The Social Illusion of Race, Gender and Sex/Intersexuality

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First of all, one might ask, what does gender have to do with race? Don’t these categories address different target groups, and why is it an illusion? If one pays closer attention to the word illusion, it becomes clear that the answer to the second question is “no”, simply because it addresses every human being.  However, as we will see in the following, this concept is not as easy as it seems. Just by using the term “different target groups” I have already created a categorization. In this post, I will show how, and why society creates social categories, and why it is important to realize their interchangeability by comparing the historical concepts of “race” and “intersex”. In this context, I will refer to Elizabeth Reis’ Bodies in Doubt, in particular to the first chapter which deals with the categorization of hermaphrodites, and draw parallels to categorizations of blacks in White Victims, Black Villains by Carol Stabile, by connecting both to the idea of ideologies in The Theory Toolbox by Nealon and Girroux. I believe that in order to overcome the social bias, it is important to know were these seemingly normal “viewpoints” come from, and to find possibilities to stop/change them by questioning them.

Both terms gender and sex are social constructs, because the words themselves have no natural meaning, but are rather based on societies desire to categorize and differentiate things. In order to give words meaning, people talk about them in different contexts, and try to prove it scientifically. By society I mean e.g. media, upbringing, education, surrounding, the law, religion etc. or in short; every kind of group that deals with social contexts. I will refer to these contexts as discourses. “Words have only meaning only in specific contexts; they don’t “mean” something naturally or mystically (Nealon and Girroux, 24). So if there is no meaning in the word or in the object itself, it becomes clear that is us who give meaning to it. Neolon and Giroux refer to this process as ideology, since “Ideology is the making natural of cultural phenomena“(98). Furthermore, they add that ideologies are misleading ideas that cause “false consciousness” (an inability to see real conditions because they are masked by false ideas (93) or so to say an “illusion”.

Reading Reis’ book in the context of ideologies, it seems easy to draw parallels between the problem of gender and especially intersex and the problem of race. The actual problem is that humans make it a problem. We tend to see the world (consciously and unconsciously) as a binary system of e.g. black and white, or male and female, because our social ideologies tell us to. In order to have an orientation in the world, we believe in authorities. These authorities may be the media, scientists, physicians or the government etc. In order to keep a kind of “order” in the world, these authorities try to determine what is natural or normal, and in turn unnormal and unnatural. In the 17^th and 18^th century, when the medical sector was on a very basic level, doctors reports on hermaphrodites (intersexual induviduals) depicted the latter as something that is “in between” the binary system of male and female. Some physicians even believed that these “creature[s]” (Reis,1) weren’t even human. Reis shows that they referred to hermaphrodites in their reports as “monstrous births” (2), and associated them with predominately negative images such as the devil or mythical creatures. Consequently, since intersexed people had "abnormal genitalia", and did not fit the binary system, they were said to threaten the social ideologies of e.g. marriage and normative heterosexuality, and the political system when it comes to the "right" to vote. These examples are compareable to the ideologies of race in the respect that although there is no genetic difference between any human “race”, and there is no natural meaning between e.g. being of “white” or “black” skin color, the “White” society (especially in the colonial era) gave it a meaning by determining every one of a different skin color, in particular black, as inferior. Those people were also questioned to be human, and as scientific tests failed to prove these assumptions, and even after the Civil War, the government and the media strategically started to illustrate them as the “culture of dependency” and “crime” that was “disorganizing” the social and political system (Stabile). 

These are only a few connetions that depict how social ideologies influence our way of thinking, by creating and normalizing meanings. These examples also show that the constructs are interchangeable because the concept is always the same:

Ideologies accompanied with negative associations create fear, and fear can easily become hatred. The fear for uprising of certain groups causes suppression through the government and other authorities. This suppression is also caused by societies desire for power/priviliges and wrong ideologies.

We grow up, surrounded by these ideologies and it might seem difficult not to follow the ideas which have become written or unwritten rules for us, the so-called “common sense”. Altough meanings change, as society itself changes, intersexuality is still seen as something "wrong". Having the basic concept of the ideology/illusion in mind, shouldn't we finally be able to understand that nothing has a meaning by nature, that we give meaning to things and objects through discourses, and that we have the power to change these discourses? I think the main question is: Why would we want it to change if it doesn’t affect us “directly” or if we are the "priviledged?

Sources:

Nealon, Jeffrey. Searls Giroux, Susan. The Theory Toolbox. Second Edition. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2012. Print

Reis, Elizabeth. Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009. Print.

Stabile, Carol. White Victims, Black Villains. Gender, race, and crime news in US culture. New York: Routledge, 2006, 153-189.