Bodies as open projects: reflections on gender and sexuality

Maria Elizabeth Susanna (Elbie) van den Berg

Department of Philosophy & Systematic Theology University of South Africa PO Box 392 Pretoria 0003 vdberms@unisa.ac.za
Abstract This article argues that the social constructivist paradigm falls into the same dualistic trap as biological essentialism when attempting to respond to questions of gender and sexuality. I argue that social constructivism, like biological determinism, presumes a split world, where subjective lived experiences are separated from the world of socio-cultural forces. Following a phenomenological approach, grounded in Merleau-Pontys ontological view of the body, this article attempts to move beyond the dualistic metadiscourses of social constructivism in maintaining that identity is a fully embodied process. I see gender and sexuality as necessarily embodied and corporeally constituted. In the light of this, I propose an understanding of gender and sexuality that focuses on the centrality of the body as open project. This approach sees gender and sexuality as embodied processes that are enmeshed with the complex fabric of lived everyday experiences and concurrent socio-cultural and historical processes. Drawing on real-life examples, I conclude that gender and sexual embodiment are not one-dimensional according to a binary system of male versus female. Rather, given the documented experience of the indeterminacy and ambiguity of human existence, there are a variety of possible embodiments of humankind.

Introduction For centuries the dominant trend in thinking about gender and sexuality has been premised on a separation between metadiscourses on gender and the lived bodily experiences of a first-person ontology. Social constructivist scholars have taken biological determinism to task by emphasizing that such an approach to gender and sexuality is simplistic and reductionist. Moreover, they have pointed out that biological determinism serves the interests of patriarchal ideologies. Responding to essentialist views, social constructivists argue that socio-cultural and historical processes profoundly gender peoples bodies and sexualize their behavior according to a compulsory heteronormative model. While there are undoubtedly grounds for accepting the social constructivist paradigm, I maintain that this model focuses too narrowly on the aspects of social construction and metadiscourses on gender and professed sexual differences between fe-

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male and male bodies. Accordingly, I argue that social constructivism fails to give an adequate account of the ways in which we live and experience our sexualities and genders. Drawing on anthropological, sociological and psychological studies of differently1 gendered people, I call for a rethinking of the way we theorize gender and sexuality. My point of departure is the concept of the body as open project. In my view, gender and sexuality are fully embodied processes, intrinsically incorporated in the totality of any individuals existence. Against the backdrop of my approach to gender and sexuality, I am reluctant to give fixed definitions of the two concepts. In my view, gender and sexuality are fluid and ambiguous2 and because of their complexity, they cannot be reduced to single definitions. However, when I claim that gender and sexuality are fluid and dynamic, I do not mean that the meanings of these two concepts can be conflated. In fact, gender and sexuality are distinct in the sense that gender refers to socio-cultural constructions of femininities and masculinities, while sexuality involves the things people do, think and feel that are related to their sexual desires. Following Foucault (1980) and Butler (1990), I maintain that both gender difference (masculinity versus femininity) and sexual difference (male versus female sexualities) are cultural constructs used to enforce patriarchy, which is a system of power inequality that accords power to men at the expense of women. According to this perspective each individual is unique in their gender characteristics, regardless of their biological sex. There are no proper gender attributes. This broader concept of gender includes androgyne, bigender, intersex, pangender, transgender, butch, femme, and so on. It takes into account the multiplicity and fluidity of gender. Likewise, this approach sees sexuality as the deep-seated direction of an individuals erotic attraction, which is on a continuum and not limited to a set of absolute categories (heterosexual versus homosexual). This broader concept of sexuality includes transsexual, bisexual, asexual, pansexual, gay, lesbian, and so on in taking into account the plurality of sexual meanings and the ambiguity of lived experiences. Since, from a phenomenological and poststructuralist approach, human existence is irremediably indeterminate and ambiguous, I argue that all human activities, including sexuality and our ways of living gender, are intrinsically unified in one synthesis. It is impossible to reduce the lives of individuals that involve human relationships and sexual desire either to biological sex or to socio-cultural structures. From my phenomenological perspective, gender and sexuality3 are not fragments, detached from an individuals lived experiences. Neither are they the products of an arbitrary system of social rules and normalizing cultural practices. Rather, the meanings of gender and sexualities are seen as fluid and dynamic.
1 2 I do not see homosexual, intersexed, transsexual and transvestite people as different, but as belonging to a continuum of sexualities. I have, nevertheless, used scare quotes in recognition of the other status accorded to such people. In my view, the meanings of gender and sexuality are not fixed, but can transcend the rigid two-dimensional sex/gender model. This means that individuals have the freedom to choose any kind of gender and sexuality without conforming to the conventional dichotomies of gender (masculine versus feminine) and sexuality (heterosexual versus homosexual). A distinction should be drawn between sex and sexuality, because they are not the same. Sex is an intimate act (sexual intercourse) between two people. Sexuality is a central aspect of ones personality (of being human) that helps to define how one interacts with other people and how one is perceived by oth-

