The naturalistic turn in feminist theory: A Marxist-realist contribution

Against feminist nature-phobia: Restoring the status of nature

Although it seems rather undisputable that human societies are rooted in organic and non-organic natural realities, the challenge to such claims by feminist theorists like Judith Butler has had an enormous influence on feminist discourse. Addressing the issue of biology by deconstructing the sex/gender distinction that had seemed so indispensible to earlier feminists, Butler famously argued that sex does not precede its discursive elaborations, but that ‘this production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender’ (1999: 11; emphasis added). What is at work in Butler’s writings and in discursive poststructuralism generally is what Bhaskar calls ‘the epistemic fallacy’, whereby ontological questions are understood in epistemological terms (2008a: 242). Butler is right that we cannot know about sex other than through conceptual systems that are always culturally constructed. What I question is the way in which she derives from this truth the conclusion that sex does not exist beyond our conceptualisations of it. While Butler has sought to refute claims that she reduces biology to its enmeshment in discourse, her framework precludes an analysis of what effects biology might have on discourse and performative processes. Likewise, her appeal to ‘materiality’ (1993) is unconvincing to the extent that she insists on attributing to discourse the force that structures, constitutes and governs the material. Butler’s invocation of biology and matter is thus more rhetorical than theoretical.

Although denying biology any significance for social matters seems to be aimed at putting a final nail in the coffin of biological determinism, the move actually depends on a deterministic notion of the biological. Seeking to avoid biological determinism by avoiding biology does not challenge the basic sociobiologist conviction that, if biology is admitted to be a basis of human functioning, then it must determine human behaviour. As Andrew Sayer points out, radical constructivism ‘fails to challenge its enemy’s mistaken belief that natural powers are deterministic rather than potentials and constraints’ and thereby ‘it can only defend a realm of social determination by excluding nature and positing a socially constructed realm in which biological constraints are either absent or inconsequential’ (1997: 476). Toril Moi argues along similar lines:

I get the impression that poststructuralists believe that if there were biological facts, then they would indeed give rise to social norms. In this way, they paradoxically share the fundamental belief of biological determinists. In the flight of such unpalatable company they go to the other extreme, placing biological facts under a kind of mental erasure. (1999: 42; emphasis in original)

Wary of feminist theorists’ ‘flight from nature’, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman warn that ‘the more feminist theories distance themselves from “nature”, the more that very “nature” is implicitly or explicitly reconfirmed as the treacherous quicksand of misogyny’ (2008a: 4). The radical constructivist stance may be opposite to biological determinism on a superficial level, but it operates within the confines of the latter’s categorical structures, only in inverted form. What characterises both camps is reductionism, insofar as that which is really both biological and socially constructed is reduced to a matter of either biological or social determinations. It is only if we concede that there is a natural dimension to social existence, and seek to specify its conditioning role while demonstrating that such conditioning is not the same as determinism, that we have reached the core of the determinist argument and challenged the notion that if there is nature, nature overrides everything else.

The naturalistic turn emerging among feminist theorists during the last decade frames itself as a challenge to nature-phobic trends in feminist theory. Grosz, for instance, confronts ‘strong resistance on the part of feminists to any recourse to the question of nature’ (2005: 13) and the way that ‘[w]ithin feminist scholarship and politics, nature has been regarded primarily as a kind of obstacle against which we need to struggle, as that which remains inert, given, unchanging, resistant to historical, social, and cultural transformations’ (2005: 13). The concern is primarily to challenge Cartesian notions of nature as a passive object that culture shapes, dynamises and inscribes itself upon. Instead, the active force of nature as well as its essential indeterminacy and unpredictability are emphasised and explicitly or implicitly characterised as something that feminists have reason to embrace. Grosz has recently (2004, 2005, 2011) made daring efforts to revitalise Darwin’s work by combining it with readings of Deleuze, Nietzsche, Luce Irigaray and Bergson. Since Grosz’s work both offers one of the most elaborate new materialist theorisations of nature and is highly representative of the major philosophical tendencies of the naturalistic turn, I here primarily focus on her work.

