Why arguing for the abolition of gender is a form of colonisation
Here we have a highly technical explanation of how gender abolition is colonization, by Lola Phoenix.
When mentioning that I don’t identify as a woman, I end up in a lot of debates with people who believe in abolishing gender. Recently, I’ve comprised an explanation of why arguing for the abolition of gender is a form of colonisation.
I think LP means “composed,” not “comprised,” but anyway.
You probably have heard of the philosophy that gender is a social construct. What that means is that, while there may be biological and bodily markers of what we refer to as “gender” (or “sex” as it is just as much a social construction as “gender”), the concept of gender is something constructed by our culture. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, as some may take the connotation of “social construction” as, but rather that cultures define it.
Sex is is just as much a social construction as “gender” – ok, so then what word do we use to name the two kinds of sexually dimorphic human bodies?
Leaving that for a later day, so we have gender and sex, which culture defines. Ok.
But I want to go further than that. Gender is not just a social construct, but it is an epistemology. What’s an epistemology? Simply put, it’s gained knowledge.
No, it isn’t. That’s not what the word means.
But LP says it is, and that gender is no different. That looks like a non sequitur to me, but ok.
I feel making a distinction between an epistemology and a social construct is important, especially when we’re approaching gender through an intersectional lens.
Well…yeah, because epistemology is not the same thing as a social construct at all. What approaching gender through an intersectional lens has to do with that I have no idea – could it be that LP just likes using fancy-sounding words?
Gender is not just performance, it is a process that we come to know ourselves and others. It something that we have placed importance on, categorised, and developed over centuries. The problem with “social construction” is that it paints a stagnant picture. We don’t just construct gender and then we’re done. It’s not like a building that’s made up that we all live in. But it’s something that we do constantly, that we change, that we mould, and shape, and it’s something that we’ve been doing for centuries.
That sounds like art, or architecture, or city planning, or fashion, or music, or an array of cultural creations. It doesn’t sound like gender at all. Is LP perhaps just trying to say that ideas about gender have changed over the years? Even while many core ideas remain annoyingly immutable? Possibly, but it’s really hard to tell.
Then LP says gender isn’t like a house that we can tear down, so we can’t tear it down. Then LP says it’s not realistic to try to abolish gender, and that doing so is like trying to sieve the baby out of the bathwater. Then, suddenly, and one might think rather late in the game, LP decides to define gender.
Gender is an epistemology, and it’s an epistemology that’s constructed through the lenses of other intersections. Most of the dialogue that I’ve seen that suggests abolishing gender comes from a usually white perspective. They have their own perception and concept of what “gender” entails. The problem when you take that outside of a white-centric perspective is that not only is it far more complex, but the process of applying white gender epistemologies to other gender epistemologies becomes a colonising process.
Now here we hit a stumbling block, because I have no idea what that means. Literally none. It just looks like word soup to me.
LP gives an example: it’s not right to call hijras trans, because that’s an oppressive and colonizing act.
Ok. I’m good with that. I won’t call hijras trans.
The same goes for two spirit people. Ok.
In this situation, not only are we pushing a white epistemological concept of “gender” onto other cultures, but if we go forth with abolishing it, how can we expect people for whom their gender interacts so closely with their race, their religion, their cultural background, to divorce or even to recognise the bits and pieces of gender that are independent of their culture to destroy? Or, if gender is an epistemology, is race and other intersectional factors part and parcel of gender in such a way that one cannot simply abolish it alone? And if we attempt to do that, it leads to the next big problem I have: that the abolition of gender may be, especially stemming from a white feminist bases, a colonising force.
Here’s the stumbling block again. I can’t make any sense of that. Word soup. I have no idea what LP is trying to say there.
Is this because I’m so very cis? Or is it because LP doesn’t know how to write clearly? Maybe.
Quite often anthologists and others attempting to classify and and give names to other cultures have created problematic systems that are oppressive. In fact, you see this with the concept referenced above, “two spirit”. “Two spirit” as a name has become more popular where previously the term “berdache” was used, based on the French bard ache implying a male prostitute or catamite and originating from an Arabic word meaning “captive, captured.”
I hate it when anthologists do that, don’t you? So colonialist, collecting all those poems or stories and imprisoning them in one single Eurocentric anthology. Bastards.
It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that there is a society which has no word for “gender”, where the concept of “gender” does not exist. While there may be behaviours that certain people do or don’t do that are gendered within a white epistemological framework, if a culture has no concept of it within itself, then how exactly do we abolish it?
Point pretty comprehensively missed there, I think. If a culture has no concept of gender then even the most ardent abolitionist wouldn’t feel a need to abolish it, because there would be no “it” to abolish. Besides which, the feminists I know who would like to get rid of gender stereotypes don’t particularly want to go messing around with cultures they don’t understand, they want to get rid of gender stereotypes here, where we live and have to deal with them.
Do we simply put our Eurocentric epistemology of gender toward the culture and abolish whatever does and doesn’t fit our definition? And what if, despite not having a concept of gender, the culture is still oppressive towards one sect of the population which has a biological difference that we would judge as a sex characteristic (e.g. for example, what if that culture saw being square jawed as a sign of power and men just so happened to be the predominantly square jawed people in power)? Do we reframe it under gender? How do we approach it? It all becomes incredibly complicated.
