In labour.

Okay, so this is, and isn’t related to The Second Sex. It isn’t because it is not a direct engagement with chapter 2, which is next in line, but it is, because these issues are generated by reading the text, in particular the biological context chapter.

I am currently reading Kathleen Canning’s Gender History in Practice, the chapter on feminist history after the linguistic turn. There are a couple of pages on the Social Democratic textile union, working class women and pregnancy, which recount the demands by female workers in Gera in October 1926 for restoration of the eight-hour day, expanded maternity leave, access to birth control, repeal of the law banning abortion and liberation of women from housework (p. 94-5). This got me thinking about childbirth and care as labour today and reproductive politics in e.g. Denmark, where I was born and spent my teens and young adult life.

My thoughts are a bit jumbled, so I think I will begin on a containership, which left Melbourne in late June 2010 bound for Europe. I was on the ship as a paying passenger with my partner Roland. The crew and first and second officer were Pilipino, and the captain and chief engineer and electrician were from the former Yugoslavian Republic. The crew talked about their families and children and how difficult it was to be away from them for so long (the Philipino crew’s rights were notably different from European crew members, with contracts that ran from 6-12 months at sea, over against the European 3 months – don’t get me started). They were also very curious as to why I did not have children, and the chief concern was, who was going to take care of me, when I got old. While this particular situation made me feel excessively privileged, bourgeois and white, it also set different economies and societal practices and expectations into relief.

I am assuming that the situation in which one is dependent on one’s children in old age, means a social situation that does not have a welfare system with pension, guaranteeing you some sort of income, when you are too old to work. Your children will have grown up, and work, and thus provide for you. In Denmark, you pay someone else to do this, through for example an ‘old people’s home’ perhaps with selfcontained units, like the one my grandmother lives in. She pays rent in return for a small apartment, with visits from a carer once a day, with lunch supplied. Other than that, she manages herself. Now, my grandmother is not quite as old as to belong to the generation of workers in Canning’s analysis. But she does belong to the generation, which built the welfare state, and was a working woman. She began as most young women did, by working as a maid, but from there began sewing, in particular brassieres and girdles. She did this during the war in Copenhagen, and after her son was born, she shifted to another sewing workshop closer to Lyngby, where she lived, because they provided day-care for her son. At some point in the 50s, available work became more and more difficult, due to the shifts of many production facilities to Poland, and what was available in Denmark, became, she said, more and more like working in a factory. And so she stopped working (you know, the paid work), and they lived off my grandfather’s income, until their children were old enough to work and assist.

What I am getting at here is childbirth and rearing as labour and as a contribution to society. Because what I was thinking is that the discourses surrounding childbirth have dramatically changed, while the social function, i.e. reproduction of society is unchanged.

Two things sparked this thought. First of all, a discussion with Jess Cadwallader about the banning of breastfeeding in public places, which she pointed out is a denial of women’s labour. Second, it turns out that in Germany, where I am employed at the moment, I am subject to an extra tax, because I don’t have children, and thus will be in need of extra support when the time comes.

In response to Jess I thought, ‘My god I hadn’t seen this. Must. Think. More.

And in response to the tax I thought ‘Hey! That’s not fair. What happened to my right as a woman NOT to have kids?’ Again feeling extremely bourgeois and pc.

After thinking about this on and off, and then reading about the women in Gera I came to this presumably very banal observation, noted above about the discourses of childbirth have changed and that having children today (in Denmark) is regarded as a basic human right. And this way of speaking about children individualises, personalises and I think, veils a profoundly social interest. So much so that the state invests in reproduction in terms of heavily subsidised and healthcare covered IVF treatment as well as tests for Down’s syndrome and other ‘abnormalities’ in every foetus. The IVF treatments are extended to include lesbians and single women, to maximise productivity. All of which contributes towards producing ‘normal’ and white babies, who will ensure the existence of the nation, especially in light of increased immigration. I think that this is one of the reasons that I do not think of breastfeeding over a latte in Copenhagen in terms of labour. I should have, of course, but I didn’t.  

Until I was faced with the tax, I had not thought about my ‘choice’ not to have children as having social and nationalistic ramifications. Selfish? Indeed. Privileged? Undeniably. But the only people I have met who raised the social issues were the crewmembers on the ship. People in Denmark see it as a strange decision, and as passing by a wonderful opportunity (and a couple of fundas as going against nature), and so on. But no one has mentioned the state. And I wonder, if men and women in Denmark think of having children as a means of providing for themselves when they are old?

