The fact that there is only one
chapter in this book, apart from a few observations in the contribution by
Held, which raises issues of gender, and the fact that the contribution in
question is written by one of only two female contributors, already say a great
deal about the issues which Murgatroyd addresses. I can do nothing other than
accept the force of her observation that, like many others working in social
theory, I have simply not accorded questions of gender the attention they
undeniably deserve. Even up to some ten years ago, in common with so many
others, I unthinkingly used the terms 'man' and 'men' to refer to human beings
in general. It does not necessarily follow from this that, as Murgatroyd says,
I have thereby ignored one half of humanity. Not all aspects of social life are
gender-divided, and precisely one of the issues which has to be faced in social
theory is how far, and in what ways, the difference that is gender 'makes a
difference'. It does not seem to me, for example, that the basic
presuppositions of structuration theory vary according to gender, or would have
to be revised fundamentally in the light of giving more specific attention to
gender relations. Murgatroyd seems to accept this insofar as she attempts to
use the theory to illuminate aspects of gender.
Murgatroyd opens her chapter by
considering the importance of domestic work, pointing out that orthodox
sociology has been forced to undergo considerable rethinking in this area.
Prior to the renewed impact of feminism from the early 1970s or so,
sociological accounts of work and domesticity usually contrasted places of
labour outside the home with 'the family' as a separate and distinct sphere.
'Work' was equated with 'paid employment'. As Murgatroyd shows, this sort of
view is fundamentally inadequate. The association between domestic labour,
'housewives' or 'homemakers', and the images of wife and mother, connect on the
one side to overall conceptions of masculinity and femininity, and on the other
to wider institutional features of the state and division of labour. Although
some of these relations seem to be changing fairly rapidly, the connections
involved remain quite tightknit.
Probably few would take issue
with these observations today, although detailed exploration of them is
difficult and controversial. The more original part of Murgatroyd's discussion
concerns those sections of her chapter in which she connects social
reproduction to the 'production of people'. Structuration theory, she argues,
can be fruitfully applied in this regard. Counterposing economic production to
the production of people, she says, is a useful way of supplanting the usual
comparison between the public domain of production and the domestic sphere. It
is not only material goods which are produced and distributed in any given
social system; people are also. Those engaged in the production of people can
be defined as individuals who procreate and nurture others in such a way as to
'create' them as human beings. Much of this activity is concentrated in the
domestic sphere. Labour-power, she proposes, is the link between material
production and the production of people. 'People-work', she states, 'produces
people who embody labour power of various kinds' (p. 157). Labour-power is then
fed back into the overall reproduction of social life.
People-producing work, Murgatroyd
says, is concentrated within, but not confined to, the domestic sphere. For
instance, the medicalizing of health care has subjected pregnancy and
childbirth to the overall control of medical professionals. We can also specify
direct ties between the production of people and broader aspects of social
organization such as class or ethnic divisions. Thus, for instance, we can
analyse people-producing work in terms of how far it facilitates or inhibits
labour-market opportunities. Whether a married woman decides to look for paid
employment will depend upon such factors as what job she might hope to get, the
work of her husband, domestic work in which she has to engage, divisions of
responsibility in terms of childrearing, and the availability of services to
substitute for domestic tasks which she carries out.
While Murgatroyd makes some
interesting and important points, I am not sure how far I would follow the particular
approach she adopts. Although I was marginally influenced by Bertaux's work -
to which she refers in her analysis - 1 do not find the 'production of people'
a very helpful concept. In the first place, it seems to me to stand too close
to historical materialism. Her argument is that an account of economic
reproduction needs only to be complemented by an account of'people production'
to form a viable interpretation of the intersection of gender and other social
divisions or relationships. If one has reservations about the degree to which
there is a distinctive economic 'infrastructure' underlying other social
institutions, this approach loses some of its appeal. Second, it is not very
clear exactly what sense is to be given either to 'production' or to 'people'
here. Perhaps one might argue that there is a reasonably close similarity
between procreation and the manufacture of goods, since in both cases human
beings materially make the 'end products'. Even here, though, the comparison
seems rather attenuated. For instance, material goods and services are not only
produced, but consumed. One cannot very easily see any processes of the
'consumption of people'... save perhaps in warfare. The use of the term
'people', which sounds simple, also becomes vague once one starts to examine it
more closely. Human organisms are produced physically by the act of
procreation, but where 'person' means 'competent human agent', the production
of'people' shades over into social reproduction in a very generalized sense.
