The Contribution of Black Feminism

Towards the end of the eighties, substantial challenges appeared to the notion of gender, echoing the debates that took place within the feminist movement. Among these criticisms, those of black and lesbian feminists stand out: they questioned the priority given to the category of gender over other identity features such as class, sexual orientation, race, or ethnicity (hooks Reference hooks1984; Wittig Reference Wittig1992). As we have seen, “gender” aimed to move research beyond its reduction to the scope of “women” as an autonomous and/or universal classification. However, the central issue of these critiques was not solely the diversity of experiences that women can have, but more importantly, how these experiences are intersected by identity axes that overlap in complex ways. Furthermore, the suspicion expressed by different feminist thinkers and activists was: if gender is considered the main category of analysis, what other features of women’s experiences are thus neglected or even made invisible? What relationship may this have with the reproduction of unequal power relations within women as a group?

bell hooks’s key contribution challenged the place of gender as the primary category of analysis in feminist theory. In Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (Reference hooks1984), hooks articulates the demand of hearing the voice of black women not just in society as a whole but within the feminist movement and academia. hooks criticizes the focus on issues of gender by white feminist theorists insofar as it makes invisible or straightforwardly ignores issues of class and race that are equally relevant to understanding the different ways women experience oppression. In her words: “Privileged feminists have largely been unable to speak to, with, and for diverse groups of women because they either do not understand fully the inter-relatedness of sex, race, and class oppression or refuse to take this inter-relatedness seriously” (Reference hooks1984, 14 [my emphasis]).

hooks claims that it is misleading to focus exclusively on gender: to consider it the primary category to understand women’s oppression evinces that those undertaking research are not considering that race or class have an equally relevant role as axes of domination. In simpler terms, the most prominent research in gender studies has been carried out by white feminists who do not acknowledge their own privileged position in a racist society: race does not figure as relevant in their work, given that their own experiences are not marked by racism as it is the case with black women. Hence, the issue of race is not properly considered in their theorizations. However, hooks does not claim that feminist research should be dismissed, given that it has been conducted in a biased form. On the contrary, hooks criticizes this racial blind spot to argue that black feminists have a key role in the general theoretical and political project of feminism.

Given that gender implies a relational understanding of femininity and masculinity, hooks explains how race illuminates in a particular way the experiences of black women in their relation to white women and to black men: black women share with white women the experience of sexist oppression. However, in terms of race, black women are oppressed while white women are privileged, and hence, participate in their oppression. Regarding black men, black women share with them the oppression due to a white supremacist organization of society, but in terms of gender, black men enjoy a privileged position in relation to black women. hooks concludes:

The special vantage point that hooks believes black women occupy because of their marginal position in society implies a specific standpoint from which feminist theory could be better developed, avoiding its racial blind spot and incorporating a wider perspective on women’s and men’s specific experiences.Footnote ¹¹ That is why hooks has been considered as part of the tradition of feminist standpoint theory, along with theorists such as Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway (Harding Reference Harding2004).

Haraway (Reference Haraway1991) highlights the relevance of the criticism women of color have offered of the “ethnocentric and imperializing tendencies of European and Euro-American feminisms,” particularly since they started to publish in the early 1980s. Moreover, Haraway adds:

As we saw, Lévi-Strauss’s theory of the exchange of women in patriarchal societies to secure social relationality between men was used by Rubin to analyze how women were constituted as objects but not subjects of rights since they could be exchanged by their fathers in marriage. To give an example of how black feminist criticism illuminates the limits of this original theorization, Haraway explains that in the New World, black women were not constituted as ‘woman’, as white women were:

By presenting the incest taboo as a determinant of the passage from nature to culture, Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology understood the specificity of “humanity” as related to kinship and the emergence of culture. However, as Haraway relates, not “every” body was considered “human” to the same extent. Within these implicit “degrees” of humanity, slavery condemned some bodies to the lesser status of “animal.”

In Rubin’s theory, kinship vested men with rights in women that they did not have in themselves. This explained the transformation of females into oppressed women, the cultural production of gender from “natural” sex. Rubin’s anthropological perspective made clear how women’s oppression was not a natural or necessary outcome, but a historically specific process. However, as hooks, Haraway, and others showed, “slavery abolished kinship for one group in a legal discourse that produced whole groups of people as alienable property” (Spillers quoted in Haraway Reference Haraway1991, 145).

In conclusion, the experience of black women cannot be separated from the institution of slavery since they were “unpositioned, unfixed, in a system of names; they were, specifically, unlocatable and so disposable” (Haraway Reference Haraway1991, 145). In other words, if white women “were not legally or symbolically fully human,” slaves were “not legally or symbolically human at all” (146).

With hooks and Haraway, we also see that the issue of race relates not only to the history of slavery and its effects but also to the history of colonization. In “Moments of Danger: Race, Gender, and Memories of Empire” (Reference Ware1992), Vron Ware argues for a feminist theory of history that investigates the construction and reproduction of racialized femininities. Through a discussion of oral history, Ware considers how social memory of the British Empire “is continually affected and transformed by cultural forms in the present” (116). Her concern in this paper is “to understand how categories of racial, ethnic, and cultural difference – particularly between women – have been constructed in the past, in order to explore how these categories continue to be reproduced in more recent political and ideological conflicts” (116).

As hooks had already shown, Ware, too, stresses that, although feminism was supposed to appeal to women everywhere, “too many women have been excluded or left by the wayside feeling unwelcome, invisible, and unaccounted for by the representation of a sisterhood which was apparently ‘white’” (119). Ware adds that it was not only “race” that divided women “but it has certainly presented feminists with one of the most complex puzzles” (119). Hence, Ware claims that any feminist historian wanting to adopt a perspective on race and gender ought to follow the model of black feminist criticism (120–121). Doing so would mean understanding that race is not a matter of exclusive concern to black people and that historical research should inquire into the social construction of whiteness. Here, Ware’s argument resounds with Scott’s perspective on historical analysis:

Ware also argues for a similar relationship between knowledge and power in historical writing: “In order to figure out how ideas about black and white femininity are expressed today, it helps to consider how these categories have been produced historically” (199).

The value of black feminist criticism to feminist theory and historical writing is not reduced to showing the limits of an exclusive focus on gender and the complexity or “puzzles” when approaching the different experiences of femininity, masculinity, and oppression: it is to be found also in the answer that they provide, namely, the acknowledgement of the interrelatedness (as hooks claimed) or relational connectedness (in Ware’s words) of gender, class, and race. It is to black feminist activism and theory that we owe the notion of intersectionality.

In the early nineties, Kimberlé Crenshaw (Reference Crenshaw1991) published a ground-breaking article in which she used the term “intersectionality” as a metaphor to characterize how systems of oppression, such as gender and race overlap. As Patricia Hill Collins (Reference Collins2019) reconstructs:

Intersectional studies will develop in the following decades, retaining this critical insight. Black feminist contributions show that the development of the notion of gender has been motivated and challenged by social activism and its own debates. Thus, academics and activists have shared an interest in comprehending the puzzles of identity, among them the complex overlapping and sometimes opposing dynamics of issues of “gender” and “race.”Footnote ¹²

Judith Butler: Imploding the Sex/Gender Distinction

In Gender Trouble (Reference Butler1990), Butler undertakes a genealogical critique of gender as part of the basic vocabulary of the tradition of feminist theory.Footnote ¹³ Their critique aims at the very definition of the term as discontinuous from the notion of sex: that what we consider that pertains to gender does not “follow from” what sex is. This was the theoretical move that allowed feminists in the seventies to reject the idea that inequalities between men and women were justified in nature or biology: gender then “is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex” (Reference Butler1990, 8). However, as Butler explains:

Although feminist theorists had already argued that what has been considered feminine and masculine had no necessary relation with the way bodies are sexed, Butler is pointing out that a certain continuity between the categories remained implicit: insofar as what is feminine is considered as the cultural meaning of female bodies, and what is masculine, of male bodies. But, if there is a discontinuity, why has this correspondence been preserved? Moreover, why claim that there are two genders for two sexes, and not three, four or any other number? Butler concludes that: “The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it” (9). Hence, if gender is to be fully considered as constructed and radically independent of sex, “man and masculine might just as easily signify the female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one” (9).Footnote ¹⁴

The resistance of our gendered “common sense” to accept this claim is proof of Butler’s point: that there is an unjustified assumption of correspondence or correlation between sex and gender that remains in place in the feminist theorization of gender. However, Butler’s argument goes even deeper: they also pose questions over the supposed “natural” or “given” status of sex:

Butler claims that what we consider “sex” is also culturally constructed insofar as it depends on scientific and institutional discourses. In other words, the meanings of “sex” are historical, too. If this is so, then “sex” is not a pre-discursive reality. Moreover, Butler will also conclude that it is our understanding of gender that produces our idea of sex as a fixed binary: the notion of sex is not the cause of gender – we already knew that – but an effect of gender. This is more difficult to grasp or accept: “If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all” (9–10).

