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A sociological concept of gender in postmodern society
Hismy
Vol. 19, Nos 4-6, pp. 859-065, 1994 Copyright@ 1994Elswier ScienceLtd Printedin GreatBritain.All rightsreserved 0191-6599/94$7.00+0.00
of European Ideas,
Pergamon
A SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPT OF GENDER IN POSTMODERN SOCIETY KAREN SJ~RU~+
1. A FEMINIST’S
REFLECTIONS
ON THE
CONFERENCE
At the conference, we had presentations arguing the death of philosophy, the death of man, the death of Marxism, the end of history, the end of socialism, the end of ideology and the end of humanism. The only isms of modern thinking which haven’t been declared dead are those of capitalism, liberalism and feminism. In response to Johan Galtung’s invitation to us to think and speak of the unspoken, we might pose the question whether capitalism or liberalism deserve the glory of survivors. Whether the “mortality” instinct of the European and North American intellectuals is actually more an instinct than a diagnosis of our time. And what kind of dilemmas is the rest of the world placed in, faced by the ethnocentric and yet so self-assured showdowns of European intellectual thought? Feminism and feminist thought are put in a rather odd situation: in many respects we are taking over the modemising project of the disillusioned male intellectuals, demanding equal access to waged work, money and public life-and at the same time some feminists have joined Postmodern criticism of Modernist thinking. We also have a tendency to focus feminist theory on the concept of ‘patriarchy’ without taking into account firstly the ‘anti-patriarchal’ tendencies of the modem brotherhood ‘society, and secondly the Postmodern death cramps of the brotherhood society.
INTRODUGTION In my work I probably try far too ambitiously to develop a new approach to the sociology of gender.’ In my view, recent changes in gender relations are so dramatic that we need completely new theories of sex/gender. At the same time, the theoretical foundation of feminist theory in the humanities, inspired by Poststructuralist and Postmodern theory and recognising a joint field of criticism, underlines the challenge for sociological thinking. Sociological theory of gender has for many years relied on a functionalist frame of reference, seeing the relation between the sexes as defined by a functionally rational division of labour based on biological differences and mutual agreement in married life. Recent sociological works on gender have been inspired by Marxist-feminist theory regarding gender relations as a pattern of oppression derived from *Department of History and Social Sciences, Roskilde University, P.O. Box 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark. 859
Karen Sjmxp economy and class relations. Both perspectives offer an unsatisfactory interpretation of the recent development in gender relations. Feminist perspectives, like the Marxist perspective, have approached the criticism of patriarchal oppression without actually realising the impact of their own criticism; they haven’t dealt with the results of the changes in which they play a vital part. These changes make the life of women and men more alike than ever before in history-fathers are supposed to take an active part in childbirth and infant care, and women are supposed to be waged workers and bread-winners on equal terms with men, and to be able to pursue a career in former male trades. On the other hand, the changes also make women’s lives more diverse, when the childless career woman has more in common with her male colleague than with the single unemployed mother. In other words, the relation between biological sex and sociological gender is being restructured in the sense that the gender relations are no longer centred around the gender division of labour and women’s material dependence on men. But even if gender has been dramatically transformed, the changes are not so great and unambiguously emancipating that the criticism of the oppression of women should be abandoned. What is needed is self-critical reflections on feminism as one of the great projects of emancipation in modern society, and reflections on the theory of oppression which is inherent in feminism and in other liberation movements. My approach rests upon the fundamental assumption that the relations between the sexes and the representations of sex have changed dramatically: on one hand, in the part gender plays in family life, in sexuality, in working life and in power relations; and on the other hand, in the reflection of sex in images of or ‘simulation’ of the female and the male characteristics, as manifest in patterns of interpretation, taboos, norms and personal relations. My first hypothesis is that taboos related to sex are reversed: in all earlier societies there was a taboo against women and men doing the same work, a taboo that was related to sexuality and heterosexual marriage. Today a taboo has developed against monopolising work tasks for one sex. And that means that the general material foundation of gender has been disturbed. My second hypothesis is that patriarchy has been replaced by a brotherhood society, which breaks down the power of parents and potentially creates equality between brothers and sisters, but in real life the sisters have been ignored in the light of the brothers gaining new power from technology and production.
