Pasos de la metodología

According to Jacob Hale, the dominant concept of WOMAN within US culture is a family- resemblance concept containing 13 elements clustered into groups that are differentially weighted (Hale 2006).14 The most heavily weighted is a cluster containing physical

characteristics which are used in gender assignment:

14

Hale’s account is a modification of Bornstein (1994) who, in turn, bases her features of womanhood on Garfinkel’s famous study of Agnes, a self-declared intersex person who actually turned out to be transgender, not intersex (Garfinkel 1967).

A. Female sex – 1. Absence of a penis; 2. Presence of breasts; 3. Presence of

reproductive organs (uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes) which allow for pregnancy to occur if the person engages in intercourse with a fertile man; 4. Presence of estrogen and progesterone in a balance with androgens within a range defined by endocrinologists within one’s age group; 5. Presence of XX chromosomes;

The second most heavily weighted cluster in the dominant concept of WOMAN concerns more overtly social means which work together to produce the social gender assignment of ‘woman’ in a way that is unreflective, constant, and unambiguous:

B. Gender cues – 1. Gender self-presentation (‘secondary sex characteristics’,

dress); 2. Behaviour (posture, expressions, manners, styles of communication); 3. Textual cues (feminine name and pronoun use, citation of continuous, unambiguous history as a woman, having ID documents with ‘F’, consistent photographic gender presentation in accordance with 1);

C. Consistent gender narrative – Having a history consistent with the gender

assignment ‘woman’ as produced by B providing an unbroken line of descent from female infancy through girlhood to womanhood.

Of lower weighting are the following: D. Subjective sense of gender

and

E. Gender roles – 1. Having an occupation considered acceptable to a woman; 2.

Engaging in leisure pursuits deemed acceptable for women; 3. Engaging at some point in life in sexual/affectional relationship with a commonly recognized heterosexual man.

Hale employs his cluster account to critique Wittig’s (1992) and Calhoun’s (1994) conceptions of WOMAN. Wittig places too great an emphasis on feature E.3, claiming that

since lesbians do not occupy the binary sexual relationship to men, they are not women. Hale counters that this is not the only feature of WOMAN – not even the most important

feature – that is commonly taken into account in characterising someone as a ‘woman’. Against Calhoun, he objects to her reliance on the notion of a coherent unity linking anatomical features, heterosexual desire, and gender behaviour, for this seems to make some or all features of clusters A, B and E necessary – and perhaps even jointly sufficient – in order to be classified as a ‘woman’. In sum, Hale emphasizes that not all of the elements of the clusters are necessary or sufficient for a person to be classified as a woman. Clusters A and B are – so Hale – the most heavily weighted within the dominant paradigm, although for transgender women under certain circumstances, B can outweigh the absence of many of the elements of A (Hale 2006, 292).

Taken together with their respective weightings, these features constitute a paradigmatic conception of the category woman: that is, an individual who satisfies all of the features will be a paradigmatic woman within US society. An individual who satisfies the more positively weighted features for category membership – features from clusters A, B, and C – will most likely also be a paradigmatic woman within US society.

Many transgender women – particularly those who do not ‘pass’ as women from the point of view of appearance – have relatively few of the features listed in cluster B, and may have few, if any, of those listed in cluster A. Sometimes the way they dress is the only means of detecting their candidature for membership in the category WOMAN. And it is in such cases that we encounter an interesting phenomenon. Although we regularly mark and read gender – we seem to be constantly doing so – a non-passing transgender woman not only offers to society a public trace of her claim to womanhood, but makes

her ‘masculinity’ not less but more visible. Out of a crowd of passers-by, the transgender woman emerges not in her femininity but in her masculinity: her large body-frame, hands and feet, her square jaw and, if she says something, her low, booming voice come into sharper relief against the backdrop of the dress and makeup that she wears. She can become the object of public stares or, worse, verbal and even physical abuse. This is a source of psychological distress for many transgender women, particularly for those just beginning to transition or for those who transition later in life.

The point I am making is that Hale’s account is deficient in the way it formulates the attribution of womanhood mainly in terms of resemblances. One can possess several of the feminine features Hale lists, yet these can be effectively swamped by certain other aspects of appearance or demeanour which count as typically ‘masculine’. In short, Hale fails to take into account the contrast category MAN, and the negative weighting of the features from the category MAN for membership of the category WOMAN. In the realm of

social interaction, feminine features emerge only against a ‘neutral’ background, so-to- speak. If strong masculine indicators are present, womanhood may not be attributed. Taking into account the studies of Kessler and McKenna (2006), Hale has already indicated this: absence of a penis is high among biological features which assign individuals to the category WOMAN. In day-to-day social gendering, however, many other ‘absences’ – such as the absence of a deep voice, square jaw, large hands and body-frame – must be made more explicit within the concept of WOMAN. More than this, however, it

should be made more explicit within Hale’s approach to WOMAN how features from the contrast category MAN interact with features from the category WOMAN so that some ‘masculine’ features fail to disqualify an individual as belonging to the category WOMAN.

The attribution of ‘woman’ follows not only when a sufficient number of the typical or paradigmatic ‘feminine’ features are present, but also when there is an insufficiently large number of paradigmatically ‘masculine’ features – especially of those weighted highly in the attribution of ‘man’ to an individual.

Many people will have a sufficient number of the ‘feminine’ features as well as a certain number of masculine features. What decides the attribution of ‘woman’ to an individual is a sufficient number of sufficiently weighted ‘feminine’ features. But what counts as ‘sufficient number’ and ‘sufficient weighting’ is at least partly determined by the presence of any typically ‘masculine’ features in the same individual. Paradigmatically ‘female’ features interact with paradigmatically ‘masculine’ features altering the degree of resemblance to paradigmatic ‘women’ that should be exhibited for membership of the category WOMAN. If a heavily weighted ‘masculine’ feature – for example, a penis – is exhibited by the individual, a sufficiently high number of ‘feminine’ features – and from among those, preferably the ones more heavily weighted for membership of WOMAN – are

needed to compensate, so-to-speak, for the presence of male genitalia.

Hale’s family-resemblance concept of WOMAN is simply a paradigmatic conception of

WOMAN. For ‘women’ who exhibit all or many of Hale’s features to a sufficient degree (if such exist), membership in the category WOMAN is not ‘tainted’ by the possession of

features from the respective contrast category MAN. However, not all of those commonly

called ‘women’ are ‘untainted’ by paradigmatically masculine features. A person belonging to the category WOMAN may dress and behave in a paradigmatically

‘masculine’ way, or may possess elevated levels of testosterone in her body, or may possess considerable quantities of body hair, and so on.