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Judith Butler (1990, 1994) has argued that gender is performative and that what we think of as biological sex is in fact embodied gender; she describes it as the corporeal incarnation of a discursively constituted (performative) gender. This perspective alerts us to the flawed distinction between biological sex and gender according to which biological sex is seen as a natural and essential truth, while gender is seen as a cultural construction. I follow Butler up to the point where she renounces any agency or subjectivity in the constitution of gender and sexuality. She claims (1990:25,148) that gender is always a doing, though there is no possibility of agency or reality outside of the discursive practices that give those terms the intelligibility that they have. I take issue with Butlers view that gender is realised solely through the discursive mediations of the socio-cultural practices, disengaged from the incarnate subject. I am not arguing that incarnate subjects pre-exist their cultural embeddedness, but, rather, that livable embodiment is a precondition for agency. The meanings of genders and sexualities are not only discursively or textually constituted, but are also real, concrete, lived and they exceed the merely discursive. In my view, socio-cultural and historical structures function only as lived and interpreted by embodied individuals. The lived bodies of human agents are not completely determined by socio-cultural and historical processes, but possess their own agencies and agendas. I propose a model of the body as an open project as a way of offering a productive understanding of a variety of gendered and sexual embodiments. This model offers a means of accounting for embodied individuals who are non-normatively gendered and who do not fit into a heteronormative reading of bodies. I conclude that the integrity of humanity depends on the recognition and incorporation of a variety of genders and sexualities. Beyond metadiscourses My argument concerning the body as open project is based on Merleau-Pontys phenomenological views on intentionality and concrete lived experiences. I use his philosophical insights as a basis for arguing that gender and sexuality are fully embodied processes, rather than dissociated from an individuals lived experiences. In this connection, Simone de Beauvoirs The Second Sex stands as a founding text about the significance of lived experience and questions of embodied subjectivity, agency and meaning-making. With her famous claim One is not born but becomes a woman (2010:267), De Beauvoir rejects the essentialism which claims that women are born feminine (according to existing cultural norms and expectations). She insists that they are constructed as feminine through unexamined preconceived ideas and social conditioning. Both Merleau-Ponty and De Beauvoir are groundbreakers of the idea of the body as open project. Patriarchal cultures have existed throughout the ages and across religious and political affiliations. This ideology is predominant in most cultures and orders the sexes/genders hierarchically according to the false idea that men should hold social power while women should occupy subordinate positions. Many years before the cultural constructivist school, Margaret Mead and Simone de Beauvoir called patriarchal societies into question. In effect, Meads work in The social organization of Manua (1930) and De Beauvoirs work in Le Deuxime sexe (The second sex) (1949) radically questioned the ideology of womens natural inferiority to justify patriarchal domination. De Beauvoirs approach to the situation of women under patriarchy alers. Sexuality encompasses sexual intimacy and biological reproduction and is experienced and expressed in thoughts, desires, beliefs, values, attitudes, body image and self-image.

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lows for the meaning of a womans body to be attributed both from the inside and the outside. She maintains that the meaning of a womans body is determined by how each woman lives her body. This approach challenges the hegemonic sexual dualism of biological determinism. Despite Meads and De Beauvoirs efforts, the naturalistic bias continued to dominate sex and gender studies. Social scientists began to focus on gender and sexuality in social and cultural contexts in the 1970s, long after the publication of The social organization of Manua and The second sex In this period anthropologists, sociologists and ethnologists,4 following a cultural constructivist approach, pointed out that sex roles, sexual differences and gender roles vary from culture to culture. Thinkers in this school emphasized that the degree and quality of social relationships between the sexes and the stratification of gender are highly variable between cultures. Like Mead and De Beauvoir, these studies took issue with biological determinism. They pointed out that its propensity for understanding gender and sexuality according to biological givenness is simplistic and reductionist. They highlighted the biases and false assumptions that underlie naturalistic essentialism, namely: we know what constitutes the nature of men and women; males and females are predominantly natural objects; men and women by their very nature are fundamentally different; and sexual relations should be understood as a polarization of two distinct categories or essences, viz. masculinity versus femininity. Rather than assuming that we know what gender, sexuality, male and female mean in a universal sense, these cultural constructivist thinkers suggested that we ask what these notions mean in particular social and cultural contexts. The central tenet of social constructivism, as exemplified by these studies, is that gender, sexuality, male and female are cultural constructions, not given aspects of human existence. Based on this perspective, social constructivists argue that persons are sexed and gendered according to social and cultural processes, rather than biological givenness. In addition, thinkers, such as Ortner and Whitehead, Fausto-Sterling, Harding, Dupr, Epstein and Straub, assert that biological determinism serves the needs and interests of patriarchal ideologies.5 Recently, the social constructivist approach has yielded great advances in the understanding of gender and sexuality. Feminist thinkers, gender theorists and human scientists, such as Jeffner Allen (1982-1983, 1989), Luce Irigaray (1993), Hlne Cixous (1986), Drucilla Cornell (1995), Iris Marion Young (1990), Emily Martin (1987) and Michael Kimmel (2004) argue that bodies are sexed and gendered according to a dom4 Cultural constructivist studies focusing on the deconstruction of naturalistic essentialism include R. Rivire, Marriage: a reassessment, in Rethinking kinship and marriage, ed. R. Needham, Tavistock, London, 1971, pp. 57-74; A.S. Meigs, Male pregnancy and the reduction of sexual opposition in New Guinea Highlands society, Ethnology 15: 393-408, 1976; S.B. Ortner and H. Whitehead (eds.), Sexual meanings. The cultural construction of gender and sexuality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981; J. Epstein and K. Straub (eds.), Body Guards. The cultural politics of gender ambiguity, Routledge, New York, 1991; G. Herdt (ed.), Third sex, third gender: beyond sexual dimorphism in culture and history, Zone Books, New York, 1994; D.L. Hodgson and S.A. McCurdy (eds.), Wicked women and the reconfiguration of gender in Africa , Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH, USA, 2001. See: S. B. Ortner and H. Whitehead (eds.), Sexual meanings: the cultural construction of gender and sexuality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981; A. Fausto-Sterling, Myths of gender: biological theories about women and men, Basic Books, New York, 1985; S. Harding, The science question in feminism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1986; J. Dupr, Sex, gender, and essence, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 11: 441-457, 1986; J. Epstein and K. Straub (eds.), Body guards, Routledge, New York, 1991

