s. The mutation begins at the 70s: “In an article in 1973
that documents the terminological change of sex to gender, Strathern
anticipates his conception of gender as a symbolic system” (STOLKE, 2004, 91). In
1988, she launched a book which deepens her conception. But it is in the 80s
that feminist analysis about gender relations is more sophisticate. With the
emergence of neo-liberalism, poststructuralism becomes hegemonic and dominant
and the gender ideology is one of its products.
The intellectual productions from
the 70s called “postmodern” are actually reformed and depoliticized versions of
critical trends of the 60s. The struggles of the end of the 60s (that ranges
from the counterculture to the student and workers' struggles in Germany/France,
and the workers' struggles in Italy, etc.) and critical intellectual production
(Debord and the Situationist International, Henri Lefebvre, Marcuse, Sartre,
etc.). Capitalism's mutation occurs from the 60s and is realized in the 80s,
with the emergence of the full regime of accumulation (Viana, 2009; Viana,
201b), which means a cultural transformation that seeks to appropriate the
previous oppositional culture to disarm it and cause it to lose strength and
effect.
Poststructuralism has as its
fundamental point the criticism of the approach of the whole, or, as says one
of its main ideologues, of the “meta-narratives” (Lyotard, 1986) It is
precisely this aspect that enables the non-politicisation or micro-reformism,
depending on the approach. Some poststructuralist, when denying all, start to
perform purely descriptive approaches (non-politicisation) of everyday elements
and other reference to power, but purely in everyday scale, isolating the power
relations in a certain place or social relationship and after this isolation,
presents isolated fights and makes its praise, refusing all forms of
articulation and expansion of the fight. This procedure is used initially by
Foucault (1989) and Guattari (1981), and, afterwards is performed by gender ideologues,
which create a set of constructs ahistorical and isolated, as the so-called
“gender relations”, and address some social phenomena creating a small world
reified that references to culture and power, but taken as metaphysical
entities and solely linked to this reified world.
Gender ideology arises in this
context. And nothing more revealing than the vicissitudes of feminists who have
embraced this concept and elect power relations as a fundamental and at the
same, time hide or are unaware that these relationships are products of this
same reality and therefore power relations. The “masculine domination” revealed
by Bourdieu is harmless against him, perhaps by reason of being a sociologist,
an intellectual, although he says that intellectuals are a “dominated fraction
of the dominant class” (Bourdieu, 1990). Joan Scott, Judith Butler and all
others are above this “masculine” reality marked by “power relations” and they
are female specimens, but do not suffer the determinations and oppression of
other mortals. In a nutshell, the ideologues think they are as Baron of
Munchausen and thus can be pulled by the hair and become immune to what exists
(culture, power relations, phallogocentrism, male illusio, etc.). The references also have the same “immunity” and
therefore Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, are the great inspirers of the new
ideology.
Thus the archeology of the term
genre is only a description of its uses, but never of its genesis and its
relationship with the social and historical changes. And so once again, it
reproduces the evolutionary and unilinear conception of development of human
thought, which occurs since Comte and Hegel, and reaches today with
"ingenuous" gender ideologues. The ideology has no independent
history, stand-alone (Marx and Engels, 1991), except in the very ideological
discourse, which reverses the reality and presents itself as a product of a
breakthrough and improvement of the previous idea or as a false break with the
predecessor conceptions, but always going towards the absolute truth.
Thus, the gender ideology is so
dated historically and socially determined as any other ideology, and its
ideological sources (poststructuralism) as its content, demonstrate the limits
of such approach, revealing only another form of false consciousness
systematized.
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