It helps, though it's difficult, because the naturalistic explanation is so entrenched in the dominant ideology, to consider masculinity and femininity as co-dependent concepts created from the division of humanity into classes of people in order to allow the exploitation of some people by others, and which would lose their meaning and their importance if that dynamic were to disappear.
In the narrow, marxist sense of "class", capitalists exploit workers (by paying them less than the value created from their labour), and notable differences accrue to each class from the social and psychological consequences of that economic division, even within groups of the same ethnicity or gender. Whether someone belongs to the group of people in power or to the people who are exploited determines the opportunities accorded to that person to a huge extent. In the case of racial exploitation, it's skin colour (and so forth, for various definitions of race) that signify that appartenance. Skin colour, as the marker for that hierarchy, also becomes the excuse and justification for that hierarchy in racist ideology, just as (capitalist) class characteristics then become justifications for class oppression.
In the case of gender-based exploitation, males exploit females (quite often in ways that analyses of capitalist, waged-based exploitation fail to account for, because they do it through other modes of production), and the division of humanity according to sexual characteristics -- not the existence of those characteristics in and of themselves -- creates the classes of men and women: men and women, with their extremely variable attributes, depending on historical and local particulars, which those who embrace naturalist ideology keeps having to find new reasons for, because they de facto exclude social factors (and, therefore, oppression).
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2007-09-14 09:39 pm (UTC)In the narrow, marxist sense of "class", capitalists exploit workers (by paying them less than the value created from their labour), and notable differences accrue to each class from the social and psychological consequences of that economic division, even within groups of the same ethnicity or gender. Whether someone belongs to the group of people in power or to the people who are exploited determines the opportunities accorded to that person to a huge extent. In the case of racial exploitation, it's skin colour (and so forth, for various definitions of race) that signify that appartenance. Skin colour, as the marker for that hierarchy, also becomes the excuse and justification for that hierarchy in racist ideology, just as (capitalist) class characteristics then become justifications for class oppression.
In the case of gender-based exploitation, males exploit females (quite often in ways that analyses of capitalist, waged-based exploitation fail to account for, because they do it through other modes of production), and the division of humanity according to sexual characteristics -- not the existence of those characteristics in and of themselves -- creates the classes of men and women: men and women, with their extremely variable attributes, depending on historical and local particulars, which those who embrace naturalist ideology keeps having to find new reasons for, because they de facto exclude social factors (and, therefore, oppression).