2
The Poststructural Turn

I

Contemporary feminists do not speak of men and women as sex classes. Indeed, until Lawford-Smith revived it in Gender-Critical Feminism, the term 'sex class', a term that connotes the political, had vanished from the feminist vocabulary, being replaced by 'gender', which connotes the social. This apparently innocuous shift is in fact politically significant.

For instance, notice that 'sex' and 'sex class' are conceptually entwined, whereas 'sex' and 'gender' are not. In the sex-gender distinction, 'sex' refers to the biological categories of male and female and 'gender' to the social roles of masculine and feminine into which the sexes are cast1 - the male sex into the masculine role and the female sex into the feminine role. The masculine gender has therefore coincided with the male sex and the feminine gender with the female sex. But, as 'gender' is conceptually distinct from 'sex', it appears possible for a member of the male sex to be a member of the feminine gender and for a member of the female sex to be a member of the masculine gender. As Judith Butler writes, 'if sex and gender are radically distinct, then it does not follow that to be a given sex is to become a given gender; in other words, "woman" need not be the cultural construction of the female body, and "man" need not interpret male bodies'.2

First, Butler uses 'woman' for 'feminine being' and 'man' for 'masculine being'. If gender is masculinity and femininity, and if Butler's claim is that a particular sexed body need not assume a particular gender, then she ought to have written that 'feminine' need not be the cultural construction of the female body and 'masculine' need not interpret male bodies. Or, more simply, a female person need not become a member of the feminine gender and a male person need not become a member of the masculine gender. For Beauvoir, a woman is a member of the female sex socialised into the feminine gender.3 So, even if a male person became a member of the feminine gender, he would not be a woman. Contra Butler, 'woman' cannot be the cultural construction of the male body. In Butler's use of 'woman' for 'feminine being' and 'man' for 'masculine being', a slide is apparent from gender as roles - masculine and feminine - to gender as the persons who, through socialisation into these roles, the sexes become - men and women. Once that slide has occurred, the sex-gender distinction appears to admit the possibility of a male person becoming a woman and a female person becoming a man.

Second, insofar as 'masculine' means 'that which befits a male person' and 'feminine' 'that which befits a female person', a male person who assumes the feminine gender is a male person who assumes that which befits a female person and a female person who assumes the masculine gender is a female person who assumes that which befits a male person. A male person who assumes that which befits a female person is not of the same kind as a female person who assumes that which befits a female person (the former is an effeminate - abnormal - male person, the latter a normal female person), and a female person who assumes that which befits a male person is not of the same kind as a male person who assumes that which befits a male person (the former is a butch - abnormal - female person, the latter a normal male person). If the conceptual distinction between sex and gender permits a male person to assume the feminine gender and a female person to assume the masculine gender, it thereby creates two further categories - effeminate male person and butch female person; it does not permit male people and female people to occupy the same category, to share the same name, much less the name 'woman' or 'man'.4

Nevertheless, it does seem that sex and gender can come apart in a way sex and sex class cannot. On the view that the sexes are classes, a male person has, as his birthright, membership of the oppressor class and the rights that accompany this membership. Although he may be deemed insufficiently masculine, a poor specimen of his sex, he does not thereby lose membership of the male sex class. His by birth, this membership and the rights attached to it cannot be forfeited. A member of the female sex has no birthright to membership of the oppressor class. Although she may perform masculinity and may even succeed in being taken for a member of the male sex, she cannot overcome this fact. She can perhaps be granted membership of the oppressor class by its members, but she would not thereby become a member in the sense in which a member of the male sex is one, because her membership would be conditional. It would not be hers by right. Relevant here is Marilyn Frye's discussion of 'the presumption of male citizenship', that is, 'the principle that if, and only if, someone is male, he has a prima facie claim to a certain array of rights, such as the rights to ownership and disposition of property, to physical integrity and freedom of movement, to having a wife and to paternity, to access to resources for making a living, and so forth'.5 When men abridge or deny other men's rights (as in conscription), they must provide a justification for it (the need to raise an army), because the presumption is, as Frye says, on the side of their having these rights.6 When men abridge other men's rights unjustifiably, the ones at the receiving end experience this abridgement as emasculating, as a denial of their membership of the male sex class.

In short, the shift from sex class to gender has worked to depoliticise sex, with implications that are now becoming clear. In this chapter I explain why this shift occurred.

II

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault tells the history of a transformation of power. For a long time, he writes, power was that of a sovereign - originally the father in the Roman family - over his subjects.7 This power was 'deductive', 'a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself'.8 In the modern era, power ceases to be that of a sovereign over his subjects and becomes instead biopower. This power is 'productive', 'working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it'.9 Where sovereign power repressed the subject, biopower constructs it. Where sovereign power was centralised, biopower is diffuse. Where sovereign power was possessed, biopower is 'exercised'.10 On this view, the 'juridical' conception of power, according to which power is 'possess[ed] like a commodity',11 is now anachronistic and must be abandoned for a poststructuralist one, a conception of power as biopower.

The poststructural turn has implications for a feminist analysis. Put simply, power ceases to be that which members of the male sex class wield over members of the female sex class, becoming instead that which produces the sexed-gendered subjects men and women.

'Power', Foucault writes, is that 'which makes individuals subjects'.12 Here 'subject' has a dual meaning: subject in the sense of 'self' and subject in the sense of 'person under the dominion of'. That is, the process of making individuals subjects is at once their formation as selves and their subjection.13 How is it their subjection? It is discourse, with its normative force, that is invested with the power of turning individuals into subjects. For example, the sex-gender discourse sorts people into the categories male and female and compels them to adhere to the norms of the category into which they have been placed - masculinity for the male category, femininity for the female. It thereby turns people into the subjects men and women, who discipline themselves according to - and are thus the subjects of - the sex-gender discourse.

On this theory, it is not men who govern women; it is the sex-gender discourse that governs both women and men. Men have been displaced by the sex-gender discourse, men and women as sex classes have been displaced by men and women as sexed-gendered subjects, and men's subjection of women has been displaced by men and women's subjection to the sex-gender discourse.14 In short, the vertical structure has been displaced by a horizontal one. This is reflected clearly in the following passage from Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight:

Within a Foucauldian/feminist framework, it is indeed senseless to view men as the enemy: to do so would be to ignore, not only power differences in the racial, class, and sexual situations of men, but the fact that most men, equally with women, find themselves embedded and implicated in institutions that they as individuals did not create and do not control - and that they frequently feel tyrannized by.15

Men are not the enemy of women; men and women...