The CSMCH took a decidedly theoretical turn this week as the legal scholar Davina Cooper (King’s College London) shared with us the conceptual foundations of her new ESRC project on reforming legal gender identity. She challenged us to think differently about what gender is, what it could become, and what sorts of spaces it could inhabit. Our dedicated scribe, Calum Aikman, was there to take notes and send this report, or you can listen again to the talk by following the Audiomack link or tuning in to our podcast channel on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
In an age when gender is an increasingly important feature on the political landscape, how can we seek to resolve the contentious issues that arise? How can gender identity hope to move beyond today’s climate and become something new? And what chance is there for agreement and unity when feminist campaigners are frequently at odds with one another? These are just some of the questions which animated Davina’s paper on ‘reimagining the conceptual space of gender’.
Davina began by briefly illustrating the recent history of gender politics, arguing that the main themes are by no means new; many feminist essentialist arguments, in particular, have been aired at regular junctures in the recent past. These have, however, been considered secondary to the broader challenge of how to define women and womanhood without resorting to overtly male, middle-class modes of thought.
But the increased prominence of debates pertaining to the rights of transsexual men and women, amongst other things, has shifted emphasis towards ideas that specifically evaluate gender. Many governments throughout the world have been involved in passing legislation that seeks to further ‘trans’ rights – Davina mentioned Malta, Denmark and the Republic of Ireland as three countries that have taken the lead in formulating a light-touch approach to gender transitioning.
Yet progress remains uneven, and even those states with a more interventionist ethos have found it difficult to avoid issues – such as sex-divided spaces and provision of ‘puberty blockers’ – that generate a great amount of controversy. (In some instances, it is established feminist groups that have raised objections – such as over proposals to make gender reconstruction easier, for example.)
Davina sketched out two contesting concepts that influence the way many of us think about such matters. ‘Gender as Domination’ (GDom) was described as a paradigm in which exploitation is considered a part of everyday relations between men and women; its proponents thus focus primarily on combating those factors that make it possible, with a defence of rights and freedoms as one of the main goals.
In contrast, ‘Gender as Diversity’ (GDiv) sets out to tackle the hardships experienced by gender-fluid people, and adopts a more outrightly radical attitude that emphasises trajectories of self-realisation. Davina explained that there is no single right or wrong answer to the narrative of gender experience, and that both GDiv and GDom are valuable as interpretive models.
Of course, both these approaches also have flaws: GDiv is unduly concerned with subjective needs, while GDom – although relational in its understanding of how men and women shape each other – can potentially become over-focused on ‘dystopian’ visions of male predatory behaviour and female victimhood.
Can these two conceptions of gender coexist in a way that allows for positive dialogue, rather than antagonism? What Davina suggests is a move away from such binary divisions, by introducing alternative ideas that illuminate other social inequalities and, in doing so, provide a ‘hopeful conceptual line’ that can go beyond the stale assumptions of the ‘gender wars’.
Her own idea is to offer a utopian perspective by thinking in terms of ‘prefiguration’ – a concept which aims to challenge the restrictions inherent in a given situation by proposing that one should act as if the desired alternative is already in place. This creates space for play and imagination, to work within a plural framework that assumes ideals and reality to be part of one continuum. Although Davina stressed that for any such theory to be effective an awareness of objective evidence is still necessary, her hope is that such an approach will allow people to concentrate on identifying what gender might become, rather than be trapped in competing, often authoritarian definitions of what it already is (or, indeed, what it is not).
Davina further argued that prefiguration can provide a new dimension to gender politics, by allowing it to engage with various socio-economic issues that highlight other aspects of the gender experience – family life, for instance, or care-work. She noted that legislators already have the potential to act in a prefigurative fashion, by changing meanings and notions of gender while introducing political reforms.
Even so, she argued that individuals ultimately have a greater degree of agency than the state does, because they are not bound by the limitations of what is ‘real’ and ‘right’, and can thereby give their imagination free rein. She did acknowledge that the utopian nature of prefiguration has its drawbacks, not least because harmful relations between men and women cannot simply be wished out of existence. But at least it brings forth new concepts to work with: these ‘fruitful pathways’, as she described them, have the potential to go beyond current struggles by substituting competition and criticism with something more constructive.
Commenting on the paper, Mathias Thaler (Edinburgh) began by conceding that he did not fundamentally disagree with any of the main points raised in the paper, noting that Davina’s portrayal of prefigurative politics as a collective reflection on what gender could mean allows for a genuinely new perspective on an otherwise frequently terse debate. Nonetheless, he expressed some reserve about what he described as the ‘ambivalent’ nature of prefiguration as an idea, observing that its ‘playfulness’ can only oscillate between the seemingly contradictory principles of utopian idealism on the one hand and realpolitik on the other. This, he suggested, has the potential to cause conflict, especially if the underlying principles are not properly understood by the wider public. The frequent accusations of failure that have dogged the Occupy movement, for example, illustrate what happens when a performative and experimental movement is unable to articulate its agenda on its own terms.
Related to this, while Davina suggested that activists were empowered through the act of prefiguration, Mathias wondered just how many actual examples of this there actually are, and commented more generally on his feeling that there wasn’t much ‘empirical substance’ to the paper. He was also sceptical about how effective the legal system could be in enabling prefiguration, given the capacity of the law to erode its playful, subversive qualities, and ruminated on the involvement of academics themselves – should they seek only to bear objective witness, or is it their responsibility to mediate actively in the issues they are studying?
Calum Aikman is a PhD student in History. His research mostly focuses on twentieth-century British and Scottish politics, trade union history and the fortunes of the Labour Party in the post-war era. His thesis is on the political thought of the Labour Party’s ‘revisionist’ right wing in the 1970s. He is a CSMCH steering committee member.