Assigned Faggot: Gender Roles, Sex, and the Division of Labor
A boy in eighth-grade math class walks over and says, "You sit like a woman. What are you, a woman?" We both know there's no right answer.
When I was born, the obstetrician said I was male. So, growing up, that was the role expected of me. People told me I'd become a heterosexually-married adult man. I shouldn't have long hair, wear dresses, or cry "like a sissy."
At some point, though, that comprehensive set of expectations (that gender role) changed. By the time I hit adolescence, no one thought I'd marry a woman. Boys were supposed to like football and act tough, but nobody looked at me and thought I could ever do that. My classmates started calling me gay before I even knew what the word meant. More and more, people expected that I would behave different from my male peers.
Of course, their expectations carried a weight of moral condemnation. When they called me a "faggot," they made it clear that it was a very bad thing to be. But, none of them seriously believed that someone who looked, moved, and sounded like me could be anything else. I was chastised and punished for filling it, but nevertheless "faggot" was the role I was pressured to fill.
Are gender and sexuality fundamentally personal identities, or are they imposed by a larger social system? How sharp is the line between them?
Walking down the hall in high school, it feels like every other word is "faggot." An especially churchy classmate tells me that if I was a real Christian, I wouldn't "want to be that way any more."
In gym class, the coach sends the boys to one side of the room and the girls to the other to do different activities. No one looks surprised when I go with the girls.
On paper, US conservatism believes in a strict gender binary. You are male or female, birth to death. Men are naturally one way and women another. No one really falls in between. Men, of course, are naturally strong and unemotive. They sleep with women but socialize with each other.
And yet, people who embraced that ideology wholesale would meet me and assume that my friends were girls, that I was emotional and "sensitive," that I'd defer to my male peers, and - perhaps most of all - that I was sexually available to men. But since they didn't read me as cis female, why weren't they bringing the usual male expectations?
When I had straight male friends, why did they expect me to be emotionally supportive and assume I had some special insight into "what women want?" They didn't seek that from each other, and they'd have either laughed or gotten angry at anyone who asked it of them.
If their idea of gender was as binary as they believed it to be, why didn't they place me into a male role?
Unfortunately, many women-particularly single women-are afraid of the perspective of wages for housework because they are afraid of identifying even for a second with the housewife. They know that this is the most powerless position in society and so they do not want to realise that they are housewives too...
We are all housewives because no matter where we are they can always count on more work from us, more fear on our side to put forward our demands, and less pressure on them for money, since hopefully our minds are directed elsewhere, to that man in our present or our future who will “take care of us”.
Did those people believe in genders besides female and male?
With their ideas, they didn't. With their actions, though, they did. After all, they created at least one gender role besides "man" and "woman" - I know because they assigned me to it! My social position was not authentically male. I was failed-male. In practice, my gender was "faggot."
When they said "faggots aren't real men," that was an is, not an ought. "Faggot" is a socially-real gender category distinct from "male." It is imposed (like all genders) by a social system beyond the control of any given individual. Gender, after all, is more than either individual identity or cultural beliefs. Each gender role corresponds to a particular place in the overall social division of labor.
To be given a feminized gender (like "woman" or "faggot") means to be given feminized work: emotional, interpersonal, domestic, caregiving, and sexual. When you meet someone, they read a gender onto you. Practically speaking, that means they either expect you to take on those tasks or they expect others to take them on instead of you. There are, of course, plenty of signifiers that help people make that gender assignment (speech inflections, clothes, names, communication styles, inferred secondary sex characteristics, etc). But all that only makes up half of what a gender is - the rest is being expected to do specific kinds of work, and you can't cleanly untangle the two halves. Being conventionally feminine means being expected to wear makeup, long hair, etc - but also to have a less aggressive conversation style, to step aside for men on the sidewalk, to be "nurturing," and to sleep with men. On the ground, the division of labor and cultural norms are united. Each upholds the other.
I sit in a therapist's office and talk about how since transitioning, I've felt less and less connection with any sort of sexuality and I don't understand why. He tells me I just need to accept that I'm attracted to men - once I do that, he says, things will fall into place.
