Juliet Mitchell’s (1975) re-reading of how Freud was useful in understanding sexual difference was very influential within feminist debates about psychoanalysis, but many of its assumptions are more accessibly outlined by Ros Coward (1978). Coward critically re-reads Freud as providing a fundamental critique of the notion of gender as an inbuilt part of identity. She argues that this reading makes his sexism irrelevant, because what is crucial are his ideas about gender as acquired through social learning and never fixed. She argues that psychoanalysis can be used to look at the connections between sexual and social forms of oppression. Coward explains that some feminists have seen it as a way to explain how ideology works. She says it shows ‘how the categories of masculinity and femininity are constructed in a particular society’ (1978: 43). Her re-reading of Freud is, as is Mitchell’s, heavily based on the ideas ofJacques Lacan (for example, 1968), a French philosopher who developed Freud in ways that stressed the importance of language in forming sexed subjects. This brings out what she suggests is the anti-essentialist nature of Freud’s ideas. Lacan argues that to enter society the child must acquire language and therefore the positions of masculinity and femininity which are an integral part of language. The child does this via a process of splitting: separating themselves from their sense of connection to the mother’s body, and thereby separating conscious from unconscious thought. Desires and thoughts no longer allowable as a social being are tucked away in the unconscious. The process of splitting is precarious and never complete, so identity shifts and subjectivity is socially constructed.
The way in which splitting supposedly works in the ‘normal’ development of femininity implies that feminine subjectivity may be more precarious. According to Freud (Coward, 1978) boys split from their mothers and identify as masculine because they fear castration as a punishment if they continue to compete with the powerful father to stay closely connected to the mother. Freud is read as suggesting that the initially bisexual drives he argues characterize sexuality are then socially organized into the approved form of heterosexual reproduction. However,
girls supposedly realize they are already castrated and have a continuing struggle to define their sexuality. Coward notes that Freud’s account of the girl’s development as an abandonment of active clitorial sexuality for the mature woman’s passive vaginal sexuality is unconvincing. Why would girls give up their active sexuality in such a way? Freud posits that it is because they recognize their sexual organs as inferior, which assumes that penises are somehow naturally and inevitably better. Such phallocentric assumptions have been the target of much of the criticism of Freud (for example, Jackson, 1999). For Coward, Lacan’s ideas help overcome this problem because he argues that a crucial part of the process of splitting which makes the child into a social being is the mirror phase, when the child becomes fascinated with its image in the mirror. They learn to see themselves from the point of view of others — as an object, an independent individual not dependent on the mother. Yet to sociologists this is no new idea, as Charles Cooley (1902) proposed something very similar in his concept of the looking glass self (see Howson, 2004: 15—16). However, what Coward stresses as particularly useful about Lacan is that he argues that what is important in the development of gendered sexuality is not the actual penis, but the concept of the penis. Lacan calls this symbolic representation of the penis: the phallus. The phallus represents difference, not because of any natural superiority it may have as a sexual organ, but because it is symbolic of the valuing of maleness in the existing social and cultural order. Learning to be masculine and feminine is about learning that those who are identified as masculine will be privileged and that being a woman will entail accepting some level of social (not inherent) inferiority. There are questions about whether this makes women passive victims.
Feminist psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray, argues that it is precisely women’s position ‘outside’ discourse that enables them to criticize it. In a similar vein to Kristeva, she notes the extreme difficulty women have in representing themselves and their experiences within a masculine dominated symbolic system. Women only have access to these ‘male’ systems of representation which distance them from themselves and other women (Irigaray, 1985: 85). She sees ideas about sexuality as fundamental to systems of representation. Women’s sexuality is multiple, and does not fit the dominant phallocentric model of sexuality based on men. Irigaray argues that such sexual discourses try to capture women within a logic of sameness. But women have a far more plural sense of sexuality and, therefore, of subjectivity. This plurality arises, she thinks, because the two lips of women’s genitalia constantly touch. Women can touch themselves without aid of an instrument (for example, hand, woman) (Irigaray, 1991: 58). Thus, her body is always-already active (sexually). However, this active fluidity is presently inexpressible and/or excessive in relation to patriarchal ways of thinking about sexuality and subjectivity. Women
remain outside discourse, but unlike Kristeva, Irigaray argues that their excess can be a basis for agency. Kristeva argues that sexual differentiation needs to be overcome, but Irigaray argues that women must be recognized as autonomous and sexually specific (Grosz, 1989: 100—1). She proposes the possibility of thinking about bodies differently, of defying bodies and the boundedness of binaries such that the feminine is no longer divided from, but instead related to, the masculine (Irigaray, 1985). Social changes, and in particular women’s entry into the workforce, are helping to produce such new possibilities. As women have entered ‘the circuits of production’ and have been potentially freed from the mother role by contraception and abortion, they have begun to take on ‘that impossible role: being a woman’ (Irigaray, 1985: 83).
