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From Sexual Divisions to Sexualities: Changing Sociological Agendas
Abstract
Twenty-four years after the founding of the British Sociological Association, its first annual conference to give major attention to ‘Sexual Divisions in Society’ was held in Aberdeen in 1974. Eight years later, in 1982, the focus was ‘Gender and Society’, and in 1994 the theme was ‘Sexualities in Social Context’.1 We thought it useful to look at how sociology has changed over this period, reflecting particularly on whether these titles reflect more general conceptual/political shifts, and what this means politically and conceptually in relation to feminism.
Whereas others have considered the interrelationship between feminism and sociology in terms of the impact of the former on the latter, this paper focuses on the influence of sociological thought on feminist theory. Sociological perspectives were much in evidence within feminist thought in the 1970s, but the shifting disciplinary hierarchies associated with the 'cultural turn' of the 1980s have since undermined sociology's influence within feminism - and especially in feminist theory. One consequence of this, I suggest, has been the erasure of some important sociological insights and perspectives from the map of feminist theory. In particular the origins of social constructionism have been forgotten, along with much that was distinctly social in this approach. In charting the course and assessing the effects of the 'cultural turn', I make it clear than not all feminists have followed that route. I argue for the recovery of the social from its eclipsing by the cultural and for the continued importance of a sociologically informed feminism into the 21st century. In making the case for a distinctly sociological approach to central feminist concerns, I will take sexuality as a case study. Here I seek to demonstrate that sociology has more to offer feminism than the cultural focus of queer theory.
In the majority of cases where they have not been ignored altogether, women employees have been regarded by industrial sociologists in one of two ways: on the one hand as indistinguishable from men in any respect relevant to their attitudes and actions at work; and on the other as giving rise to special problems, for the employer and/or the families or communities from which they come.1 Both approaches are inadequate and the adoption of either means that the possibilities of comparative study of the expectations and actions of men and women in industry are generally lost — possibilities which could aid the analysis of some of the central problems of industrial sociology, as well as provide a more adequate understanding of women’s position in the labour market and at work.
To begin to understand the reasons for sex-related occupational differentiation in the labour market, which is the object of this chapter, it is necessary to consider both the sexual norms which define the place of men and women in the household and outside it, and the forces which operate in the labour market itself. The emphasis in this chapter is on the structure of the labour market, and the question of men and women’s place in the family — the household sexual division of labour — is relegated to the status of an explanatory factor which contributes to, but does not of itself determine, the differentiation between the sexes in their work roles. The structure of the labour market is seen as one cause among several of women’s overall social position, albeit an important one. Ideological factors are, in this view, both cause and effect of women’s inferior position in the labour market and within the family.
Attempts to account for the persistent subordination of women to men by the use of existing theories of social stratification have hardly been very successful. In a sense this is not surprising, given that the ‘problem’ of sexual inequality was not one that emerged from within the existing corpus of academic sociological theory, but rather emerged from outside it and forced sociologists interested in stratification to come to terms with it. For this reason, many attempts to explain sexual stratification have consisted of squeezing the phenomenon into pre-existing conceptual categories rather than developing them out of an analysis of the phenomenon itself. These attempts — both functionalist and Marxist — have until recently been, as Acker (1973) has said, just examples of intellectual sexism. Much discussion has revolved around such questions as whether, and in what sense, women are a class, or a caste, or a status group, or some other such concept plucked from the analysis of stratification in other contexts. Apart from being an interesting sidelight on the tendencies towards reification in sociological theory, this illustrates how an implicit concern has been to preserve the validity of existing approaches to stratification in the face of a potentially disconfirming instance, rather than to develop a deeper analysis of sexual inequality.
It is no new experience for community studies to be subjected to harsh criticism (Stacey, 1969; Bell and Newby, 1971), but to my knowledge no one has so far looked at the British variety from the point of view of their adequacy in dealing with the relationships between the sexes and the significance of gender within society. To begin this critique I shall address my attention to the summary by Frankenberg (1966), a work to which I owe a great personal debt of gratitude (it might be said to have made me what I am today); and to a recent work of futuristic optimystology, The Symmetrical Family by Michael Young and Peter Willmott (1973). This latter illustrates in both its conscious/unconscious humour and its unconscious/conscious theory the deficiencies of the genre of community studies as well as the peculiarities of its auteurs.
In this chapter, we want to explore the complex relations between culture, sexuality and gender in feminist theorizations of the labour market. To begin to do this, we turn first to early feminist analyses of the labour market, including Barrett (1980) and Cockburn (1981). We explore what we see to be their restricted understandings of the social as an analytic category in the explanation of gender, restrictions which, in later work made possible the hollowing out of the social, and led to its abandonment and replacement by the cultural. We see this trajectory as having led to limited understandings of the gendering of the labour market, especially visible in the investigation of the significance of sexuality in the organization of the labour market.
In Bodies That Matter, renowned theorist and philosopher Judith Butler argues that theories of gender need to return to the most material dimension of sex and sexuality: the body. Butler offers a brilliant reworking of the body, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain sex from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She clarifies the notion of "performativity" introduced in Gender Trouble and via bold readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud explores the meaning of a citational politics. She also draws on documentary and literature with compelling interpretations of the film Paris is Burning, Nella Larsen's Passing, and short stories by Willa Cather.
If domination divides us against ourselves because of the joint effects of the use that is made of us and the internalization of our “difference,” it also brings with it the birth of our consciousness. The practices of the dominant class which fragment us oblige us to consider ourselves comprised of heterogeneous pieces. In a sort of patchwork of existences we are forced to live things as distinct and cut off from one another, to behave in a fragmented way. But our own existence, hidden beneath this fragmentation, is constantly being reborn in our corporeal unity and in our consciousness of that unity. Our resistance to the use that is made of us (resistance which grows when we analyze it) restores homogeneity to our existence.
Even if it is — and perhapsbecause it is — crisscrossed withconflicts which are created in us by the very use that is made of us at every moment of our daily lives, consciousness is the very expression of these conflicts. If we are torn and if we protest, it is because in us somewherethe subject is discovering that it has been used as an object. Permanent anxiety, so constant among us that it has become a tiresome banality, is the expression of being torn like this: it is to know that we (I), who are conscious subjects in our experience, are negated as subjects in the use that is made of us socially.
This conflict between the subject (that is, the experience of one's own acts) and the object (that is, the appropriation which splits us up) produces our consciousness. Today this consciousness is still oftenindividual; it’s that of particular experience, and not yet our class consciousness.
In the history of the concept of gender, through the work of Margaret Mead, sex role theorists, and Ann Oakley, we find a progressive denaturalisation of the division of labour and psychological differences between men and women, and a stress on cultural variation. But none of these authors, nor most recent feminist work, has questioned the assumption that gender is based on a natural, sexual dichotomy. Delphy argues, however, that the link between sex and gender, and sex, sexuality, and procreation, should be questioned by feminists, and that it then becomes clear that gender precedes sex. It is the social division of labour, and associated hierarchical relations, which lead to physiological sex being used to differentiate those who are assigned to be dominant from those who will be part of the subordinate gender/class.
This paper challenges the shift away from Women's Studies to Gender Studies. The author argues that this shift allows the study of difference between the sexes to replace that of the study of sexual inequality and the social subordination of women.
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