Postmodern femininities and masculinities

The meaning and understanding of gender has changed dramatically in the past four decades.

However, gender remains a politicized category describing social identity, which is contested

and changing. The conservatives have argued that feminist movements contributed to the

general social crisis and decay, while many feminists argued that there has not been enough

progress made towards gender justice and equality. Although, there are a variety of

movements which take gender as a primary or important element, in general it is agreed that

the highly-politicized, sometimes radical, feminist movement, broadly defined as a Second

Wave, has passed its peak. The third wave is less visible and more preoccupied with identity

and “micro-politics.” In part it can be attributed to a variety of historical formations,

enormous gains achieved by the feminists, conservative backlash, internal divisions within

the movements, as well as feminists turning towards academic knowledge production.

In this paper I will outline major debates in feminist theory in relation to the changing

understanding of gender through essentialist, modernist, and postmodernist lenses. I will

argue that although postmodern theories of gender are the most convincing, promising and

potentially transformative, in many ways they are the least political, because they are

typically confined within the boundaries of the university and academic language. However,

this might be attributed not to gender theories specifically, but to the “postmodern turn” in

general. The collapse of grand narratives rendered a radical remaking of society a naïve

proposition not worthy of academic attention. 

The essentialist understanding of gender was a dominant paradigm up until the mid-1970s,

although Simone de Beauvoir proclaimed in the 1949 that “one is not born a woman, but

rather becomes one.” This marked a radical shift in understanding of gender, or rather sex,

although her ideas did not become very popular until much later. What is considered to be

first wave feminism was a late 19th and early 20th century women’s suffrage movement,

although there have been women suffragists much earlier as well. Women did not question

gender difference as such, but rather fought for equality with men. Sex was assumed to be a

biological reality which was natural and unquestionable. The suffragettes argued against sex

inequality and tried to convince men that sex difference should not be a basis for political

disenfranchisement. Women fought for a greater freedom as women. However, essentialist

understanding did not vanish with a new theoretical concepts or practices. Several feminist

movements, such as gynocentric feminism, argued that women were inherently more human,

virtuous, and superior to men. For example, certain eco-feminists argued that women are

inherently closer to nature, that femininity provide with better models and practices for

human coexistence, sustainability, and peace. Although there is, or might be, some merit in

such observations, they do not address crucial issues of gender as a social construction, what

purposes gender serves in the social organization, and in what ways gender is harmful for

both men and women (although to different degrees). So for example one could argue that

statistically women might be convicted less often then men for violent crimes, but it does not

prove biologically and essentially a women’s goodness, because it can be explained by

different socialization, expectations, and a variety of other factors, which social

constructionists would insist must be considered. Overall, gynocentric movements were

politically weak and ineffective, although there remains variety of gynocentric theories,

approaches, and practices. The model of femininity, which should only slightly be altered not

to reproduce patriarchal internalized aspects, is perceived as an ideal. Such an approach and

understanding of gender, of course, became widely criticized by the theorists moving in the

postmodern direction.  

The break in gender understanding during the second feminist wave can be attributed to

Gayle Rubin, who came up with the term “gender/sex system.” The Gender/sex system,

according to Rubin, refers to equation that male=masculine, female=feminine, and the object

of desire is of opposite sex/gender, constituting a necessarily heterosexual relationship.

Gender, according to Rubin, should be seen as social construction which is designated to

reinforce heterosexuality and hierarchy. Gender becomes the social location, which typically

designates woman as lower on the social hierarchy. However, contrary to later postmodern

theories of gender, which sees gender and sex as socially and discursively produced, feminist

theories during the second wave maintained that sex is a biological essence and gender is a

social construction.

Major feminist advancements happened during the feminist second wave. Changes in law,

politics, culture, sports, and general consciousness had been altered enormously. Towards the

end of the second wave however a variety of conflicts occurred. Certain feminist theories of

oppression where challenged as white, heterosexual, and middle-class centered. The category

of gender, as the only and the most important category, was questioned. Combahee River

Collective, for example, issued a statement, which read: “we are actively committed to

struggling against, racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular

task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that major

systems of oppression are interlocking” (412). Much of the feminist theory took a turn

towards intersectionality approach, which did not analyze gender in isolation from other

markers. Women of color criticized feminist theories which had white, middle-class woman

as their primary subject. Postcolonial and transnational feminists criticized unexamined

feminist universalisms, claims for “global sisterhood,” and persistent women’s victimization.