Directing her edge against social constructionism, Grosz highlights that if we are to make sense of the forces of social construction and inscription we need an account of ‘what these bodies are such that inscription is possible, what it is in the nature of bodies, in biological evolution, that opens them up to cultural transcription, social immersion, and production’ (2004: 2; emphasis in original), and that ‘without some reconfigured concept of the biological body, models of subject-inscription, production, or constitution lack material force’ (2004: 4). This is a crucial insight of which most contemporary feminist theorists seem to have lost sight. For instance, the whole bulk of literature on the social construction – or performative production – of gender and sexuality depends upon the implicit notion that humans are, by their nature, desiring and needy and as such vulnerable to social influences. Yet such assumptions are rarely made explicit or specified. Grosz follows up this theme of how to make sense of the relation between bodily natures and social construction only in very general terms, where the prime concern is to challenge notions of nature as some kind of ‘timeless, unchanging raw material, somehow dynamized and rendered historical only through the activities of the cultural and the psychical orders it generates’ (2005: 45). Instead, she makes a case for a nature conceptualised not only as dynamic in and of itself, but also as unpredictable, constituted by nicks, cuts and ruptures. And to the extent, she argues, that feminism and other political movements are ‘directed to bringing into existence futures that dislocate themselves from the dominant tendencies and forces of the present’ (2004: 14), this quality of nature should be affirmed.

Another central theme in Grosz’s work is her challenge to the notion of nature and biology as that which limits and constrains social being. Drawing on Darwin, she argues that ‘[b]iology does not limit social, political, and personal life: it not only makes them possible, it ensures that they endlessly transform themselves and thus stimulate biology into further self-transformation’ (2004: 1). The two-way movement, in which the social not only is made possible by but also incites change in nature, is important: Grosz declares that she does not want to replace social reductionism with biological reductionism (2005: 43). Her work, she argues, focuses on ‘the space between the natural and the cultural, the space in which the biological blurs into and induces the cultural through its own self-variation, in which the biological leads into and is in turn opened up by the transformations the cultural enacts and requires’ (2004: 1). Yet she is clear about the primacy of nature, in the sense that it is the basis or ground of cultural life. And, importantly, the constraining force so often ascribed to nature tends in her account to be attributed to culture: while nature enables, the influence that culture exerts on nature is one that ‘diminishes, selects, reduces … the complexity and openness of the natural order’ (2005: 48). Although there are no clear-cut boundaries between nature and culture in Grosz’s theoretical account, there is thus no simple collapsing of the distinction such that one subsumes the other. The relation, for Grosz, is one of emergence: ‘Nature is the ground, the condition or field in which culture erupts or emerges as a supervening quality not contained in nature but derived from it’ (2005: 44). While theorists like Butler have sought to reveal the natural ‘ground’ of the social as itself a social construction, Grosz thus revitalises the more commonsense notion that social phenomena should indeed be seen as ultimately based in organic and inorganic structures, relations and forces that pre-exist and transcend their cultural expressions. At the same time, defining the relation between nature and culture in terms of emergence – a concept I will discuss further below – in Grosz’s account this grounding status of nature in no way implies that it determines culture, since the latter takes its own unpredictable routes.

The glorification of indeterminacy

Radically challenging the taboo on nature dominating feminist theory, Grosz’s work is a welcome and robust effort to counter the trends of cultural reductionism. What I wish to challenge here are some of the assumptions saturating Grosz’s work, stemming very much from the fact that she, like other new materialist thinkers, operates within the postmodernist tradition that she shares with her social constructionist adversaries. One problem I identify is Grosz’s emphasis on and glorification of indeterminacy. As mentioned, a major organising thread in Grosz’s work is her thesis that nature is not static, inert or predictable, coupled with an only rarely outspoken assumption that it is this unpredictability and indeterminacy of nature that renders it a friend of feminists and other radicals. Now, there are some crucial distinctions that Grosz does not make. While emphasising the inherent dynamism of natural life, she slides into highlighting nature’s unpredictability, indeterminacy and defiance of ‘precise causal analysis’ (2005: 38). This conflation is analytically problematic, since change and dynamism can indeed follow determinations, even predictable ones: there is nothing about dynamism as such that is at odds with structuredness. And while change is indeed a central concern for feminists, it is all but self-evident that feminists would wish for unpredictable and indeterminate change.

