Parveen Adams presentation

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Sexual Division vs. Sexual Difference: Comments and Manifestations

Parveen Adams wants to warn us that we’re in danger. We are in danger of assuming that our political models are direct representations of reality: that there’s a real-world situation which exists separately from our understanding of it, and our models are reflections of that reality.

When we believe that our model reflects a prior reality, when, in Adams’ words, a concept from ideology is “promoted to a privileged position” (102), this limits – forecloses – how we’re able to think about the world. It shuts off avenues of thought. A concept may begin by shedding light on a previously-obscure aspect of social structure, but this same concept may end by preventing us from understanding beyond its own limitations. So we’re starting out from Althusser, who talked about how the ‘layer cake’ model in Marxism blocked our understanding of how ideology reproduces the conditions of production.

The concept Adams wants to examine is sexual division, and this is where she begins. “Many feminist theories assume that the problem is obviously one of sexual division.” (102). We know from Althusser that when something is obvious it means it’s so much a part of our ideology that we can’t see we’re in ideology at all.

Adams wants us to be able to tell the difference between sexual division and sexual differences. Sexual division is the idea that there are two categories, men and women. These categories are exclusive (you can only belong to one or the other) and exhaustive (they cover all the possible ways of being human). These two groups exist in a power relation: men oppress women. Most importantly, these two categories correspond to two groups which exist in reality.

Sexual difference, in contrast, is the idea that discourses produce a variety of sexual differences. These may interact with each other, they may accentuate each other, and they may even contradict each other. The differences that are produced will depend on the system of representation that you use. That is, sexual differences are not differences in reality that are then mirrored in the discourse. They are produced by the discourse.

Why is this important? Choosing to look for sexual division or choosing to look for sexual differences will produce different results, and it will direct our attention in two different directions.
Adams’ point is that sexual division may well be a useful idea, but it is an idea. It is not a structure in reality that we have named. It is a signifier within a system of representation, and it’s the system of representation that creates our relationship to our experience.

Adams gives us an example. She looks at Judith Mitchell’s work in Psychoanalysis and Feminism in order to examine how the idea of sexual division shapes what Mitchell is trying to accomplish.

Adams says that psychoanalysis is important because instead of accepting sexual division as a given, Freud said that it had to be explained. He does this through the central story of psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex, which explains in one story the origin of gender, sexuality, and culture. The incest taboo, if we remember from Derrida, is what Levi-Strauss places at the origin of human culture. Freud says that the oedipal conflict is the internalization of the incest taboo. In the oedipal choice, you decide whether to identify with the mother or the father. You choose a gender, and that’s how you become a social human being. So if we remember Lacan’s doors into signification, the bathroom doors, we see that they are not just any doors: they are the first doors into human society.

Judith Mitchell wants to use psychoanalysis to rescue us from having to accept the oppression of women. She wants to get away from both the biological and the social models of sexual divison. She wants to say that the oedipal story is structured by sexual division because society is structured by sexual division, and that if we change the division in society, we will change the story in our heads. As Adams says, in psychoanalysis, “masculinity and femininity are the psychical reality of the human order” (105).

(A note: by masculinity and femininity Adams means gender – the whole realm of gendered behaviours, not just what we think of as the obviously masculine or obviously feminine. She means being a woman or being a man.)

The next thing Adams says is this: but this is not how gender is structured in reality. This is how gender is structured in psychoanalytic theory. Even when Mitchell is saying that sexual division could be an effect rather than a cause, which to Adams is a step forward, she’s still assuming that sexual division is always already there for the child to choose.

Judith Butler will take these ideas in another direction. She’s going to rewrite this article, using these ideas but applying them to an individual’s experience of internalizing and expressing gender. It’s going to be about a personal relationship to the discourse. Adams is interested in society as a whole.

This problem of assuming sexual division applies to a number of theories: Marxism, psychoanalysis, radical feminism, other feminisms. These theories all require that there be a category, woman, so that they are able to say that women are oppressed.

Adams notices that when we try to combine different systems of representation, Marxism and psychoanalysis being her example, we assume that we can do so because they each have a subject. (As we remember from Althusser, the end product of all ideology is the subject.) It is easy to assume that if we just look hard enough, we’ll be able to see how all of these subjects are really one subject. She calls this the unified feminine subject.

“Femininity,” (the gender woman) “is the psychical representation of the reality of society for women and of women’s oppression. (106)” If we say that what it is to be a woman is to be located on this side of sexual division, then we impose a unity on women’s experience. We privilege the idea of sexual division. This makes it much more difficult to talk about the differences in women’s experience. There is an analogy here with Saussure’s assertion that linguistic behaviours like onomatopoeia are irrelevant to the consideration of the system as a whole. They are trivial precisely because they do not fit the model. The same danger applies to feminism.

From our position much later in theory, it is obvious to us that all women do not have the same experience of themselves as women, as subjects in society, as people experiencing oppression. Our obvious example might be that racism and sexual differences interact to form an experience of oppression whose structure cannot be predicted by citing sexual division as their source. We must instead look at specific discourses within society and how these discourses interact.

