Define Women! And Other Patriarchal Instructions

Some definitions.

1 “A woman has a vagina; a man has a penis”

(some politicians, with a nod to “gender critical” feminists)

2 “A woman does not have a penis”

(some politicians, with a nod to “gender critical” feminists)

3 “A woman is an adult human female”

(“gender critical” feminists, citing dictionaries).

4 “A woman is a woman and a man is a man, that’s just common sense”

(former UK prime-minister, citing the well-known source “common sense” also cited by “gender critical” feminists)

What the fuck!

Welcome to the patriarchal dystopia otherwise known as “gender critical” feminism where women are defined as having vaginas as if this definition is necessary for feminism.

Much made “gender critical” claim: we have to define women to liberate women!

But that’s the patriarchal order! Define women!

Much-needed critique: You don’t need to define something to liberate it.

Much-needed counter-claim:  We need to liberate women from being defined.

After all, consider where we ended up, by definition.

A woman is a woman.

Oh, the sheer and utter banality of this, sexism, his received wisdom, the patriarch, learning nothing about anything by saying something is something.

To say a tree is a tree is to say nothing about trees.

To learn nothing.

If man is the answer to the question of what is man, the answer is there is no question.

A woman is a woman.

The patriarch is telling us he has nothing to learn about women.

That he does not want us to question who women is or for there, even, to be a question.

But we do.

Question, that is.

????

!!!!

Question yes, but why the exclamations, Sara?!

Because of where we have ended up, dear reader.

Turning feminism into another, nothing learnt.

Anneliese Dodds and Bridget Phillipson has been recently appointed as ministers for women and equalities. Neither seem to be part of the “gender critical” feminist movement, by which I mean, they do not seem to be endlessly searching for a definition of women that is robust enough, or crude or banal enough, to exclude trans women, once and for all.

Dodds has said what many feminists have long said. Definitions of women are contextual: how we define women depends on who is defining women and in what domain.

Responses from “gender critical” feminists and their patriarchal pals are as expected.

A “gender critical” feminist said: her comments are “nonsensical.” Labour has “abandoned” women!

A patriarchal pal said: “That is like appointing two climate deniers as Co-Secretaries of State for Net Zero.”

Oh no, they won’t define women! Which means they deny women exist!

Why do we have such a ministerial position? Not because of who women are, but where women aren’t. We have such a position in order to redress gender inequalities. In fact many people who are happy to define women do not believe in the existence of gender inequalities!

You don’t need a definition to pay one group of people less than another or to treat one group as worth more than others. As anyone who knows equality law knows, you can be discriminated against because you are perceived to be a member of a disadvantaged group whether or not you are.

Perceptions have material consequences.

Groups, social achievements. With histories.

To be a member of a group is to be assigned a place in history.

Not all of us keep to our assignments. Our place in history.

To fight for change requires, usually, loosening the hold of a history, sometimes by saying something has a history, what might have previously been thought of as nature.

The way things are.

Or were.

Definition is a past tense activity (the word coming from French definicion from de “completely”+ finire “to bound, limit,” from finis “boundary, end”).

No, we are not finished! We will not end the conversation! We are just beginning. We don’t know who will come, or who we will become, when we have refused to be delimited by definition.

That refusal is not about words or not only about words. It is about worlds.

Definitions precede us.

Yes.

We exceed them.

Also, yes.

That is why, mostly, liberation is from definition. This is no mere negative model of freedom (freedom from rather than freedom to). To be liberated from definition is how we open up what it is possible to do and to be.

For some to define ourselves for ourselves is to counter claims that we do not or cannot exist.

Claim 1: You cannot change sex.

Claim 2: Sex is material.

These claims are in contradiction. If sex is material, then it most certainly can be changed.

Matter is, after all, dynamic.

Almost by definition.

And so are we; dynamic, that is.

Almost by definition.

Power: how the change that might otherwise happen because of the dynamic nature of life is stopped.

Power: how you stabilise what is required to survive or thrive within a given environment.

No wonder the elites promote “gender critical” feminism– sex made another conservative agenda, turned into evidence of what cannot or should not be changed (like history, institutions, the nation-state, civilisations itself).

Back to sex, to nature, that rock.

“What passes as common sense feels as if it has always been there, the sedimented, bedrock, wisdom of ‘the race’” (thanks Stuart Hall).

A feeling of longevity, what goes without saying.

That rock crumbles.

Things, they say, have always been that way.

Except they haven’t.

Words, they say, have always meant the same thing.

Except they didn’t.

Feminism’s Brexiteers (thanks Sarah Franklin),

Oh, what your victories are costing us, will cost us, all of us, even all of you.

So: we will keep moving, fighting, being.

And knowing.

Those who refuse to be bound by definition know more about definitions, how they  function, what they do; we learn about police by being policed, from doing what we are not supposed to do, by definition.

Definitions are not private acts. They are messages, often issued as instructions, with social lives; telling us who we are or who we can be, where we can go or not go.

Boundaries are drawn; a hand in things.  No, we are not saying boundaries are fascist (they say we say that for a reason).  Boundaries are products of labour. They are made from materials, what is “out there,” but they are made. They sometimes have a moral purpose, a way of grouping things, like the boundary between weeds and flowers, a boundary which does something, issued as another instruction: weed them out, get them out, they will take over, protect the garden, that little petal!

Boundaries: how worlds are shaped.

Boundaries: established by force, at least sometimes.

The violence directed to someone because she looks like a woman. And that is a message passing down like electricity, that he can do that, she deserves that.

