South African Journal of Philosophy

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Bodies as open projects: reflections on gender and

sexuality

Maria Elizabeth Susanna (Elbie) van den Berg

To cite this article: Maria Elizabeth Susanna (Elbie) van den Berg (2011) Bodies as open
projects: reflections on gender and sexuality, South African Journal of Philosophy, 30:3,
385-402, DOI: 10.4314/sajpem.v30i3.69585

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/sajpem.v30i3.69585

Published online: 28 Oct 2013.

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 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 ques-
tions of gender and sexuality. I argue that social constructivism, like biologi-
cal 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-Ponty’s 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 pro-
cess. I see gender and sexuality as necessarily embodied and corporeally con-
stituted. In the light of this, I propose an understanding of gender and sexual-
ity 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 gen-
der 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 pre-
mised on a separation between metadiscourses on gender and the lived bodily experi-
ences 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 determin-
ism serves the interests of patriarchal ideologies. Responding to essentialist views, so-
cial constructivists argue that socio-cultural and historical processes profoundly gen-
der people’s bodies and sexualize their behavior according to a compulsory
heteronormative model.
While there are undoubtedly grounds for accepting the social constructivist para-
digm, I maintain that this model focuses too narrowly on the aspects of social con-
struction and metadiscourses on gender and professed sexual differences between fe-
386 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2011, 30(3)

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 ’differently’1
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 individual’s 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 defini-
tions. 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 inequal-
ity 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 individual’s erotic attraction, which is on a
continuum and not limited to a set of absolute categories (heterosexual versus homo-
sexual). 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 sex-
ual desire either to biological sex or to socio-cultural structures.
From my phenomenological perspective, gender and sexuality3 are not fragments,
detached from an individual’s lived experiences. Neither are they the products of an
arbitrary system of social rules and normalizing cultural practices. Rather, the mean-
ings of gender and sexualities are seen as fluid and dynamic.
1 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 ac-
corded to such people.
2 In my view, the meanings of gender and sexuality are not fixed, but can transcend the rigid two-dimen-
sional 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 femi-
nine) and sexuality (heterosexual versus homosexual).
3 A distinction should be drawn between sex and sexuality, because they are not the same. Sex is an inti-
mate act (sexual intercourse) between two people. Sexuality is a central aspect of one’s personality (of
being human) that helps to define how one interacts with other people and how one is perceived by oth-
S. Afr. J. Philos. 2011, 30(3) 387

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 bio-
logical 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 sub-
jectivity 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 Butler’s 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, con-
crete, lived and they exceed the merely discursive. In my view, socio-cultural and his-
torical structures function only as lived and interpreted by embodied individuals. The
lived bodies of human agents are not completely determined by socio-cultural and his-
torical 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 va-
riety 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-Ponty’s
phenomenological views on intentionality and concrete lived experiences. I use his
philosophical insights as a basis for arguing that gender and sexuality are fully embod-
ied processes, rather than dissociated from an individual’s lived experiences. In this
connection, Simone de Beauvoir’s 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 politi-
cal 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 cul-
tural constructivist school, Margaret Mead and Simone de Beauvoir called patriarchal
societies into question. In effect, Mead’s work in ‘The social organization of Manu’a’
(1930) and De Beauvoir’s work in Le Deuxième sexe (The second sex) (1949) radi-
cally questioned the ideology of women’s ’natural’ inferiority to justify patriarchal
domination. De Beauvoir’s approach to the situation of women under patriarchy al-
ers. Sexuality encompasses sexual intimacy and biological reproduction and is experienced and ex-
pressed in thoughts, desires, beliefs, values, attitudes, body image and self-image.
388 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2011, 30(3)

lows for the meaning of a woman’s body to be attributed both from the inside and the
outside. She maintains that the meaning of a woman’s body is determined by how
each woman lives her body. This approach challenges the hegemonic sexual dualism
of biological determinism. Despite Mead’s and De Beauvoir’s efforts, the naturalistic
bias continued to dominate sex and gender studies.
Social scientists began to focus on gender and sexuality in social and cultural con-
texts in the 1970s, long after the publication of ‘The social organization of Manu’a’
and The second sex In this period anthropologists, sociologists and ethnologists,4 fol-
lowing 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 con-
stitutes the ’nature’ of ’men’ and ’women’; males and females are predominantly natu-
ral 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 cul-
tural 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 hu-
man 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, Har-
ding, Dupré, 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 under-
standing of gender and sexuality. Feminist thinkers, gender theorists and human scien-
tists, such as Jeffner Allen (1982-1983, 1989), Luce Irigaray (1993), Hélène 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 dom-
4 Cultural constructivist studies focusing on the deconstruction of naturalistic essentialism include R.
Rivière, ‘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 cul-
ture 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.
5 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: biologi-
cal theories about women and men, Basic Books, New York, 1985; S. Harding, The science question in
feminism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1986; J. Dupré, ‘Sex, gender, and essence’, Midwest Stud-
ies in Philosophy 11: 441-457, 1986; J. Epstein and K. Straub (eds.), Body guards, Routledge, New
York, 1991
S. Afr. J. Philos. 2011, 30(3) 389

