Policing the boundaries of gender

for the Old Mole Variety Hour 31 August 2009

Earlier this month, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) announced that they will be verifying the gender of South African runner Caster Semenya, who won the women's 800-meter event at the Berlin Games.

The incident raises a host of issues:  the incompatibility between conventional femininity and athletic prowess, the pressure on women athletes to be heterosexually attractive, the racism of dominant western culture and its beauty standards, the presumption of male athletic superiority and the question of gender segregation in sport, the invasion of Semenya's privacy by leaking the news of testing before the results are in.

But the point I want to concentrate on today is that the binary structuring of gender in our society is a social, not a biological fact. As Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna noted many years ago, if we consider a list of items that differentiate females from males, "there are none that always and without exception are true of only one gender." Or as Alice Dreger pointed out more recently in the New York Times, the panel of doctors charged with verifying Semenya's gender "are not going to be able to run a test that will answer the question. Science can and will inform their decision, but they are going to have to decide which of the dozens of characteristics of sex matter to them. Their decision will be like the consensus regarding how many points are awarded for a touchdown [or] a field goal — it will be a sporting decision, not a natural one, about how we choose to play the game of sex."

Let's consider a short history of sex testing in sport. In ancient Greece, the Olympic games were closed to women athletes, and the ban was enforced by the simple expedient of having the athletes compete unclothed. In the twentieth century, the initial strategy for gender verification was pretty much the same as that used by the Greeks—visual inspection of genitals. Judging from online comments, many people still believe this is an appropriate test. But doubts were raised about the reliability of the International Olympic Committee (IOC)'s use of that method, perhaps because of the increased availability of surgical and hormonal procedures to reshape bodies, or perhaps because of increasing awareness that not all societies surgically alter the genitals of newborns to make them less ambiguous.

In the US, about 1 in 2000 births—about 5 per day— according to the Intersex Initiative, require specialists to assign a child’s sex. Once that assignment is made, the practice for many years has been for immediate cosmetic surgery on the infant to produce genitals that the parents can feel comfortable with. That means that any child born with a clitoris longer than one centimeter is likely to have it cut down to a size considered to look more feminine.

In 2006 the journal Pediatrics published a consensus statement signed by 50 international experts on the treatment of intersex conditions, also known as disorders of sexual development, or DSDs. The Consensus, responding to activism as well as to the lack of medical research showing positive outcomes of this genital surgery on infants, instructs doctors to discourage families from rushing into surgery, but the statement's vagueness allows for these practices to continue.

You can hear more about intersex issues on the May 2009 episode of Gender Blender, archived on the KBOO website.

Anyway, by the early seventies, a genital check was no longer felt to be a reliable test for gender. So the IAAF and the IOC switched to a test done for chromosomes.

It's worth noting here that even though the criteria for determining gender membership shifted—from genitals to genes—the notion that there was a bright line somehow persisted.

But chromosome testing, too, though also still apparently a point of faith for many, is not a reliable boundary marker. Not everyone is XX or XY—some people are XO, or XXX, or XXY, or XYY. People may have a mosaic of chromosomes, because of mutations during development, or may have two sets of chromosomes, in what's known as chimerism, when two fertilized eggs merge to form a single individual. Further, as Dreger points out in the Times, although the gene called SRY usually appears on the Y chromosome and makes the fetus develop as male, it can also turn up on an X chromosome, or not work on a Y chromosome, so that there may develop XX males and XY females. Given these uncertainties, the IAAF and IOC both abandoned these tests in the 1990s.

Chromosome testing was problematic not only for those born with many of the intersex conditions or DSDs, but also for transgender athletes. Current IOC and IAAF policy allows participation of transsexual athletes who have had surgery and hormone therapy as long as the transition occurred either before puberty or at least two years before the competition in question. Also allowed to compete as women are those found to have a select list of intersex conditions or other DSDs. Policies on other medicalizations of human diversity are unclear. But the ruling on transsexual athletes suggests that the new gender boundary is being sought in hormones, even though, again, no hormone is unique to one gender.