Here is Butler’s most polemical claim that amounts to a strong blow to the very category that previous feminist theorists championed during the eighties. Paradoxically, we could use Scott’s own words to understand Butler’s critique: gender is a primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated. Butler’s argument traces how this legitimating function of gender works even at the level of the determination of what sex is. It is the sex binary that remained unchallenged in the original definition of gender, even in Scott’s own theorization, as she would recognize in her writings from the nineties.

While black feminists and the notion of intersectionality questioned the exclusive relevance or priority of gender when studying the oppressed experience of women, Butler’s Gender Trouble represents the climax of the tragic narrative of the emergence of the category of gender insofar as it attacks its very definition: they question its theoretical heart, the analogy that sex is to nature as gender is to culture. This founding analogy makes nature (and the body understood as natural) a mere passivity that receives the active imposition of form from culture.Footnote ¹⁵ However, Butler not only distrusts the notions of nature and culture that the parallelism presupposes: but they also undermine the analogy by questioning its theoretical performance and its political effects. If we take the sex-gender distinction to its limit as a distinction between the natural-given-prediscursive and the cultural-constructed-discursive, in their own words:

To this extent, the original definition of gender has been seriously undermined even in its most sophisticated version. This critique of gender is also not just a “theoretical” one: it goes hand in hand with a critique of the political limits of the way feminist theory had understood gender. The target of Butler’s critique is the heterosexist assumptions behind the notion and its presupposition of ideal sexual dimorphism. Moreover, Butler claims that the heterosexual matrix through which subjects are formed as gendered subjects requires that the binary of sex be posited as prediscursive: it is because we believe that the zero degree of embodiment is exhausted by the options of “male” or “female” and their corresponding “masculine” or “feminine” gender that heterosexuality as a social norm is sustained, reproduced, and reinforced.

Here we also have a reversal or denial of the presupposition of a linear nature of the relationship between sex, gender, and desire: even in the definition of gender, there was an assumption that “first there was sex,” as the given nature of bodies, male and female (a reality outside time, history and interpretation); then “there was gender,” as the historical interpretation of male and female bodies as men and women and their roles, rights, or possibilities in society; and because of that, “finally” we have heterosexual desire as the erotic and affective destiny of human males and females. This linearity is criticized because it lacks justification: it is supported by a metaphysical or foundational view of the nature of human bodies or “nature” itself, on the one hand, and it also assumes that history, as the realm of human development, is linear in itself, positing an “origin” that explains why what comes later has happened, and even a teleological drive, where the aim of human relationality is heterosexuality. History would then come “after” nature (as in Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology), and the temporal process of “humanization” would be, at the same time, a departure from our animal origin and delimited or confined by our natural instincts toward reproduction, understood in its cultural form as heterosexuality.

These foundational, linear, and teleological assumptions had already been challenged by poststructuralism, as we saw with Scott. These assumptions are also rejected in Butler’s text, given that Butler is presenting a genealogical critique of gender. There is no “origin” to reconstruct, no time “before oppression” – as the theories of patriarchy or even Rubin’s sex-gender system implied. As Butler would famously claim, there is no original “man” and “woman” for which other forms of embodiment – lesbian, gay, trans, or nonbinary – would be derivative copies or abnormal forms. Thus, a poststructuralist critique focuses on the regime of knowledge-power that requires that narrative of origin to reproduce itself. Butler calls it “heterosexual matrix”:

This notion attests to the primacy given by Butler to compulsive or normative heterosexuality as a fundamental norm in Western culture. Butler is following Foucault’s take on The History of Sexuality (Reference Foucault1980) and building their theory from lesbian critical interventions within the feminist movement and from the previous theoretical work by lesbian feminists such as Monique Wittig, Adrienne Rich, and, of course, Rubin (Reference Rubin and Reiter1975) who had already argued that the incest taboo presupposed another, more fundamental taboo on homosexuality. Moreover, Rubin (Reference Rubin and Vance1984) also studied the normative and oppressive aspects of our understanding of sexuality. However, there is another contextual element that influences Butler’s take on compulsory heterosexuality: the HIV/AIDS crisis since the eighties and how it made visible the violent consequences of homophobia that prevented proper response to the epidemic all over the world (and, particularly, in the United States under Reagan’s administration).

If our knowledge and experience of sex, gender, and desire are produced by a heterosexual matrix, this means that it is not because there are male and female humans that they are destined to love or desire in a heterosexual way (if they are to be considered “normal” subjects). Sexual dimorphism is not the cause of heterosexuality; it is the other way around. Heterosexuality is a social construction whose effect is our belief in sexual dimorphism as the uncontested given nature of bodies. If heterosexuality is the “natural” sexual orientation, homosexuality, then, is “unnatural,” even a mental disease, as it was considered by the World Health Organization and psychiatric handbooks until 1990.

For the reader not familiar with feminist and queer theory developments of the last four decades, here again, they could find a counter-intuitive claim. Is Butler claiming that human bodies cannot be described as being either male or female? Yes, that is Butler’s claim in part, but some clarifications are needed. On the one hand, Butler is not the first one to point this out. Previous studies on the history of science have contributed to the critique of sexual dimorphism and male and female as dichotomic or “opposed” to each other, as in the research by Foucault and Haraway. On the other hand, the sentence “human bodies cannot be described as being either male or female” is not the correct phrasing of Butler’s claim: it should rather be “human bodies cannot be neutrally described as being either male or female.” What I am highlighting is that it is not an issue of impossibility of description: it is an issue of possibilities of description and their consequences. What poststructuralism (and other linguistic turn perspectives) taught us is that a neutral description is impossible. Thus, we see again the intimate relation between knowledge and politics that is stressed by Butler in the same manner as in Scott’s texts.

The explicit political aim of Butler’s critique is the presence of a homophobic bias in gender studies and feminist theory. Butler’s genealogical critique shows that what was left unquestioned in the sex-gender distinction had the political effect of securing heterosexual assumptions. Does this distinction make room for lesbian and gay ways of living one’s embodiment? Are lesbians “other forms” of being a woman?Footnote ¹⁶ Are they derivative forms of an original one? Moreover, why did “woman” tacitly imply “heterosexual woman”? Is there a “normal” way of being a woman and an “abnormal” one? By building on Foucault’s histories of the way that sciences and institutions since the seventeenth century focused on sexually so-called deviated or abnormal subjects, Butler shows that feminist theory – as society at large – uncritically assumed that heterosexuality is the norm for people’s way of loving and desiring. In their argument, the unexamined assumption of the binary of gender and sexual dimorphism is the ungrounded ground on which that assumption rested and continued to be reproduced.Footnote ¹⁷

So far, then, we have traced the following problematic assumptions of the analytical category of gender: (1) the sex-gender binarism by which women correspond to femininity and men to masculinity, which reinforces the matrix of compulsive heterosexuality, that is, the assumption that there are only two sexes, two corresponding genders and a sexual desire of one gender for the other; (2) the taboo of homosexuality, which made it impossible to consider nonheterosexual sexualities as modes of desire with equal legitimacy instead of seeing them as “deviant” forms; and (3) ideal sexual dimorphism: taking the heterosexual binary normative framework for granted reinforced the classification of the body as “either woman or man,” with no third option. In this case, intersex activism has been fundamental, given that declaring “pathological” the anatomy of newborns who did not conform to ideal sexual dimorphism has resulted in the violence of surgical “correction” of their bodies to adjust to “what should have been the case” (Fausto-Sterling Reference Fausto-Sterling2000).

