III. Vernacular Gender

id="iii-vernacular-gender">III. Vernacular Gender#

Outside industrial societies, unisex work is the rare exception, if it exists at all. Few things can be done by women and also by men. The latter, as a rule, just cannot do women’s work. In early eighteenth-century Paris, you could recognize the bachelor from afar by his stench and gloomy looks. From notaries’ records, we know that solitary men left no sheets or shirts when they died. In the time of Louis XIV, a man without a woman to keep house could barely survive. Without wife, sister, mother, or daughter he had no way to make, wash, and mend his clothes; it was impossible for him to keep chickens or to milk a goat; if he was poor, he could not eat butter, milk, or eggs. He could not cook certain foods even if he had the ingredients.50 And today, in the rural Mexico I know so well, a woman would rather die of embarrassment than let a man cook the beans.

From afar, the native can tell whether women or men are at work, even if he cannot distinguish their figures. The time of year and day, the crop, and the tools reveal to him who they are. Whether they carry a load on their head or shoulder will tell him their gender. If he notices geese loose in the harvested field, he knows a girl must be nearby to tend them. If he comes across sheep, he knows he will find a boy. To belong means to know what befits our kind of woman, our kind of man. If someone does what we consider the other gender’s work, that person must be a stranger. Or a slave, deprived of all dignity. Gender is in every step, in every gesture, not just between the legs. Puerto Rico is only three hours from New York. Two-thirds of its people have been to the mainland. Yet even today, in the interior of the island, there is no such thing as a Puerto Rican gait; women sail down a path like sloops chopping in the tradewinds, and men swagger and roll to the rhythm of the machete, but both in the unmistakably jibaro fashion. One knows that they could not be from nearby Santo Domingo, much less be gringos from the States. In many Puerto Ricans, vernacular gender has survived for decades, not only in the Harlem barrio but even when they have lived mixed up with hillbillies and blacks in the South Bronx.51

Gender is something other and much more than sex. It bespeaks a social polarity that is fundamental and in no two places the same. What a man cannot or must do is different from valley to valley. But the social anthropologist has missed the point, and his terminology has become a unisex mask for a reality that has two sides. What Bohr and Heisenberg have done for the epistemology of physics has not yet been done for the social sciences. That light fits the paradigms of both particle and wave, that neither theory alone conveys its complex reality, and that no broader framework allows us to grasp it more clearly are today everyman’s truths. But that a similar approach is demanded for most social-science concepts is still news for many.52

“Culture” like “behavior” is a typical term that is used when “the” Puerto Rican becomes an object of study. The social worker makes efforts to deal with “him”. The delicate and always dual nuances contained within each aspect of vernacular culture are ignored, jammed together, violating the traditions of millennia. The teacher in the New York school tries to help the Puerto Rican “child.” He or she does not realize that childhood only came into being as gender vanished. The teacher seldom reflects on the fact that the symbiosis of the social sciences and modern institutions is an effective device for reducing gender to sex. I shall later argue that this breakdown constitutes the decisive anthropological characteristic that sets the contemporary age apart from any other. But before launching an initial exploration of gender, I shall outline three shoals on which it would be easy to run aground before reaching deep water. These preliminary remarks will also provide a perspective on economic sex.

Ambiguous Complementarity#

Only the newcomer perceives culture. For the insider there are men and women and then a third reality: outsiders who might be foreigners, slaves, domestic animals, untouchables, or freaks. If the outsider is perceived as a sexed being, his sex or, more properly, gender is seen in some analogy to that of “our” men and women. Kinship is possible only between what we conceive as men and women; it only specifies the fit between gendered people. What we perceive as men and what we perceive as women can meet and fit not only because but in spite of the unique contrast between them. They fit like the right fits the left.53 The analogy between male and female and the duality of right and left is useful at this point, principally because it allows me to explore some of the dangers of misunderstanding. In many cultures the left hand is the weak and powerless one; it has been subject to millennia of mutilation. Right-handedness is not just accepted or submitted to: It has become the inculcated norm. The child who would use the left hand is reprimanded, the hand slapped, tied behind the child’s back, or crippled. Organic asymmetry has become the fact. A neurological preponderance that manifests itself in greater sensibility, strength, or aptitude has been turned into the ideal of right dominance. The left has become adaptive to the right as its ever needed and cherished assistant. The analogy can be and is constantly used to support the idea that the “female sex is sociobiologically male adaptive.”54