Kai Wright, in an essay on The Root, observes that, whatever decision the IAAF panel comes to about Semenya's gender, her "humanity has already been sacrificed to Western culture’s desperate, frightened effort to maintain the fiction of binary, fixed gender. . . . We cling to this lie of binary genders for the same reason we fantasize about the essential nature of race: to make unjust social hierarchies seem natural. But they’re not. They’re [human constructs], and competitive sports have long been a tool for keeping them in place."

Those constructs are, like competitive sport itself, also deeply enmeshed with capitalist marketing.  As transsexual lesbian playwright Kate Bornstein observes in her play Hidden: A Gender, "Once you buy gender, you'll buy anything to keep it."

I urge you not to buy.


update, more recently:   http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-olympics-are-still-struggling-to-define-gender/

Monsters of the Market reviewed

The Angel of Socialism

David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Caplitalism.  Haymarket Press, 2012.

A shorter audio version of this review was broadcast on the January 7, 2013 Old Mole Variety Hour.


Vampires and zombies abound these days in popular culture and in the culture of the market. In 2009, journalist Matt Taibbi famously dubbed the investment bank Goldman Sachs "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." Some consumers face "zombie debt" that creditors continue to demand long after it has expired or been written off.

Regular listeners to the Mole may recall the long history of these metaphorical horrors, including Karl Marx 's description of Capital as "dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." But if capital is vampiric—like the aristocratic Count Dracula with his new property in England—then members of the laboring class are historically associated with zombies. These emerged in Haitian Vodoun, where the zombie is a reanimated corpse, enslaved to a zombie master. In folk culture, peasants have sometimes explained their wealthier neighbors as zombie masters. The 1932 movie White Zombie features Bela Lugosi as a mill owner whose workers are zombies.
 
These associations go some way to explaining why zombies and vampires are among the monsters that concern David McNally in his timely and engaging book, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism, available in paperback from Haymarket Press. McNally affirms that vampires and zombies "need to be thought conjointly, as interconnected moments of the monstrous dialectic of modernity. … the vampire and the zombie are doubles, linked poles of the split society. If vampires are the dreaded beings who might possess us and turn us into their docile servants, zombies represent our haunted self-image, warning us that we might already be lifeless, disempowered agents of alien powers” (253).  McNally has little to say about the flesh-eating ghouls of George Romero's movies, and nothing at all to say about the sparkly vampires of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight or their ancestors in the suffering aristocrats of Anne Rice stories, though his argument has provocative implications for understanding these figures.

Instead, McNally addresses the ways that corporeal horror emerges from the nature of capitalism, including from the denigration of the physical inherent in the notion of abstract labor and of value as an abstraction from the physical form of any commodity. McNally locates the emergence of corporeal horror in historical eras of enclosure and the fragmentation of space and the body. The first of his three long central chapters surveys the history of early modern Britain, the process of the enclosures of common land and privatization of common resources, and the use of public dissection and anatomy as punishments for the poor. People were cut off from access to land, and thus forced to become wage workers, detached parts, as in the expression "factory hands." Those who resisted the market were criminalized for "stealing" the very things to which the common folk had once had recognized rights.

Fears of graverobbers and protests at the gallows in sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century England came about in part because the bodies of those who were executed were used for public dissections, in a days-long spectacle that McNally notes served not scientific exploration but as "a civic display of bourgeois rule enacted on the bodies of paupers and criminals, a ritual designed to inscribe social control over the bodies of the laboring poor" (28). The relevant monster in this chapter is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, notably quite different from his cinematic incarnations because he not only speaks, but speaks eloquently, and the novel ends with a successful rebellion by a group of sailors against their captain.

The third chapter of Monsters of the Market surveys recent anthropological work on the stories of witchcraft, vampires, zombies, and other body horror in parts of the world more recently drawn into the globalizing capitalist process, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. For instance, Nigerian cinema—Nollywood—is now the world's third-largest film industry, and has produced hundreds of voodoo-horror movies that turn on stories of blood sacrifice and ritual dismemberment in the interests of accumulation. Drawing on the work of historian Luise White, who has noted that "many of the African terms that denote vampires derive from words used for specific groups who performed highly-regimented work routines" (196), McNally concurs that the twentieth-century African tales of vampires and other monsters are ways of trying to understand the mysteries of capitalist relations, in which land is enclosed, privatized, and commodified; time as well as space is fragmented and regularized; and individualism and market relations supplant traditional systems of kinship and community.