Respectively, these cultural assumptions contributed to the reproduction of unjust social hierarchies and even violence toward: (1) trans and nonbinary, (2) gay and lesbian, and (3) intersex lives. The suspicion around the notion of gender was that it was part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Due to this criticism, Butler and Scott argued in their nineties’ writings that feminist theoretical focus should move to issues of sex or sexual difference instead of issues of gender (Butler Reference Butler1993; Scott Reference Scott1999). Such claims make plausible to write a narrative of the “rise” and “fall” of the analytical category of gender as the result of these feminist debates.

The Performativity of Gender

As with black feminist thought, Butler’s contribution also offers a new way of thinking about gender, one that is built over the destructive power of their intervention. In addition to defining the knowledge-power dynamic through which subjects are gendered as a heterosexual matrix, Butler claims that gender should be redefined as performative. Why call it performative? Butler considers gender as related to the performative feature of discourse, its possibility of bringing about what it names.Footnote ¹⁹

Although a thorough analysis exceeds this Element, let us recall Austin’s famous distinction between a constative and a performative use of language. Austin showed that there are situations in which the words that are uttered do not “describe” what is happening but constitute what is happening. If I say: “This sentence is written in English,” I am making a constative utterance whose aim is to describe an occurrence, and, hence, it makes sense to ask if what I said is true or false. However, when in the context of a marriage ceremony, a priest says, “I declare you husband and wife,” he is not describing something that has already happened. He is not informing the audience of a “fact”: he is actually joining two persons in marriage by saying those words. It is the same case when I make a promise: if I say, “I promise I will pay you my debt, I am not referring to an extralinguistic event that may make my sentence true or false. In fact, my words are not true or false because the performative use of language is not properly assessed in terms of truth conditions. My promise will be kept or broken, but it makes no sense to say it was true or false when I made it. It was made regardless of whether I kept it or not in the future.

Of course, some conditions must be met for the speech act to be valid: for example, the person performing the marriage should be the appropriate one, and the person must follow the conventions related to the act. Hence, the performative use of language relates to norms and institutions that give it its force, its ability to be successful as an act or, as Austin preferred, to be felicitous.

Butler combines the idea of the performativity of language with Foucault’s thesis on biopower; thus, the emergence of the subject is a process within a matrix of knowledge and power that produces it as a gendered subject. There is a performative declaration at the moment of birth, where the institutions of medicine and the law are involved, that produces subjects as “boys” or “girls.” This production is not a single act; it is a process that goes on and is reiterated throughout people’s lives under social surveillance. In a sense, the gender we are assigned at birth (and, with today’s technologies, even before birth) is a promise society demands us to keep – a promise we were not really “there” as conscious subjects to make in the first place. That is the effect of the compulsory repetition of gender norms and the paradox of the subject, as Foucault has shown: we are enabled as subjects by social norms at the same time that we are “subjected” to them.

If gendered subjects are produced within a heterosexual matrix, then gender is an accomplishment, not an attribute that is merely “expressed” or the “cause” of how we behave, desire, or love. In Butler’s words:

A key element of gender as performative is its rejection of the idea of a “preexisting identity.” More specifically, Butler challenges the idea of a “cause” of our gendered self as a foundation that would universally define our experience and behavior as women or men. As genealogy reveals, it is the other way around: our self-perception as women or men is the effect of a series of compulsive behaviors we are obliged to repeat since birth. Gender is thus related to the social expectations around our way of living our embodiment.

Thinking of gender as performative means that it is an effect of normative discursive practices and frameworks that constitute us through the compulsive repetition of those behaviors and roles: it is this repetition, sustained over time, that creates in us the illusory belief in being (or having to be) coherent subjects of sex, gender, and sexual desire, that is, of “having” a gendered “identity” in a substantial sense. As a process reiterated over time, gender is a social ritual drama that requires the performance to be repeated, rewarded, or punished. Bodies are no longer considered passive surfaces of cultural inscription but are seen as a sedimented effect of this process of compulsive repetition, as bodily styles.

Now, this constitution is contingent and not necessary in a philosophical sense: it could have been different. There is no metaphysical foundation that grounds and determines it. That is why there is a compulsion to repeat in order to approach the normative binary ideals of “true woman” and “true man.” Moreover, since they are social ideal norms, they are impossible to fully embody. That is why Butler sees in the performativity of gender also a theory of agency: to the extent that repetition is understood as an iteration without an origin or foundation, it is then a temporal process subject to failure, to the possible displacement (and change) of gender norms.Footnote ²¹ As we saw, Butler claimed that believing in an essential sex or a true or abiding masculinity or femininity (or implicitly accepting this by not historicizing these notions) conceals the performativity of gender. However, if we see gender as performative, what gains “visibility” are the possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality. In simpler terms, gay, lesbian, trans, intersex, and nonbinary modes of existence are subject positions produced by the same heterosexual binary matrix that produces “normal” straight women and men but given its normative nature, the former are socially read (and punished) as “not-normal.”

We could say that the recognition of the hierarchical component implicit in the apparently “neutral” social classifications of bodies had already been made explicit and denounced through the notion of gender in the seventies and eighties, showing how the relational definition of masculinity and femininity established an asymmetry by which what was feminine was socially valued as inferior to what was masculine. In the performative conception, this implicit hierarchy is also criticized, but the binary reading of gender is rejected: now, what is made explicit is how the heterosexual matrix forces a dynamic of inferiorization between “normal” subject-bodies and those that will be read as deviant or pathological. That is why, in Butler’s view, the force of the performative relates not only to biopower and its generative effects but also to the violence of gender norms that are policed in formal and informal ways. The interpretation of homosexual, transsexual, and gender nonconforming people as deviant or mentally ill enabled their criminalization, imprisonment, or seclusion in psychiatric institutions until quite recently.Footnote ²²

So far, I have presented Butler’s take on gender to show that, although it was properly read in the nineties as a strong blow on the theorization produced by previous feminist theory, it also opened then the way for its critical refiguration. That is why I propose to abandon the seemingly tragic narrative of the “rise and fall” of the usefulness of gender and replace it with a different retrospective take from the vantage point of the present – a moment in which the meaning of gender is, again, openly contested. Hence, let me explain what it means to refigure gender as a historical category.

The theory of performativity refigures the category of gender as a historical one by casting gender in itself as a historical emergence or event (Scott Reference Scott1991): its definition is the result of a specific context, with its specific possibilities and limits, its assumptions and biases, its power relations. It is also a temporal classification with no foundational status and can change or be redefined by being used and contested. When we considered gender as an analytical category, we had already claimed that it named the changing organization of sexual difference as a historical phenomenon. However, if it is a historical category, we can question the implicit binary understanding of its relationship to the notion of sex. The iterable nature of all categories, even those related to identity, gives us a key into their historicity:

Gender, then, is both a cultural way of configuring the body and open to its remaking. This process of making and remaking what counts as a legible body relates to its historicity: “Terms such as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are notoriously changeable; there are social histories for each term; their meaning change radically depending upon geopolitical boundaries and cultural constraints on who is imagining whom, and for what purpose” (10, my emphasis) The historicity of gender is also tied to a repetition open in its effects, its performativity:

Let me spell out some features of the historicity of gender: the embodied subject emerges through a temporal process that has no foundational origin that determines “from the start” what it will become and no closed destiny either. Hence, subjects are opened “at both ends” of their becoming: this openness explains the production of subjectivity through the forced repetition of ideal gender norms – because there is no given, preexisting identity – and the possibility of agency – because the singular process by which a body interacts with those norms combines ways of approximating them and ways of deviating or swerving from them.

There is another side of the openness of subjects that relates to gender as an enactment, a social ritual drama. Gender is lived as an internal reality, but feminist theorists have shown that it exceeds this reductive way of defining it – in another sense in which “the personal is political.” Gender also relates to available symbols, normative concepts, and political, social, economic, and religious institutions and practices. It does not belong solely to the private sphere: it is also a very public issue, something that could be illustrated with nineteenth-century legislation on dress codes (e.g., see Stryker Reference Stryker2008).

