Gender theory: putting an end to preconceived ideas

The last edition of the Manif pour Tous on Sunday February 2 made it one of its battle horses: No to gender theory. A few days earlier, the collective of the “Day of withdrawal from school” also had as a target this gender theory supposed to be in ambush behind the device “the ABCD of equality”. Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, specialist in work on gender, recalls the fact that there is not a theory but studies on these questions. Above all, she stresses that this research does not aim at sexual indifferentiation but the link between biological sex and social stereotypes.

– Can we speak of a gender theory or should we speak of gender studies?

There is no such thing as a theory. There is a vast interdisciplinary field of scientific research, gender studies, which opened up 40 years ago in the university in the West, and which ranges from biology to philosophy through anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, political science, literature, law and more. Today, gender studies exist all over academia. All the work carried out in this field is not aimed at proposing “theories”, even less A theory, but at enriching the knowledge and the explanation of the social division of the feminine and the masculine, of the relations between men and women, and of their relationship. unequal treatment, across societies, institutions, eras, discourses and texts. We have found it quite normal, for nearly a century and a half, to work on the history of social classes, their constitution, their confrontation, their transformations. Likewise, it is legitimate and useful for the understanding of the world that the relations between women and men across time and cultures be the subject of a scientific investigation.

– What are the issues addressed by this work?

It is a very wide field of investigation. We start from the fact that between the biological characteristics relating to sex (chromosomes, gonads, hormones, anatomy) and social roles, there is no necessary relationship. No hormonal characteristic, no distribution of chromosomes destines women to domestic tasks and men to management of the public sphere.  Thus, for example, within gender studies, we study the history of the division between political and domestic spheres, its theorization by Aristotle, the way in which it marked Western political history, if not world, and its social consequences. for women and men. Historians, philosophers, political scientists, anthropologists work together on this question, combine their data and their analyzes. Likewise, there is no necessary connection between biological sex and the adoption of a female or male behavior or identity, as is seen in a number of cases. Each individual has so-called “feminine” and “masculine” traits, in varying proportions. Psychology can say things about it and, in fact, psychoanalysis has been interested in the bringing into play of the feminine and the masculine in affective and loving relationships for more than a century.

Some date the beginning of this movement to Simone De Beauvoir’s “one is not born a woman, one becomes one”. What do you think?

Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex played an inaugural role in opening up this field of study in France and the United States. But Simone de Beauvoir’s perspective is neither absolutely original (we find similar formulations in Freud since the XNUMXs), nor undisputed within gender studies which, like any scientific field, is not homogeneous, and gives rise to place in many internal debates. Moreover, we cannot understand the meaning of this sentence outside of its context. Beauvoir does not say, of course, that one is not born “female”, and, in fact, she devotes long analyzes to the biological and anatomical characteristics of the body of the woman. What she says is that these biological characteristics do not explain or justify the inequalities in treatment that women face. In truth, the first attempts to theorize the discrepancy between biological sex and gender are 60 years old. They are American doctors working on the phenomena of hermaphroditism (the fact of being born with sexual characteristics of both sexes) and transsexualism (the fact of being born male or female but living as belonging to a gender which diverges from the sex of birth) which provided the first theorizations in this field. These doctors were neither subversive nor feminist. They started from the clinical observation that there was not necessarily a coincidence between sex and gender in humans. We ourselves all make the distinction between sex and gender in a mundane and un-theorized way. When we say of a girl that she behaves in such and such a respect as a boy, and vice versa, we clearly notice the difference between the sex of this person and his character traits. All this shows that the postulate of the coincidence between sex and gender, or even that the distribution of sexed individuals into two genders, is not sufficient to account for human complexity. Where uninformed opinion gives simplistic and limited answers, gender studies offer more complex and accurate formulations of all these phenomena. It is the role of science not to reproduce opinion.

Are there researchers explaining that gender identity is only social and do we consider that this current would be a perception to the end of work on gender?

There are researchers who question the idea that what we commonly refer to as “sex” is a category based solely on physiological criteria. In fact, when we speak of the “two sexes” to designate women and men, we act as if individuals reduced themselves to their sexual characteristics and we attribute to these traits which are in fact acquired socio-cultural traits. . It is against the effects and the socio-political uses of this abusive reduction that researchers are working. They rightly believe that what we call “sexual difference” too often stems from distinctions that are unfounded in biology. And that is what they are warning against. The idea is not of course to deny that there are biological sex differences or physiological asymmetry in reproduction. It is rather a question of showing that we take, in our judgments and our ordinary treatment of these questions, differences linked to gender (and therefore to the position of women and men in societies and cultures) for natural differences.. It is these gender differences that some researchers would like to see disappear. But the discussion is lively, within gender studies, on the way in which biology and culture interact with each other, or on the psychic effects produced in us by the apprehension of body differences, knowing also that we are discovering today that biology itself is susceptible to transformation.

What has neurobiology brought to work on gender? 

Precisely, with work on the brain and brain plasticity, we can demonstrate, first of all, that there are no significant differences between the brains of men and the brains of women, such that women would be unfit for such field or such achievement, and in fact, for a century, therefore since women’s access to all levels of education, we have witnessed an unprecedented explosion of their creativity in the fields of the arts and sciences; and above all we are in the process of demonstrating that there are no immutable cerebral characteristics.  If human cultures are constantly changing, and with them gender roles, the brain is also susceptible to transformation. The brain controlling the reactions of the whole organism, this means that we cannot simply take advantage of a nature of women and men. The latter is not fixed in its manifestations and it is not rigidly divided into two sexes. There is no biological determinism in this sense.  

Didn’t Vincent Peillon make a mistake in explaining that he was not in favor of gender theory and that the ABCDs had nothing to do with it?

The preamble to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 says that in order to reduce prejudice, we must reduce ignorance. This is what it is about with the ABCD of equality. Science, whatever it is, begins by asking questions. Asking questions about gender stereotypes is far from enough, but it is a step in that direction. When I hear my daughter, a 14-year-old college student, wonder that the insults exchanged by boys in the schoolyard always target mothers (“fuck your mother” and its variants) and never fathers, for example , or when the schoolmistresses, in order to understand the distinction between common name and proper name, ask their pupils to give the names of “famous men”,  I tell myself that, yes, there is work to do at school, and that you have to start early. As for Vincent Peillon, the mistake he made was to accredit the idea that there is “a” theory of gender, by declaring his opposition to it. Obviously, he himself does not know the richness and variety of work in this field.