2
Gender Embodied
We can tell you something of the life she lived. We can catalogue her being: tissue, bloodstream, cell,the shape of her experience to the least moment,skin, hair, try to see what she saw, to imagine what she felt, clítoris, vulva, womb, and we can tell you that despite each injury she survived. That she lived to an old age. (On all the parts of her body we see the years.) By the body of thís old woman we are hushed. We are awed.
We know that it was in her body that we began. And now we can see that ít is from her body that we learn. That we see our past.We say from the body of the old woman, we can tell you something o the lives we líved. -Susan Griffin "The Anatomy Lesson"
I begin this chapter with a consideration of the interrelation of various aspects of women's experience that have been separated by prefeminist approaches, from the macrocosmic societal to the microcosmic texture of the personal, individual experience. This is a step in the feminist project of reintegrating the hidden or lost aspects of ordinary experience into our knowledge concerning the psychology of women.
The consensual reality of Western culture has held that gender is a given, contained in or identical with the sex of the newborn. Gender and gender-linked attributes are viewed as natural rather than as socially and psychologically constructed. Paradoxically, then, all children must be taught what is natural and those who do not learn their lessons well are viewed as unnatural.
It has been one of the programs of feminist psychology to introduce and demonstrate the distinction between gender and sex. Many theoretical and empirical works have developed and established this distinction, introduced early on by Gayle Rubín (I975) and others. In addition, the work of John Money (I973) and John Money and Anke Erhardt (I972) has shown quite dearly that assigned gender rather than sex establishes a feminine or masculine identity. That is, children raised as boys or girls become boys and girls even when this identity is later discovered not to match genetic makeup. As Roben Stoller has suggested, the effects of "biological systems, organized prenatally in a masculine or feminine direction, are almost always ...too gentle in humans to withstand the more powerful forces of environment in human development, the first and most powerful of which is mothering" (in Miller I989, p. 253). In other words, it is not the possession of certain genitals or even chromosomes that establishes gender identity and related characteristics and behaviors, but whether meaningful others treat the individual as female or male and, in that way, teach the individual how to be a female or a male. Our culture has no human category more basic than this one and, in order to survive psychologically, each of us must be educated in how to be either female or male.
One of the two gender categories is assigned at birth based on externl genital apparatus. In our society, these categories are considered to be invariant throughout life, with the exception of surgical intervention, by means of which the removal or addition of the appropriate genitals then permits a concomitant change in gender irrespective of chromosomal makeup.* Not all societies offer this democratic choice; in many, castrated men simply become eunuchs, as in the case of harem attendants. Even in our own society, both intentionality and adoption of a new gender identity are required for a man to be considered a transsexual rather than a castrated
*Garfinkel (I967) has done an interesting analysis of an individual who underwent a surgical change and the concomitant learnings that were required to adopta new gender identity socially and not just surgically man. Obviously the change from female to male does not allow for as much ambiguity, nor do society's constructs provide as many gradations.
Although there is ample evidence (Money I973) that gender-related physical characteristics are continuous, not dichotomous, attributes, they are, again by consensual agreement, culturally and morally divided into only two categories (Garfinkel I967). There is considered to be something wrong with a person who does not fit neatly into one of the categories-not something just physically wrong, but a moral and even intentional transgression punishable by ridicule and humiliation, psychological and sornetimes even physical violence. Failing all these modes of enforcement, oras a consequence of the damage caused by them, this problem is likely to be considered for psychotherapeutic treatment.
In order to create and maintain the illusion of dichotomy, any ambiguities must be eliminated or disguised. This is accomplished by means of a myriad of signals and markings indicating that one is female or male, including posture, manner of moving and speaking, dress, and voice tone (Frye I983). These signals are physically based but they become psychologically pervasive as the individual develops, so that they are eventually both expressed and experienced in every realm simultaneously. Focusing for a moment on the physical, it is women who generally have to alter their bodies and restrict their movement to maintain the illusion of dichotomy. With the use of razors, depilatories, tweezers, hairstyling, makeup, nail polish, nylons, high heels, bras that lift, augment, or reduce, garments that tighten and reduce, women do not look anything like men. The differences are not only observable but often exaggerated. Gregory Zilboorg (I944) has suggested that this reversa!of the more commonly observed pattern in other species-wherein it is the male who must appear decorative and attractive to the female--is a function of the extreme power differential between males and females in our culture. Women must make themselves pleasing tomen.