Radical feminism talks about "compulsory heterosexuality" - the idea that heterosexuality is more than a sexual preference some people happen to have. It's a political institution built into the gender system itself, through which all women (including lesbians) are pressured to treat sex with men as inherent to womanhood. This approach to sexuality cares about the pleasure of men, but leaves non-male desires as (at best) an afterthought. Without it, feminized gender roles (woman and faggot alike) would bear little resemblance to their current forms.
I faced that imperative, just like my cis female peers. To be sure, people delivered it to me on different terms. Attraction to men was expected of me, but never treated as though it were positive. However, it was still part of the role I was assigned. Accepting my lesbianism still entailed a process of soul-searching to break through some deeply internalized messages; it tracked closely with the experiences of the cis lesbians I know.
Sexuality doesn't neatly come apart from gender. Gender is an overarching system, a way of organizing certain types of work within class society's overall division of labor. My socialization into a feminized role brought with it certain sexual expectations, just as it carried emotional and interpersonal ones.
Neither sexuality nor gender floats free, separate from each other or from the overall organization of society. They aren't (just) individual identities, and they aren't (just) cultural ideas. These roles exist physically: the interactions humans have with each other and with the world re-create them every day. If you ignore that context, you'll misunderstand the relationship between them.
Cultural norms about gender receive institutional support from the government, businesses, religious congregations, etc. After all, gender is an efficient and elegant way to get some people to do certain kinds of work for free. Sure, some aspects of contemporary gender predate capitalism. However, this gender system is still capitalist to its essence. Why? Capitalism digested those older components and turned them into something qualitatively different (as the historical research of Silvia Federici and other Marxist feminists shows).
Beliefs and practices aren't merely ephemera. They aren't fluff on top of an underlying economic reality. They're part of economic reality because they're part of how people carry out the daily work of existence. Their function within it is vital. Without them, it wouldn't be easy to get anyone to do feminized work for free, but with them? People "spontaneously" enforce those roles on each other via social pressure, "common sense," and violence. Why else do so many women punish each other for deviating from fundamentally-sexist norms?
Again, though, the ideas in people's heads are only half the picture. The conservative Christians I grew up around believed wholeheartedly that only two genders existed. But when they couldn't find a place in the male role for people like me, what did they do? They created another one for us (faggot). Did they call it a gender? Of course not, but ideology isn't what you believe. It's what you've internalized through what you do. And isn't it telling that if you asked them about trans and nonbinary people, they'd say none of it was valid because "those people are just confused faggots?"
8
Nearly all liberals (and more than a few leftists) arrive at their politics by first noticing an instance of oppression, then deciding to oppose it. They hear conservatives condemn gays, for instance, and think, "We've got to stop that prejudice. Gay people deserve respect!" That's an understandable approach - disrespect, bigotry, and microaggressions are right there for all to see. Shouldn't they be gotten rid of?
But when you remember that ideas and beliefs are only half of what's going on, doesn't something almost sinister emerge? We can remove the outward signs of oppression. But does that mean it's gone, or just that it's harder to see?
When you look at someone's face, it doesn't take its shape from the skin on the surface. It takes it from the bone underneath. If outright bigotry is the visible skin, the division of labor and the need to enforce it are the bone. Had I grown up in a liberal area rather than a conservative one, the people around me would have believed that women should be considered equal to men and that LGBT people deserved acceptance and respect. Those categories would have been enforced more gently - but they still would have been enforced. Since capitalism's division of labor would have remained, feminized work would still have gotten assigned to feminized roles.
They wouldn't have called me "faggot," but they would have called me "fabulous" - and at the end of the day, the role expectations are the same either way. Respect and inclusion would have been nicer makeup, but the face beneath would have been no different.
Radical politics should begin with the physical reality of class society and its division of labor.
The cultural half of the mechanism matters. It isn't a question of "divisive social issues." Norms and ideas are part of how the system works, and separating them from "economic class" just shows you've misunderstood both.
But because these roles are unified with the class system, the goal can't simply be greater respect. Imposing them politely is still imposing them. The surface manifestations are an important part of the phenomenon, but they aren't all of it. And ultimately, radical politics must seek to abolish the entire thing.
And if radicals forget that, then sure, they might find ways to make society look less oppressive.
But will anyone have actually gotten free?
SOPHIA BURNS
Sophia Burns is a communist and polytheist in the US Pacific Northwest. Support her on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/marxism_lesbianism