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inant patriarchal heterosexist discourse. They maintain that womens oppression is the result of an epistemology of oppression (compulsory heterosexism). In order to break its hold on the bodies of women and other marginalized people, they argue that the patriarchal heteronormative discourse needs to be deconstructed.6 I agree with the social constructivist view that cultural institutions and social processes, which function as a juridico-discursive system of power (as Foucault (1984: 333) calls it), gender peoples bodies and sexualize their behaviour, but I maintain that it focuses too narrowly on the aspect of social construction and normalizing cultural practices. In my opinion, social constructivism falls into the same dualistic trap as naturalistic essentialism; it presumes a split world, where subjects are divided from the world of cultural processes and their own lived experiences. This kind of thinking is also reductionist and eliminativist. It fails to give an adequate account of gender identity and sexuality because it ends up reducing sexuality and gender to third-person cultural phenomena. Moreover, while I agree with feminist thinkers (liberal, Marxist, radical and socialist) that we cannot ignore the social and political realities of gender discrimination and the oppression of women in the name of a persistent primary heterosexual matrix, this approach has tended to focus too narrowly on dominant social and political metadiscourses on gender and ostensible sexual differences between men and women, without really considering embodied everyday experiences. Feminisms, except for existentialist and postmodern perspectives,7 have tended to focus on the dimension of gender, i.e. the way we interpret our sexualities, without really taking into account the data and lived experiences of a first-person ontology. By contrast, I argue that embodied everyday experiences (intentionalistic experiences), such as sexual desire and the way we do (Butler) gender, have a first-person ontology and that these lived-through experiences cannot be reduced to a third-person ontology. My argument in this article is based on Merleau-Pontys ontological view. His key ideas (for my purposes here) are: the world which is given in perception is the concrete, intersubjectively constituted life-world of immediate experience and it is through this experience that we have the idea of being (Merleau-Ponty 1964:xvi, 17).
6 For example, Irigaray (1993:133) claims that traditional male-focused discourse on sexuality, which pretends to be neutral, excludes the feminine and ignores sexual difference. This point is underscored by Allen (1989:86), who maintains that feminist theory seeks to dislodge sexuality from those reifying ideologies which freeze sexual relations into natural forms of domination. According to Butler, the deconstruction of the primary heterosexual construction of desire is no easy task. What is needed, according to Butler (1990:148) is a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition [of the heteronormative matrix] itself. This debate continues in, for example: J. Allen, Through the wild region: an essay in phenomenological feminism, in Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, Vol. XVIII (19821983), pp. 235245; L. Irigaray, An ethics of sexual difference, translated by C. Burke & G.C. Gill, The Athlone Press, London, 1993; H. Cixous & C. Clment, The newly born woman, translated by Betsy Wing, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986; J. Butler, Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity, Routledge, London, 1990; M. Shildrick and J. Price, Vital signs: feminist reconfigurations of the bio/logical body, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1998; W. Simon, Postmodern sexualities, Routledge, London, 1996; M. Kimmel, The gendered society, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004; D. Haraway, A cyborg manifesto: science, technology and socialist feminism in the late twentieth century, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the reinvention of nature, Free Association Books, London, 1991. I am referring here to feminist thinkers, such as Janet Price (1999), Magrit Shildrick (1999), Christine Battersby (1998), Marion Young (1990), Ros Diprose (1994) and Helen Marshall (1999) who insist on the centrality of the material body. Influenced by postmodernism, they see the body as a textual corporeality that is fluid in its meanings.

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Based on this phenomenological perspective, I maintain that there is no disconnection between body and mind, between a persons physical-biological structure and lived phenomenological being. Accordingly, in this article, I aim to move beyond metadiscourses of social constructivism in maintaining that cognition is a fully embodied process. I argue that, even though the sexed and gendered body is mediated by cultural and political constructs and discourses, the lived body is the basis for experience and knowledge of ourselves and other people within this world. There is a need for an embodied philosophy that can go beyond the tendency to theorize about gender and sexuality in a disembodied fashion in order to talk and write from the lived body. Using this theoretical approach, I call for a rethinking of the way we understand gender and sexuality by exploring the body as open project. I use the phrase the body as open project to mean that all human beings have the power for agency and meaning-making, and even though our choices are constrained by existential, historical, cultural and political situations, our bodies are never determined and fixed. Our bodies as lived play a central role in the formation of our subjectivity, including the experience and expression of our genders and sexualities. Moreover, and as I will argue, gender and sexuality are necessarily embodied and irreducible either to biological categories (male, female or intersex), or to cultural constructs (masculinity or femininity). Hence, I argue for a resistance to fix bodies/subjectivities and to embrace the idea of the irreducible ambiguity of embodied experiences (including sex, gender and sexuality). Gender-role transcendence and problematizing the body There is a wealth of sociological, psychological and anthropological documentation available concerning non-normative sexed and gendered persons.8 They include transsexuals, homosexuals, lesbians, cross dressers, transgender and intersex persons. The narratives and lived experiences of thousands of people who are transgendering9 have been told and many have been published. Still, in the late-modern era, only two genders are socially and legally permitted10. Can sex cause such anxiety that Western societies have to control the sex and gender of the human body? Foucault (1984:333) refers to this system of power as a collection of rules that regulate self-fashioning in a binary system of male and female. He calls for a critical analysis of the discursive social practices11 that circumscribe, constitute and regulate peoples sexual desires and gender identities. Magrit Shildrick (1997) points out that Foucaults persistent analysis
8 See for example Ortner & Whitehead (1981); Ifi (1987); Epstein & Straub (1991); Raymond (1994); Gevisser & Cameron (1995); Lewins (1995); Blackwood & Wieringa (1999); Haynes & McKenna (2001); Anderson (2003) and Ekins & King (2006). 9 I borrow this term from Richard Ekins and David King. See their work, The transgender phenomenon, 2006. 10 In most countries, the legal system is premised on a two-gender system, which results in denying the rights of those who do not fit the stereotypical male/female sex/gender roles. For example, until 14 November 2006 gays and lesbians in South Africa were denied the legal status of marriage, and in some countries, i.e. Western Australia, Uganda and Zimbabwe, consenting sex between adults is a criminal offence. Offenders can be jailed for up to five years or even face the death penalty. 11 Foucault (1984: 333) describes these discursive practices as juridico-discursive systems of power, in which sexuality is treated as the correlation of a domain of knowledge, a type of normativity and a mode of relation to the self; it means trying to decipher how in Western societies, a complex experience is constituted from and around certain forms of behaviour: an experience which conjoins a field of study (connaissance) (with its own concepts, theories, diverse disciplines), a collection of rules (which differentiate the permissible from the forbidden, natural from monstrous, normal from pathological, what is

