On June 26,2015 the United States Supreme Court ruled that same sex couples have the right to marry in all 50 states. One month later, on July 26, 2015 Caitlyn Jenner (aka Bruce Jenner, a renowned Olympic athlete) hit the cover of Vanity Fair displaying her new gender identity.
This is the year of tolerance and euphoria for the LGBTQ movement. Ten years ago, who’d have thought it? We have passed the precipice – both gay marriages and transgender identity, have hit the main stream. Even though many businesses still refuse to hire transgendered people and right-wing fundamentalists are mounting a counter-campaign to protect the civil rights of bigots on a skewed interpretation of religious freedom, with the exception of laws limiting abortion, both Federal and State courts have sent the signal that gender and sexuality concerns will be protected under the concept of individual civil liberties.
But it all happened so quickly, so very quickly. In the end, I can’t help but wonder why. Was this just that all our hard work in the LGBTQ community has paid off so we should just ride the wave of success without question? I honestly wish it was that simple. But as a long-time Social Justice Activist, Marxist and Lesbian Feminist I have to take the long view and try to analyze the underlying causes for this fairly rapid change in attitude. (I can just hear the groans and boos of readers begging me not to rain on our parade or worse – thinking that any questioning of our wins is really a form of self-hating homophobia.)
For many of us who have come out of both the Gay and Women’s Movement we see the more recent advances in the LGBTQ movement inextricably tied to the question of gender’s relationship to sexuality and reproduction. In the 1970’s radical feminists challenged the fixed and essentialist nature of gender roles as a critical aspect of women’s oppression in a male dominated patriarchy. The fact is that the rapidly changing technology in the last century, particularly in the domains of sexuality and gender has taken even the most creative visionaries and forward looking young people by surprise.
The introduction of everything from birth control and artificial insemination, to hormone therapy and plastic surgery, to test tube babies, robotic wombs, incubators, and in vitro fertilization challenges the concept that biology is destiny. Technology has severed the fusion of sexual reproduction/gender identity which has been the basis of the patriarchal family and male dominated institutions for the past two thousand years. It raises the question “What is a Woman or Man?” What is biologically determined and what is environmentally and culturally determined in defining Woman and Men? And why are categories of gender identity limited to two? What is the purpose of the institution of marriage and why is it defined in terms of sexual copulation though reproduction is no longer considered the primary purpose of marriage. If marriage is failing as the primary locus of reproduction, how do we reproduce the next generation in the current society?
Leaving aside, those reactionary folks who always want to preserve the status quo, there is much confusion and lack of clarity among progressives as to what strategies we need to use to end oppressive sexual/gender structures and systems.The absurdities and contradictions in the current understanding of sexual and gender relations are legion and range from the ridiculous to the sublime.
A couple of questions that I am going to try to deal with in this blog (I’m sure you can think of your own):
1)Should the basic personal economic unit in society, whether it be marriage or civil unions or some other form, be based on monogamous sexual copulation as the primary requirement?
2)Is the formation of a binary male-female gender identity determined by biology or environmental/cultural factors?
The fact is that if we want to successfully answer these questions and come up with strategies that will actually lead toward progressive values of equality and democracy we cannot gloss over these contradictions with wishful thinking. If we are going to develop a good analysis, we have to consider all historical and current patterns.
Background: (If you feel that you have a thorough grasp of all the millions of debates on Capitalism’s relationship to Patriarchy, Marxist vs. Post Modern Structural Analysis and Reform vs. Revolution, you can skip this rather simplistic attempt to summarize history and move straight to the analysis of the sex vs. gender and role of marriage discussion which appears below the fold.)
Understanding the interrelationship between Patriarchy and Capitalism.
Patriarchy, perhaps the oldest form of domination of one group over another, is defined as a social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line; broadly: control by men of a disproportionately large share of power.
Patriarchy as a form of oppression was probably made possible by the fact that, in the earliest societies, the act of reproducing the next generation, the prime directive of the formation of a society, was (and to a large degree still is) primarily accomplished through the biologically determined sexual act of women bearing children by copulating with men.
