Gender Theory in Troubled Times. Rachel Alsop
the other side of the binary or claiming a position as non-binary. Although trans people sometimes articulate their subjectivity in terms of having a male brain in a female body, or vice versa, there is little biological evidence to support such a claim, particularly in the light of neurobiological research rejecting a division into male and female brains. Nor, thus far, is there any indication of there being biological markers which signal transitioning choices. But this does not make biology irrelevant. In ways which we will explore more fully in chapter 7, the body is of pivotal importance to trans identity. Its visible morphology and characteristics, such as breasts, facial hair and muscular structure, are used as markers of sexed identity, which enable interpersonal recognition within social space. Consequently, many trans people modify their bodies through surgery and the taking of hormones. Testosterone, for example, whose determining power we have been resisting thus far in this chapter, is a widespread aid to trans people who are seeking a more masculine appearance in order to enable recognition, by others and themselves, of their sexed identity. The consequence is to make even more complex the relation between biology and sexed identity. For there are men with many of the biological features of many other men, in terms for example of bodily morphology, hormone levels, facial hair and musculature, who nonetheless have retained ovaries, have wombs and give birth. This undermines Alcoff’s suggestion (see above) that we can anchor sexed identity in possible roles in reproduction.
Nature/culture and the new materialism 6
The distinction between sex and gender mirrored a supposed distinction between nature and culture. Sex was nature. Gender was culture. The arguments in the previous sections challenge that distinction from the perspective that culture influences the way in which we interpret the biological data. Nothing is simply given. But that does not mean that the natural world, what we think of as the data of biology, has no role to play in our practices of assigning and claiming sexed difference. Arguments, now identified under the term ‘new materialism’, also challenge a picture of ‘culture’ as something that can float free of, and be unconstrained by, nature. The distinction between nature and culture (sex/gender) is challenged not only by the recognition that culture mediates what we count as nature but also by a recognition that nature has some explanatory role in relation to culture. The material itself has agency. We must not, argues Colebrook, ‘conflate the being of a thing with the mode in which it is known’ (Colebrook 2000: 78; original emphasis). What is termed the new materialism stresses that, although culture ‘structures how we apprehend the ontological, it doesn’t constitute it’ (Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 98). Instead culture itself is viewed as anchored in and interwoven with nature. Nature is something which itself is an agent in the formation of culture. In relation to accounts that are offered of sex and gender, such a focus is linked to biological accounts of the body. Surely, it might be thought, there are facts about my body which bear some relation to my identity as male or female or intersex or transsex? Aren’t there some biological features which suggest/ground the cultural distinctions we adopt?
The new materialism, then, identifies a project of bringing ‘the materiality of the human body and the natural world into the forefront of feminist theory and practice’ (Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 1). The narrative surrounding this project has sometimes been articulated like this. Feminists have been suspicious of biological accounts of the body because they associated them with a form of determinism that suggested the inevitability not only of a binary sex difference but also of the psychological features, social roles and bodily styles which are taken to accompany it. In the flight away from biology, however, there is a danger of ignoring the materiality of our bodily life and viewing our everyday sexed categories as exclusively the result of our cultural classificatory practices. But this is problematic, for, it is suggested, it makes our categorization of the world float free of constraint. Moreover, it appears to rule out engaging with the scientific/biological in any positive way. Instead we are limited to critique. Therefore we need to return to biology to explore our bodily materiality and its intersections with our classification into sexed kinds.7 In the words of Gill Jagger (2015), summarizing this new materialist work:
Uniting the various strands in the new materialism … is a broad aim to give the materiality of matter a more active role. This includes redressing the ‘biophobia’ that would seem to characterize much contemporary feminist body theory … It also involves rethinking the nature/culture dichotomy to recognize that it is not just that nature and/or matter are products of culture but that culture is also in some sense a product of nature. Indeed, nature is that without which culture wouldn’t exist at all.
Elizabeth Grosz suggests there is a certain absurdity ‘in objecting to the notion of nature, or biology itself, if this is (even in part) what we are and will always be. If we are our biologies, then we need a complex and subtle account of that biology … How does biology – the structure and organisation of living systems – facilitate and make possible cultural existence and social change?’ (2008: 24). Grosz makes these remarks in the context of a paper exploring the work of Darwin, encouraging us not to be afraid of Darwinian ideas, for these ideas are not necessarily determinist and can provide a grounding for understanding the open-ended process of our becoming whatever we might be. Grosz here is stressing the points made by feminist biologists which we have highlighted above, namely the openness of biological processes, their interaction with environmental factors, and the plasticity of our brains in response to them. Nonetheless, she draws some problematic conclusions which are not endorsed by the biologists we have so far considered. In embracing natural selection she appears to give it a foundational explanatory role so that ‘language, culture, intelligence, reason, imagination, memory – terms commonly claimed as defining characteristics of the human and the cultural – are all equally effects of the same rigorous criteria of natural selection’ (2008: 44). Moreover, within this process, a binary sexual difference is required, as, ‘one of the ontological characteristics of life itself’ (ibid.). And this sexual differentiation, and the sexual selection with which, for Grosz, it is interwoven, is then invoked to ground racial and other forms of bodily differences.8
However, Grosz’s work seems to run counter to that of the feminist biologists we discussed in the previous section. It is one thing to argue that we cannot ignore the contribution which nature itself makes to the terms in which we make sense of it. It is quite another to take a particular interpretation of our biology to be authoritative in the way Grosz has done. To allow for the possibility of constraints is not necessarily to assign to a particular biological account a privileged position in articulating the nature of those constraints. The very openness of biological processes which she herself has stressed, and which is insisted on by biologists such as Anne Fausto-Sterling, seems in conflict with a model which insists that a particular way of systematizing that biology is fixed and unchangeable. Riki Lane argues that ‘mobilizing a reading of biology as open-ended and creative supports a perspective that sees sex and gender diversity as a continuum, rather than a dichotomy – put simply, “nature” throws up all this diversity and society needs to accept it’ (2009: 137). Lane, as a trans theorist, is confronting what is seen as an anti-biologism within some gender theory and exploring the complex interpellation of biological and cultural factors in the aetiology of trans subjectivity, but without treating Grosz’s biological account as authoritative.
Entanglements
New materialists stress that there is something independent of our conceptualizations which sets constraints on what can be said about it. While respecting that claim, we also recognize that we cannot disentangle the bit which is given from our ways of thinking about it. What needs addressing, according to Karen Barad (2007), is ‘the entanglement of matter and meaning’, the inter-implication of the discursive and the material in which no priority is given to either side. Barad explores this entanglement with particular reference to the work of the physicist Niels Bohr. Viewing matter as an active ‘agent’ ensures that matter and meaning are mutually articulated. Importantly, however, although the empirical world of matter takes an active part, this does not involve according it either some sort of immediate