Gender relates to knowledge and power, words and doings, and the private and public spheres. Given the changing nature of these realms, we encounter again what Scott had already stated regarding the task of the historian: to trace how concepts such as gender acquire the appearance of fixity and to pay attention to the play of force involved in any society’s construction and implementation of meanings: to politics. This construction is also done through our knowledge practices. Again, knowledge and politics of bodies are intimately related. How can we, then, understand this relationship without collapsing one notion into the other? To answer this, I will introduce Haraway’s notion of situated knowledges. With it, I will argue that an integral feature of the historical redefinition of gender is born from the way that feminist theory imploded another dualism, that between nature and culture that has been a founding assumption of the definition of gender as opposed to sex.

Donna Haraway’s Situated Knowledges: History and Embodiment Beyond Dualisms

One of the theses that defined gender as a social construction presupposed that “sex” belongs to the realm of nature as the fixed and given “raw material” of embodiment. Butler’s critique of the sex-gender distinction was influenced by feminist inquiries that had put that dualism into question. Donna Haraway’s work has been key to rethinking the relationship between nature and culture, sex and gender, language and materiality, constructivism and empiricism, and, with that, knowledge and power. If performativity allows us to refigure gender as a historical category, the notion of situated knowledges is also fundamental for further elaborating on the relationship between the knowledge and politics of bodies this redefinition entails.

In “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Haraway claims that:

I want to highlight the partial coincidences of this definition with Scott’s and Butler’s ones. First, we have the notion of field. Second, we found the association of gender with the production of difference. Third, they reject the idea of “fixity” or “reification” in relation to embodiment. Haraway will also relate embodiment with a matrix, as we shall see later (595).

The idea of “nodes” in a field and responsibility “for difference” indicates the entanglement between a feminist perspective on embodiment and ethics. This is so because Haraway is elaborating the notion of situated knowledges as a feminist redefinition of scientific objectivity by which the intimate ties between bodies, knowledge, and power are acknowledged in their tension and potency.

Feminist epistemologists in the eighties rejected the definition of scientific objectivity as value neutrality for two interconnected reasons: first, because it presupposed an unattainable knowledge ideal and, second, because it had historically enabled a specific hegemonic perspective to be accepted as “the universal” scientific point of view. It is an impossible ideal because it presupposes a timeless, ahistorical, and unconditioned subject of knowledge: one that is nowhere and comes from nowhere. This is nothing other than the “God Trick”: believing that we could know as a God would, who exists without being in any specific time and place and can see everything at once. However, in the history of modern science, as feminist epistemologists have shown, a specific subject position occupied “the” scientific position: that of the white, cis, heterosexual, bourgeois male.Footnote ²³ Hence, the class, race, and gender biases of much of scientific production (Harding Reference Harding1986). There has been then no real “value neutrality” in an epistemological sense. Moreover, the God Trick also leads to ethical shortcomings: by promising a perspective of transcendence of all limits, the modern notion of the objective subject fails to take responsibility for its knowledge claims.

For Haraway, the issue of the God Trick view of objectivity and the biases in scientific research that it made possible is not just a question of “bad science.” Instead, it is a question of the need to redefine our understanding of the subject of knowledge.Footnote ²⁴ The feminist reformulation of objectivity means recognizing that there is no subject without a body and, therefore, without location, without marks of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and so on. We have mistakenly thought about what we do when we investigate and produce knowledge if we do not take seriously the embodied nature of our existence and our knowledge practices. Knowledge is a human activity, one that is, as we ourselves are, subject to change and finitude – as the philosophy, history and sociology of science have shown during the second half of the twentieth century.

Our embodied existence locates us in a time, a place and a series of social classifications or categories of identity. That is why objectivity cannot avoid recognizing the situated status of our knowledge practices and claims. Nevertheless, Haraway’s idea of a subject of situated knowledges (in the plural) does not define this situatedness as a fixed location or close identity. On the contrary, similarly to Butler’s performativity, it also reveals our openness and relationality. Redescribing scientific practice from a conception of the subject that recognizes its embodied self teaches us about the limits of knowledge as much as it illuminates our partial perspective and positioned rationality. Situationality is epistemological and political: partiality (and not universality) becomes the condition for being heard, for making rational affirmations, and for being held responsible.

Since Haraway’s theoretical project has been to keep doing science, to produce “better accounts of the world,” she offers a meaning of science “that insists on its potency in ideological struggles” (Reference Haraway1988, 591): “Science has been utopian and visionary from the start: that is one reason ‘we’ need it” (585). This clarification relates to Haraway’s interest in moving beyond the constructivist versus empiricist dichotomy in general epistemological discussions and within the feminist theory tradition. Objectivity as situated knowledges implies a rejection of relativism. Here we find a certain difference with Scott’s and Butler’s poststructuralist frameworks. It is mostly a difference in rhetoric, since Haraway shares the critical drive of semiology, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and narratology, but believes that we can still reclaim a notion of objective scientific knowledge. As she claims: “We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life” (580).

Hence, objectivity as situated knowledges is not dichotomously opposed to value-neutrality. On the contrary, it is an attempt to move beyond sterile dichotomies like empiric-constructed, fact-fiction, and discovered-invented. For Haraway, in the objectivity-relativism dichotomy, both positions evade responsibility. The relativist “anything goes” that maintains that no objectivity is possible, that any position is equally valid, denies the relevance of critical research, and reduces the production of knowledge to a “mere” power game. For Haraway, we can recognize the mutual implications between power and knowledge without falling into the relativist extreme by engaging in “power-sensitive” conversations. In short, although modern science has fallen short of its emancipatory aims, it would be a mistake to see it as exclusively designed for oppression.

In sum, the voices of the oppressed are needed in science. If striving for situated knowledges means being accountable for our partial perspective, knowledge production needs to foster conversations between standpoints. To be “sensitive to power” means that we acknowledge that in the history of science, not every voice has been heard – as feminism itself has shown. Research must be undertaken recognizing the different power relations in which we participate. In sum, rationality is possible: it is redefined as critical positioning, as being accountable for our knowledge claims.

Since Haraway is moving beyond the empiricist-constructionist dichotomy, she frames the terms of the theoretical challenge as follows: how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice of recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of the “real” world (579). It is clear that the first part of this sentence sums up Scott’s poststructuralist take on history and gender. The second part relates to the linguistic turn in general. Within contemporary theory of history, Hayden White’s work (Reference White1973) has been a paradigmatic effort to recognize the way that historical writing appeals to figurative resources to “make meaning.” White’s take on historical writing is a sophisticated theory of how we make historical meaning. However, as Pihlainen (Reference Pihlainen2017) has shown, discussions over White’s contribution tended to arrive at sterile debates around the dichotomy of history as fact or fiction. Since the spirit of situated knowledges is to avoid such dualism, Haraway’s take can be useful for the theory of history, too.

To further understand Haraway’s position in relation to bodies, meaning, sex, and gender, we need to introduce another notion: that of the “material-semiotic actor.” Haraway connects the redefinition of objectivity with the critique of the dichotomy between subject and object of knowledge that makes the first one the powerful agent that appropriates the latter, that uses it as a resource as if the object were a passive, inert entity. To reject these assumptions, Haraway offers the notion of “material-semiotic actor” that “is intended to portray the object of knowledge as an active, meaning-generating part of apparatus of bodily production, without ever implying the immediate presence of such objects or, what is the same thing, their final or unique determination of what can count as objective knowledge at a particular historical juncture” (Reference Haraway1988, 595).

Haraway is inspired by Katie King’s notion of “apparatus of literary production” understood as “a matrix from which literature” is born:

Hence, objects of knowledge emerge at the intersection of different practices, among them, the views on the biological body that Haraway claims that emerged at the intersection of biological research and writing, medical and other business practices, and technologies (596).

To understand fully Haraway’s concept (and its relevance in Butler’s argument), let us present her critique of the sex-gender distinction. For Haraway, this distinction presented sex as “only the matter to the act of gender,” where “Sex is ‘resourced’ for its representation as gender, which ‘we’ can control. It has seemed all but impossible to avoid the trap of an appropriationist logic of domination built into the nature/culture opposition and its generative lineage, including the sex-gender distinction” (592).

