The Corporeal Resists the Corporate

Reflecting on my engagements with gender theory

My relatively brief academic career spanned twenty-six of my seventy years of life, from starting my PhD at the University of Bristol in 1994 (I was a mature undergraduate student in Theology and Religious Studies at Bristol from 1991-1994), to accepting voluntary severance from my role as Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Roehampton during the pandemic in 2020. Most of my academic research during that time focused on gender theory and sacramental theology, using a Lacanian psychoanalytic lens through which to reflect on questions of desire and fear, love and violence, in relation to sexuality, embodiment, language and our human yearning for the divine.

Contested ideas about gender and sexuality now occupy the frontline in the culture wars, having morphed into a toxic confrontation between extremists on both sides. Female bodies, identities, spaces and activities have been colonised by trans women demanding unconditional access. Puberty blockers have been used to halt the normal processes of healthy adolescent development, giving rise to growing concerns over their long-term impact. There has been a dramatic surge in cases of gender dysphoria among children and young people, especially among girls. Misogyny has been driven underground by a liberalising gloss but it remains deeply rooted in western culture and is re-emerging in violent and dangerous new forms. It’s little wonder that girls struggling to adjust to the sexual pressures and hormonal turbulence of emergent womanhood decide life would be less complicated if they abandoned any attempt to become women and declared themselves male or non-binary instead. At the same time, trans women like Dylan Mulvaney and Jordan Gray indulge in performative stereotypes of idealised femininity which bring fame, wealth and adulation, while real women and girls languish on the sidelines in all our lumpen, beautiful imperfection. I could go on and on.

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These unintended consequences and unexpected developments in gendered ideas and identities have led me to look back and ask myself how far I colluded in the ideological appropriation of gender theory before I woke up to what was happening. I’ve been revisiting some of my writings with that question in mind. Having been banned by Catholic authorities and now by some progressive academics on account of my writings, I continue to try to navigate a creative but challenging path between two conflicting ideologies, and it’s not surprising that ideologues on both sides want me to shut up!

ON SILENCING AND CENSORSHIP

Some who formerly appreciated my work on gender now tell me they feel betrayed and disappointed because they think I’ve changed my position. They expected me to be an enthusiastic advocate for the LGBTQIA+ movement, instead of aligning myself as I have done with gender-critical feminists on the far left. One US feminist professor tells me that she used to recommend my publications to her students, but they now refuse to read anything I’ve written. That says more about the closed minds of those on the liberal side of academia than about my writings. Meanwhile, conservative Catholic vigilantes continue to bleat on about my corrupting the youth of the Church with my wicked ideas.

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Looking back, there is little I would change in my published research, though today I might express some of it with a different emphasis. I have never agreed to the collapse of what I regard as the important distinction between sex and gender. On the contrary, I’ve always defended the sexed body against its dissolution into gendered social constructs, while not denying the oppressive power of the latter. I was and am influenced by Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, but I should have recognised and resisted the extremism of “their” (sic) denial of bodily realities.

Butler presents LGBTQIA+ activism as a revolutionary anti-capitalist movement opposed by fascists on all sides, but the proliferation of identities beyond the legitimate struggle for lesbian and gay rights is the ultimate manifestation of a postliberal capitalist ideology. It is driven by narcissistic individualism, feeds on the commodification of insatiable desire and, in the medicalisation of trans bodies, is one more manifestation of the corporate power of big pharma and the technological domination of nature.

Yes, nature is a complex and elusive concept, but we humans are not above and beyond the sexually reproductive mammalian species to which we belong. I ask myself what drives the desire to resort to extreme medical and surgical measures to sustain the illusion of sexual metamorphosis. Is it not the ultimate in the commercialised fantasies of capitalism to advocate, as Butler does, for the repeated modification of the body by hugely expensive medical and surgical manipulations and lifelong dependency on costly drugs regimes to indulge delusions of limitless sexual transfigurations?

There is everything to condemn in Trump’s cynical appropriation of gender to justify a harsh authoritarian regime of banishment and censorship under the bogus claim that he is protecting women. Butler has written a long critical analysis of Executive Order 14168 in the London Review of Books, but in mirroring his polarising absolutism they risks becoming as much an extremist as he is. (Sorry about the grammar, but that’s what Butler has told us they prefer, and preference is all in this world of limitless choice for those who can afford it).