Certainly men also participare actively in physically and psychologically signaling their gender appropriateness, but in less artificial and physically constricting ways: in our culture, they must consistently signa! ways in whích they take up more space and make a greater impact on the environment than do women. They must be more powerful in every way, from the personal to the institutional. As one example, on a recent radio talk show, the guest was an expert in vocal training. Severa!of the callers were distraught males who wanted to know what to do about their voices, which were relatively high in comparison with the acceptable range for men. The expert immediately trotted out a series of exercises designed to help these men practice lowering their voices. Why should this be deemed necessary?
Viewing the problem from the societal perspective, it ís apparent that the illusion of dichotomy must be maintained. Translated to the personal, individual experience, these men were motivated to avoid the personal humiliation of not fitting into their assígned category. They were sure that something was wrong, not with the categories but with themselves, and were desperate to change it. George Bush was faced wíth this same problem during his campaigri for the presidency. He was coached in how to alter his voice in arder to avoid being seen as not masculine enough for the job. Sorne of his later actions in the Gulf War, however, put his masculinity beyond question.
In a society that emphasizes individuality to the extent that ours does, people attribute causality to individuals more than to characteristics of the environment or social context. This has repeatedly been shown to be so dinically, as well as in the extensive psychological attribution literature. Gender dichotomies are not questioned. Instead an individual who is unable to conform with their rigid distinctions thinks, "There is something wrong with me."
There is a distinction to be made here between the experience of females and males that is crucial to the psychology of each. Simply put, while males may be ridiculed and humiliated for behaving or sounding or looking like females, so may females. Women are subject to censure not only for behaving too much like men but for behaving too much like women. We can all easily conjure up examples of hurtful criticism of women for being masculine (pushy, castrating, dominating) as well as feminine (talking incessantly, nagging, gossiping, being concerned with appearance, driving poorly, dieting)-a form of misogyny that is a part of daily life. Even the Sunday comics, often standard fare for children as well as adults, are still filled with long- suffering husbands ridiculing their wives' obsession with appearance, shopping, and dieting and their poor housekeeping skills. A truly revolutionary moment will occur when people stop laughing, for example, at mother-in-law jokes.
This process starts early when young boys taunt gírls and exclude them from their play, and culminares in "the normal male contempt for women" (Brunswick I940). Such an aggressive and derisive attítude does not at all detraer from, but adds to, traditional masculinity. A woman's hatred of men would certainly not be considered natural either by psychologists or by socíety at large; it would be defined not only as unfeminine but even as masculine, and undoubtedly as pathological. This important point in the psychology of women toda y cannot be overemphasized. While aman in our society can attain approval and avoid humiliation by behaving in socíally prescribed masculine ways, a woman does not have this same uncomplicated alternative. She may be admired for responding in an appropriate (feminine) way, but she is also subject to social sanction for this behavior, just as she would be for responding in an inappropriate (masculine) way.
Enforcement of such gender adherence in Western society is largely psychological, based upon the extremely powerful mechanism of humiliation, which results in the experience of shame. Shame is one of the most potent of societal and individual psychological enforcers, putting nothing less than the basíc sense of esteem and worth at stake. A person who is ridiculed feels a sense of shame or humiliation, a sense of being physically and, secondarily, psychologically so seriously flawed asto experience annihilation of the self, the desire not to exist. Something is so wrong with the very core of the self, both physically and psychologically, that it must dissolve.
lt is particularly shameful not to fit clearly into a gender category, so that individual and interpersonal psychology are both based upon the need to fit. Herein lies the motivation of transsexuals, who must make themselves fit one or the other category. Even those who seem to desire not to fit, as would someone striving for an androgynous identity, often reporta deep sense of shame when, in a minor public transaction, their gender is mistaken or cannot be discerned. I have heard clients and nonclients describe their sense of embarrassment or shame in such a situation, as well as the embarrassment of the person who was unable to categorize them and who is socially required and personally motivated either to apologize profusely or to susrain the ridicule.
As a classroom exercise in my graduare seminar on gender and ethnicity, I often ask a female and a male student to exchange gender roles in a role play of a dating situation; she takes the traditional male role as she views and experiences it, he the female role as he s es it. Although the students understand the importance of this exercise and usually participare in it good-naturedly, they consistently reporta sense of humiliation and shame in enacting the other gender's role. Most important, this sense of shame is specifically related to the physically based psychological aspects of that role. The woman often reports that her manner of behavior, seating positions, and use of her body and space made her feel "lewd." She has displayed and used her body too openly and freely, which, if done by a male, would be considered natural and thus invisible. On the other hand, the man most often relates his sense of shame to feeling diminished both physically and fully as a human being by having to be so sensitive to cues from the other person and by having both to contain himself and to remain in a state of permeable readiness.