THE IMPOSSIBLE
SEX-METHODOLOGICAL
CONSIDERATIONS
The changes cannot be solely related to the struggles of the women’s movements or by the entrance of women into the labour market, as there is a tendency to do in both Postmodern theory and sociological interpretation. Instead, one should realise that the changes are connected to the inner contradictions of modern society in which women as objects and housewives are placed in a category which is contrasted with a world of ‘political men’ and ‘sexless wageworkers’, and in which the modern Freudian understanding of
Gender in Postmodern Society
861
human identity based on sex is seen in contrast to the capitalist economy breaking up complementarity of the sexes. As a whole I argue that we are witnessing a movement towards Postmodern genders, a movement related to the general movement towards a Postmodern society. I usually characterise the development of gender relations-at least in my own small part of the world-as a world sensation, in order to underline that the breaking up of gender complementarity in working life and in the political sphere is unique in the history of (wo)mankind. Of course changes in gender and gender relations are not totally new. Several times in history, particularly in connection with changes in culture and in the mode of production, the social contract between men and women has been dissolved or just changed; and different natural surroundings and different cultures have created different gender relations. Social development over the last 20 years has created so much change in modem society that one can speak of a break-up in the industrial wageworker society based on Modernist thinking. But still the changes can be identified only partly by means of the traditional empirical methods of sociology. In any case a Postmodem sociology would have difficulties relating to the deconstruction project formulated by Derrida. Postmodem thinking has often been identified with the break-up in modern society based on what Lyotard has called ‘The death of the grand narratives’, that is a clash with the big theories, with the big coherent history writing and with the ideas of emancipation of the modem bourgeois-capitalistic society. Feminist thinking shares crucial aspects with the Postmodern critique of Enlightenment thinking, the critique of the rationalism of modern society, which was related to gender already by Nietzsche and Simmel. This rationalism is based on hierarchical dualisms placing rationality above feeling, subject above object, man above woman. These hierarchical dualisms have been criticised by several feminists and by Derrida. The one side represents the modem ‘positive’ values: subject, rationality, culture, activity, logos, identity and presence. The other side represents the violently suppressed side: object, feeling, nature, passivity, pathos, difference and distance; and woman could be added to this side as the one part of the dualism that links women to the not-yet rationalised remainders from traditional society which modern society must suppress in order to maintain its claim to universalism. Jameson characterises the Postmodem situation as a situation where the modernising process is completed. The residual zones of ‘nature’ and ‘being’, still existing in modern society as remainders from the earlier society, and making it possible for the modern society to transform elements of nature, have disappeared in Postmodem society. For feminist theory concerned with Postmodern thinking the obvious problem is that feminism is a thinking of emancipation. It contains the fundamental interest in women’s liberation even if this notion of liberation is far from unambiguous.3 To a certain extent feminism sticks to the dualism which is the target of its own criticism. And in doing so there is a danger that the man-woman dualism has just been turned around and transformed into a female ‘essentialism’, a worship
Karen Sjkup
862
of the female essence. Susan Hekman attacks this tendency, a tendency to maintain a female pattern of virtue based on caring and nurturing.4 For both Nietzsche-and the Postmodern thinkers inspired by him-woman becomes a creature unspoilt and original, ‘difference’, the pole in the man/woman dualism that has not been subdued to the scientific claim for an absolute truth, the logocentrism that according to Derrida at the same time is a fallogocentrism. Hekman argues that, according to Nietzsche, women’s demand for a truth is a threat to femininity, as the real art of femininity is falseness, beauty and appearance.s This notion of women being outside the truth of modern society was later put forward by Baudrillard, as he argues that the truth of the female Eros is seduction opposed to the male potency performing sexuality, and by Lyotard, as he opposes the female masquerade to the male search for truth. For both Baudrillard and Lyotard (as for Nietzsche and Foucault), this notion of woman leads to a perception of feminism as reactionary, as an attempt to subdue the female mystery to the male fallogocentrism. The challenge to my work is that most Postmodern thinkers do not relate the clash with Enlightenment philosophical thinking to sociological changes. For of course it is not just ways of thinking that are the matter. The central institutions of modem industrial society witness an era of radical change or even dissolution: the modem wageworker family with a male bread winner and his wife primarily taking care of kids; the labour unions as wage negotiators and cultural centre for the working classes; the national state as a cultural and political unit. Even the concept of work has changed. The notion of productive work or work at all defined as paid work and men’s work and the notion of non-productive or not-work as unpaid work and women’s work give way to a more diffuse concept of work which is not possible to measure quantitatively, work like information, service, caring. Similarly, the social individual and the discourses through which the individual relates to the public no longer identify with stable institutions like gender, family, work and class culture. The market and the electronic media open the ‘hyper space’6 in which the individual is given no means of a stable identification. Regulating oneself becomes a matter for the single individual in a world of chaos and complexity. But just as the modern society still contained elements of Premodern society, the Postmodern society contains elements of both the Premodern and the Modern society. And the psychology of gender is still heavily influenced by Premodern patriarchal gender relations.
