The Philosophy of Sexuality
September 13th, 2008 | by Matthew Smith |Some rather shallow notes on our set philosophy reading from week 6: Gatens, Moira. “Sexual Difference or Sexual Equality”.
Gender has been ignored in philosophy until very recently. Gatens discusses how some influential philosophy can be reapplied with gender in mind to show that women’s femininity is socially constructed.
In philosophy of politics:
Hobbes’ Leviathan presents the idea that the state is a giant monster made of of social institutions. The only place for women is under the umbrella of “those accepting by word and deed and conquered by war”. Women can’t participate in Hobbes’ polity, they are purely ruled by it.
Hume thinks women must “insinuate” their way into society by being associated with men. Hume shows how a voice is denied to anyone who is different from the dominant voice, i.e. women and people of other ethnicities. (Hume has also been used when talking about how any outsider must learn to speak in the dominant paradigm which may not be their own, for example Australian Aboriginals were required to speak in terms of “Land Rights” even though it’s an alien concept to their culture, likewise, women are required to speak with a man’s voice / language if they are able to take part in political discourse)
Labour, property and contracts
Engels states that when houses used to be communistic, womens work was public but since monogamous families have come about, it has become private. He glosses over the fact that labour conceived as property was the cause of men leaving the home. At the time of the industrial revolution, women’s bodies were considered incapable of producing goods.
Rousseau sees women as providing the backdrop / foundation to society. They are part of nature (Or part of the furniture) so don’t participate in the economy.
Marx is silent on gender but marxism has had a major impact on feminism since there are many parallels. Marxist feminists talk about the absence of wage relation in women’s work. i.e. that work undertaken by women in the home doesn’t have an economic value or isn’t part of the economy when it should be.
Sexuality, subjectivity and reproduction
In general, Men can be seen as split into natural man and social man. This is the idea that there is the physical man’s nature and body (including sexuality) as well as the intellectual and social man’s aspect. But women are typically not developed this way in traditional thinking, they are seen as neutral (i.e. their sexuality is not separated from any other aspects of their being). It seems that women just naturally attend to “natural needs” because they are the ones who give birth.
Mill advocates a strong public / private divide based on a “social contract” suggesting that women benefit by having a protected space. He forgets that relegating women to private space makes them invisible which means they are vulnerable to private dangers (i.e. rape, incest and domestic violence). Mill fails to acknowledge that women’s positions are not brought about by contract but by social construction in which women don’t have a choice.
de Beauvoir and Firestone say that contraception allows women to enter the workforce: Who will do the housework now? Maybe home labour will be contracted which would bring it into a relationship with the public sphere. (This was written in 1991, since then we’ve found that women just continue to do both)
What is women’s sexuality without reproduction? Women’s sexuality is defined in society by their reproductive role, so it seems like so much feminism is obsessed with women’s liberated sexuality once reproduction is taken out of the equation. This ignores other dimensions of women’s beings. What of male – female relations and marriage for the non-reproductive female? de Beauvoir makes the assertion that the relationship must be based on a shared project.
Gatens thesis is that feminism is often reduced to a choice between artificial equality (ie. contraception) or acceptance of the natural differences between genders. She argues that this choice is artificial and that we need to challenge the social constructions of femininity.
References
Gatens, Moira. “Sexual Difference or Sexual Equality” in Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality, Cambridge: Polity Press & Indiana University Press, 1991. [Google Scholar Search]
Moira Gatens bio at U Syd website.