inant patriarchal heterosexist discourse. They maintain that women’s 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 pa-
triarchal heteronormative discourse needs to be deconstructed.6
I agree with the social constructivist view that cultural institutions and social pro-
cesses, which function as a ‘juridico-discursive system of power’ (as Foucault (1984:
333) calls it), gender people’s 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 nat-
uralistic 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 iden-
tity 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 social-
ist) 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 ex-
istentialist 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 embod-
ied 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-Ponty’s ontological view. His key
ideas (for my purposes here) are: ‘the world which is given in perception is the con-
crete, 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, ac-
cording 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 Psy-
chology & Psychiatry, Vol. XVIII (1982–1983), pp. 235–245; L. Irigaray, An ethics of sexual differ-
ence, translated by C. Burke & G.C. Gill, The Athlone Press, London, 1993; H. Cixous & C. Clément,
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.
7 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 corpore-
ality that is fluid in its meanings.
390 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2011, 30(3)

Based on this phenomenological perspective, I maintain that there is no disconnection

between body and mind, between a person’s 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 embod-
ied process. I argue that, even though the sexed and gendered body is mediated by cul-
tural 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. Us-
ing 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 deter-
mined and fixed. Our bodies as lived play a central role in the formation of our subjec-
tivity, including the experience and expression of our genders and sexualities. More-
over, and as I will argue, gender and sexuality are necessarily embodied and irreduc-
ible 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 trans-
sexuals, 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 gen-
ders are socially and legally permitted10. Can sex cause such anxiety that Western so-
cieties have to control the sex and gender of the human body? Foucault (1984:333) re-
fers 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 so-
cial practices11 that circumscribe, constitute and regulate people’s sexual desires and
gender identities. Magrit Shildrick (1997) points out that Foucault’s 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 No-
vember 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 differ-
entiate the permissible from the forbidden, natural from monstrous, normal from pathological, what is
S. Afr. J. Philos. 2011, 30(3) 391

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 argu-
ments upon which scientists justify the practice of surgically altering intersexed per-
sons. 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 differ-
ences 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 de-
fiance 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 com-
prise 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 gen-
der 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 biolog-
ical 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)’.
392 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2011, 30(3)

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 sociolog-
ical 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 in-
ternationally, 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 vari-
ations 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 as-
sume 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 & Wieringa’s Tommy boys, les-
bian men and ancestral wives (2005) and Herdt’s Third sex, third gender (1994). The
aim of this discussion is to show that the existence of differently gendered people tran-
scends 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 gen-
der attribution and points towards contextual gender and sexual identities beyond a
simplistic reductionism.
Tommy boys, lesbian men and ancestral wives documents female same-sex relation-
ships in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Namibia, Swaziland and South Africa. Ruth Mor-
gan and Saskia Wieringa (2005:313) note that, whereas traditional marriages between
women in some of these countries were lived openly because they were fully institu-
tionalized 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, includ-
ing 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 be-
haviour that belongs to a person who stands in a certain relation to another human be-
ing’ (2005: 317) 12.
Morgan and Wieringa’s point about the contingency and fluidity of gender concurs
with Herdt’s 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 biolog-
ical sex.
S. Afr. J. Philos. 2011, 30(3) 393

sexual dimorphism model found in science and society — in the way they con-
ceive 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: to-
ward a unified analysis of gender diversity’ (1994).
Roscoe (1994:338) points out that berdache status is not a compromise between bio-
logical sex and gender, nor is it an alternative role behaviour for nontraditional indi-
viduals 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 infant’s 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 vari-
ous 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 infant’s face, nose, eyes and geni-
tals. 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 quali-
ties it takes to endow a person with gender, such as social factors, individual prefer-
ences, 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 infant’s sex was still not deter-
mined 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 bi-
ological sex of an infant and form the basis of the person’s 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 gen-
der and suggests a rethinking of gender beyond the binaries to allow for multidimen-
sional 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 Herdt’s 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.
394 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2011, 30(3)