These viewpoints greatly complicated the understanding of gender since many feminist

theories or political projects of “sisterhood,” which were previously presented as universal,

had to be revised. Audre Lorde states that “by and large within the women’s movement

today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race,

class, sexual preference, class, and age” (293).The feminist identity divisions should be seen

in the context of the rise of identity politics, which embraced various marginalized groups.

Although the sex and gender separation occurred and a variety of criticisms about the need to

recognize differences complicated what gender means, woman remained the primary concern

of feminist theory. Men where largely theorized in relation to oppression of women, and not

as gendered beings. Politically, liberal feminists also achieved the highest gains in social and

political transformations, although that often meant equality with men, not necessarily

transforming male dominated institutions and the premises they are built upon. Catharine

MacKinnon, for example, was critical of the equality approach which simply suggests that

equality needs to measure up to male standards. She argues that “to define the reality of sex

as difference and the warrant of equality as sameness is wrong on both counts” (251). Issues

of difference and equality have remained one of the central feminist concerns.

 The turn to postmodern feminism brought enormous changes to the understanding of gender,

sex, and sexuality. While earlier sex was fixed category and gender was thought of as social

construction, postmodern theories proclaimed that both of them were changing and of

discursive construction. Sexuality, similarly was subsumed under gender oppression in the

early feminist theorizing, but queer theories claimed that sexuality was a category of

oppression in itself. However, at the time of these changes Women’s Studies departments

were increasingly professionalized and further away from social movements which were

emblematic of the 1970s. The turn towards Postmodernism meant more focus on discursive,

linguistic, or psychoanalytic theorizing. It also meant that earlier feminist theories and

activism, while having made enormous changes and improved situation of women, at the

same time reinforced and naturalizes binary gender system, which could be seen as ultimately

regressive. Focus on sexuality evolved into the queer theory, masculinity studies started to

emerge as a subfield in women studies. The Women’s Studies departments throughout the

1990s, and even more so recently, were changing their names to include gender and sexuality

in their tittles. Judith Butler became emblematic to postmodern gender and queer studies.

Butler argued that feminist theory on sexual difference “is at its most productive when it is

not taken as a ground, foundation, or methodology, but as question posed but not resolved”

(543). Gender should be seen as unstable, historically contingent, and fluid. For Butler there

is no interior, biological, or metaphysical essence. Both gender and sex are discursively

produced and materialize through endless performative acts. Gender is also deeply embedded

in the heterosexual matrix, which Butler describes as a “grid through which bodies, genders,

and desires are naturalized” (362).  Butler also poses difficult challenges to feminist theory

and questions its subject. Drawing on Foucaultian notions of power, state, and discursive

subject formation, Butler asks what happens when “the feminist subject turns out to be

discursively constituted by the very political system that is supposed to facilitate its

emancipation [?]” (354). This is the important point, even if Foucault or Butler would argue

that there is no space outside the discourse, but at the same time, “obviously, the political task

is not to refuse representational politics – as if we could” (355). It is a necessary question for

feminists or anyone who is committed to dismantling the present gender and sexuality system

to engage in. The major difference between modern and postmodern feminists in

understanding how power operates is between power as sovereignty and power as a

discursive entity. Second wave feminists saw institutional, individual, and collective male

power and domination as exercised against all women collectively and individually. The

postmodern explanations of power treat power as a discursive formation which is not exterior

but works through the agency of individuals and disciplinary institutions. Individuals

simultaneously produce power and are produced by it. However, Sara Lee Bartky warns

against uncritical appropriation of discursive power theories since they treat their subject as a

generic human, meaning a man; such an approach has been a case throughout the history of

the Western philosophy. She states: “Foucault treats the body throughout as if it were one, as

if the bodily experiences of men and women did not differ and as if men and women bore the

same relationship to the characteristic institutions of modern life” (278). These insights create

new challenges, but also open new possibilities for reformulation and transformation of

masculinity and femininity.

