1.8: Liberation Theory Part 4

 

Gender Liberation

 

Many expectations around gender are built deeply into the fabric of society. There are expectations that people assigned male at birth act in masculine ways and that people assigned female at birth act in feminine ways. What masculine and feminine are supposed to mean is also deeply rooted in our cultures. The idea that people bond for life as one man and one woman is also an expectation with deep roots. Along with those, gender and sexuality expectations are social structures that give fewer rights and less pay to women, normalize violence against women, and which structure the economy to make much of the work that women have traditionally done invisible to society. Many people are working to transform those expectations and structures.

Note

The following is a short excerpt from Chapter 6 of the book Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change by Cynthia Kaufman.

Feminism

I grew up with uncles who were baseball players and had my own left-handed glove since before I can remember. When I was in the fifth grade, I wanted to play baseball at school. At my school, there was only one girl who would hang out around the baseball diamond. She was there because she was the girlfriend of one of the boys. The rest of us were not allowed there. Something important was happening on the baseball diamond that required that girls not be there, except as admiring onlookers.

Since we weren’t allowed to play in the game that was using the real diamond and the school’s equipment, I brought equipment from home and my friends and I played by ourselves. Our teacher didn’t make the boys let us play. The most we could get out of her was to let us store our gear in the classroom and not tell us we couldn’t play in our own game. At the time, I thought the teacher and the boys were being mean to us. It was only much later that I came to understand that our exclusion from the game was part of a much larger picture.

At that time, girls were not supposed to be athletes; we were encouraged to use our bodies as objects of admiration rather than authors of action. And we certainly weren’t supposed to compete with boys. Having girls in on the game would have interrupted the rituals the boys were engaged in, such as bonding around common goals and ranking themselves according to skill. And at that time, if a girl played sports, calling her a lesbian was part of the teasing to get her to conform.

Since that time, the relationship between women and sports has changed dramatically. Now girls are expected to play soccer, and colleges fund women’s sports, and a few women’s professional sports leagues have even had some successes. Women who play sports are less likely to be called lesbians as a form of harassment, as more high-profile gay, lesbian, and transgender people have become accepted for who they are. What caused these changes in the world of sports—and in the world’s expectations for girls and women in all life spheres? One of the main forces forging this change was feminism, the other was the queer liberation movement.

At least since the late 1800s, women and men have organized to demand a better life for girls and women. Women’s rights activists worked hard to get the population as a whole to see women as more than mothers, low-paid workers, and sex objects. They pushed for a change in consciousness, for   women to be recognized as full human beings, active participants in the game of life, players and not just observers of someone else’s sport. Along  with early demands for suffrage and other civil rights, feminists critiqued corsets and invented bloomers to make physical activities possible for more girls and women. Among many other strategies developed over decades of organizing, the women’s movement worked hard to pass Title IX in 1972, the federal law that outlaws discrimination on the basis of gender in educational institutions that receive federal funding. Ever since Title IX, schools have been under pressure to equalize the way they fund male and female sports.

But feminism has not just been about women finding a way into male games. Many feminists have had a deeper critique of society and have argued for more far-reaching changes, such as an end to hierarchy, competition, and war.

Two of the more important demands of feminist movements have been for seeing the family as a social institution and for seeing violence against women as a political issue. Prior to the women’s movement, political issues were those that had to do with participation in the public sphere. Feminists began to see that how these spheres were constituted was a political issue. It is a political issue—meaning an issue having to do with power relations—that many of the concerns of women were, by definition, seen as unimport-ant. One of the early slogans of the women’s movement was “the personal is political.” This meant that the ways women are kept in the private world, and the ways that the work done in the private world is ignored and degraded, are political in the sense of being based on operations of powe.

Heidi Hartmann wrote an influential article in 1981 called “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Toward a More Progressive Union.”24 That article prompted many feminists to look more seriously at how male domination is structured into our predominantly capitalist soci-ety. Hartmann went on to found the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in 1987, which focuses on economic issues such as better access to childcare, flexible work schedules, and health care for all.

Socialist feminists such as Hartmann are interested in challenging the gendered implications of the labor structure of capitalist societies. Where the dominant order was built upon the ideology of separate spheres, socialist feminists have worked hard to get society to acknowledge the activities of the private sphere as work. One of the most influential books on this subject was Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift. In that book, Hochschild argues that, while many heterosexual families have an ideology of equality, time use studies show that women still work many more hours a week on the average than men, when wage labor and household labor are both counted. Who does the housework is seen by many as a trivial concern, but authors such as Hochschild show that it matters tremendously. Her work shows that a married woman with children works an average of one month a year more than her male partner.