THE CONCEPT
OF PATRIARCHY
IN FEMINIST
STUDIES
My theoretical approach is unusual in the dominating trend in Danish feminist research of the social sciences. In most of these feminist studies patriarchy is regarded as a power relation that is continuously able to restore itself, first through the alliance between patriarchy and capitalism, as formulated by Heidi Hartmann,’ and later through what has been called public patriarchy.s
Gender in Postmodern Society
863
After Hartmann, Sylvia Walby9 and Anna J6nasd6ttir,‘” among others, have tried to differentiate the theory of capitalist patriarchy. Walby presupposes the existence of patriarchy, when she argues: ‘that the concept of ‘patriarchy’ is indispensable for an analysis of gender inequality’ and put forward a theory as to how its constituent elements articulate in contemporary Britain’.” She argues that women have witnessed progress in their social position, but that it is necessary to distinguish between progress in women’s position and changes in the forms of suppression of women, to distinguish analytically between the degree of patriarchy and changes in its form. I2 women need love in order to come into social According to J6nasd6ttiri3 existence, in order to be persons, while men are entitled and authorized to make use of their entire range of existing and potential capacities as persons. That means that they meet women as sexual beings and men as personal authorities. And the patriarchal system forces women and men into a system in which: ‘. . . Men today are dependent on a profitable ‘traffic in women’ if they are to remain the kind of men that historical circumstances force them to be’.14 Although these theories deserve our respect for their ability to structure the concept of modern patriarchy in a very fruitful way, I still argue that they share the limitation of not being able to reflect a possible dissolution of patriarchy or a radical change of its form.
CHALLENGING
THE CONCEPT
OF CAPITALIST
PATRIARCHY
Patriarchy as a universal concept is insisted on by feminist scholars like Walby and several Danish feminist scholars of the social sciences. They mainly refer to empirical studies registering the obvious, still existing differences between the conditions of men and women in society, among other things unequal pay, unequal political representation, higher unemployment rate among women and a lower degree of career mobility. Focussing on conditions certainly still suppressing women, feminist scholars are prevented from discovering that there is an opposite trend-at least in Denmark-that young women today get better education than men; that women gain access to and even form a majority in former male professions such as medicine, theology, dentistry, pharmacy and so on; that women gain representation in parliamentary bodies; and most of all that women are no longer dependent on the combination of material support with marriage. One reason for not focussing on the actual change is that feminist studies in the social sciences have an equal-opportunities perspective, often refered to as ‘state feminism’, and they will emphasise the inequality between the sexes even if it is diminished. A perspective like this is not wrong, but it is not fruitful for opening up the analysis of the dynamics of changes in gender. Furthermore, feminism has a tendency of not reflecting its own agency in the changing of gender. According to my analysis, on which I am unfortunately not able to elaborate further here, capitalist patriarchy and its institutions formed a vulnerable alliance based on the obvious contradictions, claiming the rights of the individual at the same time as it claimed the individual’s rights to his house and family.