A major function of our heterosexual pairing arrangements involves maintaining the illusion of dichotomy of the prescribed gender differences themselves. Couples generally pair up with the male partner being taller, older, more educated, and so on, than the female. Certainly he is expected to have a deeper voice, a larger body, be more than she is in the ways that men are supposed to be. The couple who defies this arrangement risks ridicule and a sense of embarrassment or shame. In order not to diminish their sense of self, most people in our society do not violare this norm and, thus, participare in maintaining the societal and personal illusion of gender dichotomy. The small number of heterost"xual couples who do defy these proscriptions usually have the approval of a subculture whose rules allow them to be praised and respected, not ridiculed. Less typically, sorne couples may redefine as personally meaningful not following society's mores in this sphere. If they feel humiliated, however, their rebelliousness will not be long-lived unless it becomes a means of counteracting the humiliation by denying or mastering it. The power of shame as a motívator should not be underestimated.
ANATOMY IS DESTINY
Freud was accurate in observing that anatomy is destiny, but erred in his explanation, in bis leve] of analysis, which was both phallocentric and reductíonist. Destiny is inherent not in biological anatomy but in anatomy gendered and meaningfully contextualized. Anatomy given meaning in our society becomes destiny, for this is the meaning that it is given. One of the most existentially profound and psychologically meaningful issues with which each of us must contend is the arbitrariness of anatomy and its assigned meanings, which then determine every individual's life path toan extraordinary extent. Once assigned, iris gender, as the basic psychological organizing principie in the family (along with age) and in larger society (along with race and dass), that determines and organizes development and identity.
Research has indicated that gender identity is generally established somewhere between an infant's twelfth and eighteenth month (Person and Ovesey I983) and is well in place by the third year (Money and Tucker I975). By that time the child has developed an organized concept of itself as a girl or a hoy, along with many of the associated meanings. That identity or template will then continue to grow in complexity and to incorporare new levels of meanings and behavior as the individual matures and is further educated by parents, teachers, and peers, or even as society permits the specific attributes identified with each gender to change.
The organizing principie of gender is general rather than specific. It does not involve, for example, whether one wears one's hair short or long, or dresses in skirts or pants; rather, it creares the íllusion of being a girl ora hoy, a woman or a man, by dictating what a female or a male in this society does. Gender is achieved; it would probably be more accurately expressed as a verb than as a noun. It is something that one does repeatedly, probably thousands of times a day. It is a higher-order abstraction whose actual content or referent is, in principie, irrelevant but, in practice, crucial and which is enforced by approval and acceptance if one conforms and ridicule and humiliation if one transgresses. As previously noted, if a smaller reference group, such as a feminist one, supports changes in the specifics, such as developing androgyny or more involved, sensitive fathering, then its members may receive approvai· for them, but this is not a change in the higher-order principie that one must comply with the gender prescriptions of meaningful others to gain approval and avoid humiliation.
In this way, physical attributes are tied to gender not by a natural attribution of meaning but by a rather arbitrary one. While the body is always gendered, it is also true that gender is always embodied. Stable meaning can be found in neither the particular attribute or act nor the gender with which it is associated, but in the division of attributes by gender, in the gender system itself. There is obviously a significant tendency in our culture for that division to be made by according males the more expansive and aggressive qualities and females the more vulnerable and confining ones. Many attributions don't fit these categories, however, and are much more arbitrary in content. Women, for example, were once not allowed to wear pants without violating the culture's system of confinement. Through much struggle and social upheaval, this stricture has loosened, although many subtle means of confining women are still with us.
Similarly, long hair on men, once considered effeminate (a special derogatory term for femininity displayed by males; note the need for such a word) or associated only with women, has come to be seen as macho by the same men who would once have ridiculed it. There is an old country-and-western song about a hippie who hides his long hair in his hat befare entering a "down-home" sort of bar. His life is endangered when his hair begins to escape the confines of the hat and is noticed by the "good old boys" in the bar. These days, that same group of drinkers would most likely be sporting long hair themselves. The meaning given to long hair by the valuing context has changed.
In another example, the father of a young son pointed out to me that the boy's legs were smooth and well shaped "like a girl's." He could not conceive that they were "like a boy's" or that shapely legs could be anything but a gender-linked, dichotomous variable. Conversely, a woman who wore a bathing suit to the beach without shaving her legs was approached by a young boy who asked incredulously why she had legs "like a man's." He was asking her to fit herself into one of the two categories by shaving her legs. The perception of the physical ungendered in this dichotomous manner is impossible for most people. Can the body exist ungendered? To adapt the old adage about the meaning of a cigar, Is the body ever just a body? In our society, for a human to exist ungendered would be to exist in a meaningless state. lt has been repeatedly demonstrated that people notice instantly whether a person is male or female* (Bem I98I; Grady I977; Kessler and McKenna I978; Laws I979). Without this knowledge, not only would interpersonal and intrapersonal development be ínterrupted but even physical development would be "unnaturaL" How would one stand, sit, walk, speak, think, feel, and act ungendered? How would others know how to think about, feel, and behave toward one?
