Degendering Sex; Undoing Erotic Alienation
Priscille Touraille
translated by Lise Weil
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The following reflections * did not emerge from my doctoral research (though they are not unrelated to it); they are reflections which I have pursued alongside it for some time. What I present to you today is a sketch, a work project and not a research outcome; it's a project which ideally would require reference to numerous philosophical works. Today I wanted simply to set off on a trail which, to my knowledge, has not yet been proposed in these terms.
I think that everyone here is familiar with Wittig's phrase “a lesbian is not a woman” in The Straight Mind. 1 If being-a-woman is defined by the fact of being in a relationship with a man, I think that a certain number of you would agree with Wittig's definition. The sticking point, for many, is in the reference to biology. At this point the response tends to go like this: “okay but come on, after all, I am a woman! I can accept that having chosen lesbian relationships I am not a woman socially speaking, but I am a woman, I can't deny my biology.” Some often go so far as to specify, by a strange pleonasm, I am a lesbian woman, thus implying that there is such a thing as a lesbian man. If you say I am not a woman, the response may be “well good, okay, you refuse to be a woman in the sense that you refuse the cultural attributes of femininity. But that doesn't change the fact that you are a woman, after all!” What's understood is that you have no choice but to be a woman, a female, you can clench your jaw and walk with your legs spread wide like an orangutan carrying a bomb between his thighs, but you cannot escape the fact of “being female.”
But why? What prevents me from saying I am not female? The meaning of I-am-a-woman in the sense of I-am-female seems to be the product of a reality that is impassible and impossible to question without questioning our most powerful system of reference, that of biology. But who says that male and female are biological realities? Who says that these terms, which seem to refer to the most exact and irreducible of realities, are not just a thought construction? Perhaps we have to begin by asking what a biological reality is.
The problem in the social sciences is that we haven't listened enough to feminist sex researchers in the field of biology. And as a result, we haven't gotten around to evaluating the categories of male and female as we've done the categories of man and woman. “Sex” has become above all a social category for those working on a feminist critique of the social sciences. But in the process of “thinking gender” (Delphy 2 ) we have forgotten to “think sex” in the sense that biologists give to it.
In France, Evelyne Peyre and Joelle Wiels have written a great number of articles on the subject since the mid-70s and their work is finally beginning to be circulated in the media. 3 A recent article in Le Monde was titled “Woman Doesn't Exist and Neither does Man” after an interview with Evelyne Peyre and the intended meaning was “man and woman don't exist in the biological sense”. 4 Evelyne Peyre, with whom I've been working since I first began my doctoral thesis, has a way of speaking about biological sex which throws its ordinary usage into question, and which calls the social sciences to task for still using the term “sexes” in the plural when speaking of men and women. In biology, she says, sex refers to a function, procreation, as other elements of an organism may refer for example to the function of breathing or digestion. Differentiated organs always exist to accomplish the functions of an organism. It is the same thing for sex. The fact that procreation can only happen with the participation of two individuals in certain species, including ours (a phenomenon call gonochorism) is not enough to permit us to speak of two sexes. Yet we speak all the time of two sexes.
For biology, says E. Peyre, this is inexact thinking. And if by sex one understands something that springs uniquely from biology, an innovation in the mode of reproduction dating back about 600 million years, 5 then using it in place of gender categories will prevent us from ever being able to think clearly about these issues.
Biological method is reduction; it works with characteristics, and in the case of sex, with chromosomes, gonads, hormones, etc. The reality of what we usually understand by sex is broken down by biology, which works with “male” or “female” only at the level of discourse, not in methodology. “Male” and “female” are thought operations, not realities, because through these terms we refer not to the part that’s implied, but to the whole which carries this part. As William of Okham, whose thinking has been very important to contemporary scientists, noted back in the Middle Ages 6 , we mustn't multiply definitions unless we have to, we must eliminate as far as possible redundant and unnecessary propositions. “Male” and “female” are not necessary propositions for biology. Not only are they not necessary, but as feminist biologists have clearly shown, they are more problematic than helpful in the description of the reality of sexual characteristics. 7 On the other hand, the categories of male and female are completely necessary to the maintenance of gender systems (see Colette Guillaumin's analysis of the discourse of Nature 8 ) since these terms validate for common thought the existence of a “natural” reality which transcends the social order.
