Gender Abolition: A Beauvoirian Argument for Discursive and Social Gender Expansion
by Anya Sudershan Khanna
Introduction
Gender abolition is often described as a destruction of gender, an excision of gendering and gendered elements from society. While the idealistic promise of it can certainly be appealing, it has its discontents—such as the potential of removing vocabulary without fixing issues. However, this may not mean that gender abolition is not worth pursuing; instead, it suggests the need for an expansive, not destructive, approach to gender abolition. In this paper, I argue that an expansive gender abolition is necessary for liberation from the constraints of gender, as well as for bringing about much-needed complexity in the discourse of gender labels. This paper aims to answer these questions through a theoretical approach based largely on the theories of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler that is then applied to a hard case. In the first section of this paper, I establish gender abolition (the cessation of gender as a form of social categorization, oppression, and distribution of labor and resources) as necessary for free navigation of gender and thus a normative goal; in addition, I distinguish destructive and expansive approaches to abolition. In the second section, I posit that expansive abolition is a more favorable option than destructive abolition. Finally, in the third section, I use the terminology of “cisgender” as well as neo-identities as hard cases to prove the consequences of contemporary discourse as well as the merits of expansive abolition. Overall, I aim to provide a theoretical case for expansive abolition as well as an argument for bringing further complexity into contemporary discourse of gender.
There are some important notes on terminology to be addressed with this paper. First, the word “gender” as I use it has four meanings. It refers to (1) a realm of stylization and performance that can be described as gender(ed) expression; (2) an engagement—or lack thereof—with a system of socialization that produces a gender(ed) identity (it is important to note that identities like “agender” fall under this; (3) a structure of ideology based in social systems, norms, roles, and responsibilities applied differentially by perceived gender identity; and (4) an abstraction referring to an understanding, either individual or societal, of the gendered realm. The gendered realm, here, refers to an abstract space of all that is, interacts with, or does gender—a realm that is fluid and varied both inherently and dependent on the individual. It is also important to note that these four definitions are not clear-cut distinctions, they blur together frequently; a reference to “gender,” could mean any combination of these senses depending on context.
Section I: From Free Navigation to Abolition
In this section of the paper, I attempt to establish free navigation of gender as normatively good, for which I first turn to Beauvoir’s claims about the nature of gender and womanhood. Then, I show the interactions between Butler and Beauvoir on this topic, which lead to the conclusion that liberation necessitates free navigation of a gendered world. Finally, using Wittig, Butler, and Beauvoir, I establish how free navigation could mean “abolishing” gender either expansively or destructively.
Many who discuss Beauvoir’s analysis of gender cite her famous line: “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” And yet, this claim is not entirely clear; if one becomes woman, when? In childhood, in socialization, in otherhood, in some experience, or simply in self-identification? We may shed light on Beauvoir’s characterization regarding (first) biology and (second) socialization. First, regarding biology, Beauvoir frequently talks of the effect of the penis as differentiator between boy and girl. For a little boy, she says, the penis “is both a foreign object and himself,” functioning both as something to control and part of the self. And she, in turn, argues that “the absence of a penis keeps her [woman] from being aware herself of a sex.” Yet, Beauvoir does not seem to think biology has such an inherent power over gender, instead noting the role of socialization. In a discussion of the diminished effect of the penis in matriarchal societies, she argues that the penis’ power depends on the context: “Only within the situation grasped in the totality does anatomical privilege found a truly human privilege.”3 In doing so, she argues that male privilege does not begin with the penis, simply that the penis reflects such a privilege in a society which bestows unto it such an importance. This observation of the role of socially placed importance is part of the move to the second point of this analysis: socialization (the process of learning, either through tutelage or inference, social norms and expectations). Socialization is perhaps the most compelling account of how Beauvoir defines woman—visible in her discussion of dress. To Beauvoir, “dressing is not only adornment” but an expression of “woman’s social situation.” In that sense, dress is crucial to a woman’s gendered life, because it requires a “compromise between exhibitionism and modesty.”4 Beauvoir uses this to illustrate the restrictions placed on a woman in womanhood, but it reflects something further: the idea of the societal gaze. Beauvoir herself mentions that “even in narcissism the gaze of the other is involved,” implying that there is some sort of gaze of the “other” internalized into the psyche of a woman that influences her navigation of gender. The other is not one person here, for when Beauvoir uses examples they discuss women wanting “people to admire” them, not individuals.5 The people being general and reflecting the people of society, the gaze is then that of society itself (more on this in relation to public/private in section 2). Thus, key to womanhood is navigating a gendered world while being socialized with a restrictive gaze, as opposed to men—who then purportedly are given autonomy in their own socialization.