864
Karen Sjimp
Capitalist patriarchy, or using Foucault’s concept ‘the discourse of sex’, has been in a transformation process for several decades. I would go as far as to maintain that it has only been established in Denmark for a few decades, and it has never been a stable contract between the sexes. First and foremost capitalist patriarchy is dissolving due to the loss of men’s monopoly on paid work; and the loss of their right of property to women and children, and through that, also the rights to women’s work and sexuality. But this dissolution is also due to the fact that capitalist patriarchy rested upon the ‘irrational’ age- and sex-based power hierarchies of Premodem society that were successfully criticised-at least in our country-with criticism focussing on the lack of ability or will to adapt to democratisation processes or just change. In Denmark, the same kind of criticism has also led to the dissolution of the university professors’ power system and the feudal power of the master artisans. The ideas of emancipation in the feminist movements and in the socialist movements created a paradigm of liberation which is today losing legitimation. It is no longer easy to identify the topics of the feminist case. We have to focus on the transformation process in gender relations and open up to new topics addressing the new gender relations of Postmodern, post-Oedipus time. Juliet Flower-MacCannell, in her study,15 argues that the brother of modern society acts as an Oedipus in a society which is actually fatherless. The fatherless society is left to his narcissist regime based on the fiction of brotherhood in which the sister is ignored by the brother acting without the responsibility of the father. We are now facing the next post-Oedipus era, where the remainders of patriarchal power and love are fading away even more. In the feminist debate Postmodernist feminists are often characterised as postfeminists or anti-feminists. In my view fighting the suppression of the postOedipal man is not less feminist than fighting capitalist patriarchy. On the contrary, a new construction of a theory of suppression might point at many more important questions to be addressed. Postfemmism or Postmodernist feminists have primarily been identified with the idea that women should not be regarded as a homogeneous group sharing the same interest, such as a universalising theory like the Marxist-feminist theory tends to.16 Alternatively, they see women as a heterogeneous group with avariety of interests, some opposite and some mutual. This has lead to consideration of whether feminism has general identifiable aims. I don’t think that this view of Postmodernist feminism is fruitful; on the contrary it is reductionist. It is not open to the critical potentials of Postmodern thinking of gender, which to me is just a method or an inspiration to deconstruct the discourse of modern gender. When gender in the genealogy of Foucault’7 is regarded as a discourse, that means that it comes into social existence through the way it is spoken of. Or the way that power speaks about gender, or stages gender. Whether speaking of gender as a homogeneous group or as a heterogeneous group we are caught in the discourse of gender. And acting out one’s sex as a feminist scholar is part of working out the discourse. The precondition for looking behind this discourse is that gender is investigated as a historical discourse, as a concrete expression of power relations and a dialectic between the individual members of each sex, between motherhood
Gender in Postmodern
865
Society
and fatherhood
as two fundamental metaphors ofgender expressing the meeting of love between the two sexes. But gender should both be addressed as a discourse and a material matter, as a discourse in constant change and as historical actuality. Karen Sjnrrup
Roskilde
University
NOTES 1. This paper is part of a larger work in progress on the Postmodern clash with the sociology of gender at a theoretical and an empirical level. 2. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the cultural logic of late Capitalism, London; Verso, 1991). 3. An illustration of the ambiguity of thinking regarding the meaning of ‘women’s emancipation’ is provided by presentations at the Women Philosophers Symposium (Amsterdam: April 1992). Two qualitatively and extremely different issues that were circulating reflect the wide range of conceptions of what a liberated condition would entail: (a) women’s emancipation first and foremost is a question of extending human rights by ensuring that declarations of human rights are formulated to include women as individuals (in contrast to the formulation in the UN declaration of human rights, which interprets the individual as the family father who has rights to his house and his family as well as to brotherhood as the basis for a human peaceful co-existence; Hannelore Schroder). (b) Clarification of whether emancipation requires that prostitution is fegalised (women should be free to sell their bodies) or criminalised (all women’s sexuality is prostituted by prostitution). 4. Susan Hekman, Gender and Knowledge-Elements of a Postmodern Feminism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 5. 5. Hekman, op. cit. p. 28. 6. Fredric Jameson uses this concept of hyper-space. 7. Heidi Hartmann, ‘The Unhappy Marriage between Marxism and Feminism, Toward a more Progressive Union’. in Lydia Sargent (ed.), Women and~evo~tion (London: Pluto Press, 1981). 8. Carol Brown, ‘Mothers, Fathers and Children: From Private to Public Patriarchy’, In Lydia Sargent (ed.), Women and Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 1981); and Birte Siim, ‘The Scandinavia Welfare States-Towards Sexual Equality or a New Kind of Maie Domination’. 9. Ibid. 10. Anna G. Jonasdottir, Love Power and Political Interests (University of Grebro Press, &ebro: 1991). 11. Walby, op. cit., p. I. 12. Walby, op. cit., p. 23. 13. Jonasdottir, op. cit., p. 219. 14. Ibid., p. 222. 15. Juliet Flower-MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother-after the Patriarchy (New York, 1992). 16. Ulla Koch (ed.), Ksn og videnskab, Aalborg Universitetsforlag 1989, is a Danish example of this tendency influenced by the American feminist Sandra Harding. In my review (in Danish) in the Danish Journal Ihtnsk Sociolqgil/l (Co~nhagen 1990), I elaborate on this criticism. 17. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: an Introduction. (London, 1979 and Copenhagen, 1975).