However, this is precisely not the point I want to make. The analogy means something different. Each man and woman outside of a push-button society depends for survival on the interplay of two hands. In some societies, right-handedness is more pronounced than in others. In other societies, as in the Chinese, etiquette, good taste, and world view demand that the left and the right predominate alternately in a delicate, detailed orchestration.55 In some societies, as among the Nyoro of Africa, to be left-handed destines one to the sacred group of diviners. But, regardless of the greater power, skill, or dignity attributed to one hand, more often the right than the left, the two hands are used for complementary actions and gestures. Tradition rigorously instructs the left-handed shaman which hand he must use for the offering. The two hands always act together according to two programs that are never the other’s mirror image. Thus, this unique kind of duality is always ambiguous.

The oldest traditions place the fundamental trait of our existence into this singular kind of bifurcation. It constitutes an ambiguous complementarity, different from both a mirror image and a shadow. As duality, it is distinct from the positive copy of a negative and from the deterministic match of DNA’s double helix. I assume it to be the foundation of metaphor and poetic speech – the only appropriate mode to express it. Twins, the navel/umbilical cord, yin/yang are among the mythological representations through which this duality seeks expression.56 One of the difficulties in the kind of opposition that exists between gender and sex should now be less obscure. It may be appropriate to consider vernacular gender as the foundation of ambiguous complementarity, and the sex of economic neuters as the modern experiment to deny or transcend this foundation. By reducing all interaction to exchange, the social sciences have laid the groundwork for this denial and for the legitimacy of an economic analysis of the relations between men and women. This is why I speak about economic sex. It should therefore be clear that two distinct types of language are required for speaking about what once existed and what now obtains.57

Socio-Biological Sexism#

I have chosen to begin this introduction to gender and sex with a reference to the right and left hands because the analogy is effective. Further, the analogy immediately suggests a second difficulty that, unlike the first, is not fundamental but contingent on current academic fads. In the United States, it is now almost impossible to analyze gender related to behavior without provoking a response from two quarters – feminist Marxists and socio-biologists. I want to keep my argument free from both these distorting repercussions. A discussion of gender with feminist Marxists is impossible. Their sex-conscious use of political economics eliminates the ambiguities of gender by means of a double filter. However, I want even more carefully to avoid stooping to engage in any argument with those who are taken in by the fashionable rhetoric of Lionel Tiger, E.O. Wilson, A. de Benoist, and their like. They start from the postulate of biological determinism and assume that culture is built on it; for me, what is unique about Homo sapiens as a human phenomenon is the constant incarnation of the symbolic duality of gender. I do not quarrel with the observations made by the new ethologists; however, the fact that genderless modern humans behave almost as apes confirms my thesis that the regime of sex is inhumane. Further, biological determinists need not be answered by me; that task I can leave to what, in the USA, is called the liberal establishment. The legitimacy of social planning and the management of care within a liberal society depends on the credibility of the expert’s claim that he is anti-fascist and anti-racist. It is for him to point out that the new socio-biology of sex is replacing the socio-biology of race launched by Count Gobineau. When one sees what sexism reveals, racism then seems more like an early homologous groping. As nineteenth-century racist theories served to buttress European colonial pretensions, so contemporary sexist thought ministers to a worldwide regime of latter-day unisex humbug. The new sexism fits the colorful elites who govern post-colonial economies today.

The contention of all socio-biologists is the same. And the structure of their argument is ingenuously simple, the source of its seductive strength.58 Most readers of their books are not prepared to see that behind the complex discussions woven of mathematical algorithms and risky statistics nothing more lies hidden. The argument runs as follows: Among primates, the female is already male-adaptive.59 Primitive men dominate their women; high culture institutionalizes this dominance; hence, it is scientifically legitimate to speculate that genes must account for the regularity of this pattern of primacy in men and submissiveness in women. Genetic male dominance accounts for sex roles then and now.