Does this make sense? In case you were wondering, I am now quite happy to cough up with the extra tax. After a few thoughts and detours, that does make sense to me.     

more thoughts on the biological

Am still stuck on the biological stuff – sorry for harping on about this. But I am intrigued by her descriptions of the body, and how she interconnects the various somata. I am assuming, after some thought, that the use of soma is to emphasise the body of the organism (what we in Danish would call legeme, as distinct from krop, which means body) from the body, which is soma+situation. Is that too simplistic and does it read a postmodern sex/gender distinction into Beauvoir? Her point is, it seems to me, that while the female soma has things in common with other somata (sorry for sounding like a wanker with this plural), the human female is also distinct by virtue of the resistance to the subordination to the species, experience of destiny and process of distinction from the male (p. 39). This destiny which women experience, what would that be? From the immediate context, I would have assumed that it was this subordination to the species, but would that not go against her denial that biological data form a fixed identity (p.45), or should we read on to where she says: ‘In truth these facts cannot be denied, but they do not carry their meaning in themselves’?

This brings me to my next point: The gendered discourse of science.

As soon as we accept a human perspective defining the body starting from existence, biology becomes an abstract science; when the physiological given (muscular inferiority) takes on meaning, this meaning immediately becomes dependant on a whole context; ‘weakness’ is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

Is she here accepting scientific discourse as gendered, or as a given, before contextualised meaning is bestowed? And would this not be crucial to the discussion raised by Jess, when this was just a googlegroup:

I think there's a difference between 'One is not born, but becomes a woman' and 'One is not born, but becomes, woman,' are different, definitely, but even based on Moi's discussion, I think there's more to be unpacked: French does, after all, tend to multitask! (That is, Moi says that Beauvoir rejects 'Woman' as a patriarchal myth, so she could never mean the second sentence, but I personally think that the idea that one becomes Woman because one lives in the context of such patriarchal myth is far more interesting and useful! And more proximate, imo, to Irigaray...)

To which Jennifer replied:

Interesting .... I have always assumed that Beauvoir meant the second of the
two.

I am chewing my way through Dialectic of Enlightenment and its feminist expansion, Nicht Ich, by Christina von Braun, and so am very influenced by the viewpoint of the patriarchal myth, which Jess connects to Irigaray.

Any thoughts?

Biological Data II (34-49) read by Christina

Biological Data II (34-49) read by Christina

Moving on from females as mere enslaved egg-sacks, and males as mere enslaved fertiliser of the species, to the ‘higher forms of life’ (34) reproduction both maintains the species and creates new individuals. These include fish, toads and birds. As far as I can tell, the difference here is not only that the father plays a nurturing role, but also that the offspring are cared for, which suspends the reproduction drive. And then we come to the mammal, where maintaining and creating is sexed. The mother is closer to the offspring than the father, the female is ‘determined by the servitude of maternity’, while the male is presented as a sexual predator. Females are prey to the species, regulated by a sexual cycle (she will repeat this argument with humans), which moves in two phases. During heat she may invite the male, but never initiates coitus: the male imposes himself on her; very often she submits to him with indifference or even resists him. Whether she is provocative or consensual, it is he in any case who takes her: she is taken’ (35, italics in original) [Andrea Dworkin?]. The male penetrates and thus dominates the female, while she receives and endures. 

And then comes a sentence, which I don’t get, do you? She says (p. 36 a bit above the middle): ‘although she feels the sexual need as an individual need ... she nevertheless experiences the sexual adventure in its immediacy as an interior story and not in relation to the world and to others.’ It is this last bit, the difference between an interior story and in relation to the world, which I don’t quite understand. 

So after this violation comes alienation, which is when the foetus is carried: ‘inhabited by another who is nourished by her substance, the female is both herself and other than herself during the whole gestation period (36). After the birth, the female devotes herself to the young, abdicating her individuality for the benefit of the species which demands this abdication (37). The male on the other hand ‘separates himself and is confirmed in himself’. The male is thus posited as an individual, confirmed in the aggression against his fellow creatures. The cycles that effect the male are much less pervasive and exhausting than those afflicting the female. At the top of the animal scale, the two sexes thus ‘represent two diverse aspects of the species’ life’ (38). This opposition is not passive/active, nor change/permanence. Perhaps maintenance and creation signifies best, what is at stake for both sexes. And then we come to Woman, who in relation to other females is the most individualises, fragile, experiences destiny strongest and distinguishes herself from male most significantly (39). From 39-43 Beauvoir launches a detailed description of the reproduction cycle in the human body, but most detailed in the female body. Puberty is where the species installs itself in her, and is as such a crisis. Menopause, when the species releases its grip is another difficult crisis.