In early subsistence societies, Marxists assert that there is some evidence that the biological limits of sexual reproduction did not lead to male domination – that while Patriarchal control is evident in almost all societies, it was when the earliest communities discovered agriculture and domesticated animals and produced a surplus of goods, that men asserted their right to control of the community’s wealth and, within that, the right to control women’s bodies and functions. While biology was instrumental in the success of early patriarchal domination, subsequent Patriarchal forms were motivated and shored up by strictly social concerns about the distribution of power and surplus wealth.
Capitalism is a specific economic system for producing and distributing the wealth of society, based on the concept of private property and the exploitation of most people by those members of society who own the means of production. Previous economic systems, such as slavery and feudalism, were also based on the unequal distribution of goods and power, and, except for the earliest subsistence societies, were all also Patriarchies. In fact, patriarchy is the one system which seems to be able to adapt itself and exist within other economic formations.
The United States, established during the rise of Capitalism worldwide and based on capitalist economic principles, has traditionally held two separate and often contradictory ideologies as the basis of our political system:
1) The first is the rights of the individual firmly rooted in John Locke’s ideology of life, liberty and the right to private property which dominated 17th century English thought. This thought reflects the transition from Feudalism where the entire community was tied to the land for survival and had no individual rights. With the rise of the concept of private property under capitalism, and with it, the rise of individual rights separate from community obligations, the concept of individual liberty became a primary focus. The emphasis on conflict between individual rights and societal obligations was also promoted by the rugged individualism and entrepreneurial capitalist spirit rooted (even if it is more myth than reality) in our pioneers who set out to conquer the West, often on their own with few social structures to guide or support them.
2) the French ideology of equality and democracy was influenced by the ideology of Rousseau and the French Revolution based on the idea of community, equality and the participation of all citizens in the government (democracy).
Our founding documents reflect both the individual liberties and equality aspects of American ideology. One concept that should be noted, however, is that, during the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism from the 15th-18th century, capitalism was considered a positive systemic change in most of Western Europe and the United States. While the U.S. Constitution does not directly deal with economic issues in its protection of individual civil liberties, it does protect citizens individual rights including the right to own property (i.e., the Bill of Rights and the 13th-14th amendments in the Constitution).
This caused a great dichotomy in the enforcement of the fifth amendment in the Dred Scott case: the Bill Rights insured an individual the right to his property (the slave called Dred Scott) and at the same time reserved the right for states to establish their own laws which permitted some states to outlaw slavery while others permitted it. A less obvious, though not less widespread conflict arose over women’s right to vote and laws pertaining to "wife beating".
These two trends continue today and reflect the /split between the libertarian/anarchist tendency mostly reflected in the Republican grassroots and the democratic/socialist tendency which we see mostly in the Democratic party. (I know both the anarchists and the socialists are screaming bloody murder at being lumped in with libertarians and democrats, but we are not talking about the whole philosophy, just tendencies within a particular philosophical orientation).
Two other concepts need clarification before we can proceed:
1) Reform - to make change in something, typically a social, political, or economic institution or practice) in order to improve it.
2) Revolution - an overthrow or repudiation and the thorough replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed 2. A radical and pervasive change in society and the social structure especially one made suddenly and often accompanied by violence.
While history includes both reform and revolutionary movements, I would like to note three aspects of the contradictions between these two approaches:
1) The most important difference: a reform is an attempt to fix and maintain the current system instead of changing it. The violence against the African American community by the police recently exposed in Ferguson has resulted less in a struggle against the dominant white supremacist culture than efforts to curb excessive force by making police officers wear video cameras.
Women and children’s vulnerability to violence and domination by men in the nuclear family in a patriarchal capitalist economic system is dealt with by writing more liberal divorce laws and laws against wife beating (now called spousal abuse as if the violence was evenly distributed among men and women). At the same time reinforcing the overall institution of marriage does not deal with the exploitative nature of the nuclear family itself or women’s general economic inequality (older unmarried women of all races are the poorest category of our citizens).
