Adam Perkins,



“Gender Critical Feminism: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives”University of Reading, 6 March 2019Chlo? HoustonWhen I went to university as an undergraduate, memes did not exist. (For my practical purposes, the internet barely existed; it was 1997.) If they had been invented then, perhaps one of the most popular inspirational memes would have been the following quotation, which I saw on many a student poster in that year: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”When I googled the phrase - another thing we didn’t have in 1997 - I learned that it is usually attributed to the French writer Voltaire. In fact, Voltaire didn’t say or write those words; they were written by his twentieth-century biographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, as a summary of Voltaire’s position on a particular controversy of his age. The controversy in question was the publication of a book by a fellow philosopher, which was widely condemned and attacked. What Voltaire was objecting to was not the condemnation, but the burning of the book in question in public. This quotation appealed to my idealistic younger self, and to many of my peers, because it enshrined the principle of free speech which, then as now, I believed to be the cornerstone of a democratic society. In practice, of course, it’s much less appealing to uphold people’s rights to express ideas that you find upsetting or even abhorrent. Most of us would rather people who held such views just kept quiet about them, but silence has its own risks. Last year Adam Perkins, a lecturer at Kings College London, published an essay on the impact of denying free speech in science in the online magazine Quillette, which describes itself as a platform for free thought. In an ironic twist, the essay was meant to be given as part of an event on free speech at Kings, which was cancelled as the university considered it too high risk. They took this decision because of the disruption of a recent event featuring Carl Benjamin, a YouTuber whose views, which are frequently antifeminist (Benjamin has also been accused of racism and homophobia), align him with the alt-right. This event had been interrupted by masked protestors who smashed windows, threw smoke bombs and hospitalized two security guards. I don’t agree with Adam Perkins on everything or with Carl Benjamin on almost anything, but we have to consider the results of the disruption of their right to free speech. The right to protest peacefully and lawfully is of course equally important (and enshrined in law), but to prevent people from speaking, even when we consider their views deplorable, risks turning them into free-speech martyrs and creates an environment in which anything controversial is perceived as dangerous. If the idealism of Hall’s quotation is at one end of the free-speech continuum, then book-burning, or physical intimidation by masked protestors, is at the other. Most of us - perhaps all of us - would agree that book-burning is not an activity we would welcome in our society, no matter the strength of our beliefs.?If I had to identify the core beliefs that I hold most dear, free speech would be right up there. So, too, would feminism. As the child of a single mother who worked in gender studies, I have been a feminist for as long as I knew what the word meant. I’ve never really thought of myself as a radical feminist, although I’ve been called one recently, and not as a compliment. I don’t see my feminism as extreme, and it’s only recently that I have used the term gender-critical feminist to describe myself. If you had asked me a year or so ago whether I was gender critical, I would have said yes, but for a different reason from that which I might give now.?Feminism is by its nature critical of the impositions that gender involves. Gender is the term we give to the set of social norms, expectations and beliefs we consciously and unconsciously place on people based on our understanding of whether they are a man or a woman, a boy or a girl. Gender is the presumption, for example, that women are gentle and nurturing, and require clothing with fewer pockets, and that men should control their emotions, and can’t be trusted to operate a washing machine. It’s the reason why my sixth-form headmistress refused to let girls wear trousers of any form to school, because we were preparing for the world of work, where women have to dress professionally, which apparently meant a skirt. Gender is the fellow parent who told my excited four-year-old son that boys can’t wear nail varnish and he should take his off at once because he’s not a girl.So I’m critical of gender in that sense. But the term “gender-critical” in relation to feminism is slightly different. Firstly, it is premised on the understanding that there is a distinction between sex and gender. The difference between sex and gender is currently recognised in law. With my colleagues from law present, I’m not going to attempt a detailed analysis of the concepts under law. In brief, biological sex is determined by a person’s reproductive system and secondary sex characteristics: it is the biological form in which we are born. Gender, as I’ve said, is a set of roles and behaviours which is primarily social and cultural. The question of how gender is experienced (whether it’s essentialist, experienced as a feeling, for example) is a complex one and also not something I’m going to explore in detail today. But I will add to this summary that gender constructs generally serve the interests of those already in power; it is gender which keeps women and men in specific roles and in doing so denies them certain opportunities. Gender-critical feminists