Contrary to Grosz’s assumptions, I would say that the problem that nature is often seen to pose for feminists and other progressives is not that it does not undergo change, but that, if it changes, it does not necessarily do so in the direction we prefer. Put differently, it is hard to make sense of why change as such should be glorified by social movements, for what these aspire for is change of a certain emancipatory kind and such aspirations fit badly with unpredictability and indeterminacy since they require some amount of control. Moreover, a question that arises is how Grosz’s political glorification of indeterminate dynamism goes together with her insistence that indeterminate dynamism is the very heart of life. If life is inevitably constituted by the kind of innovative indeterminacy that Grosz embraces as a political promise, what then is the problem with the current state of affairs? By universalising and thus trivialising change and innovation, Grosz offers no way of distinguishing between the dynamism that is constitutive of life and the kind of change that would bring about a better world.

When Grosz does apply her principle of indeterminacy to concrete matters, she salutes the fact that ‘[g]ayness (or straightness) is not produced from causes, whether physiological, genetic, neurological, or sociological; nor is it the consequence of a free choice among equally appealing given alternatives'. Sexuality is an ‘open invention' in that it is ‘the enactment of a freedom that can refuse to constrain sexuality and sexual partners to any given function, purpose, or activity' (2011: 73). This argument points to the fact that nature, including human nature, is not a neatly functioning machine but a complex vital process involving emergence and qualitative leaps, opening up ‘a “fringe” of freedom, a zone of indetermination’ that elevates all life ‘above mere automated response to given stimuli’ (Grosz, 2011: 69). This non-mechanical character of life is indeed a crucial ontological fundament of freedom in its most basic, ‘cosmological’ sense, the kind of non-confinement that lends life such beauty. Yet pointing out the unruly character of sexual desire is not a solution to the problem of gendered and sexual oppression. Human freedom can hardly be a matter of being non-determined or ‘uncaused’, since it is only if we are enmeshed in determinate structures that we can exercise the control over ourselves and our world which any meaningful concept of freedom must involve.

It is not that Grosz denies that qualitative change and unpredictable eruptions presuppose order. Firmly grounded as she is in Darwin’s dialectic of evolution, she states that ‘[i]t is [the] relative stability and orderliness, predictability, that is the very foundation or condition for a life of invention and novelty’ (2011: 30). Yet, when it comes to the normative underpinnings of Grosz’s discourse, invention is always privileged such that stability and predictability tend to be reduced to their role as foundation of novelty and change. Indicative of Grosz’s Nietzschean legacy, it is the unruly as such that is glorified here, while the politically more pertinent question of to what extent human beings can gain some control over their destinies is left out. This is similar to the way that the theoretical logic of Butlerian poststructuralism suggests an implicit celebration of transgression as such, although there is no reason to assume that all kinds of transgressions are liberatory and all kinds of stability oppressive. The abstract and generalised privileging of indeterminacy and unruliness endorsed by Grosz and other new materialists makes them pay very little attention to the specificities of human freedom and political change. While the posthumanist orientation of the new naturalist turn is promising to the extent that it works against the dualistic juxtaposition of the human and the non-human (e.g. Birke et al., 2004; Hird and Roberts, 2011; Kirby and Wilson, 2011 ² ), it is problematic that it seems to imply a neglect of the specificities of human nature and what these mean for a feminist politics. Feminism, I contend, is primarily a movement of and for people. Consequently, a truly feminist concern with nature ought to focus not so much on nature as such but on how we might better understand the conditions for changing human life in light of its basis in nature.

If we accept that there is a human nature in the sense that humans ‘are possessed of preordained features, and subject to their order of needs in the way that other creatures also are’ (Soper, 1995: 27), then a crucial aspect of our freedom, which is an essential goal of feminist politics, is to have our needs met. And to the extent that our needs are not particularly indeterminate but part of enduring natural structures, freedom involves submitting to forces that are both structured and beyond our control. As Andrew Collier argues, ‘[m]ore or less freedom … means more or less effective interaction in one’s world – not disengagement from the causal processes operative in the “outside world”’ (2003: 15). Such freedom, moreover, goes very well with stable social arrangements that predictably ensure that people’s needs are met, while unpredictable ruptures of this pattern might prove destructive. In a passage in an explicit discussion of freedom, Grosz seems to endorse a similar view, stating that

the capacity to act and the effectivity of action is to a large extent structured by the ability to harness and utilize matter for one’s own interests. Freedom is not a transcendent quality of subjects but is immanent in the relations that the living has with the material world. (2011: 68)