The violence perpetrated against gender nonconforming people is dealt with through civil rights laws protecting the rights of the individual – reflecting a sort of hippie “do you’re your own thing” approach which preaches tolerance for diverse individual behavior as long as it does not hurt or interfere with the other’s individual liberties, instead of dealing with fact that violence against gender nonconformity is generally a well established form of controlling anyone who challenges male supremacy by transgressing hetero-normative gender stereotypes.
The educational reforms suggest that children can gain their economic equality through upward mobility which will only be available to a few, redirecting people’s energy away from redistributing the wealth to everyone and making the ownership of the means for producing wealth available to the whole community, reinforcing the continued exploitation of the majority.
2) The second definition above brings in the specter of violence that usually determines whether we choose reform or revolution –and unless we are suicidal or addicted to danger, we rarely choose revolution if we have any other option. With reform we don’t have to fix everything but just enough to keep the system running. Clearly the exploitation and violence directed against some groups will not effect other groups – in fact, the dominant group frequently gets its privilege from the exploited group – and as long as it isn’t our group that needs the systemic fixing, we tend to go for reform.
3) Reforms, unlike, total systemic change, can be easily reversed. For example, slavery can be reinstituted by incarcerating millions of people of color and instituting de facto labor conditions in the prisons (the one place where, according to the 13th amendment, slavery is allowed. Formal segregation can be manipulated into informal de facto segregation under a new set of rules and regulations (i.e., the democratic right of individual people to participate in the decisions made by society through voting have been almost lost through the restructuring of voting procedures and the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United which makes corporations people and clearly reinforces financial power by redistributing democratic people power in favor of the economic capitalist monoliths (usually referred to the battle between people and profits).
Now on to the Two Questions:
1) Should the basic personal economic unit in society, whether it be marriage or civil unions or some other form, be based on monogamous sexual copulation as the primary requirement?
Traditional Marxist analysis of the family sees it only as a method for the “bourgeoisie” to pass on their inherited wealth by controlling the women bearing their children through monogamy - hence the continued need for family as a private institution under capitalism. While this is still a major function of the family for the growth and maintenance of wealth and inequality of power for the 1%. Communists did not feel this applied, with the development of capitalism, to working class families.
Engels emphasized that the rise of industrial capitalism meant progress for women because it brought them into the social workforce. Along with the socialization of household tasks, this is a precondition for liberation. Under capitalism, however, women remained oppressed because they bore the burden of family labor even when drawn into social production. In the end, Marxists believed at the same time, as women were drawn into the workforce, their growing exploitation in the labor force would lead them to a revolutionary perspective where the family would be destroyed and all its patriarchal functions would be taken over by a socialized state.
To illustrate, he distinguished the proletarian from the bourgeois family in terms of male-female relations:
Engels states sex-love in the relationship with a woman becomes and can only become the real rule among the oppressed classes, which mean today among the proletariat—whether this relation is officially sanctioned or not. But here all the foundations of typical monogamy are cleared away. Here there is no property, for the preservation and inheritance of which monogamy and male supremacy were established; hence there is no incentive to make this male supremacy effective. What is more, there are no means of making it so. Bourgeois law, which protects the supremacy, exists only for the possessing class and their dealings with the proletarians. The law costs money and, on account of the worker’s poverty, it has no validity for his relation to his wife. Here quite other personal and social conditions decide. And now that large-scale industry has taken the wife out of the home onto the labor market and into the factory, and made her often the breadwinner of the family, no basis for any kind of male supremacy is left in the proletarian household, except, perhaps, for something of the brutality toward women that has spread since the introduction of monogamy.
It is true that the proletarian family is not based on property. But to imply that the family could only be relevant as a vehicle for the transmission of inherited property overlooks the specific economic role of the working-class family under capitalism and many of the elements of women’s oppression thus engendered.
One reform implemented through union activity was the achievement of a family wage as a temporary gain for sections of the class in the 20th century. Based on the institutionalization of the hetero normative division of labor into women nurturers/male breadwinners, It also suited capitalism’s need by reinforcing sexual/gender divisions and backwardness within the proletariat. Workers are often forced to accept what the boss wants because “I have to feed my family.” Women’s family role—above all the inherent conservatism of laboring in isolation rather than collectively—also weakens the ability of the proletariat as a whole to fight the class struggle.
