The break with the past, which has been described by others as the transition from the capitalist mode of production, I describe here as the transition from the aegis of gender to the regime of sex. ...
Industrial society creates two myths: one about the sexual ancestry of this society and the other about its movement toward equality. ...
I oppose the regime of scarcity to the reign of gender. I argue that the loss of vernacular gender is the decisive condition for the rise of capitalism and a life-style that depends on industrially produced commodities. ... I have adopted this term to designate a distinction in behavior, a distinction universal in vernacular cultures. It designates places, times, tools, tasks, forms of speech, gestures, and perceptions that are associated with men from those associated with women. This association constitutes social gender because it is specific to a time and place. I call it vernacular gender because this set of associations is as peculiar to a traditional people (in Latin, a gens) as is their vernacular speech.
I use gender, then, in a new way to designate a duality that in the past was too obvious even to be named, and is so far removed from us today that it is often confused with sex. By "sex" I mean the result of a polarization in those common characteristics that, starting with the late eighteenth century, are attributed to all human beings. Unlike vernacular gender, which always reflects an association between a dual, local, material culture and the men and women who live under its rule, social sex is "catholic"; it polarizes the human labor force, libido, character or intelligence, and is the result of a diagnosis (in Greek, "discrimination") of deviations from the abstract genderless norm of "the human." Sex can be discussed in the unambiguous language of science. Gender bespeaks a complementarity that is enigmatic and asymmetrical. Only metaphor can reach for it.
...
I know of no industrial society where women are the economic equals of men. ... Through the institutional sponsorship of the United nations, the World Council of Churches, governments, and universities, the latest growth industry of career reformers thrives. First the proletariat, then the underdeveloped, and now women are the favored pets of "the concerned." You can no longer mention sex discrimination without creating the impression that you want to contribute to the political economy of sex: Either you want to promote a "non-sexist economy," or you are engaged in whitewashing the sexist economy we have. ... To me, the pursuit of a non-sexist "economy" is as absurd as a sexist one is abhorrent. ...
... As a historian, I want to trace the origins of women's economic subservience; as an anthropologist, I want to grasp what the new gradation reveals about kinship where it occurs; as a philosopher, I want to clarify what this repetitive pattern tells us about the axioms of popular wisdom, namely, those on which the contemporary university and its social sciences rest.
... I knew that gender was dual, but my thinking was constantly distorted by the genderless perspective that industrialized language necessarily enforces. I found myself caught up in a distracting web of key words. I now see that key words are a characteristic feature of modern language, but clearly distinct from technical terms. ... A term like "transportation," however, is a key word. It does more than designate a device—it imputes a basic need."
... In every industrialized language, these key words take on the semblance of common sense. And each modern language has its own set that provides that society's unique perspective on the social and ideological reality of the contemporary world. The set of key words in all modern industrialized languages is homologous. The reality they interpret is everywhere fundamentally the same. The same highways leading to the same school and office buildings overshadowed by the same TV antennas transform dissimilar landscapes and societies into monotonous uniformity. In much the same way, texts dominated by key words translate easily from English into Japanese or Malay.
Universal technical terms that have become key words, such as "education," "roletariat," and "medicine," mean the same thing in all modern languages. ...
... I learned to distinguish vernacular speech, into which we grow through daily intercourse with people who speak their own minds, from taught mother tongue, which we acquire through professionals employed to speak for and to us. Key words are a characteristic of taught mother tongue. They are even more effective than the mere standardization of the vocabulary and grammatical rules in their repression of the vernacular because, having the appearance of a common sense, they put a pseudo-vernacular gloss on engineered reality. Key words, then, are also more important for the formation of an industrialized language than creolization by technical terms because each one denotes a perspective common to the entire set. I have found that the paramount characteristic of key words in all languages is their exclusion of gender. Therefore, an understanding of gender, and its distinction from sex (a key word), depends on the avoidance or wary use of all terms that might be key words.
Linguistically, then, I found myself in a double ghetto when I started to write this essay: I was unable to use words in the traditional resonance of gender, and unwilling to repeat them with their current sexist ring. ... most of my interlocutors felt uneasy because my reasoning interfered with their dreams: with the feminist dream of a genderless ecomony without compulsory sex roles; with the leftist dream of a political economy whose subjects would be equally human; with the futurist dream of a modern society where people are platic, their choices of being a dentist, a male, a Protestant, or a gene-manipulator deserving the same respect. The conclusion about economics tout court, which my perspective on sex discrimination revealed, upset each dream with equal force, since the desires that these dreams express are all made of the same stuff: genderless economics.