The theme of stability versus dynamism is closely connected to the dialectic between constraint and enablement, and here I discern a second problem with Grosz’s account. As in the case of stability and dynamism, Grosz seems to acknowledge that nature’s constraining and enabling capacities are two sides of the same coin. Yet when she characterises nature’s relation to the social realm, she repeatedly downplays its constraining role. There is an ambivalence in her work as to whether nature is limiting at all or just not only limiting. In one place she writes that ‘[n]atural selection does not simply limit life, cull it, remove its unsuccessful variations; it provokes life, inciting the living to transform themselves’ (2004: 64; emphasis added), indicating that she wants to complement the view that natural selection is a constraining force with an emphasis of its enabling role. More often, however, she delivers more closed statements such as ‘[t]he natural does not limit the cultural; it provokes and incites the cultural’ (2005: 51), thus altogether challenging the notion that nature has constraining effects on culture. In spite of this ambiguity, what is clear is that an implicit assumption is at work here: if the concept of nature is to be useful for feminist theorists, its association with limits and constraints must be omitted.

As a counterweight to perspectives that view nature and biology as only constraining, this is welcome. Yet something is lost when nature’s enabling dimension is overemphasised at the cost of its constraining role. It is quite obvious that nature, in both its organic and inorganic forms, is enabling for societies, since without it societies would not exist. However, in a finite world enabling forces always also imply constraints, in the sense that not anything is possible. If we are to develop serious conceptions of in what feminist change might consist, we need to ground them in notions of what possibilities and limits nature offers human existence. Grosz is right to highlight the Darwinian insight that natural structures and forces also evolve – in interaction with culture – so that their enabling and constraining effects are not given once and for all. Yet in relation to the desires and dispositions of humans and their institutions, feminist movements included, the make-up of biological relations nevertheless constitutes a relatively stable element that resists and undermines many of our attempts to change.

Nature’s constraining force

The vindication of nature as dynamic is a central theme not only for Grosz but in the feminist naturalistic turn as a whole. For example, arguing that ‘it is possible to imagine nature in such a way that it is unrecognizable as the ground for essentialism’, Alaimo invokes Linda Birke’s charge that the ‘underlying assumption that some aspects of biology are “fixed”’ is what feminists need to challenge, not biology as such (cited in Alaimo, 2008: 240). Although it is certainly true that nature in general and biology in particular are dynamic – and I doubt that many would contradict this claim when taken in its basic sense – I am concerned about what I see as a somewhat overhasty tendency to overlook the relatively stable elements of nature. I argue that without an acknowledgement of the relatively ‘fixed’ and limiting features of the natural world, including human nature, our conception not only of nature but also of the social dynamics that it underpins will prove incoherent.

When sociobiologists invoke biology as the cause of the current social order, they tend to focus on how hormones, chromosomes and other substances inherent in the individual determine behaviour. We can, however – and this is the Marxist-realist way of approaching the world – shift the focus to the structural features of the natural order and conceptualise them as the broad conditions enabling us to act and create our social world within certain confines. At the level of human nature, the productive and constraining features of nature are expressed as human powers and needs. From a Marxist perspective, it is the dialectic interplay between them that gets history going. As Joseph Fracchia states,

those corporeal factors that prevent us from making our history as we please – that which we lack and need, want or desire, that which constrains and even limits our capacities – should not be understood exclusively in negative terms as mere and passive limits. First of all, constraints and limits give definition and form to an organism that would otherwise be the living contradiction of a shapeless form. Constraints and limits force the organism to focus its energies, to direct them in relation to its predispositions or Anlagen, to exercise and develop the capacities and dexterities that it does have. Furthermore … they also present challenges that provoke the production of artefacts ranging from material goods to symbolic forms. (2005: 52)

Without a rough notion of what constitutes the natural limits and capacities of human beings, it is impossible, I contend, to make sense of any kind of social system or phenomenon. Even theorists who are extremely wary of invocations of human nature cannot but operate with some implicit notions of it. The entire theoretical framework of Butler, for instance, depends not only on the assumption that human beings are inescapably sexual, but also on the notion that we are constructed in such a way as to be affected by discursive meanings. As Sayer highlights, norms and discourses ‘don’t seem to work on non-humans – on lumps of rock or plants – so there must be something about humans that makes them susceptible to such norms and discourses’ (2011: 98). As making our presuppositions explicit is a hallmark of scholarly practice, it is troubling that the reluctance is so widespread among feminists to concede that our theoretical claims inevitably depend on assumptions about human nature.