The terms male and female represent a simple redoubling of gender categories; they are formed according to the same model and are no more realities than are men and women (in fact, we may say they are less so). Only characteristics taken in their singularity have a biological reality — e.g. the external genital organs which certain biologists call our “plumbing.” But to say that this plumbing makes a female of me in no way corresponds to a biological reality. We have learned to do it so well that we think it's the only possible way to see. But it is only a category game, and a particular manner of constituting things. And this being the case, we can completely refuse to constitute things in this manner. I can decide that this category quite simply doesn't interest me, and does not serve my way of defining what “I am.” To say “I am not female” does not constitute the same kind of denial as someone in the post-Copernican era declaring “the earth doesn't turn around the sun.” Yet this is what you will get accused of, that you are making a heretical scientific proposition. In saying “I am not female,” you are not in violation of reality, you are not challenging any established scientific truth, you are simply positing another way to see things than is customary inside the gender system. Don't get me wrong. This is not about denying that we have breasts, a clitoris, menstruation, etc. This is not about denying we have a sexed body. It’s about saying: we can refuse to agree that all the characteristics that we in fact possess and that we can claim to possess make of us a female being. It's about saying that we are not denying any biological reality in refusing the ontologization of organs and in fighting against the “bewitching of our intelligence,” as Wittgenstein would have said. 9
We are not obliged to be women, in Wittig's thinking, because we are not obliged to accept being gendered subjects or in general to accept “being for” and at the service of so-called men. We are no longer women if we refuse to be men's sexual and domestic slaves. The same thing is true for the category of female. We are no longer female from the instant we decide that our genital organs and our specific role in the process of procreation do not have to account for the entirety of our being (which the “I am” implies). I think the confusion stems from the idea that biological characteristics are capable of giving us an “identity.” The biological register cannot be an ontological register, thus one of identity. Contrary to what we read everywhere, and what our “identity cards” imply, I do not think we can convincingly speak of the existence of “sexed identities.”
Besides, think about it, we never say I AM MY BODY, we always say we HAVE a body. So how can we then say that we ARE females, when this refers only to parts of the body? (the fact that there are several parts or elements does nothing to change the whole picture). Our categories do not permit us to say “I am my body,” but paradoxically they oblige us to say “ I am such-and-such a body part.” Which goes to show that it is not the genital organs one wants to distinguish, but persons, in order to assign them to an identity, to “the paralyzing armature of identity”, to paraphrase the Martinique writer René Menil, who knew all about the ontologization of characteristics of “skin color” 10. The same problem arises with “skin color”. When one says of an individual “he's black,” this makes sense only in the ideology of race, not for biology, which studies the variable rates of melanine; biology does not study black or white individuals.
Have you ever thought about what “being a woman” means in the so-called biological sense? It means being defined as an entire being —I am this — by one's genitals, and by the specialized role which these genitals play in the process of procreation. The brain is left out. It's obscene, but who realizes it? The feminist researchers in the social sciences have seen it perfectly well: being-a-woman is much more restrictive than being-a-man since the term man refers also to what differentiates him from the rest of the living world; the term woman refers to the genital anatomy alone and to the specialized function of the gonads and plumbing in procreation. 
I am my gonads or I am my specialized plumbing is strictly speaking what we are saying when we say I am female. If you think of the famous painting by Magritte, “The Rape,” which depicts the female genitals instead of the face (its visionary title foresees the consequences of this kind of categorizing act),this is exactly what we should see when a woman stands in front of us: genitals. It's as if we had created a term to say “I am the stomach which allows me to digest” or “I am the mouth which allows me to chew” or “I am the anus which allows me to excrete.” In these cases we say “I have a mouth, etc.”, no?; Only insults ontologize in this way: e.g.: prick, bigmouth, asshole, etc. The term woman (which Wittig, I might point out, qualifies with the term “irredeemable”) should be used only as an insult — since in the biological sense that's exactly what it is, cunt — to be reserved for those who conceive of their entire body as a walking genital apparatus. From a neurobiological point of view, the only organ which might support our claiming to be this organ is the brain, for no one is capable of saying I am if she has lost her head (and the scientific/medical definition for death is cerebral death). Yet the organs specialized for sex are among those organs whose loss does not represent an ontological end for the individual, and this loss is certainly less disabling than losing vision, speech or the use of a limb.
