Gender Inequality. A Feminist Perspective

In recent years, women’s organizations and feminists have protested violence, impunity, and precariousness. Whether in the streets, at universities, in front of government offices, or in digital spaces, the mass nature of these types of mobilizations is undeniable: rivers of green and purple handkerchiefs flood cities like Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Madrid, Istanbul, Seoul, Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Mexico City. Slogans and graffiti that mix protest and irreverence such as: “we must abort, we must abort, we must abort this patriarchal system”; performances with global reach like the one led by the Chilean collective LasTesis titled “A Rapist in Your Path”; and viral hashtags like #MeToo, #BalanceTonPorc, and #NiUnaMenos are signs of our times.

Abortion in Mexico and the resistance of women to guarantee the right
Picture: CIMAC/ Berenice Chavarría Tenorio

Now, the feminist imprint is not new. Strictly speaking, we find its first signs in the critique of the European Enlightenment project in the 18^th century, which excluded more than half of the population from the principles of liberty and equality. This critique soon transformed into a political and intellectual movement in favor of women’s rights throughout much of the 19^th century, both in Europe and in America. By the first decades of the 20^th century, the movement achieved significant accomplishments through the conquest of suffrage and unrestricted access to education (Amorós, 2000).

Slogans during the 8M march
Picture: Amneris Chaparro

The fact that women could become citizens and acquire knowledge at universities is no small matter; it represented an unprecedented change in human history. Although since proto-feminist times, in authors like Christine de Pizan, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Mary Astell, we find sharp critiques of the exclusion of women from spaces dedicated to the creation and dissemination of knowledge, it was during the 20^th century that a scientific, interdisciplinary, and highly critical explanation began to take shape regarding the origin of inequality between men and women, as an issue that is neither natural nor inescapable.

In other words, the presence of women in universities was key for questioning, starting in the 1970s, the invisible structures that support, justify, and reproduce ideas, stereotypes, and specific mandates about femininity and women. In this sense, a key question for feminists of the self-called second wave of feminism [see box] was why, if women were already subjects of political and social rights, they were still treated as second-class citizens. This question presupposes the existence of different, unequal, and unjust treatment related, on the one hand, to high levels of violence, harassment, and intimidation, and on the other, to a series of material and symbolic obstacles that prevent or hinder women’s access to spaces predominantly occupied by men.

The bicycle: A symbol of women’s emancipation
Picture: Online Bicycle Museum

The bicycle: A symbol of women’s emancipation
Picture: Lithium

One way of answering that question involved a critical review of discourses that justify the status of women as—in the words of Simone de Beauvoir—the other of the human, the otherness. Specifically, both religious and biological discourses have promoted a widespread idea of inequality as a natural element of the human species. Religion, particularly within the Judeo-Christian tradition, refers to women as an appendix of men whose main virtue lies either in chastity or in motherhood. For its part, the biologistic discourse appeals to the materiality of bodies as an unmistakable sign of difference, revealed before our eyes in attributes associated with brain size, muscle mass, chromosomes, or hormonal load, to name just a few.

The fact that religion and biology point out that there are innate differences between men and women would not be such a terrible problem if no one established, based on these differences, a set of deterministic justifications about the abilities, rights, and proper spaces of each sex; in other words, anatomical or divine differences should not be used to justify moral inequality between people. In short, these discourses promote anti-egalitarian views in which the “natural difference” between men and women places the latter in a position of subordination. In this seemingly natural position, women are seen as objects destined for immanence, lacking prestige and power (De Beauvoir, 2015).

Simone de Beauvoir
Picture: Wikimedia Commons / Nia Vasileva

GIVEN THAT WE ALL LIVE GENDER ALL THE TIME, WE STOP PERCEIVING IT AS A CULTURAL ARTIFACT

One might think that these discourses are easily questionable. In the case of religion, the presence of a secularizing practice would suffice to show that it is a discourse based on a series of beliefs that are not necessarily verifiable or shared by all people. In the case of biology, it is possible to identify that the biological sciences start from a dichotomous and hierarchical understanding of sexual difference between males and females, which is extrapolated to all species, including humans. Nevertheless, raising objections to these discourses does not entirely diminish their effectiveness, in that both religion and biology provide us with meaning, give us certainty about our own identity, and about the place we occupy in the world. These discourses help to write the script and the rules of this game called being men or being women. That is to say, given that we all live gender all the time, we stop perceiving it as a cultural artifact. It is in that experience that we tend to credit our epistemic authority about being men or women based on gendered experiences, and, since there is no area of life that is not informed by its dynamics and expectations, we act or perform the role of gender as if it were natural, automatic, and unchangeable.

It was in the 1950s that the American doctor John Money coined the term “gender” to distinguish between sex roles and gender roles. While the former are determined by genitalia, as a person may have a penis or a vulva, gender roles are sociocultural constructs that help us identify men and women based on their social behavior, including the orientation of their desires. Money’s clinical approach was not free from controversy and represents a dark chapter in the history of medicine. In a corrective effort, Money’s work involved intervening on healthy bodies that simply had some genital ambiguity (what we now know as an intersex condition) in order to achieve harmony between sex role and gender role; these interventions caused irreversible physical and psychological harm to many patients.

Starting in the 1970s, feminists began using the term “gender” instead of “sex,” especially in disciplines like psychology and anthropology. Here we see a decisive step toward a new explanation for the origin of inequality between men and women that is not limited to religion and that, without dismissing the importance of biology as a scientific discipline, examines it from a critical perspective. Through the feminist intervention in universities the field of knowledge we now know as gender studies was formed. At this point, I think it is important to note that, unlike other disciplinary fields, gender studies arose from a series of political concerns expressed through exchanges among women. Following the logic and activism of the “small group,” many women “realized that subordination was not, then, personal, individual, but collective. Before, each one thought that her problems were strictly personal, but by communicating with other women, she discovered their social nature” (Bartra, 1999).