Here, we turn to Butler for their expanded view of restrictions on gender, while keeping Beauvoir in mind, to establish the need for free navigation of a system of gender. Butler begins with the point of historical situation key to Beauvoir’s account of socialization, saying that the body entails “embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities” and that it “gains its meaning through a concrete and historically mediated expression.” While Beauvoir seems to stop at the present, Butler extends it to an active process, effectively moving from the body as something that “is” to something that “does” and “reproduces”. Therefore, it is not simply a precipitation of historical events into a gendered existence, but an existence continually shaped by all that came before it. And here, Butler extends Beauvoir; Beauvoir, in discussions of dress that we have reviewed, argues that women dress with the social gaze in the mind. Butler says that this gaze drives women not only to perform specific gendered movements such as dressing appropriately but also to live within that category of woman for fear of punishment for incorrectly doing gender: “discrete genders are part of what ‘humanizes’ individuals within contemporary culture.” In doing so, Butler effectively links the struggle against the oppression of women to the struggle against the gender binary. To effectively illustrate the harms of such a binary, Butler uses a hard case in their book Undoing Gender, through discussions of intersex and transgender people. These people illustrate that there are genders outside the binary. So, we do not define gender as a binary because it is one, as the hard case proves. The only possibility, then, to justify a binary definition of gender is “to reconsolidate the power of the norm.” Thus, there is only one possible justification for delimiting gender to a binary: that the norm of a binary is good. Putting aside the mental health effects it has on non-binary people, let us turn back to Beauvoir for a moment. Much of Beauvoir’s concern is the otherhood imposed on women: is that not imposed on non-binary individuals and transgender individuals? Are they not viewed as other in relation to cisgender people the same way women are viewed as other in relation to men? Moreover, Beauvoir’s final call for liberation and change in The Second Sex involves a definition of woman centered around “the way she grasps, through foreign consciousness, her body and her relation to the world.” The body, as established, is continually shaped by history and society. Moreover, both Beauvoir and Butler have referred to socialization. Socialization requires the teaching of gender, but no two people think the same. So, how can one person’s understanding of gender be the same as another’s? It can’t. And yet, each person attempts to understand and express their own gender through a foreign consciousness that is the “restrictive discourse on gender” taught to those in society—one that “insists on the binary of man and woman” and, through a “regulatory operation of power”, “forecloses the thinkability of its [the binary’s] own disruption” So, in that sense, any person existing in this gender binary experiences that same struggle—grasping their body and relation to the world through a socialized gender binary framework. Thus, one cannot possibly advocate for women to understand their own gender freely—without a “foreign consciousness”—without advocating for an end to all restrictions on gender.