The fact that the family is property-less, instead of reinforcing its uselessness, was used by the 1% to reinforce it. The male worker is taught to identify with at least one element of bourgeois consciousness, sexism. He doesn’t own productive property, but he can imagine that he controls the family funds and is master of the ,house, even though in reality he is still only a wage slave.
The family as economic unit not only fills the capitalists’ fundamental need for free reproduction of labor power, but the family-based division of labor also enables capitalism to keep down the social wage: public services like child care, education and health care. To the degree that workers accept the myth of the family as a private refuge from their jobs and dealings with their bosses, no matter how bad things really get in reality, they are restrained from making demands on the state for social needs. Whatever needs are not met at home become the failure of the individual family, especially the wife, rather than the bosses.
The direct wage is also reduced. Capitalism uses women as part of what Marx defined as the “floating” section of the reserve army of labor. Women still must give priority to home and child-care duties and are therefore willing to accept part-time jobs and lower wages. (In the U.S., a quarter of all working women held part-time jobs in 1986 compared with 9 percent of men.) The bosses use the classic divide-and-conquer strategy to lower men’s wages as well; men are forced to “compete” by accepting lower wages or else risk replacement by women workers willing to work for less. Of course, all women are not wives and mothers. But the family's rationale — that woman’s income is supplementary and optional — is used to keep wages down for all. Even though women’s work in the home does produce the surplus market value that is considered the basis of capitalist exploitation in capitalist production, her removal from a direct role in value production in a society where value is the end-all and be-all ensures the subordination of women.
Engels called the position of the proletarian housewife “open or concealed domestic slavery.” Like a slave, the domestic laborer is tied to a particular household and family; she cannot move freely about between “employers"; and like chattel slaves in the capitalist era, she is subordinated to the relations between labor power and capital. But unlike a slave, no particular capitalist ruler directly provides for her welfare or even appears as her master. Rather she depends on the wage-labor/capital interchange to receive her share of the family wage, an indirect payment from the capitalist class for the maintenance and production of labor power.
In discussing the progressiveness of women’s entry into production, Engels did not address the inequality of wages and conditions, even though job equality is a necessary condition for putting women on an equal footing with men. In modern capitalism the disparity is great. While in the U.S., 60 percent of wives work, much of their work is part-time, interrupted by or geared to family commitments. In 1983, 80 percent of all female employees worked in only 20 of the U.S. Census’s 420 occupational categories, the great bulk of them unskilled and minimally paid. As low-paying and part-time work is the main growth area of the modern economy, women continue to earn only 64 percent of male incomes. Therefore men’s higher wage forces economic dependency even on women who work. When one compares the woman worker who is single with children to the women workers who are married and dependent on the traditional nuclear family, she has 13 percent of the wealth of men. When one throws the effect of racial discrimination on women of color’s ability to use the nuclear family and male wage for financial support, single mothers of color with children have no financial assets and are generally in debt.
Early Marxist's visions of the entry of women into the labor force followed by a quick merging of men and women as revolutionary workers who would overthrow capitalism and privatized the means of production and institute socialized methods of reproducing the working class simple did not occur. And the thought of developing such institutions under capitalism today, when the prevailing ethic is profits over people, does not reassure most mothers that their children will be well cared for.
But neither did Marxists' belief in the proletarian family based on only the personal love/sex connection hold true. Today in the U.S. one in three marriages ends in divorce, and after divorce the woman’s living standard falls on average by 74 percent while the man’s goes up by 49 percent. Thus divorce, outside of the effects of race discrimination, is the single greatest predictor of poverty for women and children. The persistence of horrors like domestic violence against women and the fact that battered women stay with their husbands is not explained by Engels’ notion that male chauvinism is a leftover from pre-capitalist society; it results from the material conditions of capitalism. After the “reform” of the welfare system, the only state developed program to support the reproduction of children, the reporting of “wife beatings” went up as they chose to stay in abusive marriages to support their children.
As capitalism heads toward mounting unemployment and broader social crisis, the prospect for women is much grimmer than described so far. By now the family wage can no longer be said to exist, not even for the middle class: compare the 60 percent of wives in the U.S. labor force in 1985 with the 25 percent in 1950.