In order for women to be recognized they need to be seen as something more than mothers, something more than a semiotic hum. They must be seen as ‘a woman, a subject with a life, sex and desires of her own’ (Grosz, 1989: 179). Admirable though this formulation is, its reliance on a conception of the sexualized specificity of women’s bodies raises difficulties. A conception of action and, by implication, agency, emerges as something originating from the spaces of the body. This is arguably a form of essentialism (see Fuss, 1989) and therefore can limit appreciations of how femininity changes, but it does provide an idea of action as not fully controlled by actors. Beverley Brown and Parveen Adams, in a critique of Irigaray (and Kristeva), suggest that rather than the body as origin, ‘sexuality determines the organisation of a body’ (1979: 39; see also Weeks, 1989). Feminist sociologists remain sceptical, but not always dismissive, of psychoanalysis.
Michele Barrett dislikes the way the psychoanalytic tradition emerging from Freud tends to make rather grand claims about its ability to explain why women and men think and act differently. She is also aware of common criticisms of psychoanalysis as excluding other factors (such as the influence of social institutions). Although careful to praise the intellectual scope and bravery ofJuliet Mitchell’s (1975) effort to defend psychoanalysis amongst feminists, with whom it was vastly unpopular, Barrett (1992) is critical of many of the claims Mitchell makes. However, Barrett thinks that, used critically, psychoanalytical theory has advantages for understanding gender because it is poised between a focus on the symbolic and the material. Mitchell (1975) for example argues that Freud is suggesting that it is the ideas about anatomy, rather than the anatomy itself, which are important. Barrett (1980: 55) disagrees, suggesting that Freud does talk about the superiority of the actual physical penis. However, Barrett is perhaps a little literal in her approach to Freud. I would argue that Mitchell is saying that, with a little help from Lacan, we can use Freud to focus on the way in which the penis symbolizes the power and privilege to which those who have one are heir.
Barrett does concede that Freud made a distinctive break with biological determinism by questioning any ‘natural’ connection between femaleness and passivity and between sexual desire and heterosexual penetrative sex (1980: 56). However, his account of gender development assumes that the ‘proper’ development of femininity means accepting a passive sexuality (Barrett, 1980: 56—7). But why is the active termed masculine? She argues that to answer this it is not sufficient to see Freud as a product of his times. Barrett claims that sexism is fundamental to Freud’s account and cannot be glossed over as do Mitchell and, I would add, Coward.
Sociologists have criticized psychoanalytic approaches to gender not only for their grand claims and their sexism but for their reductive aspects — their tendency to boil everything down to what happened to you as a child coming to terms with having a particular type of body. Stevi Jackson (1999) is opposed to psychoanalytic tendencies to reduce the explanation of all manner of behaviour to biological differences (having or not having a penis). She argues that this biological reductionism makes psychoanalysis unhelpful in doing sociology. She is especially critical of Freud’s analysis of how girls become women, seeing it as fundamentally sexist. She is not convinced that later Lacanian readings of Freud are any improvement, and would perhaps not share the enthusiasm many introductory sociology textbooks seem to have for other psychoanalytic accounts (such as Chodorow’s) that are still based on most of Freud’s assumptions. Even where sociologists do see some value in psychoanalytic approaches, they tend to use them in understanding how children develop into gendered adults, but then direct most of their concern to examining the ongoing social production of differences between women and men.
Conclusion
Generally speaking sociologists have tried critically to understand differences between women and men not as ‘natural’ but as socially constructed. Historical variations in the way sex and gender have been understood and lived help to establish that differences between women and men are not a simple outcome of having a female or male body. In fact bodies cannot always simply and clearly be placed into only those two categories. Other physical differences between the sexes are also open to interpretation, and there may be as many differences between two individual men as between a man and a woman. Nevertheless, social life continues to be organized along very gendered lines and the idea that physical differences between the sexes are significant is used to justify many injustices, especially injustices to women. Assumptions that women are also somehow less intelligent or are psychologically, as well
as physically, ‘lacking’ have also been used to justify women’s generally lower social position.
Central to sociological understandings of gender have been examinations of the lives of women and men as not just different, but as unequal. In particular, sociological approaches to gender have traditionally focused on how gender differences are produced by the way society is organized, by the social structure. In the following chapters we will see how major social institutions such as families, the education system, work, and politics, shape gender in contemporary society. Sociologists also see ideas as important in shaping gender and this book also explores sociological discussions of gender socialization, gender roles, gender stereotyping, and other more recent attempts to consider the importance of the meanings people give to their gender. Sociological theories of gender differences have both informed and responded to the collection of large amounts of empirical evidence by social scientists which suggest that — for women — being ‘different’ means being disadvantaged. In order to understand gender as a form of social inequality as well as a set of social meanings, it is necessary to first examine in more detail how sociologists think we become gendered. In the next chapter we therefore consider whether gender is something that we ‘do’ and how we learn to do it.
Key readings
Coward, R. (1978) ‘Re-reading Freud: the making of the feminine’, Spare Rib, 70: 43-6.
Fausto-Sterling, A. (2002b) ‘The five sexes, revisited’, Sciences, 40: 18-23.
Grosz, E. (1989) Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Hird, M. (2004) Sex, Gender, and Science. New York: Palgrave.
Kessler, S. J. and McKenna, W (1978) Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach. New York: Wiley.