On page 44 she notes the consequences of the sexual differentiations, namely the ‘hormonal actions that determine her soma’. [Does anyone know if there is a specific reason for using soma instead of body?] She begins with skeletal structure, muscular power, respiratory capacity, blood weight, vascular system. In general women’s system is less stable, which leads to vascular variations and convulsive attacks. This, Beauvoir attributes to the subordination to the species. And her point is, that women resist this alienation much more forcefully than any other female: ‘her destiny appears even more fraught the more she rebels against it by affirming herself as an individual’ (44). All of this biological data Beauvoir sees as an essential element of women’s situation. This is because of her emphasis on the body as ‘instrument of our hold on the world’ and ‘a situation’ (46) and the notion of humanity constantly in the making (45). But at the same time she refuses ‘the idea that they form a fixed destiny for her’ (45). The body, as dissected by Beauvoir does not, in her opinion, constitute the basis for sexual hierarchy, the construction of woman as Other or condemn her to this subjugated role.

This is fascinating, and I can’t quite figure out whether it disturbs me or not. If I understand her correctly, what she wants to show is how the ‘humanity in the making’, the ‘being who is transcendence and surpassing’ in the case of women is limited by these particular factors along with the economic and social situation. All of these factors set the parameters of possibilities – is that what you get too?  

Biological Data I (21-34) read by Christina

This chapter seeks to understand the word ‘female’ – which, from what Toril Moi says, signifies the animal female in French (femelle), in other words a she-animal (Moi 1999, pp. 60-61). It is an examination of the biological justification of male hostility, which means that the behaviour of she-animals is projected on to women.

She begins by introducing two reproductive systems which do not require male and female interaction: elementary organisms which multiply without sexes and hermaphroditic species, and how even these reproductive means have been subsumed into a hierarchy of sexuality, where the sexual reproduction is seen to be fundamental (26).

After complicating the narrative of reproduction and its ‘differentiation of individuals into males and females’, Beauvoir then jumps to philosophy and shows how this sexual differentiation has had an aprioristic status in Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, and Hegel – not entirely sure I grasped the Hegel bit though. Is it that Hegel inadvertently points to what she was arguing earlier about asexual reproduction? From Hegel we move on to Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, and this bit I found to be somewhat tricky:

Beauvoir claims that men define the sexes and their relations through sexual activity, Beauvoir argues, ‘sexual activity is not necessarily implied in the human being’s nature’ (24). Quoting Merleau-Ponty, who claims that existence is primary, she argues that the body conditions existence (a consciousness without a body is rigorously inconceivable, p. 24), and that sexual differentiation is not necessary for the perpetuation of the species. [Is this what she is saying?]

She moves on to discuss the role of the two sexes in procreation in various settings: matrilineal primitive societies, and patriarchal conceptualisations, such as Aristotle, Hippocrates and a handful of others up to the 17^th century [sounds like the time frame in Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex], which argued that the woman merely ‘fattened a living and active, and perfectly constituted, principle’ (25).  Aristotle’s ideas were perpetuated by Hegel, who saw man as the active principle and women as passive.

The points made in these paragraphs are

i)                   Sexual reproduction has been favoured as a more advanced or perfected stage of reproduction. The attempt to view it as such is to universalize ‘life’s specific processes’ and to ‘ascribe meaning to vital phenomena’ (26).

ii)                 ‘Any living fact indicates transcendence and that a project is in the making in every function’ (26) [???].

An analysis of the fertilisation process, where male and female cooperate, refutes two biases: one, that the female is passive. The spark springs from the meeting of the two, it is not inherent in the sperm. Second, the permanence of the species is guaranteed by the female. The ovum has material for future nourishment: ‘it is constituted to nourish the life that will awaken in it’ (29), which the sperm isn’t. Beauvoir’s point is that the role of the two gametes is identical, they are both necessary in the process of generating new life. However, in the secondary phenomena the male element affects change, while the female element provides the stable environment.

This has been used to argue that women’s place is in the home (Fouillèe) and that there is a direct correlation between the ovum and the female. She then argues at length through multiple examples how it is ‘difficult to give a generally valid description of the notion of female’ and that ‘gametes and gonads are not microcosms of the whole organism (31). She then begins at the bottom of the animal ladder to argue how life becomes more individual. At the bottom, females’ existence is enslaved to the species, she just produces eggs. She gives vivid accounts of termites, ants and bees, and how the queen lays eggs ceaselessly [This somehow reminds me of Byatt’s Morpho Eugenia, has anyone read it?]. Beauvoir is arguing against the idea that the insect female enslaves and devours the male, which has generated the myth of devouring femininity. Instead, she argues, ‘it is the species that devours both of them in different ways’ (33).

 I’ll return with the last 15 pages tomorrow.