She shrinks, makes herself smaller.

Or perhaps she makes herself smaller to squeeze into the space she has been given.

Sex as architecture: who ends up with more space. Or less.

Before we enter the world, there are doors that tell us where to go, W or M.

If so then, sex is social before it is biological.

Institutional, even.

Any category.

Something you can be at home in.

Or not.

We might be told, we are girls right from the beginning: a girl, a woman-to-be!

We might be girls, or women, and never feel uncertain about the assignment, even when it is hard, the hostility the drips, another boundary lesson; the misogyny so close to the surface.

I understand the need for our own spaces.

But it is complicated.

The violence directed to some of us because we don’t look like women.

Is it a boy or a girl?

A question, hostility unmasked.

When some of us open the door with the letter, W, are told we are in the wrong place.

You don’t look like what a woman is supposed to look like.

You can be cis and be told this.

We might be told it is better or safer to be clear so they can tell us apart.

“Gender critical” feminists used these words: it is a “regrettable cost” when women are “mis-sexed” because they don’t look like women.

The demand, let us be clear, is to be clear.

Look like women, or else.

What did you expect would happen?

Gender normativity through the back door.

No wonder some of us are shown the door.

You might be taught that this is not a suitable place for women and girls.

But that place is.

Here; not there.

A hand, everywhere.

A meeting can be a definition.

You might be told you did not get the promotion because you did not attend all those meeting; the ones in the pub, too, nudge-nudge.

You did not drink and joke your way into their affections. Show your commitment.

Perhaps you did not attend the meetings because you had caring responsibilities.

Or because you cannot bear their affections.

Or because you disagreed with their definition of work. Or commitment.

You can be defined out of a promotion.

Defined out of existence.

And so yes,

Definitions most certainly matter.

Because of how they are made.

And, who makes them.

Who gets to define? Who is defined?

Toni Morrison wrote “definitions belong to the definers not the defined.”

Thank you Toni Morrison for so many wisdoms. What a novel philosopher.

Black and brown people, we know too well: what it means to be the defined not the definers.

Definition: a history of the definers.

Audre Lorde, gratitude for what you teach us, said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

We will not be eaten alive.

Nor crushed.

A definition: the weight of a history. We have to feel it to be free of it.

We might say: women have been defined too much, too often, by men.

Gender: one set of definitions amongst other sets.

Gender as genre: thanks Sylvia Wynter.

And so, feminism as liberation movement is about making it harder not easier to define women.

Intersectionality: another way of making that point.

When a group has been oppressed, understandings of who they are (what they are) will be implicated in that oppression.

Implication = sticky

Remember, thanks to Marilyn Frye, the press in oppression.

A press, an impression, a definition.

Women: defined as the weaker sex.

Weakness, Simone de Beauvoir teaches us this, thanks for the lesson, is a moral judgement. Weakness only means something in relation to a project with an end. That is why biology is not just there, inert, but being shaped. That is why woman is not a biological category or, if biological, how biology becomes history.

Women as a historical situation. Most certainly, then, women as contextual.

You can be made weaker by definition– you are a girl so don’t do this or don’t do that. You might not acquire capacities that derive from action; also, from repetition.

It comes to look effortless with effort.

You teach yourself not to try.

You come to “throw like a girl” (thanks Iris Marion Young).

You might assume you don’t because you can’t. But really you can’t because you don’t.

Some women are not seen as women because of what they did or had to do, were made to do, forced to do, because they worked, undertook strenuous, physical labour.

Labouring bodies too strong, too muscular, arms too big, to receive that assignment, women.

Too capable, even.

Working-class women, Black and brown women.

Not too slight or too light to labour.

From having laboured.

There are many different kinds of labour.

Women going into labour, bearing children.

Women defined in terms of their reproductive capacities.

Women as becoming wives.

Well, some women.

It is an old wives’ tale.

The history of the word. Woman is a compound of wif (wife) and man (human being).

Woman as wife-man, woman as female servant.

The history of woman, impossible to disentangle from the history of wife, she becomes an “adult human female,” by being in relation to man.

She becomes his relative: wife, daughter, mother, sister.

Not herself, by definition.

Man = universal

Woman = relative

That is why lesbian feminist Monique Wittig claimed “lesbians are not women.”

To be a woman with a woman, women with women, is to become an “escapee” or a stray. Thanks Monique Wittig for escapees.

Straying from a system.

Oh, the strays, let’s get away!

Woman defined as being for man.

Woman as an empty vessel, a gap, a hole, to be filled by a man.

Woman has a vagina, they say.

Why are you so fucking obsessed.

What about clits and all the other bits?

I can feel an explosion, coming.

“Woman-Identified Woman” by RADICALESBIANS begins with an explosion.

“A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.”

An explosive speech act.

A lesbian herself becomes a tipping point, a breaking point, a snap.

She explodes

And not just definitions,

When reality is conferred as being in relation to man,

A relation can be revolting.

Women with women change the meaning of women.

They cannot see what we change.

Not real, not seen as real, not really.

That might be why lesbians tend to be more supportive of the project of trans liberation than many other people.

And yes, some of us are trans.

Because we know what it is like to be seen as less real or not really real; to have other people doubt our existence.

Not even to notice our explosions.

What is made possible by not wanting to be defined by the definer.

Let us revolt!

Refuse the patriarch’s instructions!

We fight for women!

We fight as women refusing to be defined as women!

Doing it for ourselves,

by which I mean,

of course,

this goes with saying,

for each other,

Sara xx