The problem resides, semantically and conceptually, in the use of the verb TO BE versus the verb TO HAVE, a usage which structures our way of thinking in Western languages. How does it happen that a characteristic of my anatomy, something my anatomy allows me or does not allow me to do, leads to my confusing myself with this part of my anatomy to the point of saying I am this part? You will say that ontological definitions in terms of all sorts of characteristics, biological or not, represent an extremely common and banal operation. She is blond, she is black, she is French, she's an idiot, she is clumsy, she is beautiful, she's a writer. It's a cognitive automatism relayed by language. Personally I think that it's this structure that needs to finally be examined from a philosophical point of view. However, in all the cases which I've just cited, if you make an effort in language, you can escape from what I would call the tyranny of the ontological. You can always say she has blond hair, she has dark skin, her behavior is idiotic, she moves clumsily, she practices the writing profession. One can, in the majority of cases, rid oneself of the use of “to be” and of the identity tic by formulating the sentences differently.
The problem with the use of the terms female and male is that even if we want to, we can't get rid of them. Because “male” and “female” force us to use the verb to be. And if we want to say “I have the genital form I have,” we’re obliged to say “I have female genitals.” We can in fact say “I have genitals,” but if we want to specify “I have. . . a certain genital form,” we find ourselves stuck, stuck as are all those who possess irregular plumbing. 11 Since there is no term to globally distinguish genital forms, we fall back automatically on gender, and thus on ontology. Moreover, the terms themselves, female and male — it's revealing — have nothing to do with even an approximation of a definition of what the famous difference in genital anatomy might be. The male/female distinction makes absolutely no reference to any difference of form in the plumbing. Female (in French) simply means “little woman.” One thus invokes gender, and not a sign which would represent the biological reality of the form. How could we “have” the plumbing we have, since it isn't named? Which shows that with the so-called “sexes,” it is truly not the genital forms which one wants to differentiate. It is the person as a whole. It is yet another of the traps of gender in language (whose mechanisms the French feminist linguist Claire Michard has analyzed 12) which in this precise case prevents us from saying that we have what we have.
If I don't want to say I'm a woman, if I don't want to say I'm a female, if I would like on the other hand to be able to say, “I who have this genital form, I who love this person who for me is neither woman nor female but who possesses this genital form,” what do I say? If I say she has a vagina, that's not okay, if I say she has a clitoris, that's not enough, if I say she has breasts, that's not enough, if I say okay I love a person who has a clitoris a vulva a vagina breasts, you will tell me stop you're being ridiculous. You'll look at me as if I were from another planet.
So what do I say? You see the term is missing. If I don't want to refer to gender, I don't have the terminology. We are not capable of saying that we have, or love, this particular genital form, except by launching into a rather weird enumerative litany. So, out of a false sense of economy, out of laziness, and because deep down we don't think it's really serious, we use the terms women, females, feminine: we give in to ontology. But it is not at all so certain that this is not really serious, that it does not have deplorable consequences in our lives.
For myself the consequences touch the area of the erotic and cause pretty severe alienation. I would say that lesbians have mostly a tendency to divide into two camps: those who assume and even reclaim being-women and those who, even without having read Wittig, are profoundly allergic to being perceived as women. The latter camp despise in themselves all the anatomical characteristics which might, with good reason, send them back to female identification. This being the case, they have a hard time believing that their lovers might desire them by way of these morphological characteristics, which some declare a dead zone. Their lovers’ desire is considered a threat, and this threat is not lived as the intrinsic menace of desire (remember Wittig in The Lesbian Body: I explode the small units of m/y ego, I am threatened, I am desired by you” 13 ) but rather as the threat that this desire might very well transform them into a woman. Here is significant testimony from the French book Attirances: “when I’m being made love to, when I allow myself to receive (implied, it’s understood, when the other desires me and not when she desires my desire), I don't like it very much because I feel terribly in danger.” 14 What is this danger, if not that the desire the other has for my body will make of me the woman I don't want to be? “I've always feared being an object,” 15 says the testimony.
