Theory Misunderstood

To the editors:

In response to Marc Ambinder's "Here Come the Gender Theorists," (Opinion, March 11, 1999), I would like to point out Ambinder's basic misunderstanding of gender theory. Deconstructive gender theory, which includes the writings of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, but also scholars such as Diana Fuss, Eve Sedgwick and Kaja Silverman to name a few, examines the social meanings attached to categories of masculinity and femininity. It does not deny that anatomical sex determines whether one is male or female but suggests that the value placed on these categories is culturally determined. In the first page of Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler argues that "to claim that sexual differences are indissociable from discursive demarcations is not the same as claiming that discourse causes sexual difference." Using admittedly complex language, Butler states that sexual difference is tied to social discourse, which does not mean that it is entirely socially constructed, as Ambinder seems to believe.

Gender is linked to both biology and culture, and, whatever the exact relationship is, it is not a "natural" or inherent property of individuals. In demanding that women's studies concentrators take "a half-course in basic human physiology," Ambinder implies that biology is truth--that there are genes and enzymes that make people the way they are.

However, such arguments do not explain why we value masculinity but not femininity; heterosexulity, but not homosexuality. In a society in which Ambinder considers women, gay men and lesbians as "oppressed peoples," gender theory demonstrates that such "oppression" has a social, rather than a fixed, biological basis.

Is this a "radical" and "leftist" undertaking? To some people, yes. But to others, it is a way to challenge an existing discourse of misogyny and homophobia. It is not to deny the validity of "Western civilization and popular culture," but to ask why women and sexual minorities have been excluded from it. Capitalism and the Enlightenment have made women, gay men and lesbians more visible, but they have not allowed them to speak fully. And as Ambinder's statement that "Harvard needs fewer English Ph.D.'s who study sex and gender" implies, maybe they still do not have that right. JENNIFER E. MOON'99   March 11, 1999