Derived Ontologies and the Feminist Debate about Sex and Gender

The polemics on the distinction about sex and gender are well known. It’s engraved in the common sense of a large extent of people to think of sex in essentialist terms, something that has been denounced by feminist philosophers such as Judith Butler who points out the detrimental consequences that this has for properly conceptualizing such fundamental categories as womanhood. However, it has been complex to differentiate sex and gender from the constructionist and performative stances of these philosophers. A perspective that understands not only gender but the body itself as socially and historically mediated gets into complex metaphysical problems that are often the source of their obscurity and their lack of appeal when presented outside academical circles. In this essay I propose to reintroduce Heidegger’s concept of a derived ontology to the debate since I believe that it offers a clear way for us to deal with the ontological status that we should assign to the scientifical concept of sex.

While gender theorists share a common conception of gender, their understanding of the concept of sex varies a great deal more. Philosopher Judith Butler proposed in her essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” to recover Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the body in order to challenge what she views as the hegemonic conception of sex and gender. The latter conception understands gender as the mere psychological correlate of a physical material substance that is unvariable and assigned at birth. The consequence of this is that gender is denied the possibility to be understood as something that can be changed, thus precluding the recognition of transgender people as such. On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology proposes to understand the body as the unfolding of a set of possibilities that are historically conditioned and socially situated. Butler also brings to the table Austin’s theory of the performative acts of speech, understanding gender itself as a performative act rather than as the psychological manifestation of a physical substrate.

In order to better understand Butler’s stance, it may be useful to remember Derrida’s appropriation of the concept of performativity since we can trace its influence on her text. Derrida understands that performative acts can be cited and must be cited in order to function. Citing refers to their reference to past analogous performative acts that, trough their sedimentation, provide the social recognition that is the source of their legitimate power of action. For example, a priest may only declare a couple to be wife and husband because of the sedimentation of similar performative speech acts which lend this particular priest the social recognition to produce such an effect. Another characteristic of performative acts is their iterability. Trough repetition it is that a performative act can be successful, but each act is not a perfect repetition of the others. This difference is what allows the gradual modification of typical acts and, in the case of gender as a performative act, what provides us the margin of action to change (though a radical and immediate change is thus excluded as a possibility) the present binary conceptions of gender. In this way, gender is understood as the result of specific and discontinuous acts of agents who perform the “script” of what is accepted as socially recognizable social roles. However, this perspective has as a consequence that such a script cannot be understood as a universal and original factum but, rather, as both the condition and result of discontinuous acts that trough sedimentation and iteration produce gender as a historically mediated category. The emphasis on discontinuity is important because it allows us to contrast this conception to essentialism which, drawing on the tradition’s concept of substance, views gender and sex as that which remains trough changes, as invariable and eternal.

While Butler offers a brilliant perspective that allows us to understand gender, sex and the body beyond the traditional categories which have deleterious material effects, I believe it can be supplemented by way of making these ideas compatible with those concepts that are instrumental in science. My stance is that we can keep Butler’s phenomenological understanding of the body while simultaneously accepting biology’s concept of sex trough Heidegger’s concept of a derived ontology. The coinage of this concept is the result of Heidegger’s quest to answer the question on Being. Much like Kant, Heidegger was confronted with the task of putting a limit to science’s metaphysical aspirations by way of examining their proper boundaries. While Kant had to confront the determinism that would result from causal models of understanding nature being extrapolated and used to understand the human agent, Heidegger puts into question whether such sciences as biology or anthropology can have a say on what constitutes the essence of what we are (the entity which in each case I myself am, Dasein).

The result of Heidegger’s quest as expounded in Being and Time is that since these sciences are the result of certain operations which abstract our fundamental ways of comprehension, they cannot properly have a say on what constitutes a human existence. Hence Heidegger’s rejection of such biological terns as human being in favor of terms such as Dasein. Derived ontologies are not rejected as such, they have a legitimate access to knowledge in the form of their instrumental rationality that ultimately allows for the type of know-how that makes a sexual reassignment surgery possible. The problem arises when this kind of partial conceptions of being are reified in illegitimate claims to answer more fundamental questions such as that of identity. Thus science’s quest for a physical ground of our binary categories of sex and gender is precluded, not only because of it deleterious material implications but as theoretically illegitimate as it supposes what it wants to prove. The importance of biological sex as a concept instrumental in certain situations such as that of a medical treatment is evident but I believe that Heidegger’s critique offers us a simple enough way to delimitate the scope of these concepts.

When we re-appropriate the concept of a derived ontology in order to understand sex as a category that is derived from a more original human experience, as a concept instrumental for a specific treatment of being that because of it’s very specificity cannot lay claim to any sort of universality, we are not doing something truly original. The whole of Foucault’s work stems from this movement and inspiration. The reading of Heidegger and his critique of derived ontologies is what allowed Foucault to arrive at his concept of episteme. Such stances as that the concept of life is of only recent invention, can only be understood if we consider Life as such a derived ontology that, trough the science of biology, lays claim to a universality that is not legitimate. The archival work of Foucault is directed at unearthing the discontinuities that oppose the fictional narrative of the concept’s presumed origins. The latter are revealed as artifices which serve to legitimize the concept trough a myth of its origins when, in truth, these histories only find that which they have laid there to be found. This movement mirrors that of metaphysics as denounced by Nietzsche, the other great influence of Foucault.

Bringing back to the table the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, not only a white cis gender male but even a presumed fascist, may seem an unwarranted move. However, I believe that this very movement of appropriation is perhaps the triumph of our liberal progressive thought that manages to paint rainbows with what Hegel called the gray pigments of philosophy.