Ok, that’s enough now. Poor LP is thoroughly confused, so there’s no further point in giving examples of the confusion. But I think it’s indicative of something that this kind of thing gets written. It’s more like an attempted invocation of spirits than anything resembling an argument or explanation.
I never knew “abolishing gender” meant, like… abolishing a law. This writer seems to think some people hope to formally, legally, literally abolish gender. So that people (or cultures) with this or that practice would wake up one morning to find that their “gender” no longer worked. “Sorry,” they’d be told. “That got repealed.”
lol
Yup, that is what it sounds like.
Word soup is right. I didn’t know that glossolalia creates such a disturbed feeling in the mind. I guess it’s due to half my brain gibbering, “What?” the other half pouncing on a subject and verb that seem to go together, the third half protesting that they may be together but they clearly have nothing to say to each other, the fourth half feverishly grasping at the hope of meaning before I sink without a trace in the sludge of words, the fifth half — the fifth half goes, “Whoa! You don’t have that many halves! You can’t even add any more.”
But, don’t you see? That’s what it’s all about. So white. So Eurocentric. So…non-intersectional.
I don’t think any of this makes any sense at all .Is the author arguing that there really isn’t any real thing called gender, because people don’t practice it the same? (It sure sounds like it). So, as a result, we need to quit saying that gender is a social construct, because it’s a social construct, so it’s not something we can just abolish because it’s so…what? Innate? I got a real headache reading this. I thought at first the argument was that gender wasn’t a social construct…but then it was described in a way that certainly sounds like a social construct to me…and that apparently gender is something white…because there might be a culture somewhere that doesn’t have a concept of gender, so abolishing it would be devastating to this culture…what? I have no clear idea at all what is going through this writer’s head. But if there is a culture that doesn’t have a concept of gender, wouldn’t that actually demonstrate pretty conclusively that gender IS a social construct?
Neither, I daresay, does she.
Colonization is when settlers from a country go somewhere else and forcefully take the land, driving locals out. The urban variant is gentrification. It causes uprooting and homessness.
Talking is not colonization. Nobody is being driven out of anywhere. Someone talks, someone else replies. There is no forcing. There is discussion. Negotiation. Each one with their respective background and ideas. What’s so bad? Talking is colonization only if ideas are violence. Only if discussion is deemed impossible for some reason and the only two options are acceptance or oppression. Sadly that’s a thought I have come to expect from student unions and the like.
This writer is awful, and the thinking behind the words – so far as I can detect thinking at all – is nothing special either.
“what word do we use to name the two kinds of sexually dimorphic human bodies?”
Oh, didn’t you get the memo? The existence of people who are born intersex or with ambiguous genitalia means that there aren’t two kinds of sexually dimorphic human bodies. It’s all one big hazy continuum, and the division of bodies into “male” and “female” is completely artificial. That’s settled science among trans activists.
All concepts are social constructs. So what?
I’m tentatively going to take a stab at this, because I actually did get something out of the quotes–though possibly not what the original author intended.
I doubt ‘gender is an epistemology’ is a very helpful way to phrase this, but it is a useful idea that ‘gender affects how we know things’ (and given that the author is also correct to point out that the way gender affects how we know things would be influenced by how gender is shaped in different cultures and subcultures). I think an argument can be made that gender affects how we know things, in that boys and girls are pushed toward different ways of learning and experiencing the world. I used to teach engineering, and some perceptive observers of how women and men engage with engineering education pointed out that men typically came into our courses with a whole body of knowledge and set of learning skills that women typically didn’t learn when they were growing up, based on hanging out with their dads taking cars apart, playing with engineering-related toys, being privy early on to the kinds of conversations engineers are accustomed to (I can remember early in my own engineering career hanging out at a party with a couple of engineers and one said ‘so what did you do last weekend’ and the other said ‘pulled a stump out of the backyard–had to dig a huge hole’ and the first said ‘really? how big?’ and the second said ‘x feet in diameter and x feet deep’). In this sense it could, I suppose, be argued that your gender affects what information you’re exposed to, and what tools you’re given to learn about the world.
But on the other hand, it might also be argued that while gender affects epistemology in that way in our culture at least it also affects epistemology in the sense that women’s ways of learning, sets of learning tools, and stores of information are delegitimised. Everybody in our culture is well aware of what it’s like to be, for example, a boy going through puberty or a man going through middle age–‘great literature’ is all about that–but the subjective experience of women isn’t visible or well known. Things women know–about sex, menstruation, or whatever–are not things the culture knows, in the sense that things men know tend to be. I had an interesting (well to me at least) experience of this a few years ago, when I sat down to write about why things I know about how to manage and lead people just didn’t seem to be working for me…you’d think after all these decades I might have possibly guessed that it had to do with sexism, but didn’t really identify that what I’d been taught and what I knew about management and leadership was knowledge for men and not for women until I explicitly wrote about it.
