Sociologists still argue over the effects and desirability of a move from structuralist attention to ‘things’ (the material) to post-structuralist attention to ‘words’ and meaning (the linguistic).They might refer to this shift as ‘the cultural turn’ (Chaney, 1994; Nash, 2001) or ‘the linguistic turn’ (Barrett, 1992). In order to understand this linguistic/cultural turn it helps to first consider what structuralism is and how post-structuralism differs.
Structuralism
Structuralism tries to understand society in terms of its social structures, its regular patterns and relationships, and usually is interested in how those structures benefit some groups more than others (see Table 4.2). There is some debate but, generally speaking, a structuralist approach is one that seeks for a hidden ‘reality’ underlying what seems
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Table 4.2 Linguistic and Marxist structuralism
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obvious or apparent. By looking carefully at the deeper organizing principles of social life, structuralists believe they can discover the truth. Structuralists approach social theory like a jigsaw puzzle. They think society has a clear structure — or pattern — which, if they can put the pieces together correctly, they will be able to see. To varying degrees structuralists suggest that this social structure determines how we live our lives. This is called structural determinism. Arguably the most significant variant of structuralism for sociologists is that emerging from the work of Karl Marx.
Marxist structuralists have devoted much effort to explaining what types of structures underlie society and how those structures determine social relations, including gender relations. A capitalist society, Marxists argue, is one in which production of food and objects is organized for profit and produces class inequalities. They argue that the capitalists, or employers, who own the means of production (the machines, buildings and other equipment needed to make things) exploit the workers by only paying them a wage instead of sharing the profits that the workers’ labour generates. However, this does not explain why women generally have an inferior social position to men. Marx saw paid productive work as central within capitalist society; it was left to his co-writer Engels (1985/1884) to explain a sexual division of labour in which women usually did the unpaid domestic labour, often as well as undertaking lower paid jobs outside the home. Feminists have tried to re-theorize these Marxist forms of structuralism to better explain women’s position (see Chapter 7). In various forms most have argued that capitalist society is organized not just around the exploitation of paid productive labour but depends upon the unpaid labour of women in the home to feed and care for paid workers and reproduce a generation of new ones by having children. There is some argument as to whether women should therefore be considered a class (see Delphy, 1984), or whether women’s position arises out of the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy interweave. The latter was sometimes called dual-systems theory, and Sylvia Walby’s work (1986; 1990; 1996) provides an example. Yet these are not the only forms of structuralism which have had influence within sociology and feminist scholarship.
Linguistic structuralism has also played a part in explaining gender divisions by establishing the importance of language in creating our world. This form of structuralism emerged from the early twentieth — century work of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure on the structures of language. Saussure (1983) wanted to understand how language worked as a system, and how it was a system that we were born into and had to use. People can use language in slightly different ways, but they have to follow the rules of language in order to be understood. There are agreed meanings for words and agreed ways of putting them together. So if I
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start referring to the sky as ‘cabbage’ people will not understand me and it will make social interaction very difficult. Saussure examined how language operated by breaking it down into what he thought was its basic unit: the sign (see Figure 4.1).The sign is made up of two parts that Saussure called the signified and the signifier, which are connected in an arbitrary way. The signified is the idea being represented (for example, the concept of female adult human being) and the signifier is what we use to represent that idea: in language this is a word (for example, the word ‘woman’). In arguing that the sign is arbitrary, Saussure meant that there is no necessary connection between the concept (signified) and the word that stands for it. There is nothing in the word itself that tells us what it means. Everyone who speaks English agrees that the word ‘woman’ stands for the concept of female adult human being; they agree that because of tradition. Previous generations pass on what the word means. Different languages have different traditions and this shows that the connection between words and what they represent is arbitrary, and could be different. If this book was written in French then Figure 4.1 would have the same picture, but the signifier would be ‘femme’. In saying that the sign is arbitrary, Saussure is taking part in a debate about where the meaning of words comes from. The other side of the debate suggests that words mean something because they refer to some material thing in the real world. Saussure argues that words refer not to actual things but to ideas about, or concepts of, things. He says that the meaning of words exists not in the words themselves, but in how they relate to other words within the system called language.
Within language meaning is constructed through difference (Saussure, 1983) and this argument has implications for understanding the way in which gender is constructed. We understand words by understanding how they relate to other words. So we understand a word because we know it is different to words with similar meanings and similar sounds. For example we understand the word cat by knowing it is different to words like lion and feline but also to words like mat and bat. We understand what is there by comparing it to what is absent. He
argues, therefore, that binary oppositions are central to how we make sense of the world. So we can make sense of what black means because we understand it as what it is not — white. Cat makes sense as not dog, and so on. What Saussure also says is that the two terms in these sets of oppositions are not equal. It is not a case of A being understood in relation to B, but of A as opposed to not A. In other words meaning is established in terms of what is valued in society, as opposed to what is not valued, and this can be used to explain gender inequalities.
The way in which meaning is constructed within a male dominated society does not easily allow women to represent themselves except via rather limited patterns or images (see Kappeler, 1986).Women have performed a supporting function within masculine meaning systems, they have been defined as everything men are not (or do not wish to be).This means that women are viewed as ‘other’ and as lacking; but women are not always invisible. To reduce the threat men feel when confronted with their lack, women have been represented or encouraged to represent themselves as harmoniously beautiful. Their aesthetic perfection will disguise lack (Pollock, 1992: 147). Challenging the focus put on women’s appearance, and the way in which women are stereotyped and sexualized, has been a central part of the feminist struggle. The difficulty has been in understanding how women play a part in constructing meaning; they do not simply consent to male definitions of them, which are in any case often contradictory. The ways in which binaries operate have been argued to play a large part in constructing gender differences.
If Saussure’s ideas are extended in order to understand societies as ‘signifying systems’ based around structures of meaning (see Barthes, e. g. 1967 and Lacan, e. g. 1968, for instance), then gender operates as a symbolic distinction between masculine (‘normal’) as opposed to feminine (different and inferior). Gendered social life and relationships can be ‘read’ and interpreted in the same way that we read and interpret written texts. In order to read society as a text, linguistic structuralism reveals the hidden structures of meaning. Whether they focus on social structures or structures of meaning, structuralism emphasizes how individuals are constrained by wider social forces. Most classical, and indeed contemporary, sociology is structuralist in this sense.
As is evident from this brief account, there are feminists with structuralist leanings but some focus less on capitalism and instead argue that current social structures need to be primarily understood as patriarchal, or male dominated. Feminists who focus on patriarchy are often called radical feminists. This does not mean that radical feminists inevitably reject Marxist approaches and Christine Delphy could be described as a materialist radical feminist (Jackson, 1998b: 15). Feminists usually use the term patriarchal to describe societies in which men as a group are more likely to benefit from current social arrangements. There are disagreements about the definition and importance of patriarchy given that some individual men may be poorer and of lower status than some individual women, but most social scientists accept that societies are generally male dominated. One piece of evidence often used to support the argument that most so-called ‘advanced’ nations are still patriarchal is that women continue to earn less than men. Women in industrialized nations only earn about 75 to 80 per cent as much as men. Globally women’s average incomes are just below 60 per cent of men’s average incomes (Connell, 2002: 2; United Nations Statistics Division, 2005).Whilst helpful in supporting structuralist arguments about the importance of economic power, such statistics do not tell us much about the many different ways in which cultural meanings surrounding work might be important. However, there are other advantages to structuralist explanations of gender.