 Masculinity studies as a discipline also attempted to address some of these concerns. Some

of the major issues masculinities are preoccupied with is to “deconstruct static binaries in

gender studies between victims and oppressors, difference and dominance, and hegemonic

(or socially validated) and alternative masculinities” (Gardiner 2). Other areas include the

reversal of traditional public/private divide in which “men are analyzed in their most private

attributes: by considering embodiment, sexuality, and emotion” (10.) However, there is some

concern coming from feminist studies about incorporation of such subfield into women’s

studies, which potentially can distract and return the focus to men, which has been the case

all along. Others warn against field becoming white heterosexual masculinity studies.

Nevertheless, the political project most scholars in masculinity studies are interested in is to

make alliances with feminist studies and to demystify masculinity as natural, unchanging,

hegemonic, necessarily violent and dominating. Understanding the multiplicity of

masculinities in various contexts and across various axes of difference can potentially lead to

better understanding of how gender works and affects different bodies.  Such insights can be

used to construct effective politics which challenge various fields from politics, law, and

media representations to behaviors and intimate relationships.

Gardiner maps out four points of consensus which exist between feminist theory and feminist

studies: 1) that masculinity is gender; 2) masculinity is not monolithic; 3) there is a need for

cooperation in order to achieve meaningful changes; 4) poststructuralist skepticism about

gender essentialism. Some authors, such as Nancy Chodorow, examine masculinity and its

formation through the lenses of psychoanalysis. Chodorow challenges notion that aggression

is an expression of masculine essence, but it “emerge[s] from variety of situated

psychodynamics […] connected to self and other […] as a defense against an endangered self

(the sense of danger being physiological, a fantasied or perceived threat of physical or

emotional attack, punitive guilt, shame and humiliation, a threat of fragmentation – and

danger can be felt from within or without)” (243).   Thomas agrees that there are potentially

dangerous directions masculinity studies can take, for example, equating injustices against

women and men as equal, without a consideration in dissymmetrical relations to power and

privilege. However, he also sees the potential of profeminist classrooms and politics in which

some “men learn from feminism in order to make subversive interventions into reproductions

of normative masculinity itself” (61). He also calls for politics and practices of typically

phallic and impenetrable male bodies for figural and literal penetration. Others argue for a

need to break away with an old idea gender/sex divide, which implies that gender is somehow

connected to or reflects sex. Judith Halberstam for example, analyses female masculinities.

She argues that female masculinity “disrupts contemporary cultural studies accounts of

masculinity within which masculinity always boils down to the social, cultural and political

effects of male embodiment and male privilege” (345). Halberstam provides with various

reasons why female masculinity can have an enormous potential: 1) it is able to dissociate

masculinity from male bodies; 2) provides non-misogynistic alternative model of

masculinity; 3) it can be used to disrupt regime of heterosexuality; and 4) provide new

insights into male femininities. However, femininities remain undertheorized and for the

most part absent from the discussion. The explanation for that can be found in feminist

theories’ desire to dismantle femininity altogether, since it was associated with submission

and powerlessness, false and destructive internalized ideals. Although Halberstam provides

with convincing arguments the potential remains to be determined. If female masculinity

takes certain signs, behaviors, norms from normative masculinity, but never fully enacts it, is

normative masculinity really challenged? Even if we recognize normative masculinity as

performance, as ideal never fully achieved, nevertheless the power it is able to generate and

exercise remains a reality. If gender proliferation is the ultimate goal, will binary gender

system will be destroyed completely or all other genders will be defined against male/female?

It is possible to envision proliferation of gender expressions, which would be a result of

various subversive tactics, but for the most part, so far, heteronormativity and male

dominance has been able to hold itself as a dominant paradigm. Proliferation of gender

expressions even if it appears as a desirable outcome of new gender and queer theory and

activism does not solve various other contradictions connected to power and difference.