If we think of productive labor as the things that we do to meet our needs, then there is no good reason not to count household labor as labor. Ann Ferguson labels this category of work “sex/affective production.” She argues that people must engage in three sets of activities that are largely outside of the sphere of wage labor to meet their basic survival needs. One set of activities is related to our basic personal maintenance. These activities include cleaning up after ourselves, getting and preparing food, and taking care of children’s physical needs. Another set involves taking care of our psychic needs. We all need to be listened to and receive emotional support. The third set is related to sexuality, which is a basic human need.

One commonality of these forms of labor in Western industrial societies is that women are disproportionately responsible for them, and because they are performed outside the sphere of wage labor, they are not considered part of the economy in standard economic calculations. Using a Marxist theory of exploitation, Ferguson argues that there are social structures in place that make it such that women tend to do more of this sort of work than they have done for them. They tend to pick up after others more than they are picked up after. They tend to do more supportive listening than they are listened to. And in the sexual arena, they do more to satisfy the sexual needs of others than they have their own sexual needs satisfied. In referring to all of these things as labor, Ferguson is following Marx in arguing that labor is not necessarily a bad thing, it is merely the name given to the things that we do to meet our needs. Things become work when the social relations around them are exploitative. For example, sexuality is a pleasurable human activity unless relations of domination structure it in exploitative ways.

One of the exciting things about the work of socialist feminists is that they are asking radical questions about the concept of work. The issue of how we define labor also has a real impact on women in the Global South. Many development strategies are aimed at increasing productivity. If productivity is defined as engagement in wage labor, then develop-ment programs will be aimed at getting more men involved in capitalist processes. Since many people living in poverty in the Global South are mostly engaged in subsistence lifestyles, these policies have tended not to decrease poverty and have often led to the breakup of the family, as men move to areas where wage work is more available. Women are then left with the even greater burden of managing the subsistence economy at home. Poverty reduction plans that focus on women as managers of the household economy have been much more successful at improving the lives of the world’s poor.

The gender systems in modern capitalist societies are built upon the myth of the nuclear family: the myth that a two-generation private family with a male wage earner and a female stay-at-home parent is the optimal form for human intimacy and childrearing. According to the dominant ideology, this family structure is natural and timeless. In her book The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz shows that this family was never very widespread in society. It has been presented as a social ideal in order to keep women in place, and there is nothing natural about it. These expectations around the gender system have been bad for women, and they are part of the reason many societies have been so resistant to people living lives free of gender and sexual expectations. There is a whole patriarchal economic and social order that is upheld by these expectations.  

Queer liberation

For much of the twentieth century, gay men and lesbians worked for equal rights in the system as well as for deeper transformations of the gen-der system. Many activists, in what John D’Emilio has called the homophile movement of the 1950s, were intent on arguing that gays and lesbians are just like everyone else, except in terms of what they did in their bedrooms and in social places such as bars and clubs. And what they did in these places should be no one else’s business. An important exception to this tendency was the Mattachine Foundation in Southern California, which theorized in 1950 that gay men and lesbians offered fundamentally distinct and valuable diversity to the culture as a whole. The next flourishing of radical queer organizing coincided with the broader social uprisings of the late 1960s.

Many people date the beginnings of the current more radical gender liberation movement to the riot that took place at the Stonewall Inn in New York on June 27, 1969. That night, police engaged in what they thought was a routine sweep of a bar where transgender people, gay men, and lesbians, many of them people of color, found community and freedom. The differ-ence that night was that the patrons resisted. According to an article that appeared in the Village Voice at the time,

Suddenly, the paddywagon arrived and the mood of the crowd changed. Three of the more blatant queens—in full drag—were loaded inside, along with the bartender and doorman, to a chorus of catcalls and boos from the crowd. A cry went up to push the paddywagon over, but it drove away before anything could hap-pen.  The next person to come out was a dyke, and she put up a struggle—from car to door to car again. It was at that moment that the scene became explosive. Limp wrists were forgotten. Beer cans and bottles were heaved at the windows, and a rain of coins descended on the cops.

Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were two of the transgender women of color who were instrumental in starting the riot. Stonewall was not the first or the last high-profile attack on a gathering of queer people. But shortly after it the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations decided to commemorate the attack in annual pride marches to be held in June. Those annual pride marches have been an important part of the move-ment since that time, and have spread to be celebrated all around the world. Stonewall marked a major phase of radicalization in the movement. As Dennis Altman put it, “No longer is the claim made that gay people can fit into American society, that they are as decent, as patriotic, as clean-living as anyone else. Rather, it is argued, it is American society itself that needs to change.”3 As gay men and lesbians became more radical, they began to look at the ways that sexuality is organized in society and how important a part of the social structure sexuality is. As these movements developed and became more radical, gay men and lesbians went in very different directions for a number of years, with gay men moving toward more open and unrestricted sexuality,and lesbians becoming more involved in the women’s movement and interested in overthrowing patriarchy. 