Vol. 19, Nos 4-6, pp. 859-065, 1994 Copyright@ 1994Elswier ScienceLtd Printedin GreatBritain.All rightsreserved 0191-6599/94$7.00+0.00
of European Ideas,
Pergamon
A SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPT OF GENDER IN POSTMODERN SOCIETY KAREN SJ~RU~+
1. A FEMINIST’S
REFLECTIONS
ON THE
CONFERENCE
At the conference, we had presentations arguing the death of philosophy, the death of man, the death of Marxism, the end of history, the end of socialism, the end of ideology and the end of humanism. The only isms of modern thinking which haven’t been declared dead are those of capitalism, liberalism and feminism. In response to Johan Galtung’s invitation to us to think and speak of the unspoken, we might pose the question whether capitalism or liberalism deserve the glory of survivors. Whether the “mortality” instinct of the European and North American intellectuals is actually more an instinct than a diagnosis of our time. And what kind of dilemmas is the rest of the world placed in, faced by the ethnocentric and yet so self-assured showdowns of European intellectual thought? Feminism and feminist thought are put in a rather odd situation: in many respects we are taking over the modemising project of the disillusioned male intellectuals, demanding equal access to waged work, money and public life-and at the same time some feminists have joined Postmodern criticism of Modernist thinking. We also have a tendency to focus feminist theory on the concept of ‘patriarchy’ without taking into account firstly the ‘anti-patriarchal’ tendencies of the modem brotherhood ‘society, and secondly the Postmodern death cramps of the brotherhood society.
INTRODUGTION In my work I probably try far too ambitiously to develop a new approach to the sociology of gender.’ In my view, recent changes in gender relations are so dramatic that we need completely new theories of sex/gender. At the same time, the theoretical foundation of feminist theory in the humanities, inspired by Poststructuralist and Postmodern theory and recognising a joint field of criticism, underlines the challenge for sociological thinking. Sociological theory of gender has for many years relied on a functionalist frame of reference, seeing the relation between the sexes as defined by a functionally rational division of labour based on biological differences and mutual agreement in married life. Recent sociological works on gender have been inspired by Marxist-feminist theory regarding gender relations as a pattern of oppression derived from *Department of History and Social Sciences, Roskilde University, P.O. Box 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark. 859
Karen Sjmxp economy and class relations. Both perspectives offer an unsatisfactory interpretation of the recent development in gender relations. Feminist perspectives, like the Marxist perspective, have approached the criticism of patriarchal oppression without actually realising the impact of their own criticism; they haven’t dealt with the results of the changes in which they play a vital part. These changes make the life of women and men more alike than ever before in history-fathers are supposed to take an active part in childbirth and infant care, and women are supposed to be waged workers and bread-winners on equal terms with men, and to be able to pursue a career in former male trades. On the other hand, the changes also make women’s lives more diverse, when the childless career woman has more in common with her male colleague than with the single unemployed mother. In other words, the relation between biological sex and sociological gender is being restructured in the sense that the gender relations are no longer centred around the gender division of labour and women’s material dependence on men. But even if gender has been dramatically transformed, the changes are not so great and unambiguously emancipating that the criticism of the oppression of women should be abandoned. What is needed is self-critical reflections on feminism as one of the great projects of emancipation in modern society, and reflections on the theory of oppression which is inherent in feminism and in other liberation movements. My approach rests upon the fundamental assumption that the relations between the sexes and the representations of sex have changed dramatically: on one hand, in the part gender plays in family life, in sexuality, in working life and in power relations; and on the other hand, in the reflection of sex in images of or ‘simulation’ of the female and the male characteristics, as manifest in patterns of interpretation, taboos, norms and personal relations. My first hypothesis is that taboos related to sex are reversed: in all earlier societies there was a taboo against women and men doing the same work, a taboo that was related to sexuality and heterosexual marriage. Today a taboo has developed against monopolising work tasks for one sex. And that means that the general material foundation of gender has been disturbed. My second hypothesis is that patriarchy has been replaced by a brotherhood society, which breaks down the power of parents and potentially creates equality between brothers and sisters, but in real life the sisters have been ignored in the light of the brothers gaining new power from technology and production.