For human actors routinely and chronically constitute and reconstitute their
qualities as agents in recurrent processes of social interaction. Save perhaps
for early socialization, it would be difficult to sever off distinctive
characteristics of'people' that can be related to the productive activities of
which Murgatroyd speaks.
My approach, therefore, would be
rather different from hers. Connecting gender to social theory, and social
theory to gender, would seem to raise the following questions. First, are there
more or less universal attributes of masculinity and femininity, and if there
are, what are their origins? Second, how is gender identity organized and
sustained in the day-to-day reproduction of social relationships in different
forms of society? Third, given that one accepts that in all known societies,
especially in more 'public5 contexts, men hold more power than women, how is
this to be explained? Fourth, how might we best understand the shifting
character of gender relationships with the advent of modernity? I cannot claim
that I have much that is novel to offer on these issues, but I do have views
about the most relevant or promising approaches to them.
In respect of the first question
raised, the answer seems to be a qualified 'yes'. Although comparative research
on the problem is difficult, and by no means conclusive, it appears plausible
to claim that there exist some very general differences between the
psychological make-up of women and men. While we cannot discount biological
interpretations, in my view the most apt theoretical framework within which
these might potentially be understood is psychoanalysis. To some critics, such
a standpoint appears perverse, not only because of reservations they have about
the status of Freud's ideas in general, but because of his notorious failure to
give much attention to the psychology of women. In her early intervention into
the debate about psychoanalysis and feminism, however, Juliet Mitchell was able
to show both that Freud's neglect of female psychology can be overestimated and
that his work contains an account of gender differences which is both subtle
and intellectually powerful. No doubt Freud's ideas in this area, as in many
others, need to be elaborated and modified in order to be made fully effective.
The writings of Nancy Chodorow are relevant and stimulating in this respect.6
In examining gender differences, Chodorow is probably right to place much more
emphasis than Freud upon the importance of the mother as compared to the
father. Her reworking of the theory of Oedipal transition provides a cogent
interpretation not only of feminine psychology, but of its reproduction across
the generations. I find helpful Chodorow's reversal of Freud's emphasis in her
argument that masculinity rather than femininity is defined by a 'loss', the
forfeiting of continuing close attachment to the mother. Chodorow's position
seems to me convincing, although I would not want to endorse it in its
entirety. Femininity and masculinity are probably more internally mixed and
contradictory than Chodorow implies. It also seems likely that divisions
between masculinity and femininity do not simply become qualities of men on the
one hand and women on the other; rather, they are mixed in some degree within
the personalities of the members of the two sexes.
If
there is anything in these ideas, gender identity rests in some part upon
unconscious feelings and imagery. Recognizing this, however, should in no way
prevent us from seeing that gender is constructed and reconstructed in the flow
of interaction in day-to-day social life. The perspective of structuration
theory is directly relevant in this regard, and I would see Connell's work as
important in opening up some fruitful lines of thinking here.7 Gender
relations, he emphasizes, are to be understood in terms of the continuity or
transformation of practices within what he calls gender 'regimes'. That is to
say, in any distinct context or arena within social life, there are ordered
ways in which gender differences are transmitted and discursively represented.
He quotes, for example, a study of gender
discrimination in a school environment. The research shows that, among both
students and staff, there are practices which define and sustain specific
conceptions of femininity and masculinity - in sports, curriculum choice,
classroom discipline, administrative activities and other spheres. These in
some substantial part express, and thereby reproduce, broader institutional
patterns in the wider society.
Gender,
Connell argues, should not be thought of as a property of individual agents.
Criteria of gender identity are embedded in the recurrent practices whereby
institutions are structured. It is worth quoting him directly on this:
'gender'
means practice organised in terms of, or in relation to, the reproductive
division of people into male and female... [it] is a linking concept. It is
about the linking of other fields of social practice to the nodal practices of
engendering, childbirth and parenting . . . gender in this connection is a
process rather than a thing. Our language, especially its general categories,
invites us to reify. But it should be clear that the 'linking concept' is about
the making of the links, the process of organising social life in a particular
way. If we could use the word 'gender' as a verb (I gender, you gender, she
genders ...) it would be better for our understanding... The 'process' here is
strictly social, and gender a phenomenon within sociality. It has its own
weight and solidity, on a quite different basis from that of biological
process, and it is that weight and solidity that sociology attempts to capture
in the concept of'institution'.