In effect, as we saw, the original definition of gender as cultural meant that it was subject to change, either over the course of history or by political action. And since this was connected to the feminist rejection of biological determinism, sex remained as “natural” or given. Haraway believes that, in the eighties’ feminist debates, the notion of sex as an object of biological knowledge “appears regularly in the guise of biological determinism, threatening the fragile space for social constructionism and critical theory” (591). In other words, since the notion of gender was elaborated to argue against biological determinism and in favor of the political transformation of unequal social roles, discussing issues of “sex” seemed to lead too easily into biological determinism.

Haraway makes a point that is fundamental to her own elaboration of situated knowledges and objects as material-semiotic actors, on the one hand, and to our interest in finding in them an inspiring insight to rethink gender as a still useful historical category, on the other. She states that it was (and is) a mistake “to lose authoritative biological accounts of sex, which set up productive tensions with gender” (591): for Haraway, this leads not only to losing analytic power but also to viewing “the body itself as anything but a blank page for social inscriptions, including those of biological discourse” (591).

According to Haraway, this loss can be avoided by refusing the analytic tradition that conceives that “an object of knowledge is itself only matter for the seminal power, the act of the knower,” denying to the object any kind of agency (592). This has been the case with Western notions of nature that considered it only as “the raw material of culture, appropriated, preserved, enslaved, exalted, or otherwise made flexible by disposal by culture in the logic of capitalist colonialism” (592). For Haraway, the sex-gender distinction has been designed under the assumption of this specific way of differentiating nature from culture. There is also a close relationship between the critique of the nature/culture and sex/gender distinction and the epistemological and ethical core of Haraway’s framework, since situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen, ground, or resource. Haraway adds: “The point is paradigmatically clear in critical approaches to the social and human sciences, where the agency of people studied itself transforms the entire project of producing social theory. Indeed, coming to terms with the agency of the ‘objects’ studied is the only way to avoid gross error and false knowledge of many kinds in these sciences” (592).

Haraway extends this claim to all sciences, not just social ones; she claims that we should consider the world neither as speaking by itself nor as disappearing in favor of us as “master decoders”: “The codes of the world are not still, waiting to be read. The world is not raw material for humanization” (593). Haraway believes “the world encountered in knowledge projects is an active entity” (593). Even the body, the object of biological discourse, “becomes a most engaging being” in a way that further refuses biological determinism and any version of realism.

In sum, Haraway’s redefinition of objectivity is also, in my interpretation, a contribution to the redefinition of gender as a historical category. If a key feature of Butler’s performative take was their critique of the assumption that sex was a pre-discursive, ahistorical reality, with the notion of situated knowledges we grasp the historicity of our knowledge claims, in two senses: as radically contingent and as produced by a situated knowing subject. In Haraway’s material-semiotic view, we found further arguments to reject biological determinism: not just because there is a history of interpretations of what the body is, but also because the body as an object of knowledge is a material-semiotic node whose boundaries (named “sex” or “gender”) materialize in social interaction without being fully determined by those boundaries.Footnote ²⁵ Moreover, if objects of knowledge are boundary projects, we can consider the narrative over the category if gender as a history of the mapping practices of embodiment. If such history is not determined by any founding origin nor by any final destiny, it is because bodies boundaries also shift from within.

In the following section, I will offer an overview of fields of inquiry inspired by, or/and in a critical dialogue with, gender studies and feminist theory that during the nineties and two-thousands continued the reflection on embodiment, identity, knowledge, and power.

Queer Theory and Trans Studies

In the nineties, new fields emerged that inquired into matters of embodiment and sexualities that cannot be reduced to gender issues: this is the case of queer theory and trans studies that pursued anti-homophobic, sexually-dissident, and anti-transphobic research and explored nonnormative sexualities, intersexuality, and transgender identity in non-pathologizing ways.

Queer theory emerged amidst the political radicalization driven by the HIV/AIDS crisis and self-critical processes within gay and lesbian communities, particularly regarding the assimilationist tendencies of dominant gay and lesbian politics (Córdoba, Sáez, and Vidarte, Reference Córdoba, Sáez and Vidarte2005). This radicalization questioned the integrationist tendencies of significant parts of the movement and highlighted the limits of assimilation. In the mid eighties, groups such as Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and Queer Nation reclaimed the slur “queer” and transformed it into a tool for political action and resistance against normalization. This marked a shift in the subject of enunciation: “queer” was no longer an insult, but a self-designation used to signify a deliberate rupture with societal norms. The queer movement also rejected reducing gay identity to a consumable lifestyle within neoliberal society. As a post-identity movement, “queer” is not merely another identity within multicultural frameworks but a critical stance that examines the exclusion and marginalization produced by identity constructs. Thus, queer politics challenged the norms imposed by dominant heterosexual society and addressed internal processes of normalization and exclusion within gay culture, including the marginalization of lesbians, trans, and nonbinary bodies, immigrants, racialized individuals, people with disabilities, and sex workers. This critique and movement paved the way for queer politics that will influence queer theory.

Although the field of LGBT studies had been developing since the seventies, influenced by the gay liberation movement, queer theory emerged from the interest in the politics of sexuality and gender “in light of major developments in feminist theory, LGBT studies, and poststructuralism during the previous twenty years” (Turner Reference Turner and Stein2004, 481). The writings by Foucault (Reference Foucault1980), Rubin (Reference Rubin and Vance1984), Butler (Reference Butler1990), and Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (Reference Sedgwick1990), were considered founding texts of queer theory.Footnote ²⁶

For queer theory, there is an intimate relation between normative views on gender and sexual identity and the distribution and exercise of power. Since what is considered proper or improper about sexuality has changed over time, queer theory explores “how current definitions came to be and how political action – broadly defined to include activities in social, cultural, and intellectual spheres – might change them” (Turner Reference Turner and Stein2004, 481). However, as Rubin had already argued, Sedgwick claimed that the study of sexuality is not coextensive with the study of gender, and anti-homophobic research is not coextensive with feminist research. She also claimed that we cannot know in advance how they will differ. Sedgwick argued that the logic of concealment and revelation around the “closet” regarding LGBT identities is an interpretive key to understanding modern Western culture. Thus, LGBT identities are not only of interest to those who perceive themselves as such but to all identities since LGBT ones are used to define the entire system of cultural meanings.Footnote ²⁷

Teresa de Lauretis used the term “queer theory” for the first time in a lecture at the University of California in 1990 to promote a theorizing of sexuality related to a more radical politics that includes not only gay and lesbian experiences but also bisexuality, transgenderism, and intersexuality (Reference de Lauretis1991).Footnote ²⁸ For de Lauretis, “queer” is a term that rejects the politically correct connotation that she believed the formula “gay and lesbian” had acquired. Hence, queer theory is interested in “deconstructing the silences of history and in our own discursive constructions, in the differently erotic mappings of the body, and in the imaging and enacting of new forms of communities by the other-wise desiring subjects of this queer theory” (xvi, my emphasis).

As Turner explains, the value of the term “queer” lies in its resistance to definition: it “connotes a crossing of boundaries, the transgression of norms, and the failure to fit expected categories” (Reference Turner and Stein2004, 481). Queer theorists understand identity as the outcome of political (including social and cultural) processes. They share an interest in dismantling reified or substantive definitions of gender, sexuality, race, class, and other categories by “examining the particular combinations of bodies, acts, and desires that they assume in order to wonder how we might combine them differently, especially without having them become disciplinary or coercive” (482). Thus, queer theorists challenge the stability and coherence of all identity categories, appealing to previous feminist theory and LGBT studies while keeping a critical eye on those developments that rested on conservative, homophobic, or transphobic assumptions.

Trans studies are another emerging field in the nineties. Stephen Whittle claims that “trans studies is a true linking of feminist and queer theory.” (Reference Whittle, Stryker and Whittle2006, xii). Whittle explains that this new scholarship was informed by community activism and “started from the premise that to be trans was not to have a mental or medical disorder” (xii). This premise generated a fundamental shift that enabled trans men and women “to reclaim the reality of their bodies, to create with them what they would, and to leave the linguistic determination of those bodies open to exploration and invention” (xii).