It is not, however, because of the weakness of the argument that I consider a controversy with academic sexism out of place, but rather because of the style in which the claims of the theoretical “biocracts” are presented. This style has much in common with racism from Gobineau to Rosenberg – “scientific” argumentation that addresses itself only to the true believer. Racism and sexism are alike not only in argument and style; their image of men is woven out of the same stuff. For both racist and sexist suppositions, humans can be scientifically put into categories and then arranged according to rank. Dark skin, low IQ, female sex, and other genetic deficiencies fall close to the bottom. Both the racist and the service professional presume the existence of an objective perspective by which they can operationally rank people’s claims to scarce privileges. Both rankings are based on the assumption of genderless individuals acting under conditions of growing scarcity. Therefore, the perspective of the racist or that of the modern educator fits only into modern Western culture. However, the legitimacy of the service professional depends on a believable rhetoric that effectively obfuscates the racism hidden in professional diagnosis. The task of arguing with the new, crude socio-biocrats I can therefore leave to those of my colleagues whose professional spectacles direct them to impute “needs” rather than to measure “inferiorities,” to those teachers, medical men, gynecologists, and social workers who are trained to degrade others into consumers of their services through their scientific diagnoses. Their self-interest combined with their optimism impels them to see that their careers, based on much more subtle ranking, are threatened should they be publicly identified with the cruder sociobiological sexists.60

A notion called the sex role61 has become very popular during the last fifteen years. Games people play, scientific treatises, pedagogical methods, and political rhetoric are all built on the assumption of its existence. Concern with sex roles seems to rise with GNP. In rich countries, how to choose, assume, and transmit sex roles has become a major worry for many people. Sociological role theory is a much more stubborn obstacle to the analysis of gender than the newly fabricated concepts of sociobiology. However, any recourse to role concepts will blind one to the perception of gender in speech as well as in action.

Gender is substantive. This is not true with sex in the economic neuter. In the perspective of the neuter, sex is a secondary attribute, a property of an individual, an adjective characteristic of a human being. The concept of sex role could not come into being until society’s institutions were structured to meet the genderless needs of genderless clients with genderless commodities produced in a genderless world. The sex role builds on the existence of genderless man. One’s sex, however, is not perceived as just one more role, one more outfit to don, one more well-fitting or ill-tailored suit for special occasions, like the role of parent, academic, or plumber. Most people consider the sex role less changeable; women know that they are stuck with it in an oppressive way. But, like it or not, to have a sex role – be it assumed, imposed, or resented – is something other than belonging to a gender. It is one thing to say that you are a man or a woman, and something quite different that you are a human being of male or female sex. Unlike gender, which means that you are either a square or a circle, the sex role is like a foundation on which other roles can be built. Some people wear their own skin as if it were chosen like either lingerie or skivvies, and beneath it feel skinned, plastic selves. Others view their sex role as a corset into which their genderless libido was forced by their parents, a foundation onto which they can layer any uniform or dress and then change or occasionally discard it. As with the vernacular, one is born and bred into gender; the sex role is something acquired. One can blame parents or society for an “assigned” sex role or a taught mother tongue; there is no way to complain about vernacular speech or gender.

The distinction between vernacular gender and sex role is comparable to that between vernacular speech and taught mother tongue, between subsistence and economic existence. Therefore, the fundamental assumptions about the one and the other are distinct. Vernacular speech, gender, and subsistence are characteristics of a morphological closure of community life on the assumption, implicit and often ritually expressed and mythologically represented, that a community like a body cannot outgrow its size. Taught mother tongue, sex, and a life-style based on the consumption of commodities all rest on the assumption of an open universe in which scarcity underlies all correlations between needs and means. Gender implies a complementarity within the world that is fundamental and closes the world in on “us,” however ambiguous and fragile this closure might be. Sex, on the contrary, implies unlimited openness, a universe in which there is always more.

Strictly speaking, discourse about gender must therefore be expressed in metaphorical language; in no two worlds does it mean univocally the same thing. And the dual, specific whole that the complementarity of concrete genders brings into being – a “world,” a “society,” a “community” – is both shaped and limited, asymmetrically, by its components. Gender can be grasped only by means of morphology; its existence depends in turn on the size and shape of the dual world it structures.62 A snail, after adding a number of widening rings to the delicate structure of its shell, suddenly brings its accustomed building activities to a stop. A single additional ring would increase the size of the shell sixteen times. Instead of contributing to the welfare of the snail, it would burden the creature with such an excess of weight that any increase in its productivity would henceforth be literally outweighed by the task of coping with the difficulties created by enlarging the shell beyond the limits set by its purpose. At that point, the problems of overgrowth begin to multiply geometrically, while the snail’s biological capacity can at best be extended arithmetically. So gender sets limits to the social structure it forms, a structure expressed in every aspect of life-style, but first of all in kinship.