The number of involuntary part-time workers increased by 60 percent between 1979 and 1985. As union-scale industrial jobs held mainly by men diminished, women entered the labor force to fill part-time and low-wage service jobs. (While women are 45 percent of the labor force, they are 64 percent of minimum-wage earners.) For this reason women account for 63 percent of the increase in the U.S. workforce in the past decade. Nevertheless, the increasing proportion of female labor will inevitably be used by capitalism as a convenient excuse for the disappearance of the decent jobs that many male workers enjoyed in the past.
The social wage is also being reduced drastically because the level of inequality is growing more rapidly and the increased control of the 1% allows them to further exploit and maneuver workers by implementing “austerity programs”. We have seen wholesale cuts in health care, education and all public services. If the system can keep mothers believing in their responsibility for the health and welfare of husbands and children (while it is the father’s job to bring home the bacon), it will create an important counter to the persistent notion that it is society’s duty to supply such services.
Today the female-headed single-parent household is the most rapidly growing family form, not only in the U.S. but worldwide. The number of single mothers in the U.S. doubled from 1960 to 1985, when one out of every four mothers in the work force headed her own family. The breakup of the nuclear family under capitalism has meant smaller family units and more responsibility on the woman’s shoulders. It is also a problem for capitalism that the “ideal” nuclear family so rarely exists, having been torn asunder by capitalist relations.
In advanced countries the trend is for the state to reconstitute the family, create foster families, etc., rather than institutionalize the poor as it did in its early years. And whatever the inadequacies of the real family, capitalism’s contradictions force it to upgrade the “family” as an ideological tool nevertheless.
The significance of the family for social control is not limited to the devastating gender divisions it sustains. It breaks down the working class into supposedly independent cells. Marx understood the conversion of human labor into the commodity labor power—making people into appendages of machines. This changes the entire working class: each worker is seen as the competitor of all others, and the preservation of one’s own children, home, etc. is one’s highest goal. The family is the group that, whatever its problems, one identifies with from birth. Thus family becomes the “tie that binds.”
We need to demand transitional changes that will lead us to revolutionary ways, outside the family, for reproducing our society. One such demand has been made by "Global Women’s Strike for Peace" which has instituted a campaign of “A living wage for all mothers and caregivers” thus connecting the unpaid labor of women into the public sphere (whether it is done in the home or a daycare center) and at the same time encouraging an emphasis on cooperative values in the society as a whole.
Another concept introduced by Lisa Duggan in The Nation several years ago, bypasses the institution of marriage and the family altogether, by emphasizing increasing the importance of civil unions – expanding civil unions so they give the same rights and protections as marriage (including the 400+ tax breaks married people get) and extending civil unions to non-sexually related persons who are living collectively in an economic unit (i.e., aunts and grandmas raising children, two or more friends who buy a house together and are raising children or not). What this does is take the issue of economic stability out of the binary sexually based institution of marriage (which has proven to be unstable anyway) and open us up to discussions of how to reproduce the next generation, developing systems from the ground up, instead of imposing large scale socialized institutions from the top down which has been a problem in some countries attempting to socialize in the past and certainly more of a problem if you try to do it within a capitalist framework.
2) Is the formation of a binary male-female gender identity determined by biology or environmental/cultural factors?
I took this description directly from a fact sheet on transgender on the Internet:
"What is the difference between sex and gender?
Sex is strictly biological – the physical body – while gender encompasses biological, cognitive, and social aspects of a human being, including identity, expression, and the expectations of others. Because gender and sex are not the same thing, it is possible for a person’s sex and gender to disagree. When this happens, it can be extremely problematic for the person dealing with this incongruity, and it can often be life-threatening, due to the potential for suicide. This sex/gender incongruity has been determined by many professional organizations and courts to be a medical condition.”
It is obvious from this fact sheet that the professionals to not consider transsexuality, pre-operative, biologically based. This might offend a number of transsexuals but that is not my problem with the definition. The term “medical condition” sounds a lot like the terms – a psychiatric neurosis - used to describe homosexuality a few years ago.