On a
more concrete level, in respect of the sustaining and reconstituting of gender
identity (like Connell) I am particularly impressed with the work of Kessler
and McKenna. Their approach is strongly influenced by ethnomethodology,
deriving in some part directly from Garfinkel's original discussion of the
construction of gender in Studies in Ethnomethodology. In that book, in
his study of 'Agnes', Garfinkel sought to show that what might be taken to be a
'given' feature of social life- 'being a boy' or 'being a girl' - has
constantly to be worked at in all areas of social practice. The very
'naturalness' of gender is achieved only through complicated, yet routine,
management of detailed aspects of bodily gesture, presentation and modes of
interaction. Kessler and McKenna develop this position further by looking
systematically at the criteria of gender attribution, as these are handled in
everyday contexts of activity. Gender identity is created and recreated through
the consistent construction of dichotomies - in other words, difference - where
no absolute dichotomies exist in biological fact. As they show, examining
biological literature on gender, there is not a single physical characteristic,
or even combination of physical characteristics, which cleanly and completely
separates 'women' from 'men'.
No problems have been more
extensively debated in the recent literature than the questions of how far men
are universally dominant over women and how such forms of dominance are best to
be explained. There is no shortage of accounts which emphasize the overriding importance
of genetic factors in explaining universal sexual inequalities. The most
prominent current examples are those influenced by sociobiology, but many other
variants are to be found. The arguments that have been deployed against
biologically inspired standpoints seem to me compelling. In particular, no
definite biological mechanism has been identified which could form a basis of
differential power between men and women. Moreover, if it is valid to hold that
gender identity diverges from clear-cut biological criteria of sexual difference,
biological explanations of differential power become hard to sustain.
A more sociological explanation
must depend upon indicating how and why gender and power relations tend stably
to converge! While there are various forms in which this thesis can be couched,
the most persuasive type of interpretation still appears to be that which links
divisions of power and inequality to the relative confinement of women (in
variable degrees and ways) to domestic contexts, as a result of their central
involvement in childbirth and childrearing. This is not a biologically founded
phenomenon, in a genetic sense, but rather rests upon the social mediation of
biological differences.
A good illustration of the issues
involved is provided by considering the connections between gender and war
(something not mentioned in Shaw's discussion). Warfare at first sight appears
as an unequivocally male activityand thus could be expected to derive from some
sort of genetic variations in levels of aggressiveness between the sexes. But
as Elshtain points out in her recent study, there have been notable examples of
female warriors, and women have often been vocal in their support for war. On
the other hand, many men have been pacifists, and fighting in wars for most
male participants has little connection with inbuilt aggressiveness. Values of esprit
de corps far outweigh those of bloodlust; the whole point of military discipline
is to develop modes of behaviour on the battlefield which, far from being
biologically built in, have to be more or less forcibly instilled into recruits.
Studies of instances in which women have fought routinely in war, such as in
the Red Army during the Second World War, show that in such circumstances the
attitudes of female soldiers do not differ markedly from those of males. The
conclusion which has to be drawn from this is that, if women in the past have
not commonly participated directly in war, this is above all the outcome of the
clear separations drawn in virtually all societies between the domestic and
public spheres.
When we come to consider how
gender relations, and their intersection with other social institutions, have
altered over the course of history, I believe that some of my ideas are again
of potential relevance. On a general level, for example, it might be possible
to link gender divisions to the association of time-space distanciation with
power. The connection usually made between inequalities of gender and the
division of labour tends to reflect the undue primacy often attributed to
allocative resources in influencing social organization and social change.
Authoritative resources, however, are at least equally important in generating
the reorderings of time and space that I hold to be crucial in major phases of
social transformation. Males are ordinarily the 'carriers' of time-space
distanciation, their separation from the domestic sphere allowing for
specialization in control of writing, information storage and professional
expertise. It is possible that some systematic lines of theoretical analysis
could be developed on a basis of such a starting-point.
The same may be said of the
analysis of the institutional dimensions of modernity. Murgatroyd's chapter
concentrates upon gender in modern societies, but, as I pointed out, seems to
me to stand too close to an unreconstructed Marxist position. I would propose
examining the location and construction of gender differences in institutional
contexts spanning each of the dimensions of modernity I previously identified.
The development of capitalism has undoubtedly dramatically affected - although
in shifting fashion - the differential social positions of men and women. Some
aspects of this process are now well known and effectively documented. They
include, among other things, the clear-cut separation of 'home' from
'workplace', together with the emergence of labour markets founded upon
individual wage contracts. These factors have greatly influenced, but have by
no means wholly determined, gender relations within the political sphere.
Appropriately developed, in the modes indicated above, the changing nature of
citizenship would form one institutional area around which to analyse this type
of issue.
SOURCE : Social
theory of modern societies: Anthony Giddens and his critics (1994) / edited by
David Held and John Thompson. © Cambridge University Press 1989
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