THE IMPOSSIBLE
SEX-METHODOLOGICAL
CONSIDERATIONS
The changes cannot be solely related to the struggles of the women’s movements or by the entrance of women into the labour market, as there is a tendency to do in both Postmodern theory and sociological interpretation. Instead, one should realise that the changes are connected to the inner contradictions of modern society in which women as objects and housewives are placed in a category which is contrasted with a world of ‘political men’ and ‘sexless wageworkers’, and in which the modern Freudian understanding of
Gender in Postmodern Society
861
human identity based on sex is seen in contrast to the capitalist economy breaking up complementarity of the sexes. As a whole I argue that we are witnessing a movement towards Postmodern genders, a movement related to the general movement towards a Postmodern society. I usually characterise the development of gender relations-at least in my own small part of the world-as a world sensation, in order to underline that the breaking up of gender complementarity in working life and in the political sphere is unique in the history of (wo)mankind. Of course changes in gender and gender relations are not totally new. Several times in history, particularly in connection with changes in culture and in the mode of production, the social contract between men and women has been dissolved or just changed; and different natural surroundings and different cultures have created different gender relations. Social development over the last 20 years has created so much change in modem society that one can speak of a break-up in the industrial wageworker society based on Modernist thinking. But still the changes can be identified only partly by means of the traditional empirical methods of sociology. In any case a Postmodem sociology would have difficulties relating to the deconstruction project formulated by Derrida. Postmodem thinking has often been identified with the break-up in modern society based on what Lyotard has called ‘The death of the grand narratives’, that is a clash with the big theories, with the big coherent history writing and with the ideas of emancipation of the modem bourgeois-capitalistic society. Feminist thinking shares crucial aspects with the Postmodern critique of Enlightenment thinking, the critique of the rationalism of modern society, which was related to gender already by Nietzsche and Simmel. This rationalism is based on hierarchical dualisms placing rationality above feeling, subject above object, man above woman. These hierarchical dualisms have been criticised by several feminists and by Derrida. The one side represents the modem ‘positive’ values: subject, rationality, culture, activity, logos, identity and presence. The other side represents the violently suppressed side: object, feeling, nature, passivity, pathos, difference and distance; and woman could be added to this side as the one part of the dualism that links women to the not-yet rationalised remainders from traditional society which modern society must suppress in order to maintain its claim to universalism. Jameson characterises the Postmodem situation as a situation where the modernising process is completed. The residual zones of ‘nature’ and ‘being’, still existing in modern society as remainders from the earlier society, and making it possible for the modern society to transform elements of nature, have disappeared in Postmodem society. For feminist theory concerned with Postmodern thinking the obvious problem is that feminism is a thinking of emancipation. It contains the fundamental interest in women’s liberation even if this notion of liberation is far from unambiguous.3 To a certain extent feminism sticks to the dualism which is the target of its own criticism. And in doing so there is a danger that the man-woman dualism has just been turned around and transformed into a female ‘essentialism’, a worship
Karen Sjkup
862
of the female essence. Susan Hekman attacks this tendency, a tendency to maintain a female pattern of virtue based on caring and nurturing.4 For both Nietzsche-and the Postmodern thinkers inspired by him-woman becomes a creature unspoilt and original, ‘difference’, the pole in the man/woman dualism that has not been subdued to the scientific claim for an absolute truth, the logocentrism that according to Derrida at the same time is a fallogocentrism. Hekman argues that, according to Nietzsche, women’s demand for a truth is a threat to femininity, as the real art of femininity is falseness, beauty and appearance.s This notion of women being outside the truth of modern society was later put forward by Baudrillard, as he argues that the truth of the female Eros is seduction opposed to the male potency performing sexuality, and by Lyotard, as he opposes the female masquerade to the male search for truth. For both Baudrillard and Lyotard (as for Nietzsche and Foucault), this notion of woman leads to a perception of feminism as reactionary, as an attempt to subdue the female mystery to the male fallogocentrism. The challenge to my work is that most Postmodern thinkers do not relate the clash with Enlightenment philosophical thinking to sociological changes. For of course it is not just ways of thinking that are the matter. The central institutions of modem industrial society witness an era of radical change or even dissolution: the modem wageworker family with a male bread winner and his wife primarily taking care of kids; the labour unions as wage negotiators and cultural centre for the working classes; the national state as a cultural and political unit. Even the concept of work has changed. The notion of productive work or work at all defined as paid work and men’s work and the notion of non-productive or not-work as unpaid work and women’s work give way to a more diffuse concept of work which is not possible to measure quantitatively, work like information, service, caring. Similarly, the social individual and the discourses through which the individual relates to the public no longer identify with stable institutions like gender, family, work and class culture. The market and the electronic media open the ‘hyper space’6 in which the individual is given no means of a stable identification. Regulating oneself becomes a matter for the single individual in a world of chaos and complexity. But just as the modern society still contained elements of Premodern society, the Postmodern society contains elements of both the Premodern and the Modern society. And the psychology of gender is still heavily influenced by Premodern patriarchal gender relations.