These lesbians who don't want to be women have, as I see it, found a strategy (a collective one at that) to say that they have genital organs instead of being these organs, thus to say that they are not women, in the prediscursive act of denying their lover access to them (when doing is saying...). The proof that my genitals don't make me a woman is that I deny them to you. “The Butch identity ... stresses the establishment of a boundary that a lover cannot cross.” 16 The various limits that I impose instantly confer on my lover (she on whom the prohibition is imposed) a female identity (whether she feels at ease in it or not), which is about supporting prohibitions, of which the primary one in the world of gender, let us not forget, is against the expression of desire (desire as we know—or as most of us don’t want to know — is violence, not violence in terms of relationships of dominance, but a desperate urge to enter the other, as in Wittig's work, to touch every touchable part of the other's body as well as those parts that can't ever be materially touched — an urge which tolerates no imposed limits). Here we see how the fear of being ontologized by one's organs conveys a fundamentally unequal reality to the erotic relationship. In its most radical version the principle will be: I ardently desire that the other desire that I do to her what I do not desire that she do to me (and, importantly, that she derive pleasure from it). She makes me feel my desire, but the condition of the relationship is that she not feel for me the desire I have for her.
The strategy by which one tries to escape the ontologization of organs, of putting limits on the other’s desire, results in keeping the lover in her woman-being. Moreover, so-called butches seem to need for their lovers to BE what they are, and as Lacan would say, “to give” what they “don't have”, since giving what they don't have, they “give themselves” (according to the well known expression), and “giving themselves” they do not in theory impose limits — except, in some cases, that of infinite resentment for not being “recognized by the other as oneself.” as Michèle Causse would say, 17 an expression which reverses a potent philosophical credo, that of the recognition of “the other” as a “not oneself,” a paradigmatic credo in gender systems thinking, and the only one that can justify our treating the other differently than how we want to be treated ourselves. I think the erotic relationship which results from this is profoundly alienated.
To degender sex, to remove from it its power to define identities, could have the beneficial effect of short-circuiting these alienating strategies of desire, giving ourselves the means to say we HAVE what we HAVE in order to avoid the jail of being what we have, and maybe finally allowing us to risk being beings of desire, of which we have at least one beautiful example in the vertiginous erotic of Wittig's permutations (The Lesbian Body), which understandably threatens protagonists of the narrow metaphysic of “equality in difference” and upholders of rigid sexual identities in the erotic arena — which at least in my opinion, should be the domain of their abolition.
The proposition to degender the sexes perhaps involves the invention of a term which does not exist in our languages, and so I appeal to your creativity, dear thinking creatures. Trying to get out of the trap of gender may be easier than we think if we can invent another way of seeing things. We're not going to revolutionize cognitive structures sedimented in language for thousands of years, but fortunately language is flexible enough to allow us to get out of it by tinkering with it. The ideal, I believe, would be to not create any term which could become another category. But we do have to get out of gender, and we can't get out of it too brutally because we are so addicted to the idea that the difference in the form of our genitals is fundamental that we can’t just decide to make it irrelevant overnight.
Michèle Causse, in l'Encontre 18 , has already invented the terms “upper frontal protruberances” and “lower frontal protruberances,” which are not without humour, if a bit long — but one refers to the breasts, not to the genitals, the other to the penis. As for me, I've been playing around with contractions; for the external genitals, you would have the clitovag, the testipen, the penivag forms.... I do not hope to convince you with these terms (I'm sure one could do much better!) but only to convey the necessity of inventing in this direction, remembering, on the one hand, that the terms created are not destined to be nominalized and on the other hand, that “to speak biology” is to speak diversity and thus to multiply the terms accordingly. I say this thinking of those persons designated today as “intersexed,” for it is they who have paid the heaviest price 19, seeing their capacity for physical pleasure flattened in the name of gender as it has been until recently in our modern cultures where they are funneled by surgical means into the false biological realities of male and female.
In the present movements against gender oppression, “transgender” — along with gay and bi-lesbian — is claiming to be one of the ideal paths. The quasi absence of an “intergender” project is very striking and, from my point of view, revealing. Is the term frightening? Does it correspond to the fear embodied in the figure of the hermaphrodite, whose capacity for sexual pleasure is seen as ideally “integral” and who is, who knows, for this very reason considered in our gendered fantasies as deserving of mutilation? Isn't this basically the same fear which haunts many people, including certain lesbians: that of a tightrope walk across gender dreamed up by beings who are working at “undefining themselves,” to use the magnificent neologism of Sabine Prokhoris 20 --in order to incarnate, voluntarily, the promise of an erotic world whose limits, with which we're already saturated by our bodily experience, will finally cease to be erected in and by our thinking.
