Gender Identity without Gender Prescriptions

The feminist philosopher Susan Bordo suggests that the dilemma of twentieth-century feminism is the tension between a gender identity that both mobilizes a liberatory politics on behalf of women and that results in gender prescriptions which excludes many women. This tension seems especially acute in feminist debates about essentialism/deconstructionism. Concentrating on the shared sex of women may run the risk of embracing an essentialism that ignores the differences among women, whereas emphasizing the constructed natures of sex and gender categories seems to threaten the very project of a feminist politics. I will analyze the possibility of dismantling gender prescriptions while retaining a gender identity that can be the beginning for an emancipatory politics. Perhaps feminists need not rely on a reified essentialism that elides the differences of race, class, etc., if we begin with our social practices of classification rather than with a priori generalizations about the nature of women.

Perhaps it is easiest to begin with that which seems self-evident: we categorize people according to sex. Therefore, it also seems self-evident that women form a (natural) group based on a shared sex, resulting in a common gender identity. Historically, feminism politics have relied on this assumed sameness among all women. Feminism can represent the interests of all women because, after all, women are all alike in being women. Of course, women differ with regard to race, class, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and so on. But these differences have been seen as less basic than the shared similarity of sex and gender.

Recently, however, more and more feminists have protested that these differences matter just as much to one's identit...

... middle of paper ...

...sitions within each of these [economic, cultural, socio-political] contexts .... Despite considerable variability in what this means for particular women, this general feature of women's experience is sufficiently universal, by all anthropological and historical accounts, that it would seem to support at least a qualified conception of a distinctive women's standpoint, one which takes into account the fact that gender is by no means the only factor shaping women's lives" ("The Philosophy of Ambivalence: Sandra Harding on The Science Question in Feminism as found in Science, Morality and Feminist Theory" eds. Marsha Hanen and Kai Nielsen, Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1987, 68).

(25) Bordo, Feminism/Postmodernism, 153.

(26) To paraphrase Bordo "the chief imperative was [is] to listen, to become aware of one's biases, prejudices, ignorance" Feminism/Postmodernism, 138.