Are Women Human? [i]
Feminisms are efforts geared towards making sense of the non-sensical treatment of women. If representation and language are to be taken into account, we may draw the conclusion that women are not inhuman, simply not persons. The state, the legal and justice systems, and social and religious institutions are the measure of the extent to which one is able to constitute personhood. Our bodily integrity, that is, body and our mind together, is a projection of the wider world internalised into the self. Being human does not necessarily imply the condition of being an autonomous, rational self – it is as much about the individual’s situated-ness in the world and the interactions with those around us. I do not suggest that the condition of being a woman is universal and uniform across the board. I do maintain that unity – for all persons who identify as women –in the spirit of achieving recognition as human, with all its attendant significations, is important.
Women are bound, in experience, by the universalised sexual differentiation of their bodies.[ii] Whether I feel myself to be a woman at all times; whether I am supposed to know I am a woman; or am conditioned to act accordingly and accept certain realities in my experience of the lived world, these considerations are predisposed by the fact that I inhabit a biologically female body. I enter the world in this body as the medium of my representation.[iii] Childcare and household management, and any work I undertake in the domestic setting, is unremunerated and unaccounted for in the national GDP.[iv] In paid employment, my salary and position are contingent upon the potentialities and actualities of my reproductive body.[v] If I were to experience physical violence, it would most likely be in the form of sexual crime. The vulnerabilities of such a body also bear the burden of the ontological implications of sexual difference.[vi]
These phenomena abound despite formalised gender equality.[vii] The fact that this equality must be codified in law suggests an implicit and established hierarchy that regulates the complex mechanism of rights. The realisation of substantive rights, across the broad swathe of human conditions, requires more resources, agency, political will and openness of mind in interpreting the law, than the acceptance that such rights are the natural preserve of every human being.[viii]
If women are not human, as measured by a universal standard of dignity and wholeness, equality is but an unrealisable notion, for women’s freedom, due to them in the quality of personhood, is denied at the outset. A sexed, gendered and sexually differentiated being is not the same as an integral human being.
Based on my work on the practical aspects of realising rights, I began thinking about the role of culture in fuelling sex-based discrimination, an area that is not given as much attention as economic and political issues. My interest in re-conceptualising this preoccupation with gender rights finds expression in the socio-politics of sex, gender and sexuality. It is both correct, and not untrue, that we – collectively – represent a socio-political project that exemplifies feminist debates of this generation. If freedom is not conceived in a metaphysical sense, then any project that surveys women’s socio-cultural positioning assumes individuals already possess a legal and moral right to their person, hence a political entity and subject by virtue of living in an egalitarian society. Such rights are constitutionally guaranteed, but can be withheld in the realm beyond what is defined as political, signalling a state of disempowerment at the level of the individual. The political refers to dynamics of power across a wider range of institutions, and not just elected office. Foucault refers to these as the ‘disciplinary’ micro-powers that constitute individuals as unfree, even as political rights are sought on their behalf.[ix] Power is less preoccupied with vested legitimacy, theoretical rights and consent, than it is with administering issues of choice and free will.
References and Additional Reading
[i] A question posed by feminists the world over. See the work of MacKinnon (2006), who argues there is evidence within the law and the policies of social institutions to suggest women are not human.
Catharine A. MacKinnon Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006)
[ii] See Sherry B. Ortner (1996) Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997)), who notes that according to historical data, there does not exist an organised community, association of peoples, ethnic group or nation-state that has not been organised along gender lines.
[iii] Ortner’s (1996) research reveals that where societies are drawn along gender lines, most of them are established as a hierarchy where the female is positioned as the ‘degraded other.’
[iv] Issues discussed at length, in every country’s context, in the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report:
< https://www.weforum.org/reports/gender-gap-2020-report-100-years-pay-equality>
[Accessed 2 July 2020]/
World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report: WEF tracks the global progression in gender equality. In 2020, the Swiss-based organisation estimated it would take 99.5 years for women and men to be equal.
[v] For further information, see the Briefing Papers of the UK Women’s Budget Group, which analyses the gender impact of UK budget allocations and changes in government policy.
[vi] I mention the vulnerabilities of the body, not as the physical vulnerability that Butler (1990) describes, but in keeping with the condition of the corporealised uniqueness of the body as per Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, (London: Routledge, 1994).
[vii] Gender refers to the idea that sexual difference is socially and culturally constructed, not to the biology of the sexed body. Both gender and biological sex are now said to be social constructs.
[viii] Kantian political philosophy asserts the freedom of each member of a community as a human being, alongside the equality of each member as a subject, asserted by the independence of each subject as citizen; this notion presumes there are no asymmetries of power and representation, though Kant does concede there is a ‘contradiction’ between freedom and what is ‘compatible’ with nature, which can be rationalised, but never fully comprehended.
Immanuel Kant (1791), The Moral Law: Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, (London: Routledge, 2005): 113
[ix] Foucault’s theory on the body releases its materiality from biology. Strategies of ‘corporeal oppression’ ‘discipline’ bodies to render them ‘docile’ and amenable to systems of organisation constructed through dynamics of power.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1975)