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 pos-
sible 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 recog-
nize 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 stereotyp-
ical 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 Clément (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 im-
possible to predict what will become of sexual difference — in another time (in
two or three hundred years?).
Cixous and Clément invite us to imagine a radical change in all the structures of edu-
cation, training and supervision and a real liberation of sexuality according to which
each individual’s relationship to her or his body (and to the bodies of others) is trans-
formed. 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 com-
plexities of sex and gender categorization, and also calls for an understanding of gen-
der and sexual desire against the backdrop of the idea that social and cultural struc-
tures function only as lived and interpreted by particular communities. Such a perspec-
tive problematizes the lived body as bearer of gender and sexuality.
In the light of these observations, I maintain that we cannot come to a comprehen-
sive 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 gen-
eral. … The postmodern as a set of unstable conditions and practices is embed-
ded 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 be-
come ‘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 episte-
mological certainty’ (Salamon 2010:1) and argue for the acknowledgment of the mul-
S. Afr. J. Philos. 2011, 30(3) 395

tiple and fluid possibilities of gendered and sexual embodiments. This perspective
problematizes the body in the same way as Morgan and Wieringa and Herdt’s
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 Salamon’s 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 gen-
der, 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 cog-
nition and any other kind of activity, such as body comportment, clothing, gender
identity construction and sexual desire. Cognition of one’s gender and sexuality can-
not 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 our-
selves 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, cul-
tural 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, in-
sisting on the autonomy of consciousness (or pure interiority). Rather, following
Merleau-Ponty, I maintain that interiority and exteriority are interlaced and co-impli-
cated, so that body and mind are inextricably linked. Merleau-Ponty speaks of an in-
carnated mind, meaning that consciousness is always necessarily embodied and corpo-
really constituted (1964: 3-4). He sees the body as a living physical-biological struc-
ture and concurrently a lived phenomenological being. The body has a double pres-
ence 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 indi-
vidual’s 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 gen-
der-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.
396 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2011, 30(3)

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 re-
search 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 indeter-
minate 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 sex-
uality 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 rela-
tions, 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-Ponty’s notion of the body’s double presence of exteriority and in-
teriority, 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 me-
diates (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 pro-
cesses. But if gender were a social construction, how is it possible for persons to tran-
scend the gender categories of male and female, as we have seen in the research of
Morgan & Wieringa and Herdt? Referring to social constructivism’s oversight of the
possibility of intentionality, Jamison Green (2001: 69) sketches the following
scenario:
If an individual’s sense of his or her own gender relied exclusively on how oth-
ers read his or her body and reacted to it, then it would likely follow as true that
if you assigned an infant’s 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 interpreted—or misinterpreted’ (2001:70). The idea
that gender is socially constructed (and some theorists claim that sex too is socially
S. Afr. J. Philos. 2011, 30(3) 397

constructed, like Judith Butler) is one-dimensional. It ignores the possibility that hu-
man 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 McKenna’s 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, be-
lieving 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 girl’s clothes and awkward body comportment and behav-
iour 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 girl’s boarding school: ‘Having to do swimming classes
when it was quite obvious I didn’t have a girl’s body wasn’t a lot less humiliating’
(2001: 21). At the age of sixteen he had surgery, ‘which I suppose can only be de-
scribed 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 be-
havior. 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
me—which it wasn’t. … But you don’t hear the real me, and you don’t see the
real me. I present myself in a certain manner—a ‘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.
David’s 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 iden-
tity for David violently failed. I use ‘violent’ here to refer to the inhumane treatment of
David’s body as a thing, an entity exterior to the totality of his existence. In the pro-
cess 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 Da-
vid’s 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 per-
sons. 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).
398 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2011, 30(3)

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 diver-
sity 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 op-
pression and denial of the enfleshments of people who are non-normatively sexed and
gendered are violent and inhumane.
David’s 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 be-
lief structure. Fortunately in David’s case, he had the strength of character to resist the
medical recommendations to feminize his fixed body in order to fit others’ gender ex-
pectations. He challenged the view that nature makes mistakes and that culture,
through the interference of science, can ‘correct’ these ‘mistakes’ by surgically alter-
ing 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 patri-
archal 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 naïve 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 be-
tween an individual’s 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 an-
other dualism.
S. Afr. J. Philos. 2011, 30(3) 399

fit the Manichean binary. It could also have harmful effects on the lives of those per-
sons who are ambiguously gendered but do not change their biological sex to conform
to society’s 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 ap-
propriated the perception that same-sex practices are unnatural and sinful’ (2005:17).
In their research they draw upon a wealth of data on women’s 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 missionar-
ies 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 in-
clude ‘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 moth-
ers 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 am-
biguity secret from their husbands, children and the public eye. The same goes for
some ‘heterosexual’ men. Could it be that ‘homosexuality’ is more frequently prac-
tised (even in disguise) than ‘heterosexuality’? Referring to Sandy Stone’s ‘The em-
pire 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 cul-
tural 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-Ponty’s notion
of the phenomenological body, I would like us to see gender and sexuality as necessar-
ily embodied and thus rigorously unified in the totality of an individual’s existence.
Gender and sexuality cannot be seen as fragments detached from an individual’s
lived-through experiences. Nor can gender and sexuality be separated from socio-cul-
tural and historical forces. Rather than theorizing about gender and sexuality in a dis-
400 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2011, 30(3)

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 under-
standing of humanity as transcending the homosexual/heterosexual divide. Human so-
ciety 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
society’s 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. In-
stead 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.

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