This is what Adams means when she says, on page 103, “the work of representation produces differences that cannot be known in advance.” She has been criticized (for example, by Michèle Barrett) for making this statement. It appears to imply that oppression cannot be understood historically. It’s true that Adams is looking at oppression structurally and synchronically, as operating in a particular moment, but ‘not predictable’ here means that you will not be able to predict a given subject’s situation in discourse by applying the model of sexual division as an origin.

Applying sexual division leads us towards abstraction and generalization. This is intellectually appealing. It feels ‘bigger’ and more heroic than addressing the messy specifics of oppression. Adams tells us that we have to resist this urge. We cannot use the same story, like the Oedipus complex, or like patriarchy, to explain every aspect of the oppression of women, because oppression is not in the originating story, and the story is not in reality. The story is a signifier in a system of representation. The articulation of a given system of representation is what produces sexual differences.

For Adams, this is important if we want to try to change society. Rather than trying to trace all instances of oppression back to the one big idea of sexual division, she wants us to look at the social conditions that gendered subjects actually live within.

Adams gives us the example of a legal case to show how the idea of a unified subject is unsuccessful for analyzing how a given discourse – in this case, that of law – will play itself out. She begins by using a male subject and demonstrating that he cannot be said to occupy the position of a coherent legal subject. If there is no coherent legal subject, there is no coherent feminine legal subject. We cannot say that the law will always operate in the same way, or always treat a woman or a man as the same kind of subject. This is not to say that there is no sexual oppression within the law, but that we will not be able to extrapolate how it will work in a specific instance by referring back to the idea of sexual division. Ultimately, says Adams, “Categories are not fixed though they may appear to be so at any one time and a category has no necessary unity” (109).

We can also demonstrate this with reference to the article from last week’s Monday. There are several elements I find interesting in this article, which seems to me to articulate a quite complex conflict of rights and categories.

First of all, everyone in the article assumes sexual division. They assume that humanity can indeed be divided into two groups, one of which has the right to ask for the absence of the other because of historical trauma and oppression. Both of these factors must be present; it is not enough to just have been traumatized. A biological woman who was attacked by a female partner would not be expected to ask that no other women be present, or no women with a particular shared characteristic of the attacker. Nor would she be permitted to ask that no biological women of masculine appearance be included, although this has been thought a reasonable request in other periods of ideology.

Sexual division is assumed to be relatively unproblematic. The categories themselves are to be expanded to take into account transgenderism, but they may stand as categories.

Even Dr. Aaron Devor, who indicates that an individual may, by choice or circumstance, belong neither to one side nor the other of the sexual division, assumes that social rights should proceed from the subject’s position relative to this division. Someone born biologically female and believing herself to belong to the gender woman has certain rights inherently. Someone born biologically male and believing herself to belong to the gender woman may acquire those rights if she meets certain criteria – in this case, specific surgical interventions. If she cannot or will not meet these criteria, she should be accorded ‘intermediate rights’. That is to say, if you do not fit into the categories of sexual division, it is obvious that this should affect your rights of social access.

It could be argued that the self-defence instructor made the option of a class for transgendered people available. This exactly proves the point. If the transgendered woman is able to produce a category for herself, or prove she belongs to an existing one, she may participate. If she remains indeterminate with respect to the available categories, she may not participate. This evaluation will happen externally and using criteria not of her own choosing.

Most interesting to me is a sort of “ghost in the discourse”. The organizer of the self-defence course says that a biological woman (or, potentially but not certainly, a transsexual woman who has been acceptably modified) might choose to take the course; might have been traumatized some time in the past; might not disclose this to the instructor; and might be re-traumatized by the presence of a pre-operative transsexual woman, which the instructor refers to as ‘a man’.

This is not to argue that such a woman could not exist. The instructor indicates that such women often do take part in her classes. It is to notice that the woman who might be traumatized by the presence of the transsexual woman is hypothetical on several levels. There is no specific woman asking that the transsexual woman not be allowed to take the course. There is only the possibility that such a woman might exist and might be traumatized.

Our conclusion must be that a hypothetical person who appears to belong unproblematically to a category imposed by gender division somehow has acquired rights not possessed by the living person whose category is undecided by the instructor and Dr. Devor, and this hypothetical person’s rights must be protected by the exclusion of the transsexual woman. The hypothetical person inside of gender is more important than the living person outside of gender; and to both of these evaluators it seems obvious that this should be the case.

These kinds of categorical judgements extend beyond access to private-enterprise services. They apply across discourses, at all levels of society, and affect access to legal, medical, and social services. Adams’ concern seems to have been more than justified. Many feminist ideas have made their way into the larger culture, and have effected important changes to the structure of society. However, it is still just as important for us as it was for Adams to examine our practises to see whether it is human beings we are protecting or ideologies.


I'll omit the works cited. Because I care.

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