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of the discursive practices that produce the manipulable body has played a major role in current feminist attempts to link the everyday body as it is lived with the disciplinary and regulatory operations that shape its form and behavior. Responding to a concern about the closed Western paradigm of sexual dimorphism, which promotes a heteronormative paradigm, Anne Fausto-Sterling analyzes the arguments upon which scientists justify the practice of surgically altering intersexed persons. She argues that this practice is based on the assumption that nature can make mistakes in sex and that medical science, as representative of culture, can correct this. According to Fausto-Sterling (2003:33), individuals born intersexed should not be forced to have their genitalia surgically reassigned just to compromise their differences to fit a societal definition of normality. She says (2003:34) if the state and the legal system have an interest in maintaining a two-party sexual system, they are in defiance of nature, because, biologically speaking, there are at least five sexes. She points out that it is a medical fact that there are three major subgroups of the intersexual body, which has been largely ignored by medical investigators. She names the three intersexes herms (the true hermaphrodites, who possess one testis and one ovary); merms (the male pseudohermaphrodites, who have testes and some aspects of the female genital but no ovaries); and ferms (the female pseudohermaphrodites, who have ovaries and some aspects of the male genitalia but lack testes (2003:34)). According to John Money, a specialist in the study of sexually ambiguous infants, intersexuals may constitute as many as four percent of births (Fausto-Sterling 2003:34). Some theorists maintain that persons born with ambiguous genitalia comprise 5% to 15% of the population. This includes any condition in which the genitalia do not conform with those of normal males and females, such as hypospadias, undescended testes, fused labia, clitoromegaly, micropenis, combination of penis and vagina (Haynes and McKenna 2001:215). Fausto-Sterling (2003:34) suggests that, on the basis of what is known, the three intersexes should be considered additional sexes each in its own right (2003:34). For her, intersexed bodies challenge traditional beliefs about sexual difference because they embody both sexes and have the irritating ability to live sometimes as one sex and sometimes the other, and they raise the spectre of homosexuality (2003:37). It can be claimed that transgender people (transsexuals, homosexuals, lesbians, cross dressers and intersex persons) in Western communities challenge stereotypical gender categories, but it remains debatable whether they transcend the straitjacket of sexual and gender dimorphism. As Judith Butler (1990:148) points out, deconstructing gender essentialism is not enough to change the politics of compulsory heterosexism, for the: implicit construction of the primary heterosexual construction of desire is shown to persist even as it appears in the mode of primary bisexuality. What is needed, according to Butler, is to displace the very gender categories, norms and rules upon which the heteronormative matrix secures itself. I argue, along similar lines to Butler, that we need to foster a deeper understanding of gender, which will embrace the body as open project when theorizing about biological sex, gender and sexuality. Such an approach would transcend the hegemonic view of gender and sexual differences by speaking to the ambiguity of lived experiences,
decent from what is not, etc.), a mode of relation between the individual and himself (which enables him to recognize himself as a sexual subject amid others).

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the plurality of sexual meanings and the multiplicity of gender identities. Before I elaborate on this mode of thinking, a brief discussion of anthropological and sociological studies of cultures that believe in a multiple gender system is necessary to open up my discussion on the body as open project. There is a vast body of anthropological and sociological scholarship, locally and internationally, on the beliefs and social practices of non-Western cultures. Some of these studies offer groundbreaking research on same-sex relationships and transgendered practices. Theses studies show an acceptance of sexual and gender variations in cultures, such as the Damara in Namibia, the Asante in Ghana, the Sambia of Papua New Guinea; the North American Indian berdaches; the hijras of India who assume a ritual caste role that may be interpreted as a third gender; and the Inuit Eskimo of Canada who incorporate an ontology of the third-sex Inuit shaman endowed with special spiritual qualities, such as changing genders. In this article, for brevity, I refer mainly to Morgan & Wieringas Tommy boys, lesbian men and ancestral wives (2005) and Herdts Third sex, third gender (1994). The aim of this discussion is to show that the existence of differently gendered people transcends the two-category gender matrix. I believe that such transcendence is significant to understandings of gender and sexuality because it shows up the complexity of gender attribution and points towards contextual gender and sexual identities beyond a simplistic reductionism. Tommy boys, lesbian men and ancestral wives documents female same-sex relationships in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Namibia, Swaziland and South Africa. Ruth Morgan and Saskia Wieringa (2005:313) note that, whereas traditional marriages between women in some of these countries were lived openly because they were fully institutionalized in the societies in which they took place, present-day lesbian relationships are often condemned. Exceptions are the lesbian men in the Damara community of Namibia and the tommy boys in Uganda who manage to gain acceptance from their families as men who have wives. Morgan and Wieringa emphasize that gender is fluid by drawing our attention to an interesting phenomenon that occurs in these marriages between women: [T]he relational aspect of gender behaviour that the female-bodied persons demonstrate who are both husbands to their wives and wives to their (male) husbands. They exhibit different sets of conduct towards their partners, including both mothering and fathering to the children born in these respective unions (2005:317). The authors conclude that, in these communities, gender is not considered as a natural element that belongs to persons born in certain bodies, but is seen as a pattern of behaviour that belongs to a person who stands in a certain relation to another human being (2005: 317)12. Morgan and Wieringas point about the contingency and fluidity of gender concurs with Herdts observation: certain individuals in certain times and places transcend the categories of male and female, masculine and feminine, as these have been understood in Western culture. The bodies and ontology of such persons diverge from the
12 This perspective differs from socially constructed approaches, which are based on a two-gender system, in the sense that gender is seen as a relationship between two human beings, irrespective of their biological sex.