From the moment of birth, if not sooner, given the modern technology available for ascertaining sex prior to birth, the body is gendered. Before the development of technology to determine sex in utero, a variety of superstitions were invoked to indicate the gender of the unborn child. Predictably, for example, if the fetus is active and moving a great deal, it is believed to be a male (Lewis I972). No doubt, if it turns out to be a girl, it would be considered a bit unnatural or "active for a female." One can only speculate how this seemingly minor interpretation might become embedded and elaborated in the future physical and psychological development of this active girL For example, she might feel that she is not quite like a girl whenever she is active. She might refuse to be too active in order not to feel like a boy. Chances are she will be unaware of having made this choice unless she continues to be described this way after birth and her parents continue to discuss it in her presence.
In any case, in the beginning is the question: Is it a boy or a girl? The answer is destiny itself and in one word establishes hundreds, thousands, of future life experiences. Everything from manner of dress, posture, appropriate seating positions, eating patterns, performance of household chores, sexual expression, and voice tone and inflection, to freedom of movement *In fact, we do this not only with humans. On a recent visir to a zoo in Australia, I was part of a group that was curiously viewing a newborn koala cub. The first and virtuallyimmediate question from the audience was, Is it a boy or a girl? Only after knowing to which gender group it belonged could people go on to comment on or respond to rhe cub. in public, safety, educational path, career choice, self-esteem, and self-concept, flows from the gender one is assigned at birth as a function of anatomy. How much more directly tied to anatomy could destiny be?
There ís no exístence in our culture prior to and separare from gender. That such an existence is socially and psychologically constructed makes it no less real. As meaningful adults begin responding, it is embedded into the infant's most essential physícal and preverbal self-concept as sensory-motor and kinesthetic knowledge. One cannot comment on a baby's existence-"lsn't he ?"; "Isn't she ?"-without access to information concerning that baby's gender. One cannot even speak of a baby in the English language without a third-person gendered referent. One of the main functions of a first name is to identify one's gender quickly (Miller and Swift I976). lt is almost impossible to find a greeting card congratulating parents on the birth of a baby that does not incorporate gender attributions. There is no concept,'no identity, more basic than this.
As many empirical studies have demonstrated, beginning at birth, parents treat female and male children differently in a variety of ways that directly or indirectly influence or define the physical and the psychological. Jeffrey Rubín, Frank Provenzano, and Zella Luria (I974) found gender stereotyping to exist within the first twenty-four hours after birth. Although there were no significant gender-related differences in newborns themselves, both mothers and fathers rated female children as significantly softer, smaller, finer-featured, and less alert. Fathers were more extreme in stereotyping. They rated boys as more alert, stronger, firmer, hardier, and better coordinated than girls. Other studies (Alberle and Naegele I952; Tasch I952; Pedersen and Robson I969) have found that fathers expected their newborn sons to be aggressive and athletic, their daughters pretty, sweet, fragile, and delicate. Mothers have been observed to be more physically responsive to male child-ren than to female children (Cohen I966) and to tolerare more aggression from sons than from daughters (Sears, Maccoby, and Levin I957). Both fathers and mothers viewed infant daughters as in greater need than sons of nurturance (Pedersen and Robson I969; Sears, Maccoby, and Levin I957). Based on their own study, Rubín, Provenzano, and Luria conduded tentatively that "it is physical and constitutional factors that specially lend themselves to sex-typing at birth, at least in our culture" (I974, p. I40). From the beginning, then, females and males are set on different physically based psychological paths.
Under ordinary circumstances, to have a body means to be alive, to move, to act, and to interact. In this society, however, literally everything about how, when, and even if we do any of these activities is gendered. Any question about the physical is meaningless until it is gendered. Conversely, everything about it is meaningful once gendered. The meaning is located contextually, not in the actor attribute itself, and is communicated interpersonally, by the ideas, feelings, expectations, and behavior of significant adults; by how an infant is held, touched, talked to, talked about; by the kinds of toys considered appropriate; by the color coding of dothing and blankets. This emphasis on sex differentiation by both parents, fathers to a greater extent, increases with the age of the child and tends to reach a maximum in the adolescent years (Unger I979), when the parents and family members are joined most vigorously by peers.