Susan Stryker (Reference Stryker, Stryker and Whittle2006) claims that “transgender” in the early nineties (and “trans” more recently), became a term to refer to “a wide range of phenomena that call attention to the fact that gender, as it is lived, embodied, experienced, performed, and encountered, is more complex and varied than can be accounted for by the currently dominant binary sex/gender ideology of Eurocentric modernity” (3). It is important to highlight here that trans studies demand a critical assessment of gender not only for their theoretical framework but also for the relevance that the notion has for defending the rights of trans people:

However, there have been tensions between trans theorists and feminist work that still claims that the identity of women should be established on a biological basis, assuming by this either a natural sexual dimorphism that rules out the experience and self-perception of intersex people or a strict line of determination between the sex medically assigned at birth and gender identity, leaving transgender experiences out of the notion of womanhood.

Following Stryker, trans studies investigates embodied difference and “how such differences are transformed into social hierarchies,” understood as “systems of power that operate on actual bodies, capable of producing pain and pleasure, health and sickness, punishment and reward, life and death.” Stryker (Reference Stryker, Stryker and Whittle2006) adds that:

Stryker’s words point toward another bias in normative notions of sex and gender and previous feminist reflections: cisexism. Julia Serano (Reference Serano2007) defines it as the belief that the self-perceived gender of trans people is inferior or less authentic than that of cis people. The categories of “cis” and “trans” have today become part of popular speech, although this does not mean that there is social acceptance of this distinction. “Cis-gender” is used to refer to people who feel in conformity with the gender they were assigned at birth according to the medical definition of their genitalia. The critique of this bias as part of what we could now call the cis-heterosexual matrix makes the dialogue between feminist theory and trans studies fundamental: “far from being an inconsequentially narrow specialization dealing only with a rarified population of transgender individuals, or with an eclectic collection of esoteric transgender practices, [trans studies] represents a significant and ongoing critical engagement with some of the most trenchant issues in contemporary humanities, social science, and biomedical research” (Stryker Reference Stryker, Stryker and Whittle2006, 3–4).Footnote ²⁹

To conclude this section, it is interesting to mention a recent publication in the journal Nature by science journalist Claire Ainsworth (Reference Ainsworth2015) entitled “Sex Redefined.” In this piece, Ainsworth reviews contemporary developments that show that the idea of two sexes is simplistic and that biologists are thinking that there is a broader spectrum than that. Ainsworth concludes that “if biologists continue to show that sex is a spectrum, then society and state will have to grapple with the consequences, and work out where and how to draw the line” (291). Hence, there are promising alliances between biomedical science mapping the sex spectrum and feminist, queer, and trans studies.

New Materialism and Posthumanism

New materialism refers to a series of reflections developed in the two-thousands which claim that there has been an excessive focus on discourse, language, and power in previous “hegemonic” constructivist and poststructuralist inquiries and that it has come the moment to return instead to insufficiently explored questions of materiality, biology, and the current knowledge offered by the life and natural sciences. Although this is one common central tenet, new materialisms encompass diverse frameworks and positions.

The same can be said about posthumanism. Rosi Braidotti defines posthuman critical theory as unfolding at the intersection between posthumanism and postanthropocentrism: “The former proposes the philosophical critique of the Western Humanist ideal of ‘Man’ as the allegedly universal measure of all things, whereas the latter rests on the rejection of species hierarchy and human exceptionalism” (Reference Braidotti, Braidotti and Hlavajova2018, 339).Footnote ³⁰ Braidotti also claims that there is a particular relevance of posthuman critical theory in the face of the current Anthropocene condition: “an environmental, social-economical, as well as affective and psychical phenomenon of unprecedented proportions. The combination of fast technological advances on the one hand and growing economic and social inequalities on the other makes for a conflict-ridden landscape marked by violent and inhumane power relations.” (339).

Ewa Domańska (Reference Domańska, Tamm and Burke2019, Reference Domańska and Kuukkanen2021) has shown that these reflections impacted historiography:

Moreover, for Domańska, the new questions posed by posthumanism and new materialism led to an ongoing shift from an interpretivist-constructivist paradigm to a posthumanist and/or ecological one in the humanities and social sciences at large (Reference Domańska and Kuukkanen2021, 186). Gender studies and queer theory, as well as the narrativist moment in theory of history, belong, according to Domańska, to the previous paradigm. Hence, she considers that these fields are moving “from textualism to (new) materialism” (189).

This Element has shown that feminist research on sex and gender demands us to redefine how we understand “humanity.” In relation to history, Domańska believes that posthumanism also contributes to this task since “It challenges the very foundations of history understood as a specific approach to the past developed within the framework of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions with their anthropocentric (and even zoocentric) bias, Eurocentrism, geocentrism, and even exclusive human authorship of knowledge building” (Reference Domańska, Tamm and Burke2019, 337). However, Domańska claims that posthumanist history as a subfield of historical reflection does not exist as such. For Domańska, its primary influence has been in environmental and animal history, where the insights offered by Hawaray, Braidotti, and Karen Barad have been crucial in motivating this paradigm shift.Footnote ³¹ Hence, the writings of these thinkers have promoted new questions and modes of research that extend beyond feminist debates.

Stefan Berger (Reference Berger2022) also acknowledges the impact of new materialism in his thorough review of the development of gender history. Referring to the “material turn” in feminist theory, Berger highlights the relevance of Barad’s founding piece “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter” (Reference Barad2003), along with Stacy Alaimo’s and Susan Hekman’s Reference Alaimo and Hekman2008 edited volume Material Feminisms (256).Footnote ³² A critical engagement with these perspectives requires a thorough analysis of the similarities and differences between the various understandings of materiality and the posthuman that have been developed since the two-thousands. Depending on the author, materiality sometimes refers to nature, biology, and/or the environment, while others associate it with material objects as “things.” In the words of Alaimo and Hekman (Reference Alaimo and Hekman2008), Barad – along with Haraway – “have developed theories that define the human, nonhuman, technological, and natural as agents that jointly construct the parameters of our common world” (5). Given its status as a founding text, I will briefly present Barad’s agential realism to provide a general idea of the theoretical challenges posed by posthumanism and new materialism to feminist theory.

Barad establishes a critical dialogue with performativity theory since they claim that there are humanist assumptions in Butler’s work that should be abandoned.Footnote ³³ Thus, Barad wants to extend Butler’s theory beyond the realm of the human and into matter itself to offer a posthumanist performative metaphysics.Footnote ³⁴ As Mariela Solana explains, for Barad, “the subject of performativity is not the human being but the universe itself; it is the world that acts generating all sorts of entities that did not exist previously to the immanent differentiating processes” (Reference Solana, La Greca and Solana2024, 210–211).Footnote ³⁵

Building on feminist, queer, and science studies, in general, and especially from Haraway’s redefinition of objects of knowledge as material-semiotic actors, Barad pursues the task of rethinking the relationship between discursive practices and material phenomena in a posthumanist way. To that aim, they claim that the notion of discursivity “cannot be founded on an inherent distinction between humans and nonhumans” (Reference Barad2003, 818):

Barad also follows Foucault’s notion of discourse (as “not what is said” but “that which constrains and enables what can be said”) and defines discursive practices as the “actual historically situated social conditions” that produce, rather than describe, the subjects and objects of knowledge practices (819). With poststructuralism, we came to understand that discursive practices are situated and historical. Barad argues that this is also true of matter.

Barad builds her position upon the critique of the nature/culture dualism offered by Butler and Haraway and rejects the characterization of matter as just a blank surface “passively awaiting signification.” Barad adds: “Matter is not support, location, referent, or source of sustainability for discourse” nor does it require “the mark of an external force like culture or history to complete it” (821). Thus, Barad combines the idea that discursive practices are not merely human phenomena with a view of matter as active, dynamic, and integral to the process of meaning making to propose an “agentic realism”Footnote ³⁶: “In an agential realist account, matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming – not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity.” (822)Footnote ³⁷

The last quote illustrates Barad’s expansion of the notion of performativity in a posthumanist direction, as what is said of matter is what Butler claimed about gender, but now with the metaphysical addition of making “the world” the “subject” of the process. In Barad’s agential realism, discursive practices and materiality coemerge, and this co-emergence is called “intra-action.” Thus, Barad stresses that both elements in the relation are agentic and that they do not “inter-act”: they do not exist as such before their relation; they “intra-act.” Moreover, for Barad, matter is not immutable: it is “an ongoing historicity” (821).