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sexual dimorphism model found in science and society in the way they conceive their being and/or their social conduct (1994:21). Herdt points out that the existence of a third or fourth gender, those persons whose minds, bodies or actions seem to defy the dualism of male and female, poses a threat to the organizational and institutional structures of cultural ideologies (1994:14, 15). This point is taken up by Will Roscoe in his article, How to become a berdache: toward a unified analysis of gender diversity (1994). Roscoe (1994:338) points out that berdache status is not a compromise between biological sex and gender, nor is it an alternative role behaviour for nontraditional individuals who are still considered men or women. Rather, it is fully consistent with the Native American belief in a multiple gender system. In the social practices and gender role structures of the North American Indians, significantly, anatomical differences are considered to be insufficient on their own to establish the gender of an individual. For example, in traditional Zuni belief an infants sex was still not determined at the time of birth and required intercession from the parents. Roscoe (1994: 342-343) explains: a series of interventions were considered necessary to ensure that a child has a sex at all. This began before birth, when the parents made offerings at various shrines to influence the sex of the developing fetus. If a woman took a nap during labor, for example, the Zunis believed the sex of her child might change. After birth, interventions intended to influence physical sex continued. The midwife massaged and manipulated the infants face, nose, eyes and genitals. If the infant was male, she poured cold water over its penis to prevent overdevelopment. If the child was female, the midwife split a new gourd in half and rubbed it over the vulva to enlarge it. This social practice among the Zunis can be interpreted as symbolic of their belief that knowing the biological sex of a child is less important than knowing what other qualities it takes to endow a person with gender, such as social factors, individual preferences, intellectual capacities and spiritual qualities. The Zuni beliefs concerning the body, what constitutes sex and gender and how personhood is defined are significant for three reasons. Firstly, the Zuni use economic, social and spiritual attributes of individuals as possible markers of gender, rather than the sex category of Western cultures. For the Zunis an infants sex was still not determined at the time of birth but required intervention from the social order. This social practice is very different from Western cultures, where sexual organs determine the biological sex of an infant and form the basis of the persons gender. Secondly, the berdache status as a third gender, which does not fit into the category of either woman or man, challenges the straightjacket of sexual dimorphism and shows up a dualistic and reductionist Western worldview, where subjects are viewed as split between body and mind, divided between their biological make-up and cultural processes. Thirdly, the Zuni belief in a multiple gender system shows up the complexities of sex and gender and suggests a rethinking of gender beyond the binaries to allow for multidimensional and contextual gender identities. This phenomenon bears a resemblance to the view of gender as relational in the Damara community, as noted by Morgan and Wieringa. Both Morgan & Wieringa and Herdts research suggest that there are important markers of gender over and above biological sex. This calls for a revision of the way in which bodies are read and how sex and gender are understood.

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Although sexuality is one of the power-structures that regulate self-fashioning in a binary system of male and female, as Foucault (1984) points out, it does not follow that dominant metanarratives in societies are impermeable to change. In fact, it is possible to challenge and undermine the excessive power of dominant social and political metadiscourses by exposing alternative discourses of lived experiences that exist on the margin of society. This kind of challenge is necessary because it gives people a critical tool to access the dominant discourses that shape their societies and to recognize the influence of restrictive cultural discourses in their lives. Resistance to the sex/gender categories of male and female carries the potential to radically revise the way in which sex and gender is understood according to stereotypical assumptions of how lived bodies should behave. To my mind, we cannot simply overlook atypical persons by claiming that they are in the minority. Neither can we purely dismiss the idea of a third gender by claiming that it is an unnatural or deviant gender orientation. Indeed, one can rightfully ask what constitutes natural or normal. Cixous and Clment (1986:83) remind us that: there is destiny no more than there is nature or essence as such. Rather, there are living structures that are caught and sometimes rigidly set within historicocultural limits so mixed up with the scene of History that [I]t is impossible to predict what will become of sexual difference in another time (in two or three hundred years?). Cixous and Clment invite us to imagine a radical change in all the structures of education, training and supervision and a real liberation of sexuality according to which each individuals relationship to her or his body (and to the bodies of others) is transformed. According to them femininity and masculinity would then inscribe quite differently their effects of difference (1986:83). The same point is made by Morgan & Wieringa and Herdt in their studies of various cultures. Sex and gender transcendence, as shown in these studies, shows up the complexities of sex and gender categorization, and also calls for an understanding of gender and sexual desire against the backdrop of the idea that social and cultural structures function only as lived and interpreted by particular communities. Such a perspective problematizes the lived body as bearer of gender and sexuality. In the light of these observations, I maintain that we cannot come to a comprehensive understanding of gender and sexuality within a humane society without taking into consideration the centrality of lived bodily experiences. As Price and Shildrick (1999: 10, 11) say: What is at stake is no longer simply the maternal body as such, but questions of what constitutes human being, human individuality, human corporeality in general. The postmodern as a set of unstable conditions and practices is embedded already within the structures of modernity. The body as open project: sex, gender and sexuality as lived experiences Recently thinkers such as Price and Shildrick (1999) and Gayle Salamon (2010) have emphasized that the body can no longer simply be taken for granted, because it has become the site of intense inquiry (Price and Shildrick 1999:12). They challenge the idea that the materiality of the body is something of which we can have epistemological certainty (Salamon 2010:1) and argue for the acknowledgment of the mul-