But what must happen to the gender categories in contemporary society to make way for free navigation of the gendered realm? It is upon this question that Butler, Beauvoir, and Monique Wittig converge. In her essay “One is Not Born a Woman,” Wittig starts out by establishing that the materialist view of women’s oppression precludes any “‘natural’ division between men and women,” saying in such a view “we naturalize the social phenomena which expresses our oppression.” This view is largely aligned with both Beauvoir and Butler’s view on “becoming” gendered. Indeed, her goal, too, aligns with Butler and Beauvoir’s. While Wittig initially seems to set herself apart by opposing the concept of woman, she explains that “woman,” to her is a myth that is fundamentally oppressive and in relation to men, whereas “women” describes the actual experience of those in the class she aims to liberate. As she succinctly puts it, “‘woman’ is there to confuse us, to hide the reality ‘women.’” Later in that same essay, she says that change requires “everyone to exist as an individual, as well as a member of a class,” 14 indicating a desire for people (“women”) to exist outside of and without pressure from prescriptive oppressive roles (“woman”). This view is effectively the same as that which we have surmised from Butler and Beauvoir: to let the individual exist outside of restrictions, regulation, or limits. Where Wittig sets herself apart from Butler and Beauvoir is the method she suggests to get to this point.
While Beauvoir gives no real path to liberation (only a vision of it), Wittig does offer a blueprint: “the advent of individual subjects demands ending the categories of sex, ending the use of them, and rejecting all sciences which still use these categories as their fundamentals (practically all social sciences).” This blueprint calls for erasing gender and gender categories altogether. Her reference to the “advent of individual subjects” implies that the erasure, in her view, would create a world in which what we currently think of as gendered (dressing a certain way, the exercise of sexuality, etc.) becoming a facet of the individual subject—thus achieving her goal of an unrestricted individual subjectivity. Whereas Wittig’s approach is negative, in that it destroys to liberate, Butler’s theories lead us to a positive path to liberation. When discussing restrictions and regulations on gender, Butler acknowledges that wonder ask “how many genders can there be.” They refuse to give a tangible response, stating that the destruction of a restrictive gender structure mustn’t come at the cost of “an equally problematic quantification of gender.”15 This notion suggests an approach to gender abolition that refuses to quantify or categorize the gendered realm, leaving it intentionally fluid and unstructured. It is this approach, which I will call expansive abolition, that Zoe Belinsky, a doctoral student at Villanova University, details:
The answer is to expand gender to the limits of its mythological sphere of possibilities to the point at which gender ceases to be an operative term in the distribution of resources and labor, and instead becomes a merely aesthetic or “personal” vector of identification that has less to do with the function of social reproduction or distribution of labor as the system we are familiar with does.
Belinsky is neither the only nor the first author to advocate expansive abolition. The point of using her passage, though, is that it clearly distinguishes expansive abolition from the approach Wittig proposes (which we can call “destructive abolition”). Whereas Wittig sees a need to destroy gendered categories altogether, expansive abolition proposes encouraging more gendered categories, labels, stylizations, and performances, with the goal of turning gender a from a tool of regulation and oppression to a characteristic of the individual—no different from any other trait or characteristic. Both approaches have the same destination in mind: creating a world in which the gendered realm’s navigation becomes a personal and free process. In such a world, the “foreign consciousness” and regulatory operations of a restrictive gender that Beauvoir and Butler concern themselves with cease to exist. Similarly, the escaping of oppression and promoting of individualism in such a world achieves Wittig’s goals. We’ve already established that Beauvoir, Butler, and Wittig’s goals are aligned, and abolition—whether it is expansive or destructive—theoretically achieve those goals. The next section of this paper subjects both methods to scrutiny to reveal why expansive abolition is the better of the two approaches.
Section 2: The Merits of a Positive Approach to Abolition
To assess the comparative merits of expansive and destructive abolition, I first will develop a view of power and freedom applicable to the situation of the struggles of gender established so far. To do so, I turn to two theorists of power and freedom: Clarissa Hayward and Michel Foucault. Clarissa Hayward’s view of power is largely consistent with the analysis of Beauvoir and Butler—which establishes that restrictions on gender often come as limits punishing those violating a social norm. Similarly, Hayward establishes a “power-defaced,” defined as a network of social boundaries delimiting fields of possible action; in turn, she defines freedom the capacity to participate effectively in shaping the social limits that define what is possible. However, Hayward’s definition is insufficiently specific for a sphere as discursive in nature as gender abolition. So, I turn to Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, an analysis of the eighteenth and nineteenth century discursive shifts around sexuality. In the first volume of the series, Foucault describes this new discourse as such:
The legitimate couple, with its regular sexuality, had a right to more discretion. It tended to function as a norm, one that was stricter, perhaps, but quieter. On the other hand, what came under scrutiny was the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals, the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex… It was time for all these figures, scarcely noticed in the past, to step forward and speak, to make the difficult confession of what they were.