In between these two chapters, McNally reads Marx's use of gothic metaphors as crucial to his account of capitalism as an occult system, one that makes work invisible. In non-capitalist class societies, the appropriation of wealth by the ruling class is evident: peasants and others hand over part of their labor, their product, or the money-equivalent, in the form of rent or taxes. "But, in bourgeois society, it is capitalists" (or job-creators, as they'd like to be known) "who pay workers, offering them wages as pay for their labor. Yet, this visible exchange conceals the invisible counter-exchange from which capital profits. For, once they purchase labor-power as a commodity, capitalists can squeeze more from it than the value of the wages paid. They do so by obliging laborers to work longer than the time required to produce the value of their wages. Everything beyond this constitutes surplus-labor, to use Marx's terminology, a surplus-value above and beyond the capitalist's costs of production" (144-145). This monstrous exploitation of living labor occurs in the hidden abode of production, where the sale of life-activity as commodified labor-power alienates the workers from themselves. Moreover, not only do "human beings [come to] relate to their life-energies as alienable fragments of personhood, as dead things that can be sold off" (147), but also, "In dividing labor-processes into ever-smaller motions that can be repeated with ever-greater speed, capitalist manufacture anatomizes the laboring body, fixating on specific organs, muscles, and nerves. Capital 'mutilates the worker,' writes Marx" (139).

The value embodied in the manufactured commodity or the commodified service is an abstraction from the things themselves or the concrete labor involved in them. "The capitalist economy thus effects a real abstraction in which products become bearers of an invisible substance (value) and concrete labor becomes the bearer of labor in the abstract" (123). The Latin root of the verb to abstract means literally to "separate, detach, cut off" (123). This abstraction is what Marx calls the secret of the fetishism of commodities, and among the tropes of cutting, dismemberment, disembodiment, and bodily horror woven throughout Marx's account of capitalism and McNally's account of the monsters of the market.

The book's central chapter also contains as clear an account as I've seen of the processes of financialization and the mechanisms of hedge funds, derivatives, credit default swaps, and other mysteries of financial speculation. Stressing that “beneath the esoteric circuits of finance lie material practices of plunder of the world’s resources and its laborers” (171), McNally elucidates the nature of fictitious capital—that which is derived not from the congealed labor of the past but from the possible labor of the future, the interest-bearing capital that hides its detour though work that has not yet been done, surplus value that has not yet been extracted, "claims on future wealth … that may, or may not, be realized" (154).

In making visible these mysteries, tales of vampires and zombies, like Marxist theory, can help us see the truly monstrous nature of capitalism, and in seeing it, move to change it. Theory-heads may be disappointed (not to say annoyed) that McNally dismisses great swathes of twentieth-century thought as "postmodernism" (referring us to an earlier book of his own), similarly rejecting the work of Michel Foucault by erroneously assimilating it to the dualistic body-spirit paradigm that informs the Marxian tradition of critical analysis of capitalism. But Monsters of the Market has much to offer lovers of monster stories interested in their early roots and global resonance, as well as anyone looking for a lucid account of the more mysterious manifestations of capitalism. Not for nothing was Monsters of the Market awarded the Issac Deutscher award for a book ‘which exemplifies the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition’.

Near the end of Monsters of the Market, McNally writes,

Marx saw the key to unions and workers' organization not in their strictly material achievements but, rather, in the spirit of opposition they cultivated. Without struggle, resistance, and international organization, he argued, workers risked becoming 'apathetic, thoughtless, more or less well-fed instruments of production'—in short, zombies who cannot awaken. Until that awakening, monstrous utopia lives on in stories, dreams, music, art, and moments of resistance that prefigure the grotesque movements through which the collective laborer throws off its zombified state in favor of something new, frightening, and beautiful. (266)

http://kboo.fm/node/52881