We cannot make sense of from where socially constructed power structures derive their oppressively constraining effect on people without a notion of constraints that are not socially constructed, such as the need for recognition that underpins our vulnerability to other people’s views. Also, the acknowledgement that the nature of human beings makes us needy of recognition serves as one of the necessary normative bases for social theories. For how could we conceptualise a social order as problematic or oppressive, unless we operate with the notion that there is something about the nature of human beings that makes us thrive under certain conditions and suffer under others? This takes us back to the issue of change and the preposterousness of celebrating change as such. It is only in relation to the relatively stable transhistorical structures, forces and needs that change – or status quo – becomes meaningful to people.

It is in a way paradoxical that the theorists of the naturalist turn do not break the postmodernist taboo on claims about human nature, although the very concept of ‘human nature’ so aptly transcends the opposition between humanity and nature. It is also unfortunate, since the marked lack in feminist theory of explicit and specified accounts of the natural ontology of human existence has created a serious explanatory deficit. For example, feminist theorisations of sexuality – from Catharine MacKinnon’s radical feminist framework to Butler’s queer feminism – generally have very little to say about sexuality as such. Instead, sexuality tends to be reduced to its historically specific imbrication in gendered power, leaving unclear what it is about human sexuality that makes it so prone to become a central field of political struggle. What is it about the nature of sexuality that makes its regulation so important? What is it about the needs we have as sexual beings that makes us reproduce oppressive sexual orders – and how can the capacities we have by virtue of our sexuality serve as an engine for political change? Last but not least, what possible sexual futures can we imagine, given that not anything is possible for human beings owing to our indeed slowly evolving but nevertheless relatively stable nature?

The failure to acknowledge that being sexual is naturally associated with constraints and vulnerabilities that defy compromise obscures the distinction between unfreedoms that are a matter of unnecessary, oppressive social constructions and those stemming from the existential condition of being human. In a critical reading of MacKinnon, Drucilla Cornell highlights this, pointing out that MacKinnon’s notion of female sexuality as wholly defined by male power indicates that female freedom can only be achieved through sexual abstinence, since there is no room for distinguishing between ‘the vulnerability and risk to the self involved in eroticism’ and the ‘feminine position of “being fucked”’ (Cornell, 1999: 153). Similar theoretical problems permeate Butler’s work, in that she pursues a notion of the subject as inevitably subject to ‘power’, while simultaneously depicting this subjugation as politically problematic (e.g. 1997, 1999). Thereby she conflates the existentially necessary powerlessness that stems from our relational nature and the powerlessness stemming from man-made oppressive systems (Alcoff, 2006). Such vagueness undermines any serious attempt to imagine what a feminist future may look like and instead locks us inside an unproductive wavering between pessimism and utopianism.

Transcending dualisms: The emergentist solution

Among feminist theorists the endeavour of transcending binaries or dualisms has become something of a given imperative. As Vicki Kirby states, ‘it is somewhat routine within critical discourse to diagnose binary oppositions as if they are pathological symptoms’ (2008: 215). The nature/culture divide seems to be one of the principal targets since it underpins so many other modern dualistic pairs, most notably the one that relegates the feminine to the realm of the natural, bodily, material, while reserving culture, mind and spirit for men. The latest version of this traditional feminist concern is the posthumanist paradigm which challenges the opposition between the human and the non-human. But what does it mean to transcend a dualism? I would argue that a remarkable confusion prevails about this question in feminist theory and that this confusion is at the heart of difficulties in dealing with the nature–society relation. For instance, in the Introduction to Feminist Theory’s special issue on the non-human, Myra J. Hird and Celia Roberts ask ‘[c]an and/or should a human/nonhuman delineation be made? … By identifying distinct categories, do we reify a dualism that we seek to dismantle?’ (2011: 109). The questions reveal a conceptual slippage that is endemic among feminist theorists and yet rarely challenged. What Hird and Roberts do not do, I argue, is discriminate between distinction or difference on one hand and dualism or binary opposition on the other. In their conventional usage, however, dualisms or binaries refer to the kind of absolute separation which ignores any interconnection and mutual constitution between the two terms in question, while distinction simply means that two things are not the same, which does not imply they can be neatly separated from one another.

