Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

144 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
such a concern says nothing about male supremacy” (1989, p. 30). In fact, “the ‘sex/
gender’ distinction is a restatement of the old ‘nature/nurture’, ‘body/mind’
dichotomy. It separates ‘biology’ out from ‘society’, and relegates it to an outer
realm where it still lurks, unmediated, unsubdued, and presumably, unknown”
(1989, pp. 24– 25). 42 Social construction refers to how gender is shaped and
reproduced culturally, how one is made and not born a woman. Usually this
perspective argues that masculinity and femininity are a relational set, symmetrical,
part of a system of binary oppositions—sort of a disembodied codependency. 43 The
emphasis on social “gender” to the exclusion of biological difference is part of the
defensiveness and coyness that Bev Thiele describes when she says (1989, p. 7):
“For years we skirted around biological difference so as to avoid biological
determinism.” Much recent theorizing on the body and gender refuses the female
body, and this is sexism not liberation. But the suspicion that the female body is too
different to be equal makes social constructivism an analysis of cultural forms where
only forms matter: it is functionalist and pluralist in bias, a liberal laissez-faire
gender economy. Cultural exchanges are stressed over biological processes, it’s
culture over nature once again. The masculinist and dualist notion of the separation
and primacy of mind over body, nature over culture continues to ignore that these
are processes. Nature and nurture not only interact but shape themselves continually
in the interaction. Marilyn Frye makes this point: “Enculturation and socialization
are, I think, misunderstood if one pictures them as processes which apply layers of
cultural gloss over a biological substratum” (1983, p. 35). She points to the
absurdity of separating nature and nurture: “We are animals. Learning is physical,
bodily. There is not a separate, nonmaterial ‘control room’ where socialization,
enculturation, and habit formation take place and where, since it is nonmaterial,
change is independent of bodies and easier than in bodies. Socialization molds our
bodies; enculturation forms our skeletons, our musculature, our central nervous
system” (1983, p. 37). Sexuality and procreativity are, as Mary O’Brien (1981) has
demonstrated, historical, dialectical, and materialist processes. The notion that only
forms matter is the substanceless aesthetics and politics of discarnate desires.
Mary Poovey’s vision is the “brave new world of the reconceptualized subject”
(1988, p. 60) which she sees as afforded by deconstruction. Her masculine-biased
reduction of the extraordinary work of Luce Irigaray to biological determinism and
the representation of even the assiduously “bisexual” Cixous in these terms is a
traditional trivialization of women’s writing. Poovey then “redeems” Irigaray and
Cixous by turning them into handmaidens of Derrida, he who is the excellent,
impotent Deconstructor who turns and turns in his immortal, non-reproductive coils.
42. See Gatens (1989) who traces the “gender” versus “sex” distinction to the male scientist, Robert
Stoller; also Lloyd (1989) Edwards (1989) and Thiele (1989).
43. For a feminist critique of codependency theory, see Laura Brown (1990) who argues “this model
is one that oppresses women under the guise of helping them, that pathologizes the political, that
moves women into therapy rather than mass action” (1990, p. 4). Instead, she suggests we “need to
challenge the concept of the ‘dysfunctional family’, raised so often in the process addictions
literature, and remind ourselves and our colleagues that under patriarchy, no family functions well”
(1990, p. 4).