2011/12 Theme: Living With Our Selves
Conversations on Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
“The cultural and scientistic assumption that all people can be classified as ‘male’ or ‘female’ creates extremely difficult problems for people who do not live their gender or sex as exclusively male or female, who have a fluid sense of their sex or gender; or who transition from one to another” (Sykes, 2011)
Female and male, femininity and masculinity are binaries that continue to structure social relations in the 21st century. As philosopher Marilyn Frye stated, “We are socially and communicatively helpless if we do not know the sex of everybody we have anything to do with” (1983). Our everyday language speaks everyone in terms of the two ‘options’ available in sex and gender. Check a box: Male Female. Some academic disciplines, media, and marketers have been in overdrive for several decades highlighting the differences between the two. Feminist scholarship has analyzed the inequity that has resulted from these alleged biological and behavioural differences. But are there only two genders and sexes, and what about the continuum that exists between the endpoints and is there any biological basis to gender differences?
In the late 20th century, Judith Butler (1993) advocated for a deconstructivist approach to gender. This process is “a way of interrogating [a category’s] construction as a pregiven or foundationalist premise” (p. 9) and shows “how the very establishment of the system as a system implies a beyond to it, precisely by virtue of what it excludes” (Cornell, 1992, p. 1). What is beyond the binaries of sex and gender and what bodies are excluded? Fausto-Sterling (2000) estimates approximately 1.7% of all births are exceptions to the dimorphic ideal. With many now identifying as transgender, transsexual, intersexed or gender non-conforming, there are many who do not conform with the “presumed coherence between and among sexed bodies, gendered behaviour, and sexuality and permits the possibility, for example, that a female sexed child might ‘know’ something about her/his gender not contained in the categories ‘boy’ or ‘girl’” (Shogan, 1997, ¶ 7). Butler (2004) states that the “non-normal” makes us question what is real and shows us that we can question the norms that govern us and see new realities:
“these practices of instituting new modes of reality take place in part through the scene of embodiment, where the body is not understood as a static and accomplished fact, but as an aging process, a mode of becoming that, in becoming otherwise, exceeds the norm, reworks the norm, and makes us see how realities to which we thought we were confined are not written in stone” (p. 29).
This call for openness to an increased range of intelligible bodies, genders, and sexualities is seen as “corporeal generosity” by Diprose (2002) “and while understanding generosity as a prereflective corporeal openness to otherness may not guarantee social justice, it is a necessary move in that direction” (p. 5).