tazking heads

At the beginning of April there was a media storm in the USA when the clothes retailer J Crew depicted a woman playing with her young child, and the male child has painted pink toenails.

A psychiatrist called Dr Keith Ablow, who works for Fox News, wrote an article decrying J Crew and “the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity”. He uses this as an example, along with Facebook, to prove that “almost nothing is now honored as real and true”. I’d like to briefly pick up on some interesting points raised by the assumptions in Dr Ablow’s article.

When boundaries are held sacred and their transgressions tabooed, identical behaviour performed on both sides is interpreted entirely differently. In this example, a mother who helps to paint her son’s toenails is the primary actor in the scenario - it’s her ”pleasure”, at the expense of her son. A mother helping to paint her daughter’s toenails would seen to be aiding her daughter in an activity freely chosen by her daughter. Just by changing the sex of the child in the scenario, the relationship can go from being a mutually enjoyable activity to a highly exploitative activity. Where a mother is seen to humour her daughter, she is seen to force her son. I also notice this tendency when it involves the sanctity of the (arbitrarily-determined) age of consent. If two people of similar ages partake in the usual pre-relationship rituals, we might call it flirting or bonding, and the more upfront one might be wooing. If the two people of similar ages happen to be on two sides of the (arbitrarily-determined) age of consent, which varies by country, then the scenario is likely to be interpreted as something more sinister. An exploitative power relationship is set up between the two, depicting the receptive partner as powerless victim and the more active one as grooming. Same behaviours, similar ages, different interpretations of the power relationships involved.

There is a fear of modernity and change (at the expense of traditionalism and writ) that is played out in debates supposedly about gender identity. Why include in an article about gender norms the unrelated topics of Facebook and Prozak? Link: modernity. They’re all symbols of modernity - about rationalism, social construction, exploded social networks and the subjugation of traditional authority to scientific experimentalism. There’s a fear of the risks and uncertainties involved, highlighted by Ablow’s statement that “the outcome of [homogenizing males and females] is not known.” The reason we shouldn’t allow our children to experiment with their gender expression is not because it has proven adverse consequences, but because we can’t predict its consequences. Plenty of theorists of modernity have written about its destabilising effects, because life trajectories are no longer dictated. They’re uncertain, people’s decisions are individualised, and so a large part of what’s necessary to navigate oneself is the ability to assess risk. Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens talk about the risk society, with Giddens asserting that risk-taking is unavoidable in our modern, innovative social environment. The moral panic created by the J Crew photograph can be seen as a fairly natural reactionary response to what’s seen as the monolithic threat of ‘modernity’ and the ‘march of progress’.

Ablow suggests that “encouraging the choosing of gender identity, rather than suggesting our children become comfortable with the ones that they got at birth, can throw our species into psychological turmoil”. This is an ambiguous statement - is he admitting that children are given a gender identity at birth (by other people), or that they are born with some innate gender identity? Suzanne Kessler’s article ‘The medical construction of gender: case management of intersexed infants’ [PDF] reports how babies born with ‘ambiguous genitalia’ are immediately operated upon so that they can be fitted into one of two working categories of sex (f/m). If sex is supposedly biologically dictated, and gender is socially constructed, then altering someone’s anatomy to fit in with established categories of difference surely genders sex. Thus come debates about the social construction of sex. Genitalia that doesn’t fit into our gender categories is treated as anomalous rather than demonstrative of sex variance. The ‘othering’ of sex variance reinforces our social construction of gender and sex. There is a chicken-and-egg scenario to be overcome here before Ablow can make any forthright assertion about how sex translates into gender, how that link can be broken, and to what effect.

Another thing on which Ablow touches is the array of consequences that might arise from gender role transgression. Personal psychological problems are one effect. An effect on which left-wing academics may agree with Ablow is that on social order. If men and women act the same, then how will labour be divided? The ‘instrumental’ and ‘expressive’ roles that Talcott Parsons assigned to men and women respectively may be obliterated. To socialist feminists, who see patriarchy and capitalism as two interlocking, mutually-supportive systems of inequality, this would mean progress. Throwing a spanner in the works of gender roles would hinder the cultural reproduction of gender inequality, which would have a knock-on effect on the gendered division of labour, which has so far refused to subside. Ablow warns us that “it will be a very big deal if it turns out that neither gender is very comfortable anymore nurturing children above all else, and neither gender is motivated to rank creating a family above having great sex forever and neither gender is motivated to protect the nation by marching into combat against other men and risking their lives.” Whilst overstepping his remit as a psychiatrist, he makes a valid point that performing gender differently means that there may be a different way of performing gender as a result. But will this really mean that we will lose parents and combatants? There is another option: we could be doubling the number of potential lovers, and doubling the number of potential fighters. If you take the gender out of gender role, you’ve still got a role.

Part of the media frenzy was an incorporated backlash of ‘I can’t believe this non-story has made the news’. Whilst this backlash is heartwarming, I do see why the story caused a ruckus. Sex and gender structure our lives - they are experienced as at the very core of our being. The grasp of sex, gender and sexuality is so ubiquitous. Whilst this goes unnoticed in most people’s lives, where the heterosexual matrix of sex/gender/desire is disturbed (such as in the lives of transgender people) the pervasiveness is made visible. Everything we do is gendered, and in our society it’s binary-gendered (i.e. we have a repository of just two genders). If gender is weaved into everything, then gender role transgression could be a real threat to the established order, the way that people conceptualise themselves and the way that we organise society. It’s reasonable, in this sense, to feel threatened - and that’s why even the progressive YoungTurks do.

There’s no one who can better illustrate how instinctively threatening transgression is to us than Judith Butler. We perform and defend gender as something primal, because the illusion of gender is so fragile, and the consequences of its breakdown so gargantuan.