Genital Identities: An Idiosyncratic Foray into the Gendering of Sexualities

Abstract

Until recently, sociology has been guilty of ignoring or erasing the body (Turner, 1991; Frank, 1992), while post-structuralism has tended to reduce it to a text, a set of meanings constituted by and negotiated among discursive practices (Game, 1991; Zita, 1992). This flight from the flesh has been interpreted by some as evidence of the paranoid masculinist character of science:

A fear of life and a disembodied approach to nature is an important characteristic of male history and scientific patriarchy. Man’s ‘paranoid somatophobia’ … can be traced to Descartes, who demonstrated the isolation of the male self, the existence of a detached ego without connectedness to the natural world. Cogito ergo sum expressed the distrust of the body and the senses … (Brodribb, 1992, p. 15)

It is perhaps ironic that the anti-enlightenment tendency of postmodernism, with its suspicion of meta-narratives, its refusal to hierarchize truth-claims and its concomittant de-centring of science, has written the body back into theory. Ironic, because general opinion is that postmodernism is the ultimate in anti-materiality. Many would sympathize with Jacquelyn Zita’s gleeful assertion that, ‘Against the intellectual anorexia of postmodernism, th[e] body stubbornly returns with a weight that defies the promises of postmodern fantasy and its idealist denial’ (Zita, 1992, p. 126).