*revised version of a paper delivered at the 5th International Colloquium of Lesbian Studies, Toulouse, France, April 2006 (return to top )
Notes
1. Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. (return to article)
2 .Delphy, Christine. «Penser le genre: quels problèmes?» In M.-C. Hurtig , M. Kail & H. Rouch (eds) Sexe et genre. De la hiérarchie entre les sexes. Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1991: 89-101. [Ouvrage réédité, CNRS, 2002] (return to article)
3. See for example: Peyre, Evelyne & Wiels, Joëlle, Le sexe biologique et sa relation au sexe social,» Les Temps modernes 593, 1997: 14-47/ Wiels, Joëlle, « La différence des sexes: une chimère résistante.» In Vidal C. (ss dir.) Féminin masculin. Mythes et idéologies. Paris: Belin, 2006: 71-81. (return to article)
4. Joignot, Frédéric, «La femme n'existe pas, et l'homme non plus d'ailleurs,» Le Monde 2, 20-21 juin 2004: 42-45. (return to article)
5. Margulis, Lynn and Sagan, Dorion. What Is Sex? New York: Simon and Shuster, 1997. (return to article)
6. http://en wikipedia.org/wiki/william_ockham (return to article)
7. Peyre, Evelyne. «Anatomiquement correct. L’art et la manière d’imprimer une idéologie dans l'os humain,» La Recherche, Hors-série n°6, 2001: 72-74. (return to article)
8. Guillaumin, Colette. Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology. London & New York: Routledge, 1995. (Chapters 9 & 10) (return to article)
9. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001, p. 109. (return to article)
10. Menil, René. Tracées. Identité, négritude, esthétique aux Antilles. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1981. (return to article)
11. Approximately 200 million people in the world conform to the definition of “intersexuality.” (Given present global population estimates, more than three million “intersexed” beings are born each year, i.e. one out of 2000; all these persons are relegated to non-existence by the male/female system.) (return to article)
12. Michard, Claire. «Approche matérialiste de la sémantique du genre en français contemporain.» In M.-C. Hurtig, M. Kail & H. Rouch (eds) Sexe et genre. De la hiérarchie entre les sexes. Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1991: 147-157. [Ouvrage réédité, CNRS, 2002] (return to article)
13. Wittig, Monique. The Lesbian Body. Trans. David Le Vay. New York: Avon Books, 1976. p. 97 (return to article)
14. Penhoat, Janick. «Je suis butch et j'en suis fière.» In Lemoine C. & Renard I. (ss.dir) Attirances. Lesbiennes fems, lesbiennes butchs. Paris : Éditions gaies et lesbiennes, 2001: 152-156, p. 15. (return to article)
15. Ibid, p. 156. (return to article)
16. Munt, Sally R. “Le corps butch” In Lemoine C. & Renard I. (ss.dir), op.cit.: 339-363, p. 355. Translated from an abridged version of the chapter “The Butch Body” inSally R. Munt, Heroic Desire: Lesbian Identity and Cultural Space, London: Cassel, 1998. (return to article)
17. The “oneself” here refers not to a gender resemblance (“we are women thus we are similar”) but to something akin to the Kantian imperative: I cannot deny that what I think I want for myself is desirable for anyone other than myself. (return to article)
18. Causse, Michèle. L’Encontre. Paris: Éditions des femmes, 1975. (return to article)
19. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersexuality (return to article)
20. Prokhoris, Sabine. Le sexe prescrit. La différence sexuelle en question. Paris: Flammarion (coll. Champs), 2000, p. 185. A shortened version of this work exists in English: “The prescribed sex,” inOliver Kelly & Walsh Lisa (eds), Contemporary French feminism. Oxford Univ. Press, 2005. (return to article)
about the author
Priscille Touraille is presently doing post-doctoral research in the eco-anthropology and ethnobiology lab of the National Museum of Natural History, Paris, on the relationship between gender thinking elaborated by human cultures and the appearance, in the course of evolution, of a certain number of sexed biological characteristics. Her 2005 doctoral thesis in social anthropology, “Sexual Dimorphisms in Body Size: Some Bloody Adaptations?” dealt with evolutionary explanations for differences in male/female body size, especially in height. Some of her poems have appeared in translation in Tessera.
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