All abnormal groups are, as he says, forced “to make the difficult confession of what they were.”18 As such, the lives of those that don’t conform are not only condemned but laid out before the public. As such, the threat of public confession makes the private lives of those deemed abnormal subordinate to the public realm. On the other hand, the “legitimate couple” is afforded privacy, but that does not give them a private life unaffected by the public gaze. Rather, this “legitimate couple” only benefits from this privacy because it has a “regular sexuality,” meaning that deviance from what is considered regular could lead to a loss of privacy. In both cases, the experiences and engagement with the private realms of sexuality (and gender) must keep the public gaze in mind, forcing the private to orient itself around the public—blurring the public-private distinction. So, incorporating Foucault’s discursive analysis augments Hayward’s understanding of power and freedom, not by changing the definitions but by providing a key enforcement mechanism. To analyze expansive and destructive abolition, it is crucial to see how each one affects not only power and freedom but also the strength of the public-private distinction, which in the oppressive systems analyzed has been significantly blurred.
Applying this framework of power, freedom, and the public-private distinction to destructive abolition reveals a problem with the method. Destructive abolition does succeed on two of the counts: power and freedom. As a societal level process of abandoning gendered categories, destructive abolition must be collaborative. Since its goal is to get rid of the restrictions of a gendered system by getting rid of gender categories altogether, it certainly allows participation to shape socially defined limits and dismantles structural restrictions. In that sense, it both promotes freedom and limits the power exerted by the system of gender. However, it has issues with the public-private distinction. To actually destroy gender more than purely nominally (a purely nominal approach would simply rebrand the problem, not attempt to solve it), one must destroy a large amount of cultural history that for many people is deeply important. The idea that gender is part of culture is not new. Butler and Beauvoir both acknowledge it when they say gender is a historical situation. Any view of gender as socialized acknowledges that gender is a social force with a history behind it. Thus, to destroy gendered categories, one would need to make irrelevant this cultural history. To do so would require a massive invasion of the private realm to sever the connections between individuals and the cultural history of gender they know (which exists at least partly in the public realm). Moreover, it is an especially harmful phenomenon to those communities marginalized based on gender. For these communities, resistance has often led to a vibrant culture, which destructive abolition would erase. To illustrate this point, race is a helpful analogy. Racial oppression is the result of societally acknowledged racial differences. Like gender, those differences are frequently visible, but they are only important because of how they are socially prioritized. For many racial groups, transitioning to a “color-blind” society—the racial equivalent of destructive abolition, as it involves the cessation of racial category usage—is unwanted. Ethnic groups almost always have some unique culture, which would be erased in a “color-blind society.” Likewise, destructive abolition could erase cultural identities that might be important to those groups. If gender is a historical situation, a deeply personal fact, and culturally imbued, any attempt to destroy gendered categories and identities then destroys those aspects in the private and public realms alike—rather than simply ending the public facets of a gendered system that constitute oppression. As such, destructive abolition is a flawed option. What remains is to see if expansive abolition can be a better one.
Expansive abolition, by definition, is a collective process of expanding social boundaries such that all locations within the gendered realm are freely navigable and unrestricted. As such, expansive abolition promotes freedom and dismantles the structural power of gender as a system. As for the question of the public and the private, the goal of expansive abolition is to promote normalization and acceptance to the point where people are not expected to explain or justify their gendered identities or experiences. As such, it aims to sever the judgment of the public from the sanctity of the private. Perhaps the biggest strength of expansive abolition is its insistence on fluidity and its refusal to orient itself for public digestibility. A strong public norm requires a clear message, which in turn requires simplifying gender and sexuality (e.g. reducing gender to a binary or sexuality to heterosexual monogamy). The complexity of expansive abolition creates a more varied, and thus weaker, norm—aiding its pursuit of allowing all forms of gendered expression and identity.
