Abstract
In The Biopolitics of Gender, Jemima Repo argues that the concept of “gender” first originated in the 1950s as a form of “biopower” that could be deployed in various ways, and in the service of various ends (some feminist, some decidedly not). Repo models her analysis of gender on Foucault’s understanding of sexuality as an apparatus of biopower. Building on Foucault’s work, Repo frames gender as an additional apparatus of biopower, and proposes to provide a “genealogy of gender” in the twentieth century much as Foucault provided a genealogy of sexuality in the Victorian era. The genealogy Repo provides draws attention to the problematic origins of the concept of gender, and the troubling uses to which gender as biopower has been put. Repo believes that understanding these origins may lead feminists to question their reliance on gender as a tool of feminist theory and politics.
Repo locates the “birth of gender” (i.e., its first use as a medical term) in 1955—the year John Money and his colleagues first deployed the concept as a psychiatric justification for surgical interventions on intersex children with ambiguous genitalia. By highlighting this first recorded use of the term “gender” in medical literature, Repo contextualizes gender as a new, disturbing, and historically specific apparatus of biopower. Money and his colleagues created the concept primarily as a tool that could be deployed to discipline nonconforming bodies into socially acceptable binaries, while securing compliance from intersex children and their parents. On the structural level, the intersex child’s physical body would be “normalized” and “corrected” through surgery so that it conformed to binary standards of male and female, while on the behavioral level the child would be reared by parents (who acted as agents of doctors’ authority) to accept what Money termed a “gender role” as a boy or a girl. Because Money and his colleagues maintained that gender was a learned role, they insisted that intersex children could, post-surgery, be reared (i.e., “disciplined,” in Foucault’s sense of the word) in such a way as to fully internalize the gender role they had been assigned by surgeons. Repo summarizes Money’s creation and deployment of gender as “a maneuver designed to ensure the child’s compliance and cooperation for the cutting up and reordering of her body” (p. 43).
From this disturbing origin, Repo traces subsequent deployments of gender, first by psychiatrist-physician Robert Stoller in the 1960s, and later by feminist scholars in the 1970s. Stoller’s work with trans populations in the 1960s echoed Money’s earlier work with intersex children. Stoller is credited with coining the term “gender identity” and, like Money, used gender as a tool to pursue a normative agenda. His goal was to discover how children developed a “normal” gender identity (i.e., one that conformed to a binary biological sex) and to manage a child’s upbringing in such a way as to “prevent the development of deviant gender identity” (p. 57). He pursued this project by investigating those he termed “pathological”—children and adults whose gender identities were nonconforming. Like Money, Stoller advocated various forms of discipline (including surgery and psychoanalysis) to bring the deviant in line with the “behavioral norms of postwar America” (p. 68).
Repo’s analysis of Money’s and Stoller’s work persuasively demonstrates that by the time second-wave feminists began routinely deploying the term “gender” in the 1970s, gender was already a well-established concept in medical literature. Feminists, as Repo puts it, did not invent, but rather appropriated, concepts of gender. The third chapter of her book (which will be of particular interest to feminist scholars) draws uncomfortable parallels between Money’s and Stoller’s work and that of feminist thinkers of the 1970s, including Germaine Greer, Kate Millett, Ann Oakley, Gayle Rubin, and Nancy Chodorow. In Repo’s analysis, each of these scholars recognized that various concepts of gender (e.g., gender roles, gender identity, sex/gender split) could be useful tools, and they saw the benefits of repurposing this new apparatus of biopower for different (potentially more egalitarian and empowering) political ends. But in claiming gender as a tool of biopower, they were forced to routinely cite and rely on the prior work of Money and Stoller. As Repo points out, this is a potentially dangerous move. Gender’s origin as biopower is steeped in physically and psychologically violent normalization projects that served to enforce male/female binaries and to support a historically specific postwar liberal democratic social-economic structure. Repo asserts that the question for contemporary feminists must now become whether or not a biopower with this genealogy can ever be safely repurposed for genuinely transformative (i.e., radical) feminist ends. In her assessment of gender’s usefulness for feminist theory, Repo urges us to remember Audre Lourde’s admonition: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