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tiple and fluid possibilities of gendered and sexual embodiments. This perspective problematizes the body in the same way as Morgan and Wieringa and Herdts research. Building upon their problematizing of the body, I explore gender and sexuality against the backdrop of the notion of the body as open project. In line with Price and Shildrick and Salamons attention to embodied subjectivity, I maintain that gender and sexuality are not fragments detached from subjective intentionalistic experiences. Rather, it is through a process of lived embodiment that we have the idea of being. The concept of the body as open project is an act of refusing closure in terms of gender, sex or sexuality, on any grounds. In my view, it is not only impossible but short-sighted to close our interpretations of the body, given the irreducible ambiguity of embodied experience (including sex, gender and sexuality). From the perspective of the body as open project there is no separation between cognition and any other kind of activity, such as body comportment, clothing, gender identity construction and sexual desire. Cognition of ones gender and sexuality cannot be separated from the lived body through which socio-cultural and historical forces are interpreted and re-interpreted. To put it differently, when we talk about the sexed and gendered body, mediated by cultural and political constructs and discourses, the lived phenomenological body, as the basis for experience and knowledge of ourselves and other people within an intersubjective world, cannot be ignored. To do so is to subscribe implicitly to a dualistic ontology, where sexual and gendered persons are seen as objects of observation and classification. It reduces sexuality and gender to third-person phenomena, such as sexual behavior, male versus female qualities, cultural and political processes, or heterosexual versus homosexual styles, while the subjective intentionalistic experiences of the first-person are overlooked or even denied. To me, embodied everyday experiences (intentionalistic experiences), such as sexual desire and gendered embodiment, have a first-person ontology,13 in that they only have meaning as experienced and lived through by a human agent. I am not, however, insisting on the autonomy of consciousness (or pure interiority). Rather, following Merleau-Ponty, I maintain that interiority and exteriority are interlaced and co-implicated, so that body and mind are inextricably linked. Merleau-Ponty speaks of an incarnated mind, meaning that consciousness is always necessarily embodied and corporeally constituted (1964: 3-4). He sees the body as a living physical-biological structure and concurrently a lived phenomenological being. The body has a double presence of exteriority and interiority that forms a chiasm with things, a crisscrossing of the experience and the experienced. The body is thus not an entity exterior to the individuals existence. Neither is it an intellectual concept reflecting an inner life. It is both expression and expressed because existence is a perpetual incarnation and indeterminate, not a set of facts (like psychic facts) capable of being reduced to others or to which they can reduce themselves, but the ambiguous setting of their inter-communication. (Merleau-Ponty 1962:166) For consciousness to be embodied also means to be sexually embodied and gender-embodied. This embodiment is an ongoing activity of actualization and synthesis
13 I borrow the terms first-person ontology and third-person ontology from John Searle. See his article, What is to be done? Topoi, 25: 101-108, 2006.

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of concrete experience, which is a total existence, and not just fragments of existence. Like all structures and functions of human existence, such as perception, speech and movement, sexuality and the way we do gender are incorporated with the totality of lived, incarnate experiences. For instance, persons as sexually embodied are not things in the world with certain properties or essences, such as heterosexual, homosexual, transsexual, transvestite or intersexed. Human nature is never fixed and, as the research findings of Morgan & Wieringa and Herdt have demonstrated, masculinity and femininity are not exhaustive. What then shall we do with the heterosexual/homosexual segregation? I propose that we abandon it altogether. Sexual embodiment can never be merely the expression of heterosexuality versus homosexuality because human existence is irreducibly indeterminate and the act of taking up and making explicit a sexual situation, and that in this way it has always at least a double sense (Merleau-Ponty 1962:196). Indeterminate here conveys the idea that the human person cannot be classified according to fixed categories, because ambiguity is of the essence of human existence, and everything we live and think has always several meanings and all human functions, from sexuality to motility and intelligence, are rigorously unified in one synthesis so that it is impossible to reduce the life which involves human relationships either to economic relations, or to juridical and moral ones thought up by men, just as it is impossible to reduce individual life either to bodily functions or to our knowledge of life as it involves them. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 200) Based on Merleau-Pontys notion of the bodys double presence of exteriority and interiority, and the interlacing of the experience and the experienced, I maintain that the lived body does not passively inhabit a world, but acts as a dialogical synergy that mediates (transforms or transcends) between the boundaries of self and other, between the specifics of the materiality of the body as it is experienced and lived (or lived through) and the cultural and political constitution of sexual and gender differences. This view has important implications for the social constructivist understanding of gender. Social constructivists assume that gender is constructed according to social rules and cultural processes. They see gender as an arbitrary system of social rules and role behaviour assigned to bodies. The assumption is that our knowledge of what it is to be a woman or a man, female or male, is constructed by social and historical processes. But if gender were a social construction, how is it possible for persons to transcend the gender categories of male and female, as we have seen in the research of Morgan & Wieringa and Herdt? Referring to social constructivisms oversight of the possibility of intentionality, Jamison Green (2001: 69) sketches the following scenario: If an individuals sense of his or her own gender relied exclusively on how others read his or her body and reacted to it, then it would likely follow as true that if you assigned an infants sex, fixed its genitals to match that sex, and raised the child in the manner of other bodies of that type, the child should have no problem adopting that social role. Green emphasizes that this scenario does not work and maintains that gender cannot be assigned by an other, but only interpretedor misinterpreted (2001:70). The idea that gender is socially constructed (and some theorists claim that sex too is socially