One of the challenges to changing the gender structures of society is that unequal gender roles seem natural and normal to most people. When I think back to my early example of sexism on the playground, I am struck by its everydayness. The roles society sets up for boys and girls are learned through routine interactions. I remember my own childhood experience with some anger, but also with a bit of doubt—it can’t have been so bad; these things happen to girls every day. Part of the problem lies precisely in the fact that there was nothing brutal or outrageous in what I experienced. I accidentally bumped up against the walls the society had constructed for gender roles. I pushed against them a bit. But, in the end, my friends and I learned how we were supposed to behave, and eventually we gave up on playing sports.

Our sense of self develops by learning these expectation and taking them into account as we make our life choices. For some of us staying in these boundaries happens with only a small loss to our personal integrity and happiness. And we can resist with only small amounts of personal risk. For others the loss involved in conforming is huge, and many people have pushed hard against those expectations. And that harder push leads to reactions, often violent ones, from those trying to maintain the gender system. People who don’t conform to the gender systems encounter tremendous levels of ostracism and violence.

 

Approaches to organizing  

In both the women’s and queer liberations movements there have been powerful or-ganizations that have taken a mainstream lobbying and lawsuits approach to social change. Two of the biggest organizations at the present time are the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). These groups use the ideology of civil rights to demand an end to discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation. Radicals often criticize these organizations for being assimilationist and for not put-ting up enough of a challenge to the status quo.

For much of the later part of the twentieth century, radicals in both the women’s and queer liberation movements challenged the institution of marriage, arguing that marriage supports male domination and allows the state to regulate and domesticate sexuality. So, the focus on “gay marriage” was hotly contested in radical queer circles. Those supporting gay marriage have argued that activists should be against state-sponsored discrimination, which is what the prohibition against gay marriage constitutes. A similar argument is made around the question of gays in the military. You don’t have to support the military to be against the state being able to keep you out of it. In both of these gender-based movements, there has been a general acceptance among radicals of the goals of the liberals, while at the same time demanding deeper changes that the liberals often do not talk about and sometimes want to distance themselves from. While NOW has worked hard to challenge workplace discrimination, radicals have also challenged the structure of a labor market that was built around the needs of a male breadwinner. And while early second-wave feminism demanded access to abortion, radicals worked to redefine a reproductive rights movement to include opposing forced sterilization.
Many people have noticed the extent to which feminism has been able to accomplish significant changes from within the network of present social relations. Some social justice advocates have taken this success to mean that feminism is not really a radical movement—it is merely a superficial change from within the basic oppressive structure of society. This idea is often at the heart of claims that feminism, queer politics, and antiracist politics are “identity politics.” What this expression means is that these are movements about personal identity, and only class-based politics is about transforming the structure of society.

Yet feminist theorists have shown how intertwined the structural and the cultural are. As women begin to feel that they matter and that their role in life should be as more than support people for men and children, they bring complex perspectives into the political mix. When they advocate for pay equality, they often also advocate for workplaces that are less based on competi tion. Fighting for equal pleasure in the bedroom often leads to a confidence that manifests itself at work. Women of color have argued strongly that for women to be free, society needs to be rid of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Socialist feminists have worked through trade unions and other forums to advocate for more flexible work schedules and for better access to childcare and better pay and working conditions for childcare workers. This change in childcare institutions is linked to women’s desires to develop parts of themselves that are not related to the home. Identity and personal desires are intricately connected to the web of structural oppression.

There is a broad world of feminist and queer politics that exists in-between liberal demands for inclusion without radical change and radical demands for total social transformation. Within this broad range there is a general belief that change happens from within the network of social rela-tions; and cultural, personal, and economic demands are interrelated, and can be won through consciousness-raising, direct action, and the power of many people refusing to settle for less than justice.

Radical social change happens when many heterosexual women fight with their partners about who does the housework; it happens when femi-nists or queers develop styles of dress that challenge dominant expecta-tions; it happens when women insist on wearing comfortable clothes and not shaving their legs.

But these personal struggles only have significant social impact when they exist as parts of a movement that links these acts and gives them social meaning. Feminists and queer activists have been at the forefront of theo-retical developments that help us to understand the psychological and cul-tural aspects of movements toward social change. Much of the social change work done by feminists and queer activists takes place in the cultural and personal spheres. Changes of consciousness are important for transforming the social fabric.

 

Activity \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Reading Response Questions

Please reflect on this reading by writing a short response to these questions. Your answer can include personal experience, and the writing does not need to be formal or polished. You are welcome to write as little as a sentence and as much as a paragraph. Think of it like journaling. 

1. What was meaningful to you in this reading?
2. How have sexism and other forms of gender based oppression impacted your life?
3. How are the oppression of women and of queer people related to each other?
4. What do you think about the differences between more radical and more liberal approaches to organizing for gender liberation?

Attributions

• Adapted from "Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change, 2nd Ed” by Cynthia Kaufman is copyrighted. It has been reproduced with permission from the author and publisher