believe that women have been oppressed not due to their gender but due to their sex. If you are a young woman who wants to work for a company that routinely doesn’t offer entry-level jobs to women aged between 20 and 35 because of an unspoken expectation that they will take a break from work to bring up children, then you are discriminated against not because of your gender, but because you are perceived to have a functioning uterus, no matter whether or not that’s actually true, or whether or not you even want to have children. If a woman is a victim of a sexual assault, I think we would all agree that it’s not because of how she “performs” her gender, be that through her clothing or make-up, for example: it’s because she inhabits a woman’s body. This is why feminists argue that such assaults are about power. I will add here the importance of recognizing that women are – of course – not the only group to suffer oppression, but that women’s oppression has historically been the concern of feminism.In my current work I study gender as a historical concept. I am interested in how early modern people conceived gender in relation to both masculinity and femininity, and in what those ideas tell us about how they lived and thought. In the seventeenth century, women were discriminated against as a sex class, for example in not being able to vote, or not being permitted to bring a case to court. But prejudice can also affect how we study a topic: for many years (a long time ago) it was believed that very few women actually wrote anything in the seventeenth century, for example, a claim we now know to be demonstrably false. It was not until scholars found women’s writing, studied it, anthologized it, that we began to teach it and bring it into universities. Feminism, too, was literary from its inception. Early scholars of women’s writing, like Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own (1929), recognized that literature is a site of gender ideology.In the absence of exact evidence, it can be a challenge for a historian to be precise about how people from the past perceived the differences between sex and gender. A number of texts give fascinating insights into historicized gender expectations and conceptions of sex identity. In my own field, for example, the relationship between sex and gender has been brought centre stage by studies of the figure of the cross-dressed actor (until the 1660s, professional actors on the English stage were male, so women’s parts were played by boys or young men). Such studies have shown, in the words of one scholar, how particular texts demonstrate “both an awareness of the constructed nature of gender, and of the resisting presence of the female as an essential identity”. We can observe an interest in the difference between sex and gender both in scholarship and in literary texts themselves.Remembering my own time as an undergraduate, I think of that as a period of awakening in terms of understanding the theoretical underpinnings of feminism. As a child I had been fascinated (and disturbed) by my mother’s copy of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), which showed a woman’s naked body as though removed and hanging from a pole. Reading it as an adult I heard it as a call to arms, a polemic designed to encourage women to understand and remove the obstacles that prevented them from operating fully and freely as equal members of society. Greer argued that it is women’s responsibility to decide for themselves to fight for their freedom, and how to do it. Professor Lisa Jardine, an early modern scholar who wore her feminism proudly and whose early death was a great loss to scholarship, said of this book that it “taught us all how to behave badly and take control of our lives”.?I do not agree with everything that Greer has written or said since The Female Eunuch; I don’t agree with everything in the book, for that matter. But I am persuaded by her argument in both The Female Eunuch and The Whole Woman, which followed it in 1999, that society functions to increase women’s dissatisfaction with themselves and their (sexed) bodies. I am also persuaded by Camille Paglia’s more recent Free Women, Free Men (2017), where she notes that the assaults on free speech which happened in the 1980s and were beaten back in the 1990s are once again occurring in our universities and mainstream media. Paglia criticizes the dichotomy which polarizes liberal and conservative, to the detriment of finding a middle ground. In reference to understanding sex and gender, she argues that it is impossible to have a theory of gender without reference to biology, but that this should not mean subscribing to wholescale biological determinism. To say that I am a gender-critical feminist will make – has made – some people feel upset and offended. Many other people, especially fellow academics, have told me that they agree with me but are too scared to say so publicly because of the real risk of abuse and complaints: many women fear to express their sincerely held beliefs because they think students will call for their jobs. Gender-critical feminists have been no-platformed, and, as we have good cause to know here in Reading, have faced much worse abuse. That’s not on. Universities have a responsibility under law to preserve free speech. We all of us encounter in universities and elsewhere views with which we profoundly disagree. Unless we permit their free expression (provided they are within the law), and unless we encourage robust, rational, and respectful debate, we are failing ourselves as an academic community. And there’s nothing idealistic about that.Thank you. ................
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