Indeed, if we see distinctions as such as the problem, we rid ourselves of the possibility of examining the relation between the two terms and one will inevitably subsume the other. Noela Davis also gives testimony to the prevailing confusion about these distinctions, when arguing that

[new materialists] theorize an entanglement and non-separability of the biological with/in sociality, and what they criticize in much feminism is the conventional assumption that the biological and the social are two separate and discrete systems that then somehow interact. (2009: 67)

But what if, as Kirby (2008) suggests, it is ‘the difference between separability and inseparability’ that needs to be destabilised (2008: 216)? It seems indeed that a lot of phenomena are unseparable in the sense that they are mutually dependent and unified at the concrete level, yet separable in that they still refer to different underlying structures and mechanisms. As Sayer notes, it is ‘strange to say that something like sexuality is not natural or unnatural but socially constructed’ (1997: 480; emphasis in original), since we can make no such distinction on the level of concrete human practices, which are always both natural and socially constructed. Yet this unseparability does not make him altogether dispense with the distinction between the natural and the social, on which his claim depends. It is when we reject any distinction that we fall prey to reductionism, such that human practices are seen as a matter only of either the natural or the social.

Kate Soper, a Marxist and realist feminist philosopher whose work on nature has had little impact to date on dominant feminist debates, highlights that the ambivalence concerning whether to distinguish nature from humanity or not resonates through all of the Western history of philosophy. As I see it, this is no arbitrary historical fact as it is rooted in the ontological structures of the world in which the human is distinct from nature while being part of it. Soper recapitulates Karl Marx’s conception of this duality:

Humanity is … belonging with the order of Nature, and sharing in a structure of dependencies on the environment that is common to other animals; but also … differentiated from that order in its very capacity to create the conditions of its own alienation (and, so Marx would argue, of its eventual emancipation). (1995: 46–47)

This Marxian approach elegantly transcends the dichotomy between nature and society, while still relying on a distinction between them. Soper specifies the ways that nature enables humans to transcend nature, most notably by having endowed humans with self-consciousness and the power of speech, while not denying that it is still nature that has this conditioning power or claiming that the independence of the human is absolute. Consequently, when human beings harness natural forces according to their own aims, this does not imply that nature is overcome in any absolute sense. Successful use – even ‘control’ – of nature always depends upon an adaptation to its constraints and powers. Reproductive techniques such as artificial insemination, for instance, are in one sense a liberation from biological constraints, but they are successful only to the extent that they submit to conditions determined by nature (Soper, 1995). As Collier (1994) stresses, our relative freedom from natural determinations does not mean that we break the laws of nature.

How can we make more precise theoretical sense of this somewhat enigmatic ‘identity-in-difference’ (Bhaskar, 2008b: 319) between nature and humanity? Often those in the human and social sciences handle the paradox by claiming to make only an ‘analytical distinction’ between things that are really undistinguishable, but from a realist perspective analytical distinctions make sense only to the extent that they reflect some kind of ontological hiatus. I would argue that this theoretically thorny issue, which is pertinent not only to the relation between nature and humanity but to all of being, is solved by the concept of emergence.

It is one of the central strengths of Grosz’s work that she theorises the relation between the natural and the social as one of emergence. In her Darwinian meditations she repeatedly highlights that increasingly complex forms of life emerge from earlier forms, thereby challenging both stark juxtapositions between human and non-human life and notions that human life can be seen as mechanistically determined by non-human laws of nature. Here, Darwin’s essentially realist ontology seems to work as a healthy counterforce to the Deleuzean postmodernism that permeates Grosz’s thinking. Grosz (2004: 91) rightly points out that the emergentist Darwinian notion of nature, according to which nature grounds and enables but does not contain or determine culture, provides a way of overcoming the dualism between nature and culture while avoiding one subsuming the other. While in its everyday sense emergence is mostly thought of in its temporal sense, whereby something qualitatively new emerges from the old, there is also emergence in the synchronic sense. This refers to the fact that something, here and now, is composed by the powers and properties of something else while still possessing its own unique powers and properties (Bhaskar, 1998a). Nature not only temporally precedes the humanity that emerged from it but it is also the causal foundation of humanity in any moment in time, this being revealed by the fact that nature can exist without humanity while humanity cannot exist without nature. Yet, humanity cannot be equated with the nature of which it is composed – it has its own distinct powers and capacities. This paradox is reflected in the fact that while all human endeavours can be studied in terms of the physiological processes of which they are composed, this gives us very incomplete knowledge about what is actually going on. As Bhaskar (1998a) highlights, the neurophysiological organisation of human beings provides the basis for our power of speech, but speech can nevertheless ‘do’ things of which neurophysiological mechanisms are not capable. Hence, we cannot understand the logic of speech, nor predict it, by understanding the neurophysiological processes constituting it.