The main counter-argument to expansive abolitionism as a viable means of achieving liberation from an oppressive system of gender is the question of those that seek to stick to conventional understandings of gender. After all, if expansive abolition gives a unilateral free pass for people to navigate gender as they please, couldn’t they opt to maintain the system of heterosexual patriarchy we see today? And are these people not complicit in maintaining the oppression of those who aim to go beyond that norm? This question presupposes that there is an ethics to gender—that one’s relationship to gender has an attached moral value. However, such a view is flawed. If the performance and identity and gender are not separate from its ethics, one has an ethical obligation to perform gender in a way that creates the most freedom. Then, for instance, there would be an ethical obligation for all cisgender people to transition to avoid complicity in the oppression of transgender people. While this is an extreme statement, it is the logical conclusion of a view that gendered identity and performance are inherently moral—serving to prove the contradictions in such a view. Rather, it is imperative to view gendered identity and performance as distinct from but not unlinked to complicity. For someone who chooses to conform to traditional expectations, simply conforming is not a moral failing. The moral failing occurs when they position their experience as a universal norm, value their identity over others, and fail to fight for marginalized groups when they are able. That is to say, expansive abolition allows any person the freedom to conform to heteropatriarchal norms but not to perpetuate the oppressive force of conformity or impede the perpetual expansion of accepted gendered experiences.
Section 3: Discursive Consequences
The discussion of abolitions of gender in this paper have largely been focused on the discursive, for good reason. There are real discursive consequences that result from un-expanded views of gender that expansive abolition could address, aiding the real-life experiences of many struggling with gender today. Moreover, some of these difficulties serve as a hard case to further prove the merits of expansive abolition. Specifically, I will be looking at two discursive phenomena: the term “cisgender” and neo-identity labels.
The term cisgender has become a widely accepted term for “a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds to his or her sex at birth.” However, it is too simplistic in its current state, because it (1) doesn’t accurately encapsulate the cisgender experience and (2) it denies cisgender people complex relationships with gender. (1) This definition of cisgender immediately presents some contradictions. First, the phrasing “corresponds” (often substituted with “aligns”) indicates some level of agreement between a person’s gender identity or performance and their at-birth sex category. This creates two normalized ideal types based on the most common sex categories assigned at birth (intersex people are often forced into one of those categories and stigmatized if not): male and female. However, we have already established that, since no two people think identically, there can be no universal gendered ideal types. So, which “male” and “female” are cisgender men and women to align or correspond with: their understandings, some other person’s understandings, or an amalgamated societal understanding? Also, ideal types are just that: ideal. They are not meant to perfectly align with all cases. So, how far can a person stray from the ideal type before they are no longer cisgender? There is no answer to that question, because there is no such “threshold of cisgender-ness.” Rather, the point is to illustrate the inherent contradiction of cisgender as a term that aims to take billions of experiences and condense them into two archetypes. This is particularly key because (2) it denies some of the complexities cis people may have in their gendered experiences. In addition to being one term that must fundamentally miss the nuances of the many experiences of those who identify with it, cisgender’s emphasis on sex at birth creates the expectation of simplicity. Perry Zurn’s account of “cisgender” elaborates on this, holding that “a gender simply inherited at birth” must be one that remains “consistent over time” and cannot experience any complexities that threaten the connection between the sex at birth and the ongoing gender identity: “A cis gender is simple. A cis gender is healthy. A cis gender goes unthought.” In doing so, he highlights that many often marginalized experiences—such as people with disordered eating, disabled people, etc.—are left out of the cisgender expectation, even when that is a label they may fit within and hold dear. However, we need not even look to marginalized experiences, because Zurn’s point about age provides another frame of analysis. Is one’s gender identity in adolescence the same as in adulthood? Are the expectations held, for example, for a boy and a man the same? With time and age, everyone navigates the world differently and develops different understandings of everything (including concepts such as gender), so how can it be said that any person may have an un-complicated relationship with gender? This is a reality for which cisgender—at least as it is defined and used today—does not account. It is with an expansive abolitionist approach, in which we understand that each gendered experience is different even if the labels are the same, that we can best add complexity to “cisgender.” However, the simplicity of cisgender as a term doesn’t just affect those who use it, it affects those who don’t.
In Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of the struggle of woman, one issue she noted was that women exist in negation. Since men were the dominant class and women were defined as simply not men, the identity woman revolved around the negation of the subject man. A similar phenomena occurs with transgender people. Transgender and cisgender are often considered mutually exclusive: a transgender person is non-cisgender and vice versa. Since cisgender is the dominant social group, one could argue that transgender (or trans, for short) people exist in negation. In fact, this is visible in many of the terms that fall under the umbrella category of trans. Take the terms “non-binary” and “gender non-conforming”, describing someone who doesn’t identify within the gender binary and someone whose gender expression differs from conventional expectations. Both words tether the identities to that which they seek to escape (the existence of a dominant gender binary and conventional expectations of gender). More importantly, they describe what that gender identity is not rather than what it is. The point of this is not to invalidate any particular label or identity but to demonstrate that (partly due to the overly simplistic view of “cisgender”) umbrella terms like these two are often forced to exist in negation to the dominant norms gender advocates hope to escape. This negation is part of what leads many people, rightfully so, to seek out neo-identities . In 2014, Christine Feraday analyzed the use of neo-identity labels—which she describes as “new identity words”—on Tumblr (a space in which the social pressures to conform are lessened by anonymity and niche-ness), and she found that for many people, the accepted terms at the time—male, female, and a limited understanding of non-binary—didn’t encapsulate their relationships with gender. For many of the people who use neo-identity labels, “they represent the frustration of people who are unable to find themselves in mainstream identity categories.” While, for some, finding a specific label is unimportant or actively unwanted, Feraday finds that—for many—it is “an identity word to describe a very specific, personal experience of gender.” This intuitively makes sense, as the specificity level of most neo-identities means they can describe what a person’s gender is, rather than simply delimiting what it is not. Neo-identities provide a hard case for the damaging effects of restrictive gender and the benefits of expansive abolition. For many of the people Feraday interviewed, they confined their use of neo-identities to online spaces because of the judgment and difficulties associated with them in other spaces. The regulations and limits that go into enforcing gender norms—especially for anyone outside the binary or mainstream—are deeply punishing, as we have established. Moreover, the need to constantly explain one’s gender identity and orient it for public digestibility encourage terms that most people know over more obscure ones, even if they might be more accurate.
When talking about discursive labels, it is often easy to forget that labeling should be about what feels right. Maybe, we don’t need to have precise definitions. Neo-identities are so subversive to the contemporary frame of gender because they are an exercise in both specificity and fluidity—they are both a seeking of a specific label describing key aspects of one identities and a refusal of simplicity for the public’s sake. But this doesn’t need to be limited to neo-identities. “Cisgender,” too, could be a complicated label, used by anyone for whom it feels right. This emphasis on what feels right is the point of expansive abolition—to envision a world wherein anyone can perform, identify with, interact with, and do their gender as they please, without any sort of regulator denying them that right.
Conclusion
This paper, through interactions with Beauvoir, Butler, Wittig, Foucault, and Hayward, has established expansive abolition as both a goal and method for liberating all people from the constraints placed upon them by the system of gender. In addition, this paper established the tangible discursive consequences of an oppressive system of gender and showed how expansive abolition could address them. Ultimately, gender should not be just a confined set of options and archetypes from which people can choose. Rather, it should be a free and open realm that allows—without restriction, without foreign consciousness, without limit, and without regulation—each person to freely engage in the stylization, performance, and identities associated with gender according to whatever feels right. For something so personal that can be a source of both immense pain and joy, what could be more important than feeling right?
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