THE CONCEPT
OF PATRIARCHY
IN FEMINIST
STUDIES
My theoretical approach is unusual in the dominating trend in Danish feminist research of the social sciences. In most of these feminist studies patriarchy is regarded as a power relation that is continuously able to restore itself, first through the alliance between patriarchy and capitalism, as formulated by Heidi Hartmann,’ and later through what has been called public patriarchy.s
Gender in Postmodern Society
863
After Hartmann, Sylvia Walby9 and Anna J6nasd6ttir,‘” among others, have tried to differentiate the theory of capitalist patriarchy. Walby presupposes the existence of patriarchy, when she argues: ‘that the concept of ‘patriarchy’ is indispensable for an analysis of gender inequality’ and put forward a theory as to how its constituent elements articulate in contemporary Britain’.” She argues that women have witnessed progress in their social position, but that it is necessary to distinguish between progress in women’s position and changes in the forms of suppression of women, to distinguish analytically between the degree of patriarchy and changes in its form. I2 women need love in order to come into social According to J6nasd6ttiri3 existence, in order to be persons, while men are entitled and authorized to make use of their entire range of existing and potential capacities as persons. That means that they meet women as sexual beings and men as personal authorities. And the patriarchal system forces women and men into a system in which: ‘. . . Men today are dependent on a profitable ‘traffic in women’ if they are to remain the kind of men that historical circumstances force them to be’.14 Although these theories deserve our respect for their ability to structure the concept of modern patriarchy in a very fruitful way, I still argue that they share the limitation of not being able to reflect a possible dissolution of patriarchy or a radical change of its form.
CHALLENGING
THE CONCEPT
OF CAPITALIST
PATRIARCHY
Patriarchy as a universal concept is insisted on by feminist scholars like Walby and several Danish feminist scholars of the social sciences. They mainly refer to empirical studies registering the obvious, still existing differences between the conditions of men and women in society, among other things unequal pay, unequal political representation, higher unemployment rate among women and a lower degree of career mobility. Focussing on conditions certainly still suppressing women, feminist scholars are prevented from discovering that there is an opposite trend-at least in Denmark-that young women today get better education than men; that women gain access to and even form a majority in former male professions such as medicine, theology, dentistry, pharmacy and so on; that women gain representation in parliamentary bodies; and most of all that women are no longer dependent on the combination of material support with marriage. One reason for not focussing on the actual change is that feminist studies in the social sciences have an equal-opportunities perspective, often refered to as ‘state feminism’, and they will emphasise the inequality between the sexes even if it is diminished. A perspective like this is not wrong, but it is not fruitful for opening up the analysis of the dynamics of changes in gender. Furthermore, feminism has a tendency of not reflecting its own agency in the changing of gender. According to my analysis, on which I am unfortunately not able to elaborate further here, capitalist patriarchy and its institutions formed a vulnerable alliance based on the obvious contradictions, claiming the rights of the individual at the same time as it claimed the individual’s rights to his house and family.
