“Libra:
In my role as moral sentinel, I strongly urge you not to watch "Telephone," the music video by Lady Gaga and Beyonce. It epitomizes everything that's crazy-making about our culture: brilliantly executed, gorgeous to behold, and perversely seductive, even though its subject matter is degrading, demoralizing, and devoid of meaning. In my role as a kick-ass educator, however, I encourage you to watch the video at least once. I think you'd benefit from seeing such an explicit embodiment of the crazy-making pressures you'll be wise to avoid exposing yourself to in the coming weeks.”
Lucky I’m not a Libra.
Anyway, in lieu of feeling obligated to see how crazy my future is going to be in the coming weeks, I thought I’d riff on Levy-Strauss’ discussion of women as signs near the end of the Rubin reading. Page 201
“For instance, Levi-Strauss sees women as being like words, which are misused when they are not "communicated" and exchanged. On the last page of a very long book, he observes that this creates something of a contradiction in women, since women are at the same time "speakers" and "spoken."
His only comment on this contradiction is this: But woman could never become just a sign and nothing more, since even in a man's world she is still a person, and since insofar as she is defined as a sign she must be recognized as a generator of signs. In the matrimonial dialogue of men, woman is never purely what is spoken about; for if women in general represent a certain category of signs, destined to a certain kind of communication, each woman preserves a particular value arising from her talent, before and after marriage, for taking her part in a duet. In contrast to words, which have wholly become signs, woman has remained at once a sign and a value."
This led me to think about our dear friend Saussure, grandfather of signs and signification, divider of signs into signifiers and signified. Translating Levy-Strauss into Saussurean terms, each woman would act as both {signifier/“speaker”/‘an individual with talents, a personality, and an identity which give them a unique value’} and {“spoken”/signified/‘a passive medium for the exchange of power and privilege between men’}.
This example may be demonstrated with classical musicians: listening to Yo Yo Ma play a certain cello composition is significantly different than listening to Zoe Keating play the same piece, but they’re both well-regarded professional cellists who transmit the notes of
Choosing to credit Levy-Strauss’ interpretation of women as “being like words” for a moment, human culture does fit Saussure’s defining characteristics of language startlingly well.
(For this exercise, I have replaced Saussure’s term ‘language’ with ‘culture’; correlatively, ‘speech facts’ has become ‘human sociality’. ‘Speech’ becomes ‘the actions and experiences of an individual’, a graceless but descriptive phrase, and ‘signs’ becomes ‘social norms’.)
(From “A Course in General Linguistics”, Introduction)
These are the characteristics of [Culture]:
1) [Each culture] is a well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of [human sociality]”.
(The idea that each culture possesses and expresses a definite, unique nature underpins Anthropology as an academic field and forms the foundation for Levy-Strauss’ studies.)
“[Culture] is the social side of [the actions and experiences of an individual], outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community. Moreover, the individual must always serve an apprenticeship in order to learn the functioning of [culture]; a child assimilates it only gradually.”
(This scenario fits Levy-Strauss and Rubin’s description of gendered enculturation and the model of the Oedipal complex as an individual’s experience of the internalization of sexual norms and power structures in their culture.)
2) “[Culture], unlike [the actions and experiences of an individual member of that culture], is something that we can study separately” as a system.
(An individual’s experiences of their culture and the actions they take within that culture become the province of psychoanalysis and history rather than anthropology. Psychoanalysis leads to Freud and the second prong of Rubin’s analysis.)
3) “Whereas [an individual’s actions and experiences] is heterogeneous, [a culture], as defined, is homogeneous. It is a system of [social norms] in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and [actions], and in which both parts of the sign are psychological.”
(As Rubin notes, there’s nothing physiologically normative about the labor and social roles which women have taken in many human societies, especially considering the inversion of these roles in certain cultures such as female hunters and male childcare providers. This leaves psychological enculturation as the generator of these ‘absolute’ cultural truths.)
This correlation gets a little hazier around point four, but still works.
4) [Culture] is concrete, no less so than [an individual’s actions and experiences]; and this is a help in our study of it.”
(Cultures change over time, as do individuals, but Levy-Strauss might argue that a culture is so slow to change that an analyst could well consider it concrete for the purposes of their study. Furthermore, languages change over time in structure, vocabulary, and usage, so it’s reasonable to allow cultures and people to do the same thing.)
So, culture fits the definition of a language of human interaction, supporting Levy-Strauss’ conception of women as signifiers and signifieds in this structure. Rubin seeks to rewrite the roles of women in this structure, demolishing Levy-Strauss’ ideas, which she can do using Saussure’s own linguistic definitions.
Delving further into the essay:
“The bond between the signifier (‘woman’-ness) and the signified (Kekiya, an adult human female) is arbitrary”
(Initially this statement seems problematic. Levy-Strauss would argue that Kekiya is inherently ‘woman’, possessing woman-ness, and she doesn’t see a choice in whether she is a woman or not, partially because this identity has been culturally instilled in her. Rubin, in calling for a deemphasis of physical structures as signifiers of gendered identity, and even the end of gendered identity as an important signifier in her culture, aspires to make this signifier-signified connection arbitrary.)
Saussure enforces Rubin’s reading of this relationship “Every means of expression used in society is based, in principle, on collective behavior, or – what amounts to the same thing – on convention”. (We only have cultures and languages because enough people repeated mutually-intelligible actions and sounds until they became the normative, universal code for their group.)
His subsequent sentence could have come straight from Levy-Strauss: “Polite formulas, for instance, though often imbued with a certain natural expressiveness (as in the case of a Chinese who greets his emperor by bowing down to the ground nine times), are nonetheless fixed by rule; it is this rule and not the intrinsic value of the gestures that obliges one to use them.”
Even so, there is some natural connection between female bodies and the assignation of ‘woman identity’, leading to the expectations of this female-bodied person to express woman-ness in behaviors and social roles.
“The symbol [female body] is that it is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier [female body] and the signified [expectation of woman-identity]. The symbol of justice, a pair of scales, could not be replaced by just any other symbol, such as a chariot.”
Under a Saussurean view of the world, Rubin is not trying to entirely deconstruct biological female as a category, but rather to reintroduce the arbitrary relationship between this person’s role as a signifier in their culture (who is usually assigned to the category ‘woman’) and what she signifies, simply following Saussure’s own definition of arbitrary-ness.
Deconstruction of the concept of womanhood will not leave the female body completely indistinguishable from the male body, but will decouple it from several expectations of ‘woman-ness’ that limit that person’s social capabilities and sexual roles.
Saussure claims “language is a social institution”, making it a carrier of culture. The vocabulary and grammar of their language define people’s perceptions of the world, as well as the ways they are able to think about the world and their potential actions in it. (Levy-Strauss demonstrates this in his discussion of the role kinship terms play in creating sexual taboos.) To change the cultural perceptions of ‘woman’ and enact the “elimination of the social system which creates sexism and gender”, as Rubin proposes at the end of her essay, we would have to change the linguistic codification of (male and female) participants. Deemphasizing masculinity and femininity in language, perhaps through the recrafting of pronouns among other changes to less directly reflect the sex of the speaker, seems to be a necessary step in the refashioning of identity in our society to deemphasize the phenotype of the speaker (and all of the cultural baggage that phenotype entails) and to move toward Rubin’s ideal “elimination of obligatory sexualities and sex roles”.
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