27 October 2009
"What's wrong with 'I bathed with her.'?"
 This was the question that really stood at the heart of the matter at a recent seminar hosted by the Democracy Development Program (DDP: www.ddp.org.za ). Attended by a variety of delegates from across the spectrum of academic and civil society, the event was meant to question society's understanding of what it means to be a man or a woman in the wake of the events around Caster Semenya.
On the face of it, a perfectly innocent statement, yet taken in the larger context of the political opportunism and media commodification of Ms. Semenya's plight these last few months, perhaps less so. As argued by Dr. Antje Schuhman, there was a concerted effort to "normalize and feminize" Ms. Semenya, to turn her into a "proper" symbol of national honour and pride. Various interests moved quickly to cast the issue to be a racially motivated one, and proceeded to "remake" Ms. Semenya in a more ... "acceptably feminine" way.
Held at the Southern Sun Elangeni Hotel in Durban, The event was chaired by Mr. Ibrahim Steyn, research coordinator at the DDP and a PhD candidate with the Centre for Democracy and Citizenship, School of Government at the University of the Western Cape, with Dr. Antje Schuhman presenting. Dr. Schuhman is a lecturer at the Department of Political Science at Wits University. Originally from Germany, her main academic focus is in Gender Studies, Women's History, Racism, Hegemony and Migration Politics.
Dr. Schuhman's Presentation  Dr. Schuhman opened with the rather interesting point that, when she first arrived in this country, she had found it very difficult to distinguish between various races as easily and clearly as South Africans are able to do. We consider these categorizations of black and white and coloured and all the rest of it pretty obvious, but as demonstrated by her experience, racial identification is actually a skill we learn. Categories seem natural to us, but in reality they are simply a mental mechanism, a model we impose on the world in order for us to understand and attempt to control it.
In much the same way, the strictly binary concept of gender that most of modern society seems to hold simply doesn't have an objective, historical reality. Far from being a real representation of the underlying reality, she argued, this binary view had actually arisen out of an essentially dualist world-view espoused by Christianity, amongst others. In the same way that good and evil, or light and dark, or black and white were all set up as mutually contradictory and antagonistic opposites with no middle ground, man and woman, masculine and feminine were also cast in this same light. Opposites, with no middle ground.
This dualism, combined with the inherent value judgements held by patriarchy, colonialism, and other structures of power and oppression went on to create a very rigid world view, where any deviation from the categories you were supposed to fit was the ultimate abomination, a deviation from God's "natural" laws and orderings, especially with regards to gender and sexuality.
The women's rights movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth century began to challenge these value judgements, primarily focussing on economic and political inequality, and culminated in women gaining the right to vote. But it would not be until the 1950's and 60's that the deeply entrenched dualistic gender roles to which both men and women were subject would begin to be challenged through second wave feminism. Arguably the most influential work of this period of feminism was publication of "The Second Sex", by Simone de Beauvoir, in which she made the statement:
"One is not born a woman, but becomes one."
Second wave feminism regarded gender as a purely social construct, the "performance" of femininity and masculinity. And while biological sex was still acknowledged as a natural binary, the second wave rejected the idea of biological determinism, the idea that one's biology as male or female should determine one's role in life, how one thought or dressed or what one did. Developing in parallel with and informed by the civil rights movement in the United States and elsewhere, feminism argued that women were no different from other oppressed groups, recognising that greater economic and political power really wasn't worth all that much when women were still confined to narrow, rigidly enforced roles and oppression in their daily lives.
It soon became clear though that privilege and prejudice were deeply intertwined with different identities, even amongst those fighting against privilege. Women within the civil rights movement still found themselves confined to narrow roles by men, while women of colour felt that white women often glossed over questions of race or class, for example. Gender, race, class, culture and many other structures all contribute to and maintain structures of power and inequality, and everybody is both part of and party to these structures.
This gradual recognition, influenced by the twin philosophical movements of post structuralism and post modernism, started to question many of the definitions of the second wave itself, most notably the assumption of biological sex itself as being binary. Judith Butler summed it up most concisely in her book "Gender Trouble", when she argued that there is no objective space outside of ideology. As regards to gender, everybody's gaze is always gendered. We cannot relate to the world except through gendered ideology, because our cultural and linguistic background simply doesn't allow it*.
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*From this, Judith Butler argues that the sexes and sexuality themselves are constructs with no objective reality in nature, performative in the same way that the second wave had argued gender was.