As I mentioned before, for Barad, agential realism would avoid holding the category of “humanity” fixed – a critical insight already developed by feminist theorists, as we have seen, but now connected to an insistence on reconsidering this notion from a perspective that rejects human exceptionalism and traces the intimate relation of our discursive practices with the nonhuman (whether it is considered as matter, nature, or biology). Barad believes that their view also avoids the dichotomy between strict determinism and unconstrained freedom, insofar as they claim that intra-actions are constraining but not determining, making the future radically open (826). For Barad, possibilities of acting “exist at every moment” and, with them, the “responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering” (827).Footnote ³⁸

In her review of the impact of posthumanist and new materialist reflections on historical writing, Domańska does not mention examples of posthumanist gender historiography. Nevertheless, she stresses the connection between gender theory and posthumanism insofar as they both seek to critically reconsider the limits and exclusions of the humanist definition of the human being (Reference Domańska, Tamm and Burke2019, 336). For Domańska, redefining the relations between the human and nonhuman should enable a critical view on the affirmation of humanity and a historiography attuned to its time as well as future-oriented (332). It is also important to note that, although Domańska argues about the relevance of these new frameworks for historical studies, in a recent publication with Zoltan Boldizár Simon and Marek Tamm she has also debated the “promises and pitfalls” of anthropocenic historical knowledge (Simon, Tamm, and Domańska Reference Simon, Tamm and Domańska2021).

Berger does register the impact of feminist new materialism in the writing of gender historians who are working within the broader framework of the history of material culture. He considers that in this historiographical practice, gender historians “have also massively advanced our decoding of the construction of gendered identities” (Reference Berger2022, 256). Berger refers to histories of material objects or “things” (like spatial arrangements in pubs or clothing) that trace how “Gender informs things and, in turn, the things that people own inform conceptions and perceptions of gender in wide-ranging ways” (Greig, Hamlet, and Hannan quoted in Berger Reference Berger2022, 256).

Regardless of the virtues and problems these ongoing inquiries may have, their contribution to the intersection between debates over gender and theory of history could lie in their further development of two key insights from previous feminist work: on the one hand, the need to reconsider how we define “humanity” after a critical reflection over the exclusions such definition can imply and/or reproduce, and, on the other, the theoretical and ethical gains that approaching our objects of study in terms of relationality instead of dichotomy may offer.Footnote ³⁹ Following Domańska and Berger, we may draw inspiration for alternative ways of approaching the past in dialogue with post-humanist and new materialist research. Attention to materiality, biology, and nature as dynamic and fully historical phenomena can offer new insights into our understanding of sex and gender. However, I believe that such dialogue should not lose sight of a feminist hallmark: the vigilant critique of any form of biological determinism or exclusionary definition of embodiment.Footnote ⁴⁰

Decolonial Feminism and the Epistemology of Resistance

The critique of humanism and “the subject” that was part of poststructuralist debates also constitutes an important backdrop to the rise of the post-imperial and interdisciplinary terrain in which postcolonial and decolonial theory arose.Footnote ⁴¹ If in Barad’s perspective the posthuman return to materiality rejects any fixed definition of the distinction between human and nonhuman, and opened the way to inquiries into nonhuman realities (such as atoms and bacteria), in post-imperialist perspectives the focus has been on those people and cultures who were colonized and denied the dignity of humanity. In a similar vein to black feminism and intersectionality studies, the history and effects of colonization show the need for feminist theory to revise theorizations of gender in its close and complicated relation with issues of race and imperial power.

María Lugones’s Reference Lugones2008 essay, “The Coloniality of Power,” offers insights into the relationship between gender, race, and colonization, as well as the continuing effects of imperialism. It reintroduces the issue of race through a reflection on colonial rule as a historically specific way – whose effects are still present – in which the fixed boundaries of “the human” have excluded some subjects by imposing on their precolonial communities frames of gender that were not part of their social relations. Lugones’s view allows us to see at work the critical insights developed by Third World and Women of Color feminists and critical race theorists, emphasizing intersectionality. At the same time, she uses the criticism of the eighties definition of gender to stress its Western-modern specificity.

Lugones elaborates the concept of “modern/colonial gender system” by putting together a feminist and intersectional framework with Anibal Quijano’s view on the “coloniality of power.”Footnote ⁴² Quijano considers global, Eurocentered capitalist power as organized around two axes he names “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” As Lugones explains: “Both ‘race’ and gender find their meanings in this model [patrón]. Quijano understands that all power is structured in relations of domination, exploitation and conflict as social actors fight over control of ‘the four basic areas of human existence: sex, labor, collective authority and subjectivity/intersubjectivity, their resources and products’” (Quijano quoted in Lugones, Reference Lugones2008, 2).

In Quijano’s model, the invention of “race” as the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet was “a pivotal turn as it replaces the relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination. It re-conceives humanity and human relations fictionally, in biological terms” (Lugones, Reference Lugones2008, 2). This classification was not only central to global capitalism but also for “the historical disputes over control of labor, sex, collective authority and inter-subjectivity as developing in processes of long duration, rather than understanding each of the elements as pre-existing the relations of power” (3). In this respect, Lugones highlights that in Quijano’s view the elements that constitute the global, Eurocentered, capitalist model of power “do not stand in separation from each other and none of them is prior to the processes that constitute the patterns. Indeed, the mythical presentation of these elements as metaphysically prior is an important aspect of the cognitive model of Eurocentered, global capitalism” (3).

The coloniality of power establishes relations of superiority and inferiority in a way that conceives “humanity” as a hierarchical difference determined in biological terms. Biological determinism, again, justifies the reproduction of unequal power relations: “In constituting this social classification, coloniality permeates all aspects of social existence and gives rise to new social and geocultural identities (Quijano, 2000b, 342). ‘America’ and ‘Europe’ are among the new geocultural identities. ‘European,’ ‘Indian,’ ‘African’ are among the ‘racial’ identities.” Lugones adds: “With the expansion of European colonialism, the classification was imposed on the population of the planet. Since then, it has permeated every area of social existence and it constitutes the most effective form of material and inter-subjective social domination.” (Lugones, Reference Lugones2008, 3)

However, Lugones points out that Quijano’s framework uncritically assumed the specific modern Eurocentric notion of gender and the patriarchal, heterosexual, and sexual dimorphic understanding. In this regard, Quijano’s view continues to “veil the ways in which non-‘white’ colonized women were subjected and disempowered” (2). Since Quijano understands sex as biological attributes that become elaborated as social categories, he accepts the opposition between sex and gender that has already been criticized. By putting Quijano’s framework in dialogue with an intersectional framework and the work by Third World and Women of Color feminists and critical race theorists, Lugones shows that the Western definition of gender was part of the cultural imposition to precolonial societies that either had different gender arrangements or no gender system was in place at all.

For example, the research by Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí showed that “gender was not an organizing principle in Yoruba society prior to colonization by the West” (Oyěwùmí quoted in Lugones Reference Lugones2008, 8). Their social categories were neither binarily opposed nor hierarchical, and sexual dimorphism was not a feature of gender arrangements either. Hence, “For females, colonization was a twofold process of racial inferiorization and gender subordination. The creation of ‘women’ as a category was one of the very first accomplishments of the colonial state” (Oyěwùmí quoted in Lugones Reference Lugones2008, 8).

It is for this reason that Lugones proposes the notion of the modern/colonial gender system to fully understand the extent to which the imposition of this gender system was as constitutive of the coloniality of power as the coloniality of power was constitutive of it. The colonial/modern gender system “could not exist without the coloniality of power, given that the classification of the population in terms of race is a necessary condition of its possibility” (Lugones Reference Lugones2008, 12).

Lugones describes the modern/colonial gender system as having a “light” and a “dark” side. The first one orders the lives of white bourgeois men and women, and it constitutes the modern/colonial meaning of “men” and “women”: it is a patriarchal, heterosexual, and binary system by which white bourgeois females are defined by sexual purity and passivity, they are ban from the sphere of collective authority, from the production of knowledge, from most of control over the means of production. Lugones believes that Eurocentered global capitalism only recognizes sexual dimorphism for white bourgeois males and females. The “dark” side “was and is thoroughly violent”: those understood as “non-white women” were not only excluded from decision-making, economics, and rituals but also reduced to animality, “to forced sex with white colonizers, to such deep labor exploitation that often people died working” (16). Also, they were not necessarily understood dimorphically: “Sexual fears of colonizers led them to imagine the indigenous people of the Americas as hermaphrodites or intersexed, with large penises and breasts with flowing milk. However, as Gunn Allen and others make clear, intersexed individuals were recognized in many tribal societies prior to colonization without assimilation to the sexual binary” (7).

