Women Who?

Today, I read something that articulated my mind.

At the moment, I get to study gender (power) relations, feminist frameworks and more specifically, how these connect to economic development. Among endless theories and perspectives about gender, sex, intersectionality, Western white thinking... I grew fond of Linda Nicholson's discussion.

I tend not to share about my academic studies anywhere but in class. However, except for this one, I wanted to leave this idea somewhere where you would read it too. Waiver, sex is (usually) binary and biologically defined (male/female), gender, on the other hand, is fluid and socially constructed - now you are ready eheh.

In the final moments of her article Interpreting Gender (1994), Nicholson makes a final point against a Feminism of difference

That "we should understand the patterns that enabled many women to acknowledge their circumstances in social terms in different and more complex ways than we have tended to do, particularly we should become more attentive to the historicity of any patterns we uncover" (p. 99). We should look at women in a particular context rather than women as such or even women in patriarchal societies.

Meaning, 'women' is not a uniform box; what about race, class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, geography, culture, education? Who defines what it means to be a woman? It can, however, be argued that Nicholson's attack on biological foundationalism, as she recognises

consists of an attack on feminism itself because without some common criteria providing meaning to the word woman, we cannot generate politics around this term - we cannot generate Feminist politics as it requires that the category woman have some determinate meaning (p. 100).

This is where it gets interesting. Nicholson's counter-argument is based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas about language. For instance, the idea that it is impossible to come up with one single feature that is common to everything we call a game.

Such as the meaning of game, the meaning of woman is determined through the elaboration of a complex network of characteristics, with different elements of this network being present in different cases - a word whose meaning is not found through the elucidation of some specific characteristics. In this way, Nicholson advocates that we think about the meaning of woman as illustrating a map of intersecting similarities and differences - meaning is found [across time and context] rather than presupposed (p. 100).

And I absolutely love that.

"This way of thinking about meaning works on the assumption that such patterns [of what it is to be a woman/man] are found throughout history and must be documented as such" - contextual variables. She says, "we cannot presuppose that the meaning that is dominant in contemporary, industrialized western societies must be true everywhere" (p.101) or across time. "Moreover, because such a stance recognizes that the meaning of woman has changed over time, it also recognizes that those presently advocating non-traditional understandings of it, such as transsexuals, cannot be dismissed merely on the grounds that their interpretations contradict standard patterns" (p.101).

Remarkably concluding,

"maybe it is time that we explicitly acknowledge that our claims about women are not based on some given reality but emerge from our own places within history and culture; they are political acts that reflect the contexts we emerge out of and the futures we would like to see" (p. 103).

There is so much to add to this and I know some concepts might not sound familiar, but the main idea is that we should look at the traditional definitions of men and women through the lens of intersectionality, multiplicity, and subjectivity. Perceiving a woman from the global North is different from perceiving a woman from the global South, and even within North and South, multiple categories are at play. If identifying as a woman (or whatever) has to do with gender - and not genitalia - we should be mindful not to fall into biological foundationalism or determinism.

Have missed you. Let me know your thoughts,

x.