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constructed, like Judith Butler) is one-dimensional. It ignores the possibility that human existence is indeterminate and ambiguous. It also overlooks the possibility of a variety of embodiments of gender and sexuality. In order to illustrate my point, I will refer to the case of David (known as John/Joan), discussed by Delphine McFarlane (2001:19-27) in Haynes and McKennas Unseen genders: beyond the binaries . David, an Australian man, was born male and named as such. A few weeks after his birth, it was discovered that David was born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia.14 At the age of two he was surgically reassigned as female. David had a penis, a uterus and no vagina. There was thus no outward indication that he was a girl. But the specialists at the time decided to cut his penis off and that he should be raised as a girl. David, believing that he was born a girl, had extreme difficulties in behaving like one and in making friends (Haynes and McKenna 2001:3). His peers, who knew nothing about his genitals, snickered at his girls clothes and awkward body comportment and behaviour that did not gel. They called him gorilla and caveman and would not play with him. David spoke of his embarrassment and humiliation at swimming classes at age fourteen when he was at a girls boarding school: Having to do swimming classes when it was quite obvious I didnt have a girls body wasnt a lot less humiliating (2001: 21). At the age of sixteen he had surgery, which I suppose can only be described as a hysterectomy where I believe I was to be made more like a female (2001: 21, 22). David rebelled and refused to give in to attempts to feminize his behavior. At eighteen an endocrinologist and a plastic surgeon constructed from his forearm a penis, or, as David puts it: a replacement for what he lost at two (2001:22). About the initial inappropriate gender assignment, and the attempt to correct the mistake, he says (2001:22): Since my initial operation, no doctor involved has contacted me to explain why they thought it was necessary, or find out if it was the right thing to do to mewhich it wasnt. But you dont hear the real me, and you dont see the real me. I present myself in a certain mannera fitting manner, so you will feel comfortable with me. The real me has been othered by you and your heterosexual hegemony. I do not have a place other than one that is in hiding; I have been bound, gagged, and masked. Davids embodied story speaks of pain and injustice, caused by medical interference to construct a body that would fit an appropriate gender category (female). When the given body refused to conform to the social rules and norms it was re-constructed to fit the opposite appropriate gender (male). Attempts to fashion a heteronormative identity for David violently failed. I use violent here to refer to the inhumane treatment of Davids body as a thing, an entity exterior to the totality of his existence. In the process David was othered biologically (not to speak about the impossibility of sexual arousal) and culturally (hiding the real Self in order to fit in). Such a dismissal of Davids existence as a fully human and intelligible person can only be called violent. In her consideration of the materiality of the body, Butler (1994: ix) admits: I could not fix bodies as simple objects of thought. Not only did bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves, but this movement beyond their own
14 Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) is the most prevalent cause of intersexuality amongst XX persons. A female born with CAH syndrome can fully masculinize to the point that he looks like a boy with undescended testes. Because the virilization originates metabolically, the effects of masculinization continue after birth (Haynes and McKenna, Unseen genders, 2001: 215).

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boundaries, a movement of boundary itself, appeared to be quite central to what bodies are. I kept losing track of the subject. It proved resistant to discipline. Inevitably, I began to consider that perhaps this resistance to fixing the subject was essential to the matter at hand. The resistance to fixing the subject is a crucial step towards the recognition that diversity should be embraced rather than used as a reason for discrimination, oppression and exclusion of bodies, which do not conform to a heterosexual paradigm. The oppression and denial of the enfleshments of people who are non-normatively sexed and gendered are violent and inhumane. Davids story is not exceptional. There are many other similar cases of infants who are intersexed and who are surgically reassigned sexually to fit into a heterosexual belief structure. Fortunately in Davids case, he had the strength of character to resist the medical recommendations to feminize his fixed body in order to fit others gender expectations. He challenged the view that nature makes mistakes and that culture, through the interference of science, can correct these mistakes by surgically altering the genitalia of intersexed persons to make them more male or female. No amount of imposed social rules, cultural expectations and surgery could make David feel like a girl.15 All the same, I do not believe that David defies the theory of social constructivism. Theoretically speaking, gender is socially constructed in the sense that perceptions of male and female are predominantly inscribed by cultural expectations. Economically and politically speaking, it cannot be denied that Western society (as constructed in the family, the classroom, the workplace or government) is gendered according to a patriarchal binary model. From a phenomenological stance, however, the constructivist theory of gender and ostensible gender differences cannot account for human agents intentionalistic experiences of their bodies and through which gender is interpreted and re-interpreted. As the case of David persuasively demonstrates, the lived bodies of human agents do not simply inscribe the socio-cultural text. Conclusion In this article I have pointed out the value and limitations of social constructivism in our understanding of sex, sexuality and gender. The claim that gender differences are artificially fashioned according to societal perceptions and expectations does not imply that gender as such is arbitrary and accidental. Current social constructivist theorists are not nave enough to suggest that, since gender is socially constructed, we can change our gender any way we like. By maintaining that gender is an arbitrary system of social rules and role behavior, social constructivism does not deny the reality of gender differences. The problem, though, is that social constructivism equates gender differences with the differences between male bodies and female bodies. It assumes a binary system where gender identities are reduced to only two categories. It takes for granted that there are only two possible embodiments of humankind, while in reality and truth there are a variety of possible embodiments. In addition, social constructivism assumes a split between body and mind, and between an individuals biological make-up and cultural processes. These assumptions have far-reaching and crippling consequences for those people who are born neither strictly female, nor strictly male and who, at the hands of surgeons, are transformed to
15 I am not saying though that nature is essentially correct, because then we slide to the other side of another dualism.