An industrial society cannot exist unless it imposes certain unisex assumptions: the assumptions that both sexes are made for the same work, perceive the same reality, and have, with some minor cosmetic variations, the same needs. And the assumption of scarcity, which is fundamental to economics, is itself logically based on this unisex postulate. There could be no competition for "work" between men and women, unless "work" had been redefined as an activity that befits humans irrespective of their sex. The subject on which economic theory is based is just a genderless human. Then, with scarcity accepted, the unisex postulate spreads. Every modern institution, from school to family and from union to courtroom, incorporates this assumption of scarcity, thereby dispersing its constitutive unisex postulate throughout the society. For example, men and women have always grown up; now they need "education" to do so. In traditional societies, they matured without the conditions for growth being perceived as scarce. Now, educational institutions teach them that desirable learning and competence are scarce goods for which men and women must compete. Thus, education turns into the name for learning to live under an assumption of scarcity. But education, considered as an example of a typical modern need, entails more: It assumes the scarcity of a genderless value; it teaches that he or she who experiences its process is primarily a human being in need of genderless education. Economic institutions, then, are based on the assumption of scarcity in genderless values, equally desirable or necessary for competing neuters belonging to two biological sexes. ...
Relentlessly, economic institutions transform the two culturally embedded genders into something new, into economic neuters distinguished by nothing more than their disembedded sex. ... Economic discrimination against women cannot exist without the abolition of gender and the social construction of sex. ... And if this is true—namely, that economic growth is intrinsically and irremediably gender-destructive, that is, sexist—the sexism can be reduced only at the "cost" of economic shrinkage. Further, the decline of sexism requires as a necessary, albeit insufficient, condition the contraction of the cash nexus and the expansion of non-market-related, non-economic forms of subsistence.
Up to now, two major motifs have emerged that impel us to adopt negative growth policies: environmental degradation and paradoxical counterproductivity. Now a third urges us: Negative growth is necessary to reduce sexism. ... I believe, however, that this is the time to turn social strategies topsy-turvy, to recognize that peace between men and women, whatever form it might take, depends on economic contraction and not on economic expansion. Up to now, no goodwill and no struggle, no legislation and no technique, have reduced the sexist exploitation characteristic of industrial society. As I shall show, the interpretation of this economic degradation by sex as just more machismo under market conditions will not wash. Up to now, wherever equal rights were legally enacted and enforced, wherever partnership between the sexes became stylish, these innocations gave a sense of accomplishment to the elites who proposed and obtained them, but left the majority of women untouched, if now worse off than before.
... Instead of clinging to the dream of anti-discriminatory growth, it appears more sensible to pursue economic shrinkage as the policy along which a non-sexist or, at least, a less sexist society can come into being. Upon reflection, I now see that an industrial economy without a sexist hierarchy is as farfetched as that of a pre-industrial society without gender; that is, without a clear division between what men and what women do, say, and see. Both are pipe dreams, regardless of the sex of the dreamer. But the reduction of the cash nexus, that is, of both commodity production and commodity dependence, is not in the realm of fantasy. ... Subsistence that is based on a progressive unplugging from the cash nexus now appears to be a condition for survival. Without negative growth, it is impossible to maintain an ecological balance, achieve justice among regions, or foster people's peace. And the policy must, of course, be implemented in rich countries at a much higher rate than in poor ones. Perhaps the maximum anyone can reasonably hope for is equal access to the world's scarce resources at the level currently typical for the poorest nations. The translation of such a proposition into specific action would require a multi-faceted alliance of many diverse groups and interests that pursues the recovery of the commons, what I call "radical political ecology." To bring those aggrieved by the loss of gender into this alliance, I shall here establish the linkage between shift from production to subsistence and the reduction of sexism.
...
My theory allows me to oppose two modes of existence, which I call the reign of vernacular gender and the regime of economic sex. ... equlity is mostly fanciful. The essay, them, is cast in the form of an epilogue on the industrial age and its chimeras. ... in a new way—beyond what I had seen in Tools for Conviviality (1971)—what this age has irremediably destroyed. Only the transmogrification of the commons into resources can be compared to that of gender into sex. I describe this from the perspective of the past. About the future, I know and say nothing.
ournature.org>
Last modified: Tue Jan 10 23:50:55 KST 2006