Beyond Gender

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Greetings.

I have this concept which hit me this afternoon and i’d like to see where it is in the collective mind (i.e internet :slight_smile:)

If your a biological determinist, christian or whatever your not gonna like this…and please i don’t mean to sound like an ass… but i’ve had plenty of those kind of conversations and i find them boring. do i need to write a disclaimer??? i dunno…

To put it all into context i was having a discussion about sex and gender and basically we were operating under the common assumption that all gender is essentially an act/performance. I was directed to the writings of Judith Butler, (and all previous arguments of her’s aside) she suggests that what causes us to decide in our minds if an individual as either male or female is by them ‘performing’ in such a way that would indicate to us they were male or female (think of clothes as merely props). This is contrasted with the notion that , for instance, i am told i am a man cause i have a penis and therefore i have to ‘act’ like a male. The former would suggest internal control, the latter external influences or validation of one as a gendered body. Also assume here that i have put gender inequality aside and also the nature/nuture debate as well as ignoring biological determinism.

Now, taking on from my small knowledge of metaphysics I could make the statement “anything is merely the result of a roll of the dice”. Apply that to some constructs; culture, ideology and gender. Examples; there are many different cultures all over the world because they all evolved seperately and developed through a combination of human agency and chance, different ideologies are developed because there are infinate possibilities when it comes to forming ideas(Marxism, Despotism, liberalism, buddhism, islam, christianity, green politics etc…) and there is an infinate number of ways in which you can apply meaning to a male or female (ideas of men and women and their social roles vary from culture to culture).

Now i hope these statements are a given…if not i’m in the wrong place…or please stop me here! lol

Focusing on gender and using the logic stated above, in any given alternate reality how you and i view gender -and sex to a certain extent- will be different given that there is virtually no way, through chance, that ideas of gender could be the same in any two given realities- although there is a methematical chance this could occur.

ok so now i have laid the groundwork of my intention it is time for a statement.

  • If possibilities are infinate, this would suggest that ideology and therefore ‘meaning’ can be limitless in make up eg. any one person will place an infinate number of possible combinations of meaning onto a can of coke, it will mean different things to everyone. But why attatch meaning onto something? why do we attatch meaning onto the photo of a family holiday at the beach? a pet? a person we love? I will say we attatch meaning to things and SHARE common meaning with other people so we can feel unified and ultimately feel we are stable as a nation, a group, a family or an organisation.

We attatch meaning onto men and women and expect them to behave in a certain way and if they don’t we may think they are weird -a ‘tom-boy’ for instance- and people behave in certain socially sanctioned ways according to their genitalia or how they think of themselves (even transvestites are operating under a socially ‘accetable’/recognisable pretext)

I suppose my final point/question is this… What are we attatching meaning to? cells? a piece of metal? atoms?? Using Butler’s notion that we infer the gender of a person by the way they act, who is the ‘real’ actor? who is performing the gender that we attatch meaning to? Some would suggest that if something has no meaning it doesn’t exist…what is the essence we are attatching meaning to that makes it ‘real’? is it just the form that appears in our brain from reflections of light off a surface or is it something more than that?

This is the concept that is gonna eat at me for a while…what is a body/person without a gender, can someone exist without a gender and who/what is the actor? and i mean remove all your ideas of meaning of gender, androgynous gender, hermaphrodite…homosexual, heterosexual …forget them or better yet, what was a homosexual before people knew what one was? Think of a baby in the womb before its parents knew what sex it was and apply it to a person outside of the womb.

If someone knows of any publications which explore this i’d love to know! and please let me have with your ideas etc…

Thanks for reading :slight_smile:

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Perhaps I have misunderstood, but I thought that the bulk of your post was positing that gender only has meaning within a particular social context. This would imply that a person who has one gender in social context “A” may have a different gender in social context “B”, without changing their behaviour at all. (Another consequence would be that the number of different genders also depends on social context: there is nothing to limit it to two).

But if this is what you were saying, then I don’t understand your final question (or rather, I think that you have answered it already). In other words, a person can only exist without gender if the social context recognises that people can be without gender. In general, this is not the case (though I believe that certain subcultures strive for this, and perhaps succeed).

So what happens typically is that if a person does not clearly fit into one gender stereotype, they trigger a dissonance; they make us uncomfortable. That, or we deny certain aspects of their behaviour (e.g. denying that a macho man could be gay). Instead, we resort to pigeonholing aspects of the person to one gender or another. So perhaps the truth is that society tends to assign gender to actions and sets of actions, and then tends to assume that a person will conform to that set, giving the person as a whole that gender. It then gets uncomfortable (and/or persecutes) people who mix and match their actions from different gender stereotypes.

Leathon

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2 points here

  1. people tend to think and interact with things in categories, life is way too complicated to keep everything in your head as a unique thing (as I recall this process starts around 6 or so in children). It would be just too difficult to maintain all our interactions with the world without some of this categorizing. Gender is an important bit of this, deciding who/what we are dealing with.

  2. this may or may not have been somewhat modified buy the rise in the internet. some of the important clues about gender are missing here. so the real question to think about is:
    how do you ‘picture’ people on the net that you don’t know in real life?
    do you make assumptions about their gender?
    have you ever been surprised when you did learn the gender of someone you had been talking to (or reading on a forum)?

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So what if you were to try a Frankenstien concept, by placing the brain of a male into a female body, and vice versa. Should my knowledge be insited, that if a male brain was in a female body the female body would act as if it were male. And completely the same way on the vice versa side???

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Gender is given to us by society . When man and women were first created , they were designated roles and given a title. Gender on any bases is universal and the traits that are assigned and expectations will never disappear. All though all humans should be treated as human beings and it shouldn’t matter what gender you are society lable us and in order to survive doesn’t one have to abide by those rules? Just because one doesn’t agree with gender, does that person necessarily have a choice or if they don’t agree won’t they be thought of as an outcast?

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this thread is the very embodiment of ambiguity. the author ask the read to define a concept which he himself does not understand, this is the precise problem I have tried to tackle in my book. gender the word has as the author implies two meanings. it can mean, people with vagania are female, those with penis male. or it can mean feminine traits.

which of these is the author referring to?