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fit the Manichean binary. It could also have harmful effects on the lives of those persons who are ambiguously gendered but do not change their biological sex to conform to societys gender expectations. Against the backdrop of this dualistic paradigm, those people who do not conform to heteronormativity are considered misfits, deviant, unnatural, immoral, and even unAfrican. Morgan and Wieringa address the issue of homophobia and the suppression of same-sex practices in Tommy boys, lesbian men and ancestral wives. They point out that current African political leaders who view homosexuality as unAfrican have appropriated the perception that same-sex practices are unnatural and sinful (2005:17). In their research they draw upon a wealth of data on womens same-sex relations across cultures to demonstrate that a range of same-sex practices in Africa existed in pre-colonial times. These social-sexual arrangements include different types of female friendships and female marriages between women, such as rain queens and sangomas. The claim by current African leaders that same-sex practices are alien and unAfrican is thus completely unfounded. Morgan and Wieringa (2005:17, 281) point out that homophobia and not homosexuality was imported from the West. The belief that same-sex relations are sinful in the eyes of God was introduced by the missionaries and colonial administrators. This led to the illogical conclusion that heterosexuality is normal and morally correct because it is natural, while same-sexuality is immoral because it is unnatural. I maintain that the concept ambiguously gendered applies, not only to transsexuals, homosexuals, cross-dressers and transgender people, but can also be extended to include straight people who use the heteronormative model as a camouflage to cover up their ambiguity. For instance, some women are wives to their husbands and mothers to their children, while at the same time they are lovers and promise-makers to gays, lesbians and sometimes transsexual individuals, keeping the reality of their ambiguity secret from their husbands, children and the public eye. The same goes for some heterosexual men. Could it be that homosexuality is more frequently practised (even in disguise) than heterosexuality? Referring to Sandy Stones The empire strikes back: a posttranssexual manifesto, Judith Halberstam (1999: 132) says: the post in posttranssexual demands that we examine the strangeness of all gendered bodies, not only the transsexualized ones and that we rewrite the cultural fiction that divides a sex from a transsex, a gender from a transgender. All gender should be transgender, all desire is transgender, movement is all. gender is defined by its transitivity, .. sexuality manifests as multiple sexualities, and therefore we are all transsexuals. There are no transsexuals. Earlier I suggested that we abandon the heterosexual/homosexual divide. I argued that human existence, by its nature, is indeterminate and ambiguous. Thus, it does not make sense to reduce sexual embodiment to heterosexuality versus homosexuality. Gender embodiment is not one-dimensional, but fluid in the sense that a variety of gender embodiments are possible. Hence I propose an understanding of gender and sexuality beyond a dualistic view of human existence. Using Merleau-Pontys notion of the phenomenological body, I would like us to see gender and sexuality as necessarily embodied and thus rigorously unified in the totality of an individuals existence. Gender and sexuality cannot be seen as fragments detached from an individuals lived-through experiences. Nor can gender and sexuality be separated from socio-cultural and historical forces. Rather than theorizing about gender and sexuality in a dis-

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embodied manner, my phenomenological approach takes the body as open project as a central nexus of meaning. The acknowledgment of non-normatively gendered people is crucial for our understanding of humanity as transcending the homosexual/heterosexual divide. Human society needs to be revolutionalized socially, legally and culturally to embrace people who do not fit into a fixed binary sex/gender system. Such a change is essential so that straight people can understand their own sexuality and gender as ambiguous, fluid and indeterminate in the same way as homosexual people. We need to reconstruct societys view of human beings in line with more human values and a re-valuation of the ethical space between embodied selves and embodied others. Differences would then be embraced, rather than used as a reason for discrimination and exclusion. Instead of shaping our stereotypical views of sexual and gender differences to meet our beliefs about the nature of human beings, our image of human existence will then be shaped by a deeper and far more nuanced understanding of sexualities and gendered embodiment. References Allen, J. 1982-83. Through the wild region: an essay in phenomenological feminism. Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, Vol. XVIII (1982-83): 235-245. Allen, J. and Young, I.M. 1989. The thinking muse: feminism and modern French philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Anderson, J.L. 2003. Race, gender, and sexuality: philosophical issues of identity and justice. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Battersby, C. 1998. The phenomenal woman: feminist metaphysics and the patterns of identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Blackwood, E. and Wieringa, S. 1999. Female desires: womens same-sex relations and transgender practices across cultures . New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, J. 1990. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. 1994. Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex. New York: Routledge. Cornell, D. 1995. What is an ethical feminism? In: Benhabib, S., Butler, J., Cornell, D. and Fraser. N. Feminist contentions: a philosophical exchange. New York: Routledge. Cixous, H & Clment, C. 1986. The newly born woman. Translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De Beauvoir, S. 1949. Le Deuxime sexe. Paris: Gallimard. De Beauvoir, S. 2010. The second sex. Translated by C. Borde and S. MalovanyChevallier. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Diprose, R. 1994. The bodies of women. Ethics, embodiment and sexual difference. London: Routledge. Ekins, R. and King, D. 2006. The transgender phenomenon. London: Sage Publications.

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