(Part 3 of 3)
Are gender distinctions (ie male/female or man/woman) and specific divisions of sexuality (hetero, homo, bi, pansexuality) a bourgeois construct? How long will these take to go away if successful in building socialism? Will they go away?
I think to begin, just as introduction or epigraph, we would do good to remind ourselves of the basics of the marxist method:
[In] a Marxist view, physical objects, their properties, our bodies, “nature,” etc. are all material, but so are social relations. And because a materialist dialectic posits that the relations in which something is engaged make that thing what it is, Marxists are principally concerned with social explanations for social phenomena. “Pre-social” categories cannot, in the Marxist ontology, be the basis for a social phenomenon. Thus in the popular terminology, every facet of society is socially constructed for a Marxist. Yet, these social constructs are also material. They are not merely the product of “ideas,” as many claiming “social constructivism” would have it; rather these constructs exist external to our thoughts and independently of individual will. Class, race, sex/gender, nation, etc. are all produced, i.e. constructed, and they are material. This is what Marxist materialism means. Marxism supersedes the age-old struggle between idealism and “realism” and puts forward a powerful social ontology which recognizes the “reality” of social structures, at the same time that it posits that every one of these structures is produced and therefore can be radically transformed, right down to its very foundations.
-- http://anti-imperialism.com/2015/10/26/what-does-a-marxist-mean-by-material/
According to mainstream science and popular opinion, sex is a trait that humans are born with. "Males", we are told, are born with penises, testes, and prostates, while "females" are born with vulvas, uteri, and ovaries. We are supposed to believe that the division of people into two sexes -- male and female -- is something "essential", something that cannot be changed because it is simply a product of how human bodies "naturally are".
However, marxists recognise that sex is not something one is born with, but a category that is imposed upon people by society. It is a concept through which we understand the world, and something that is produced by a particular set of social relations. Of course human bodies have reproductive variance, but this in itself is a banality and we cannot say that human reproductive variance existing outside of human activity is "sex", because sex is itself a concept produced by human activity. Without understanding society -- without understanding the existence and history of patriarchy -- we cannot understand why the categorization of people into two sexes happens the way it does, and is attached the importance it possesses.
Sex as a concept is not just a product of physiology (our bodies and their attributes), but rather, it is a product of a relationship between human physiology and how society is organized. To clarify, let us pose some questions: We know that the division of people into the categories "female" and "male" is very important to societies today. For example, in most cases, within the first few minutes or seconds after a person is born, a doctor or someone else present at birth examines the child's genitals and proclaims, "it's a boy!" or "it's a girl!". Perhaps a more liberal-minded doctor might instead proclaim, "it's male" or "it's female!". In either case, this proclamation made on the basis of what genitals one has at birth obviously has huge implications for the child growing up. It colors how the child will be treated, what will be expected of them, and so on. But why is the presence of a penis or a vulva so important to us? Why don't we treat eye color, for example, with the same significance?
The point in raising these questions is to show how classifying people based on genitals, and placing significance on genitals as opposed to other traits (such as eye color or anything else), are social acts. We cannot understand sex without talking about society and how people interact with each other and their bodies.
Penises and ejaculate and prostate glands occur in nature, but the notion that these anatomical traits comprise a sex—a discrete class, separate and distinct, metaphysically divisible from some other sex, the "other sex"—is simply that: a notion, an idea. The penises exist; the male sex does not. The male sex is socially constructed. It is a political entity that flourishes only through acts of force and sexual terrorism. Apart from the global inferiorization and subordination of those who are defined as "nonmale", the idea of personal membership in the male sex class would have no recognizable meaning. It would make no sense. No one could be a member of it and no one would think they should be a member of it. There would be no male sex to belong to. That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t still be penises and ejaculate and prostate glands and such. It simply means that the center of our selfhood would not be required to reside inside an utterly fictitious category—a category that only seems real to the extent that those outside it are put down.
-- John Stoltenberg, Refusing to Be a Man