Gender Justice

Abstract

Chapter 2 argued that one of the key explanations of the resilience of gender and the endurance of its hierarchical binarism is the assumption and construction of oppositional sexual difference. After proposing that bodies and subjectivity need not be framed and constituted in this way, I went on to propose that, owing to the way that sex/gender is constituted and maintained through how we see ourselves, how others see us and how we see them (i.e. subjectively and intersubjectively), the problem is the ‘fund of ideas’ (Archer 1996: xiii) from which we draw to do this constituting and understanding of identity. It is my position that the metaphysical foundation of this problem is that the prevalent mode of perception inheres an oppositional mode of perceiving the other — that is, the presumption of an antagonistic self/other relationship — which is co-constitutive with how we understand bodies, and subsequently each other and society. Foucault makes the normative claim that such hierarchical opposition, which ze characterises as ‘dissymmetry, exclusion of the other … a kind of threat of being dispossessed of your own energy, and so on. All that is quite disgusting!’ (Foucault 1984: 346). The question is, then, what would a less oppositional, less exclusionary, more symmetrical and more reciprocal ethic look like?