Emergence is a central concept in the critical realist worldview. It captures a phenomenon that is not exclusive to the nature–society relation, but characterises the relations between all different levels or strata of the world. Collier, for instance, describes the phenomenon of emergence by pinpointing the relation between the biological and the chemical:

Biological organisms … are composed of chemical substances. It is because they are so composed that they are rooted in chemistry. But they are also emergent from it: they obey laws other than chemical laws, and can do things that could never have been predicted from chemical laws alone. (1994: 116)

Importantly, this leap of emergence between levels of reality implies that higher order levels can act back upon the lower order levels of which they are composed. As Grosz highlights, the causal influence is not one-way between nature and culture, but the specific powers we have as social creatures can to a degree change the course of nature, even human nature in the long run. The reason why the concept of emergence helps us transcend dualisms between interconnected levels of reality is because it transcends the most fundamental dualism of all – that between identity and difference or unity and distinction. It clarifies how the cultural, social or human can be both part of nature and something else than nature. Collier emphasises that the theory of emergence fights on two fronts, both against dualism and pluralism, which deny intrinsic connections between entities, and against reductionism and holism, which deny that things can be distinct and irreducible to one another although they are not absolutely separate. When feminist theorists challenge atomistic separations they only too often tend to fall into the trap of reductionism, by overemphasising relatedness at the expense of distinctness. This is perhaps most common when poststructuralists challenge the idea of the autonomous liberal subject, rightly pointing out that the subject is constituted by its relations, but troublingly concluding from this that the subject is nothing more than these relations, that its relative autonomy is a fiction. I posit that the current posthumanist trend runs a similar risk of sacrificing the specificity of the human on the altar of its animality. An adoption of the crucial concept of emergence would prevent such tendencies and free us from the dualistic either/or thinking that leaves theoretical antagonists ‘tugging on one side of an antinomy resoluble in terms of a duality’ (Norrie, 2010: 103). The fundamental problem of Western philosophy, I contend, is its endemic neglect of the fundamental duality of reality which the concept of emergence addresses. Rather than echoing this neglect by emphasising, for instance, the unseparability of nature and humanity where others have affirmed the divide between the two, feminists should seek to honour and explore the very duality which makes these opposed positions both true, but only partially so.

Conclusion

The essential task of feminist theory is to explain what makes social phenomena such as patriarchy and heterosexism possible, and what the conditions are for getting rid of them. Since nature has so often been invoked as an obstacle to gendered and sexual change, it is understandable that feminists have tended to deny that any gendered order is inevitably underpinned by natural forces beyond human control. Yet I have shown that, since all social phenomena, even feminism, are based in nature, it does not make sense to see nature as politically problematic. The struggle for political change would lose its meaning unless we were part of a natural world that constrains and partly directs our lives by making us suffer under certain social conditions and thrive under others. This conditional force of nature means that we cannot create any kind of feminist future, for instance one in which we are liberated from sexuality or from needing other human beings. This should not, however, be that disheartening since the freedom that we seek would not make much sense if it were not in accord with our human natures. It is a concern that the authors of the emerging naturalist turn, who admirably break so many other ingrained taboos, seem anxious to face the limiting force that nature exerts on our feminist projects. This does no good, I argue, to the feminist cause, since it inevitably leads to utopian notions of what a feminist society could look like. I hope that the naturalistic turn could direct its energies more towards examining more concretely how nature conditions the social. Although I sympathise with the posthumanist project of emphasising the continuities between the non-human and the human, if we are to better understand the political it is crucial that we do not avoid the question of what is specific about human nature. Although I would not downplay the significance of the non-human world as such, for specifically feminist concerns the non-human and the natural is interesting only to the extent that we cannot understand the human and social without it. We need more theoretical accounts of nature that help make better sense of from what material sources gendered power structures derive their force, of how our nature constrains as well as enables our struggle against them, and of what a feminist future could and should look like given our specific needs and powers as human beings.