Butler is a philosopher. Surely, the role of philosophy is to bring deep and searching reflection to bear on issues of such ethical and social complexity that push us to the limits of our conceptual resources? The conflation of sex and gender leads to an impasse for those of us who want to defend the socially constructed dynamics of gender over and against religious and political essentialism, and to promote performativity and fluidity in the genders people choose to adopt, while respecting bodily finitude, vulnerability and integrity. Butler writes:

The decree claims to protect women by opposing gender ideology, relying on the trans-exclusionary argument that trans women are not women or constitute a threat to women, where a ‘woman’ is understood as an individual assigned female at birth. The accusation that gender or gender theorists are a threat to women forgets that the issue of ‘gender’ has been central to feminist thought at least as far back as the work of Simone de Beauvoir in the late 1940s. Biology, she argued, is part of a person’s situation, but does not determine the kind of work one will do, the person one will love, or the ‘destiny’ of one’s life. Trans people undergo surgery or take hormones, when they do, because they seek to alter anatomy: they certainly understand that there is an anatomy they seek to alter.

Note the segue from comments about gender to the medicalisation of the body to bring it into conformity with a socio-linguistic construct. Well, if that’s what consenting adults decide they want, who am I to judge, so long as young people are protected from irreversible and high-risk interventions? But anatomical alteration does not constitute changing sex. It is an extreme form of cosmetic surgery performed on healthy bodies, and it does not change the socio-sexual dynamics of women and children being at significant risk of sexual abuse, predation and violence, whether that violence takes the form of war, rape, pornography or domestic abuse, and whether it is the result of social conditioning or biological drives (and how could it be anything other than a combination of the two?) There is clear evidence that neither social nor anatomical transitioning significantly changes the relationship between the male sex drives and crimes involving sexual violence.

There is nothing revolutionary about a movement supported and funded by corporate powers and no doubt soon to be opposed by those same powers, for greed is fickle and faithless. When Trump is paying the piper, corporations will dance to whatever tune he chooses to ensure their shareholders continue to have their snouts in the trough. Those rainbow badges will soon disappear from the logos and banners of corporate branding.

Bodies are messy, intrusive and obstinate. The corporeal resists the corporate. The body speaks its vulnerability and desire, its yearning and pain, beyond all that we can say and beyond much that we can control. We are creatures of starlight and earth, sunlight and ocean, blood and air, culture and animality. Our sexed bodies produce and reproduce us, they delight and resist us, but they are what we are. We might launch ourselves from them into imaginative parodies of gender and long may we continue to do so, but ultimately our bodies lay claim to us in their living and loving, birthing and bleeding, suffering and dying.

Conclusion

All this is the preamble to sharing a dialogue that played out several years ago. Marika Rose and I have had some robust and not always courteous public exchanges in social media about the very different positions we now occupy around questions of gender, embodiment and identity. There have been glimmers of insight in those exchanges, but also barely masked feelings of mutual misunderstanding, hurt and anger between two thinkers who once sparked off one another in creative ways. I regret some of those barbed confrontations, but I’m trying to learn from them. I want to understand these differences that now create estrangements and alienations where once there was respect and friendship among academic colleagues, and I mourn the loss of solidarity that this entails. Perhaps it attests to the seriousness of the issues that concern us, that we are willing to sacrifice relationships to principles. Is that the price we pay for intellectual and ethical integrity, for I have no doubt that we are all sincere in our motives and commitments? These debates are important even if, or perhaps especially when, they are difficult and mired in passion. There is no blanket inclusivity. In listening to some victims, we necessarily silence others. In taking sides, we cannot help but tip the scales of justice because we are imperfect creatures in a wounded and violent world. All we can do is to hope that the weight of one side helps to balance the other, and the dizzying turbulence of our encounters is part of that balancing act and our academic responsibility.

This was originally a single post but I’m dividing it into two because it was too long. My next post is pasted from the Syndicate online forum, which early in 2015 published a series of comments and conversations about my book, Theology After Postmodernity. This includes an exchange between Marika and I, which gives some insight into the ways in which our positions were beginning to diverge, as my engagement with gender theory was becoming more critical. I share it not only as an expression of my own emergent position nearly ten years ago, but also out of respect for a colleague and friend with whom I have risked much as we do that precarious dance on the scales of justice while trying to keep our balance.