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Which brings us full circle back to Caster Semenya. And to Christianity. Religion often stands at odds with Science in the West, but they are in fact much more similar than is apparent at first glance. Both categorise and impose a strict linearity on the world, and are very much still the dominant paradigms on our society.
When Caster Semenya won the 800m, it was her appearance and gender performance that became an issue, because they didn't conform to the strict views society holds of "female". The South African government, public and media took up her cause with abandon, but instead of accepting and supporting her as she was, she was made to fit, to conform more closely to exactly the preconceptions by which she had been judged in the first place. Whether through magazine make-overs, or linguistically with comments like "our little girl" or "I bathed with her", or assertions that intersexuality didn't exist in South Africa, the support she received was conditional upon her normality.
And clearly her experience of support is not the norm in this country, as evidenced by the frighteningly commonplace practice of "curative rape" of lesbian women, or the influence the Interfaith Council enjoys in a supposedly open, supportive government. Society sees ambiguity as a threat. Different is evil and dangerous, and because of this, the rights of women, the intersexed and other minorities continue to be challenged the moment they transgress what is accepted.
Questions and Answers and Open Forum After Dr. Schuhman's presentation, Mr Steyn opened the floor to questions from delegates:
The first question raised the issue of "hermaphrodite" as a problematic term, to which Dr. Schuhman pointed out that most people now prefer the term "intersex", since it covers a wider spectrum of conditions and doesn't carry the same baggage as the term "hermaphrodite" does.
Dr. Schuhman was then confronted by the question touched on in the opening paragraph: "What's wrong with 'I bathed with her'?".
Expanding on the argument she had made in the main presentation, Dr. Schuhman pointed out that all athletes in essence commodify themselves to an extent, but that Caster Semenya had been made a brand in her own right by the media and political interests, according to one media commentator. Her brand image had to be "normalised" to make her saleable though.
She continued by arguing that Nationalism itself is essentially patriarchal in nature, the nation seen as a conventional heterosexual family with the nation's "honour" embodied in its women. This is most clearly and brutally evident from the phenomena of rape during times of war, where a conquered country's honour is metaphorically stripped from it by targeting the women who live there, but it manifests itself in more subtle ways as well, as for example through language, when people speak of a "family of nations" or that the nation must "protect Semenya's honour".
Caster Semenya wasn't a "proper" symbol of that honour though, hence all the efforts to change her presentation, and to recast the issue in terms of race or colonialism. In effect, race was an "easier" victim category to deal with and defend, because of the ambiguity and consequent discomfort around her appearance and gender performance.
This was followed by the more philosophical question of, if not a binary model of gender, and indeed of nature, what the alternative might be? In the words of the delegate: “What other lens might conceivably be used to view the world?”
Dr Schuhman didn't really have an easy answer to this. As Judith Butler had pointed out, we are all caught in a gendered way of thinking through language and culture and our own performance of sex and gender, so stepping outside of that paradigm is difficult, if not impossible. One possible idea from the floor was to begin to recognize continuums rather than categories, to see categories merely as the extremes points of expression/performance, with a whole spectrum of gender or sexuality or body in-between.
This segued into another question of how one might go about challenging gender dualism, to which Dr. Schuhman's simple answer was to “create confusion”. The more exposure society had to gender variance, intersexuality and other ambiguity, she argued, the more familiar and comfortable it would inevitably become with it. Where this ambiguity is currently something shameful, something to be hidden from one's community, it should instead be acknowledged and discussed.
The next question to be raised, of whether there was a government policy of some kind to test non-conforming people, led into a brief discussion on the competition policies of various sporting federations and the need to test athletes to ensure fairness.
The final comment of the evening took the position that, though feminism had decoupled sex from gender, and the gay rights movement had shown sex and sexuality to be distinct concepts, there were still other dimensions to the question of sex and gender that were being conflated, thereby contributing to the marginal position intersex and transgender people still have in society. Some of the possible dimensions brought up were  Gender identity, presentation, role, and body image, to name but a few. Recognising these as distinct, independent spectrums of expression, the attendee believed, would go a long way towards normalising the “abnormal”, and towards securing greater acceptance of ambiguity in gender and sexuality.
Mr. Steyn closed the evening off with thanks to Dr. Schuhman and the attendees.
Mina MagpieA geeky resident of the Dolphin Coast in KZN with an unhealthy fascination with Science ®. (The kind that blows stuff up) When not blowing stuff up, she fills her time with design, programming, lots of reading, and just occasionally, some exercise. Mina has a blog she's notoriously bad about updating, but new stuff does occasionally appear on there, quite inexplicably so. http://genderlines.wordpress.com |