WE ACT OR PERFORM THE ROLE OF GENDER AS IF IT WERE NATURAL, AUTOMATIC, AND UNCHANGEABLE

The feminist presence in universities made significant contributions to the formation of study and research groups that revealed that many scientific contributions deemed neutral and objective were riddled with biases that normalized sexist and exclusionary positions. Here, the concept of gender is central due to its explanatory and analytical power, as we will see later. Furthermore, the contributions of feminists, following Diana Maffia (2007), involve not only a sharp critique of scientific standards and an effort to develop other ways of building community in the sciences but also a platform that allows us to imagine and chart paths for the emancipation of all people.

Diana Maffia
Picture: Centro Internacional para la Promoción de los Derechos Humanos

For now, it is important to return to the focus of our attention: how does gender help us understand that women are treated as second-class citizens despite having all political and social rights? One primary definition of gender understands it as the cultural construction of sexual difference (Lamas, 2000). That is, while sex is defined as the biological characteristics that distinguish males and females of a species, gender has to do with the sociocultural characteristics that distinguish men and women in a society. This explanation allows us to understand the ordering of the world based on a social reading of sex, which from the outset is considered dichotomous and hierarchical. However, it is still necessary to understand, for example, what gender tells us about other identities that do not conform to the traditional dictates of masculinity and femininity, or that are fluid or dissident, and above all, it allows us to understand the origin of the hierarchy that places the feminine as inferior to the masculine.

Estela Serret
Picture: ResearchGate

THROUGH THE FEMINIST INTERVENTION IN UNIVERSITIES THE FIELD OF KNOWLEDGE WE NOW KNOW AS GENDER STUDIES WAS FORMED

At this point, the work of Estela Serret is extremely relevant (2011) as it proposes understanding gender as a primary organizer of culture that operates on three levels of intervention: symbolic gender, social imaginary gender, and subjective imaginary gender. We say that gender is a primary organizer because it is the structure on which we build language and, consequently, culture. Through the existence of signs that are linked to each other, primary symbolic pairs that shape an idea of the world are created; these pairs are order-chaos, day-night, and masculine-feminine. The symbolic pairs coexist in a relationship of enormous tension and hierarchy, where one of them becomes the central category, while the other is the boundary category. So, in the case of the symbolic pair of masculine-feminine gender, the masculine is the central category and the feminine is the boundary category. It is important to remember that, at this level of the symbolic genre, we are not referring to specific individuals, but simply to categories that allow the constitution of culture based on those pairs that will serve as a reference at the second level of intervention.

Driven by libidinal dynamics, the gender binary operates on this second level through typifications present in all societies: men and women. Thus, in the social imaginary of gender, men are those individuals who primarily embody masculine values, while women are those individuals who embody feminine values. These values can vary from society to society, as well as from one historical context to another. However, the hierarchical symbolic reference is a constant, as those associated with femininity occupy marginal, lower-status spaces, lacking prestige. Finally, the social imaginary of gender correlates with the way each person perceives themselves and the way they are socially perceived based on the gender script. Serret calls this the subjective imaginary gender.

Slogans during the 8M march
Picture: Amneris Chaparro

In everyday life, concrete people embody different values of masculinity and femininity. There is no exclusive use of anger, tenderness, hysteria, or delicacy in our individual behavior. However, there is an imaginary association of anger, tenderness, hysteria, and delicacy either with masculinity or with femininity. This is where the power of the social gender imagination lies: in the expectations regarding the exercise of the norms of what is considered appropriate for women and appropriate for men. This is revealed, for example, in popular sayings such as “men don’t cry” or in deeply rooted beliefs that women are not good at mathematics.

Likewise, the strength of the social imaginary of gender is sustained by the existence of control mechanisms that reproduce the idea of natural inequality. We find that a certain masculinity, to be considered successful, must be configured from the exercise of violence not only against women, but also against other men, and we also find that femininity, to be considered successful, is that which is oriented towards good manners, modesty and beauty. Women, men, trans and non-binary people who do not conform to these mandates are often monitored and, in many cases, punished with violence of different kinds. In other words, violence is an expression of gender inequality that has two purposes: to punish those who violate the mandates of femininity and masculinity, and to threaten the rest of the people so that they behave appropriately.

Abortion: Querétaro sinks into a legal limbo due to the conservatism
Picture: Tribuna de Querétaro, 2023o

Let us consider once again the feminist protest that arises—as it always has—from dissatisfaction, from the frustration of living in a violent, unjust, and unequal world. The nineteenth-century suffragists, the women workers who led the first strikes, the university students in the seventies, the members of grassroots movements, the institutional feminists of the nineties, the organized university women, the feminist collectives of the twenty-first century, all of them, in their enormous identity and ideological diversity, have contributed to dismantling many of the assumptions that exist about the proper behavior of women.

VIOLENCE IS AN EXPRESSION OF GENDER INEQUALITY THAT HAS TWO PURPOSES: TO PUNISH THOSE WHO VIOLATE THE MANDATES OF FEMININITY AND MASCULINITY, AND TO THREATEN THE REST OF THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY BEHAVE APPROPRIATELY

Through protest, whether peaceful or violent, the demand for equality is not satisfied with the conquest of political, social, or reproductive rights; it also has nothing to do with women wanting to become men in order to finally replace them. Feminism gains nothing if women occupy strategic positions of power only to reproduce patriarchal logic, gender mandates, and mechanisms of monitoring femininity and masculinity that perpetuate inequality as a natural fact. Feminism seeks a cultural revolution that, first and foremost, recognizes women as human beings, grants them freedom, and affirms them as such.

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