Nancy Fraser describes radical democracy as “the view that democracy today requires both

economic redistribution and multicultural recognition” (460). She argues that there has been

shift in identity and cultural politics which focused almost exclusively on recognition, rather

than redistribution and political economy. Such a shift has been theorized by other theorists

such as Lisa Duggan, who argued that social movements of the 1960s - 70s had much broader

transformative goals of the whole system, rather then recognition and inclusion in the existing

structures. Can rigid gender and heteronormotive structures be dismantled, if they are

intimately interconnected with existing juridical, political, and economic institutions of

power? Postructuralist and postmodern theories which emphasize individual identities and

cultural expressions without seriously engaging or proposing how power structures can be

altered or replaced seem to be missing important piece of the puzzle.

Another drawback which has been widely criticized by feminists, such as bell hooks, is

exclusive nature of academic language. The theoretical discourses and academic jargon is not

a problem in itself, if it is productively utilized within academia. However, it becomes

problematic when it does not travel outside the walls of academy. The difference between

second wave feminism and their politics rooted in mass politics and today’s feminist

academic producers is that they have completely different audiences and effects. Of course, it

is a gross overgeneralization that academic theories do not “travel,” but it is quite evident by

skepticism about radical transformation of the state, politics, and economy that is not an

academic priority. Politics or recognition and inclusion typically do not challenge existing

reconfiguration. Fraser argues that “affirming some identities […] requires transforming

others” and that “we should develop an alternative version of antiessentialism, one that

permits us to link an antiessentialist cultural politics with an egalitarian social politics of

redistribution” (467-68). That is the challenge for postmodernist project of gender

destabilization and transformation. 

Another challenge is commodification of difference and illusion of real diversity, while in

reality normative structures remain in place. bell hooks writes: “the commodification of

Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more

satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling” (21). The difference can no longer be

always assumed to be a positive and progressive expression, since differences work on

various axes of power; some are accepted or commodified while others are made abject.

Without addressing capitalist reliance to maintain poor and marginalized in order to extract

surplus value and have excess labor pool, we cannot realize just society, which will be simply

paved through culture politics and multiculturalism. Neoliberal reliance on self-policing of

docile citizens produced variety of previously marginalized people, who have compromised

ideals of social transformation in order to gain recognition. Progressive, transgressive, or

radical masculinities and femininities (and endless other –ninities we will come up with) will

need to be aware of these dynamics if they are really meant to have a radical potential.

Without a focus on radical democracy we will continue to rely on “a body on which inferior

status has been inscribed” (Bartky 283). Postmodern theories of gender provide important

insights but we need effective politics which goes beyond postmodern theory and skepticism

confined within the walls of academia. 

  

Works cited:

 

Bartky, Sara Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader. Eds. Elizabeth Hackett and Sally Hasslinger.New York: Oxford University Press, 2006

 Butler, Judith. “Against Proper Objects.” Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader. Eds. Elizabeth Hackett and Sally Hasslinger.New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

 Butler, Judith. “From Gender Trouble.” Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader. Eds. Elizabeth Hackett and Sally Hasslinger.New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

 Combahee River Collective “A Black Feminist Statement.” Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader. Eds. Elizabeth Hackett and Sally Hasslinger.New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

 Chodorow, Nancy J. “The Enemy Outside: Thoughts on the Psychodynamics of Extreme Violence with Special Attention to Men and Masculinity.” Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

 Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2004

 Gardiner, Judith. Introduction. Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New                   Directions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

 Halberstam, Judith. “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Masculinity Studies and           Feminist Theory: New       Directions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

 hooks, bell. “Eating the Other.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 2002.

 Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader. Eds. Elizabeth Hackett and Sally Hasslinger.New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

 Nancy Fraser “Multiculturalism, Antiessentialism, and Radical Democracy.” Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader. Eds. Elizabeth Hackett and Sally Hasslinger.New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

 Thomas, Calvin. “Reenfleshing the Bright Boys; Or, How Male Bodies Matter to           Feminist Theory.” Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New       Directions.            New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.