864
Karen Sjimp
Capitalist patriarchy, or using Foucault’s concept ‘the discourse of sex’, has been in a transformation process for several decades. I would go as far as to maintain that it has only been established in Denmark for a few decades, and it has never been a stable contract between the sexes. First and foremost capitalist patriarchy is dissolving due to the loss of men’s monopoly on paid work; and the loss of their right of property to women and children, and through that, also the rights to women’s work and sexuality. But this dissolution is also due to the fact that capitalist patriarchy rested upon the ‘irrational’ age- and sex-based power hierarchies of Premodem society that were successfully criticised-at least in our country-with criticism focussing on the lack of ability or will to adapt to democratisation processes or just change. In Denmark, the same kind of criticism has also led to the dissolution of the university professors’ power system and the feudal power of the master artisans. The ideas of emancipation in the feminist movements and in the socialist movements created a paradigm of liberation which is today losing legitimation. It is no longer easy to identify the topics of the feminist case. We have to focus on the transformation process in gender relations and open up to new topics addressing the new gender relations of Postmodern, post-Oedipus time. Juliet Flower-MacCannell, in her study,15 argues that the brother of modern society acts as an Oedipus in a society which is actually fatherless. The fatherless society is left to his narcissist regime based on the fiction of brotherhood in which the sister is ignored by the brother acting without the responsibility of the father. We are now facing the next post-Oedipus era, where the remainders of patriarchal power and love are fading away even more. In the feminist debate Postmodernist feminists are often characterised as postfeminists or anti-feminists. In my view fighting the suppression of the postOedipal man is not less feminist than fighting capitalist patriarchy. On the contrary, a new construction of a theory of suppression might point at many more important questions to be addressed. Postfemmism or Postmodernist feminists have primarily been identified with the idea that women should not be regarded as a homogeneous group sharing the same interest, such as a universalising theory like the Marxist-feminist theory tends to.16 Alternatively, they see women as a heterogeneous group with avariety of interests, some opposite and some mutual. This has lead to consideration of whether feminism has general identifiable aims. I don’t think that this view of Postmodernist feminism is fruitful; on the contrary it is reductionist. It is not open to the critical potentials of Postmodern thinking of gender, which to me is just a method or an inspiration to deconstruct the discourse of modern gender. When gender in the genealogy of Foucault’7 is regarded as a discourse, that means that it comes into social existence through the way it is spoken of. Or the way that power speaks about gender, or stages gender. Whether speaking of gender as a homogeneous group or as a heterogeneous group we are caught in the discourse of gender. And acting out one’s sex as a feminist scholar is part of working out the discourse. The precondition for looking behind this discourse is that gender is investigated as a historical discourse, as a concrete expression of power relations and a dialectic between the individual members of each sex, between motherhood
Gender in Postmodern
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Society
and fatherhood
as two fundamental metaphors ofgender expressing the meeting of love between the two sexes. But gender should both be addressed as a discourse and a material matter, as a discourse in constant change and as historical actuality. Karen Sjnrrup
Roskilde
University
NOTES 1. This paper is part of a larger work in progress on the Postmodern clash with the sociology of gender at a theoretical and an empirical level. 2. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the cultural logic of late Capitalism, London; Verso, 1991). 3. An illustration of the ambiguity of thinking regarding the meaning of ‘women’s emancipation’ is provided by presentations at the Women Philosophers Symposium (Amsterdam: April 1992). Two qualitatively and extremely different issues that were circulating reflect the wide range of conceptions of what a liberated condition would entail: (a) women’s emancipation first and foremost is a question of extending human rights by ensuring that declarations of human rights are formulated to include women as individuals (in contrast to the formulation in the UN declaration of human rights, which interprets the individual as the family father who has rights to his house and his family as well as to brotherhood as the basis for a human peaceful co-existence; Hannelore Schroder). (b) Clarification of whether emancipation requires that prostitution is fegalised (women should be free to sell their bodies) or criminalised (all women’s sexuality is prostituted by prostitution). 4. Susan Hekman, Gender and Knowledge-Elements of a Postmodern Feminism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 5. 5. Hekman, op. cit. p. 28. 6. Fredric Jameson uses this concept of hyper-space. 7. Heidi Hartmann, ‘The Unhappy Marriage between Marxism and Feminism, Toward a more Progressive Union’. in Lydia Sargent (ed.), Women and~evo~tion (London: Pluto Press, 1981). 8. Carol Brown, ‘Mothers, Fathers and Children: From Private to Public Patriarchy’, In Lydia Sargent (ed.), Women and Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 1981); and Birte Siim, ‘The Scandinavia Welfare States-Towards Sexual Equality or a New Kind of Maie Domination’. 9. Ibid. 10. Anna G. Jonasdottir, Love Power and Political Interests (University of Grebro Press, &ebro: 1991). 11. Walby, op. cit., p. I. 12. Walby, op. cit., p. 23. 13. Jonasdottir, op. cit., p. 219. 14. Ibid., p. 222. 15. Juliet Flower-MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother-after the Patriarchy (New York, 1992). 16. Ulla Koch (ed.), Ksn og videnskab, Aalborg Universitetsforlag 1989, is a Danish example of this tendency influenced by the American feminist Sandra Harding. In my review (in Danish) in the Danish Journal Ihtnsk Sociolqgil/l (Co~nhagen 1990), I elaborate on this criticism. 17. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: an Introduction. (London, 1979 and Copenhagen, 1975).