Why Has the Sex/Gender System Become Visible Only Now?

Abstract

During the last decade of feminist inquiry, a new “object” for scientific scrutiny has emerged into visibility: the sex/gender system.* Sex/gender is a system of male-dominance made possible by men’s control of women’s productive and reproductive labor, where “reproduction” is broadly construed to include sexuality, family life, and kinship formations, as well as the birthing which biologically reproduces the species. However, the “discovery” of the sex/gender system has implications beyond the need for revisions in our scientific understandings. While many feminists have argued that this discovery calls for new morals and new politics, I intend to show why its discovery at this particular moment in history also calls for a revolution in epistemology. The new epistemology must be one which is not fettered by the self-imposed limitations of empiricist, functionalist/relativist, or marxist epistemologies. We shall see, within the all too brief limits of so short a paper, what the main limitations of these existing epistemologies are, and distinguish the pre-conditions for an adequate theory of belief production from the epistemological goals of feminist inquirers which lean too heavily on these inadequate epistemological programs. The feminist discovery of the sex/ gender system certainly is more than the expression of socially unobstructed “natural talents and abilities,” of functionally adequate beliefs, and of changes in the division of labor by class. But an insufficiently critical stance toward the existing epistemologies has obscured for us just what this “more” is. We need to investigate more fully why it is that only now can we understand “patriarchy,” “misogyny,” “sex-roles,” “discrimination against women,” and “the first division of labor — by sex” as mere appearances of the underlying reality of the sex/gender system. Let us begin by first looking at the newly visible size and shape of the sex/gender system, and then examining the self-imposed limitations of empiricist, functionalist/relativist, and marxist epistemologies.