*Starts change.org petition to raise the minimum age for internet posting to 35*
I just had another thought about this–that the way in which people ask questions, and what questions are asked, can be gendered. The job of women in conversation, particularly in conversation with men, is to make the other person feel important and good about himself. In this context questions are permitted, but only of the ‘ooh, tell me more!’ variety. Men, on the other hand, are allowed to ask direct questions to gather information about things they themselves find interesting, irrespective of the feelings or interests of others. I’ve recently started a job in what I think is the most sexist workplace I’ve ever dealt with, and a lot of my experience chairing meetings here is dealing with the most important man in the room either expounding at great length about some irrelevant thing he’s thinking about or insistently asking irrelevant questions about something he happens to want to know. There’s a stereotype of women being irritating by asking questions–‘why does she always ask me questions? How should I remember what college his kid got into/what she was wearing/whatever the woman wanted to know?’–particularly unfortunate as in probably most of these kinds of conversations the woman isn’t actually asking for her own benefit, but to keep the conversation going and allow the person she’s talking to to give information, which makes people feel good.
So maybe there is an essay to be written on this subject.
As I said in the FB thread on your original link to this nonsense, there is a long and to my mind disreputable academic tradition of obscuring triviality behind obscure language. It’s also used of course by non academics to try and gain status and this seems a particularly good example – word soup indeed.
I’ll let people from other cultures keep their genders if I can stop people in my culture defining me by gender. How’s that? I don’t want to go all Captain Vimes, the Great White Two-Spirit colonial imperialist on them.
#14 You should _always_ go all Captain Vimes on people ;)
I just had another thought about how gender is epistemology. Traditionally in our culture boys are given more opportunity to experience the world kinesthetically and hapticly (is that a word?)–they have more freedom to move, explore, act, touch, grab and manipulate. Girls are expected to control our bodies and are generally given less freedom to move, either with or without adult supervision. This can’t help but affect how we learn and know. But on the other hand traditionally masculinity is associated with more abstract ways of experiencing and understanding, while women are supposed to be more ‘concrete’ and ‘physical’ (I have totally had that conversation (if you can call it that) where a male philosophy professor explains to me that women are underrepresented in his discipline because women just aren’t very good at or interested in abstract thought). So again I can see this going either way, but I’d be interested in reading someone exploring the epistemic ramifications of gendering.
Thank you, Ophelia. You took a lot more effort trying to comprehend that than the writer took to produce it. Like they say, the amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
Indeed, Gordon. How long does it take a bull to turn an acre of grass into bullshit? And how long does it take Mother Nature to turn that bullshit back into grass?
This is one very, very muddled thinker, if that is how she writes.
All I can say is that it is both simpler, and more complicated, than she can grasp. The concept of gender being a social construct is, at base, very simple: it’s how society treats people and expects them to behave based on their perceived biological sex. But dismantling which behaviours, if any, are innate and which are learned is impossible while we continue to treat people so very differently from birth.
*Toddles off to sign Chris’ petition*
To me, all these quotes add up to cultural relativity. SP is all worried that gender plays some kind of mystical role in other cultures and that only white feminists want to abolish it because they don’t give a shit about people of other cultures. That’s bullshit. We know enough about other cultures to know that gender is a hierarchy that is socially constructed, just like race. I suspect SP would criticize “white feminists” for wanting to abolish the practice of putting a hijab over women’s heads, because she sees that as colonization.
It’s interesting to think about how gender roles affect epistemologies, but we can do that without fighting to preserve and enforce gender.
This is like arguing religion.
guest @ 10 – Oh yes, definitely, there are plenty of interesting things to say about gender and how we know things – and you said more of them in those two paragraphs than SP did in that whole long piece. I’m actually somewhat puzzled as to how that terrible, empty piece managed to spark such solid ideas in you.
Jeez! ‘Gender’ is an ‘epistomology’ AND an ‘intersection’ among OTHER ‘intersections.’ Which have lenses. All in one sentence.
This person has been deliberately taught to scramble their language, and presumably their brains, this way. I haven’t checked the link, but its possible that professional status and faculty posts have been used to reward this behavior.
But anyone who doubts or quibbles about actual meaning and utility can be dismissed as ‘white,’ ‘privileged,’ ‘cis,’ etc. etc.
Oh I really really REALLY doubt that SP is any kind of academic. I’d be staggered if SP were. The writing and thinking are way too bad for that. Even the academics who dress up banalities in pseudo-technical verbiage do it with more skill than this – they have to. This wouldn’t pass muster in freshman comp.
Quibble: isn’t the author, Lola Phoenix, LP rather than SP? It switched to SP early in the OP and stayed that way for some reason.
That reason would be my total and pathetic absent-mindedness.
OK, Ophelia, your punishment is to have to listen to Barney the dinosaur sing the alphabet song 50 times. Then, if you have any brain cells left, you will be allowed to post again. ;-)
Also: More comments from guest, please. Well done and well-argued.
I second that.
I was thinking while I set up the guest post that it’s amusing what excellent comments we get from the so-anonymous “guest” – perhaps the humblest nym anyone has ever used.