Happy International Women's day! De te fabula narratur!

References

Moi, Toril. 1999. What is a Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford University Press).

'Damn, day is gone' by Christina

Hey there,
I was hoping to post something on chapter 1 today, but the day disappeared completely.

Will have something up tomorrow. But I have to say that I really enjoyed this chapter! I didn’t think I would, though. It was especially the stuff about the tyranny of the species, which I, pushing forty, am feeling and have been feeling the last couple of years. Increased PMS (in time span and in force), severely increased back pains, not to mention abdominal cramps and surges that all seem to me as ‘something’ trying to tell me that I am moving into my last stages of reproductive possibility. And yet these intensified hormonal surges are still not accompanied by a desire for children. So I very much feel that my body is a crazy battlefield, with my body not quite understanding what I actually want, so that it can give up the fight and spare me these monthly onslaughts. What I am going through really feels like what Beauvoir calls the tyranny of the species, with my body being ‘the prey of a stubborn and foreign life that makes and unmakes a crib in her every month’ (42). Anyway, that came to mind while working with this chapter. So, will post reading of Biological Data tomorrow.

Reading of the Introduction by Christina

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Introduction.

Beauvoir begins by asking ‘What is a woman?’ and swiftly moves into the discussion of femininity (p.3). She rejects (I think) the notion of the eternal feminine: clearly, no woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex (4) [Hey, my second time around I got confused about this at the end, so have added some questions regarding this sentence there]. She concludes that the female function is not enough to define woman, so again, in a more concrete context (there are women on earth) she asks: what is a woman? The paragraph beginning on p. 5 then looks at men’s perceptions of women, and themselves. Humanity is regarded as male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being (5-6). Man does not determine himself in relation to a woman, he is the absolute. Woman as Other. In her discussion of Self and Other, which is not, in ancient as well as so-called primitive societies, necessarily gendered, de Beauvoir notes that it is a reciprocal relation, where both selves essentialise themselves and objectify the other, thus positioning themselves as subjects. However this reciprocity has not extended to the sexes: ‘that one of the terms has been asserted as the only essential one, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative, defining the later as pure alterity? Why do women not contest male sovereignty?’ (p.7), and submit themselves to the foreign, i.e. male point of view? This alterity between men and women, unlike that which characterises the alterity of minority groups, appears absolute, because it is not seen as historical. Another – and very important – difference is that in contrast to black people and proletarians, who position themselves as subjects, woman does not turn herself into an essential, but stays Other. This is due to the concrete means, the dispersal of women among men, to whom they are tied. ‘This is the fundamental characteristic of woman: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other’ (p. 9). This necessity, that is the biological need, has not brought about social liberation for women. Comparison with Master-Slave. The disadvantage for women is both legal, habitual, economic, and, I guess, she says, an entrapment, given that the alliance has advantages, or as she puts it, woman ‘often derives satisfaction from her role as Other (p. 10). The next pages argue that religion, literature and philosophy have justified male superiority and that this was taken to a whole new level in the nineteenth century, when women enter the labour force. She lists three reactions to women i) virulent attacks, ii) men who argue for ‘the good woman’ which knows her place and iii) the one that takes up the most room, men who affirm equality at a surface level, while denying the structural and symbolic inequality, which underlies and informs the surface level, to which they will resort under duress. De Beauvoir warns against these three reactions, but also against feminists’ arguments (15), which remains in the same rut as the discussions which preceded them. On page 15 below she then asks how to ask the question (I assume she means ‘What is a woman?’). Denying an objective stance, she argues that women are best positioned to address the matter, and presents the perspective that will govern her line of questioning: existentialist morality (17). Here we have two significant pairs of opposition, or three if we count the man/woman one: essential/inessential, which she has used throughout to elucidate the Self/Other distinction, and then a new one, transcendence/immanence, where transcendence seems to be the positive (I am assuming it has affinities with the Hegelian dynamic and the discussion of become on page 13, whereas immanence and facticity are connected with the bad faith reading of be also on page 13?). Woman is caught between the essential (fundamental claim of every subject) and the inessential (how she is constituted as Other); transcendence (the accomplishment of freedom by every individual) and immanence (the way of life men compel her to live through objectification, by freezing her as an object). The essential and the transcendence are thus connected to the subject as such, the human, no matter what gender, while inessential and immanence are also genderless, but are nevertheless used by man to curtail, control and dominate woman.  Am right now quite bamboozled by the sentence on page 4: clearly, no woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex. So does this mean that the woman who claims to be situated beyond her sex is acting out of bad faith, i.e. denial of freedom? That the eternal feminine is an instrument of immanence?

Anyway, I hope this is enough to get us started.