The idea behind the term “sex role,” as this term is generally used, implies exactly the opposite. The carrier of the sex role is tacitly assumed to be a plastic individual having a genderless existence that is more or less shaped by “sex.” Most studies that have been done during the last hundred years on the differences in men’s and women’s activities all over the world were carried out by observers interested in primitive, traditional, exotic sex roles, even at a time when the term was still unknown.63 Thus, where gender was observed it was reported as some kind of sex.

The confusion is nicely illustrated in a 1947 statement by M. Herskovits: “No phase of the economic life of non-literate people has attracted more attention than has the sex division of labor, and many attempts have been made to explain it.”64 The sentence abounds with assumptions: The frontier dividing them from us is our literacy; all people live an economic life – Homo sapiens is always Homo oeconomicus – and thus act under the assumption of scarcity; the author knows what “work” is; finally, the prerational sex division of labor is the great mystery modern anthropology must attempt to explain. In the meantime, the vast literature Herskovits mentions has grown tremendously, but only a tiny fraction of it clarifies the distinction between gender and sex.

How the study of sex roles has muddled the issue of gender can be easily understood by looking at the literature of three periods during which “women’s work” was in vogue: Victorian ethnography, New Deal cultural anthropology, and recent feminist studies. The Victorians believed in social evolution, and they hunted for data in the writings of travelers and missionaries. Strange, unexpected behavior fascinated them as much as the extraordinary life forms that Darwin discovered on the Galapagos Islands. But, unlike their informants, they had an urge to classify what they found. Like bones, behavior had to be fitted into categories that could be arranged according to evolutionary steps, and whose culmination was England’s Victorian middle class, the ultimate civilization, the fittest to survive. In the United States, an alliance of women and clergymen read into these reports proof for the timeless quality of woman’s role as a homemaker, of woman’s nature as a gift to the menfolk, who must venture out into a rough life to subdue nature for their sake. Anthropology of the sex role began as a scientific proof for what Ann Douglas has called “the sentimental lie.” In this context, women’s work could now be understood as a mark of the harsh treatment inflicted on the weaker sex by primitive cultures. Progress could be seen as the enclosure of women into genteel domesticity, and a progressive specialization of status and vocation between the hardworking provider and his woman, liberated from the burdens of production.65

For the next two generations, interest in women’s work was low, but between 1935 and 1937 it exploded again. Within less than two years three classic studies were published. Margaret Mead stressed that biological sex alone cannot possibly account for the socio-cultural differences in personality structure between male and female that we observe everywhere.66 She sought to elucidate these differences by recourse to the psychological concepts of her time, all ultimately founded on a Freudian reading of American family life. In the same year Ralph Linton focused on the contrast between male and female behavior. He was the first to use the term role (in 1932) and described the almost limitless plasticity of the sex roles that a culture can provide for its members. Behavior rather than personality was his interest. Finally, George Murdock67 began to publish his Ethnographical Atlas. He was primarily concerned with “work” and how it is divided between men and women. Glancing at his charts, you can learn that Okinawans of both sexes participate in the making of pots, but males do appreciably more than females; among Druzes, only women are potters; and among the Koreans, only men. For eleven types of activity among hundreds of different cultures, nine different degrees of male-female participation are given. But Mead’s insistence on personality, Linton’s on behavior, and Murdock’s on work only blur the distinction between gender and sex role, which must be made intelligible.

Around the middle of the century, interest in women’s distinctive activities fell dormant again. Modernization was on the agenda. For the first time, anthropologists were on the payroll of policy makers, employed to identify obstacles to progress. Precisely during those decades when participant observation was refined as a method for reporting in detail and with delicacy on who does what in a village or hut, gender-bound behavior was treated mostly as a barrier to development, a sex-role stereotype, a cause of low productivity and an essential ingredient of poverty. Anglo-American women’s studies of the early seventies thoroughly altered this situation and organized a third wave of interest in women, this time from a feminist perspective.68 In fact, the male bias in women’s contribution to the first two bodies of research became a field of study. Soon, the work of several generations of anthropologists provided abundant evidence of an almost grotesque inability even to suspect what women do. But so far, most of these new studies have only reinforced, albeit from a female perspective, the same fundamental assumptions about gender as a primitive form of sex role, an assumption that, at first implicitly and then explicitly, had guided the earlier anthropologists.68 For the most part then, women’s studies have acted as a further camouflage of gender.