For these reasons, Lugones considers that to understand how colonialism and global Eurocentered capitalism organized sex and gender, it is crucial to understand the changes that colonization brought. If the naturalization of sexual differences is another product of the modern use of science (as Quijano claimed regarding “race”), Lugones concludes: “as with other assumption characteristics it is important to ask how sexual dimorphism served and serves Eurocentered global capitalist domination/exploitation” (7).

At the beginning of this piece, Lugones claimed that she aimed to unveil the reach and consequences of complicity with the colonial/modern gender system that subjects women and men of color “in all domains of existence” in order to “place ourselves in a position to call each other to reject this gender system as we perform a transformation of communal relations” (1). Moreover, she adds that her interest in the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality lies in understanding “the indifference that men, but, more importantly to our struggles, men who have been racialized as inferior, exhibit to the systematic violences inflicted upon women of color” (1). Lugones wants to understand the construction of this indifference that she believes is not just an epistemological question related to “not seeing the violence” because of the categorial separation of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

The issue of indifference to oppression, both epistemologically and politically, has been a persistent concern of liberatory projects. Although Lugones rightly points out that it is not just a matter of knowledge – as if a better epistemological framework could solve it – this does not mean that it is not also an epistemological issue. Lugones’s essay is an example of the effort to theorize subjectivity in its historical, situated forms, which involves comprehending this kind of indifference as well. In another article, Lugones defines his project as decolonial feminism, as it pursues the possibility of overcoming the coloniality of gender (Reference Lugones2010, 747).

A recent development in feminist philosophy and critical race theory addresses this last challenge directly: I am referring to José Medina’s Epistemology of Resistance (Reference Medina2013). I will conclude this section with Medina’s work as it enables this Element to reconnect the refiguration of the category of gender with its epistemic and political relevance in current public debates related to women’s and LGBTIQ+ human rights worldwide.

Medina takes part in the debates over epistemologies of injustices to explore the epistemic side of oppression and resistance and argues for a polyphonic contextualism combining developments in feminist, queer, and critical race theory.Footnote ⁴³ Medina is interested in investigating how gender and sexual ignorance, racial ignorance, and their interrelations “are produced by systems of oppression, what their ramifications in our social and personal lives are, and what we can do to resist them” (14).

Following Foucault, Medina claims that “resistance is a complicated and heterogeneous phenomenon that defies unification and explication according to abstract and rigid principles of subversion.” Moreover, he adds: “Our cognitive, affective and political lives are permeated by different forms of conformity and resistance that shape our lives in various (and not always coherent) ways” (14). Hence, we are shaped by systems of oppression but also by the various forms of resistance that emerge within and around them.

Medina reflects on the epistemic aspects of our social interactions “that take place in complex and diverse communities under conditions of oppression and on the resistance that we can find in those interactions” (3). Epistemic injustices, Medina explains, are pervasive not only in nondemocratic societies but also in democratic ones.Footnote ⁴⁴ Hence, they call for epistemic resistance as “the use of our epistemic resources and abilities to undermine and change oppressive normative structures and the complacent cognitive-affective functioning that sustains those structures” (3).

If resistance can be exerted from multiple social locations and differently positioned subjects relate to power in different ways, then understanding its diverse and heterogeneous forms requires understanding as well “the positionality and relationality of social agents in networks of power relations” (15). This has been precisely what my alternative narrative on gender highlighted as the critical gain from debates since the seventies. Moreover, Medina recalls that for Foucault, resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power since power has a relational character. This means, for Medina, that resistance can be exerted both within and around our discursive practices, at the center as well as at their periphery.Footnote ⁴⁵ Hence, Medina’s contextualist account covers cases of internal resistance as well as cases of external resistance “for the multifaceted activity of resisting is conceptualized as contending with, and not exclusively or fundamentally as contending against” (16). Since there lies a key insight for the conclusion of this Element, I quote Medina at large:

As Medina explains, there is an intimate connection between our sensibilities and our cognitive potential. In the foreword to his book, he claims – similarly to Lugones – that its key theme is insensitivity: “being cognitively and affectively numbed to the lives of others: being inattentive to and unconcerned by their experiences, problems, and aspiration; and being unable to connect with them and to understand their speech and action” (xi). Medina believes this kind of insensitivity is at the core of epistemic injustices. That is also why he argues that “racial and sexual insensibilities result as much in lack of knowledge of social realities as in lack of self-knowledge (or knowledge of one’s own positionality and relationality with respect to the relevant categories and the relevant forms of oppression)” (18).Footnote ⁴⁶

Although there would be much more to say to present Medina’s take on the epistemology of resistance adequately, I would like to mention that he considers the women’s movement as a paradigmatic example of the resistance to a large-scale system of oppression that we find “in the most familiar and intimate aspects of our epistemic life, within ourselves and our sensibilities” (18). Medina recalls that the numerous voices in the women’s movement had resisted “deficient social sensibilities and their blind spots, triggering a process of social learning that benefits us all, for their activism expanded our sensibilities and taught us to pay attention to the interrelations between public practices and our most intimate feelings, emotions, desires, and beliefs.” (18, my emphasis). It is also worth mentioning that, for Medina, democratic social interaction requires resistance.

Finally, Medina highlights that resistance “begins at home, in the most intimate aspects of our cognitive-affective functioning (…) within ourselves and in the activities in which we feel at home” (18). This implies putting our perspective in communicative interaction with the perspective of others, to become exposed to challenges, to processes of self-questioning or self-estrangement, “that is, processes of deep self-interrogation in which we become strangers to ourselves.” Medina claims that, by becoming perplexed about who we are, we can look at ourselves with fresh eyes. I agree with Medina’s conclusion that we have learned this from feminist, queer, and critical race theory: “the importance of unmasking and undoing the process of social construction of our perspective, of interrupting the flow of familiarity and obviousness, making the familiar unfamiliar and the obvious bizarre” (19, my emphasis). The previous trajectory of debates can be considered exactly as that: as a process of unmasking and undoing the social construction of our sex-gender perspective.

My reading of the debates over the usefulness of the category of gender, the limits of its original understanding as a social construction, along with the critical contribution of poststructuralist reflections, performativity, and the semiotic-material nature of embodiment leads to the conclusion that we have today a richer idea of the relation between bodies, knowledge, and power. The severe self-criticism that feminist theorists developed regarding their fundamental category amounts to a more promising framework for grasping the complexity of embodiment as a historical, theoretical, and political process. Following Medina, we can claim that the debates that this Element has reviewed allowed the different perspectives involved to engage in a communicative interaction, challenging the way that gender has been understood and provoking a process of self-interrogation within feminist theory that has even fostered the creation of new academic fields that further expanded the research on identity, embodiment, knowledge, and power.

These diverse mappings of embodiment may bring to mind Foucault’s famous antihumanist claim in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”: that “Nothing in man – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis of self-recognition or for understanding other men” (Foucault Reference Foucault and Rabinow1984, 87–88). Scott echoed this phrase in the introduction to his classic 1988 book to reflect on feminist research. She wrote: “Nothing about the body, including women’s reproductive organs, determines universally how social difference will be shaped” (Reference Scott1999, 2). After this journey through feminist debates, we can accept the conclusion that nothing is sufficiently stable – neither categories of identities nor the body itself. However, we also arrive at another realization: that the historicity of knowledge claims and power arrangements points toward the instability of embodiment as a basis for understanding others. It would not be a metaphysical or epistemological basis, but it can be an ethical one: a realization that informs our critical positioning as subjects of knowledge and promotes inquiries that explore and affirm human complexity (Butler Reference Butler2019).

In Section 4, I will elaborate on the usefulness of the refigured category of gender for historians and theorists of history interested in bringing a more complex understanding of embodiment to their practice.