This same document, however, acknowledges that there are societies where there are more than two (non-binary) gender identifications and that other than male-female genders have been accepted in some societies. If transgender identity and homosexuality can exist in some societies, then why is it considered a “defect” in ours?
From here on out, as a bisexual lesbian feminist, I am going to rely on my own experiences – forget the experts. It is true that there are biological differences, especially in secondary sexual characteristics which tend to put people on a gradient from people that appear extremely “feminine” to extremely “masculine” with many people sharing mixed characteristics and falling in the middle of the curve. But it is telling that I cannot even discuss these biological characteristics that appear in all people without labeling them “Feminine” or “Masculine.” So I will list a number of traits and leave it to you to put them on the gradient: very short, very tall, slim build, broad shoulders, rough, large facial features like a big thick nose or square jaw, very hairy, almost hairless, breasts, the presence of a small penis (no matter how small – less than an inch), the presence of both a penis and vagina, the ability to reproduce, etc.
What exactly makes a “woman” a “woman” or a “man” a "man." All of the above traits have been found in people of various gender identities. By our social proclivity to define sexuality and gender as either or/binary constructs connected to a specific sex, especially in America with our history of Puritan Calvinistic dualism, is also my mind a “Psychiatric defect.” Admittedly, in most societies it is hard to get away from the binary construct: our languages divide the sexes by pronouns and no one wants to be called an “it.” Characteristics that involve creativity, musicality or artistic tendencies or nurturing or involving emotions are labeled female while macho characteristics such as the ability to build things, fix cars or computers, be aggressive or rational are given over to men. When we look at the real diversity among people an cultures (has anyone ever seen a mother aggressively protect her child? Or a woman carry a large bucket of water on her head for 10 miles?) understands the absurdity of these stereotypes. Yet, for the purposes of social conformity, we live them every day and are upset when people transgress them.
As a bisexual person who came out many years ago when the term didn’t even exist or was considered “kinky” and not to be trusted by either the gay or straight community, I can relate. As a woman who never fit the stereotype of feminine and was therefore was considered a defect woman though I had a perfectly functional uterus (though I’m sure many infertile women felt equally inadequate).
I am trying to figure out how we get our gender identity – is it from outside or inside. People don’t ask heterosexuals why they are heterosexual but maybe they should. Do we imprint ourselves after the most influential adult in our lives? It seems that we believe that is a large part of the process because we spend millions of hours and dollars trying to “model” the stereotypes so our children will take after us. The male identified person takes kids to sports events, the female identified person teaches kids to dress and decorate themselves so they can catch a male identified person. How many of us have tried to give our “ugly” friend a make-over so she can catch a boyfriend? How many of us have inherited our society’s psychotic racism that identifies all women of color as “ugly?” (Including many black men).
But what if the person your son or daughter is most influenced by is other gendered? If a boy learns from a gendered person dressed in macho clothing, and exhibits macho traits like aggressiveness, it will be viewed as a positive if he emulates all of that persons characteristics, including dress signifies. But what if the same boy wants to take after his Mom who dresses in heels and flashy dresses but has a kick-ass aggressive approach and he develops the same characteristics including dress –he will be viewed as a despised sissy and his mother will be viewed as an aggressive bitch who ruined her son. In other words, if you transgress the hetero-binary norms, by definition, it is you who have the mental defect, not the ridiculous OCD rigidity of society.
My only complaint, is that our solution to this problem, does not deal with the underlying use of the sexual division into masculine and feminine in the service of maintaining really unhealthy power differentials like racism, sexism and class inequities. Radical lesbian feminists in the 1970s may have come along at just the right time when there was a convergence of revolutionary energy, so we were demanding not only acceptance and assimilation but revolutionary changes that would lead to full economic, social and political equality. The gay movement, while it had its radicals, tended to have more of a “do your own thing” approach to social justice, which meant not questioning power differentials among people (i.e., class, race and sex differences), but demanding assimilation into the mainstream stereotypes – the right to be as fucked up as everyone else.
Obviously this is just one person’s views on a very confusing and controversial topics. Would love to hear your opinion.