Delphy Summary

Christine Delphy, “Rethinking Sex and Gender,” Summary

Delphy argues that the belief that sex is natural and thus comes before gender, which is social, is holding us back.

First Delphy takes us through a history of feminist thought focused on the theme of division/hierarchy. Her point will ultimately be that we treated differences without understanding the way they were positioned with a hierarchy. And we never questioned sex. We always assumed it was the natural given, the primary division or container to which we assigned contents. Instead, Delphy proposes we ask some difficult questions:

Why should sex give rise to any sort of social classification (gender)? Is gender independent of sex? The Presupposition that sex causes gender comes from two assumptions the Delphy works to debunk:

1) The different sexes’ functions of procreation create some kind of division of labor.
a. Delphy argues that these theories never explore how nature creates these divisions of labor and why that division of labor extends beyond procreative practices (since procreative roles is their reason for gender division).
2) Biological sex is destined to receive classifications (gender traits). Human beings need classifications and they need to base these classifications on physical traits.
a. Delphy argues that this school never explains why the physical traits of sex become the means of classification when there are other physical traits just as prominent (things like height or weight, say). She also wonders why physical traits other than sex don’t create dichotomies (two sets of mutually exclusive traits) and don’t determine hierarchal roles. Delphy is returning to her opening distinction between division and hierarchy.
b. Delphy critiques the application of Derrida’s differance to social hierarchies because she argues that social differentiations can be multiple (Here she uses the vegetable example). Since we can no longer say that we necessarily socially organize in two dichotomous categories that have a hierarchy to create meaning, we can no longer argue that gender comes from the nature of social classification.

Thus, Delphy posits her thesis: Gender comes BEFORE sex. Sex marks a social division. It “allows social recognition and identification of those who are dominants and those who are dominated” (63). In other words, hierarchy comes first—dominants and dominated—and society chooses the symbol of the penis and the vagina (sex markers) to explain the hierarchy.

To explain this conclusion, Delphy cites that the various organs and “indicators” involved in sex get reduced to one trait for each, a penis and a vagina (sorry Meg). She asks us to think about all the other physical traits involved in sex. By reducing sex to these two symbols, we create an easy dichotomy.

Delphy argues then that sex—because we reduce it down to two symbols, which itself is a social act—is also social. Thus, we can’t say nature leads to social because they’re both constructs of sorts. “Sex is applied to divisions and distinctions which are social.” The belief in sex as natural is one of the “truths” Delphy asks us to question.

“Very few indeed are happy to contemplate there being simply anatomically sexual differences which are not given any social significance or symbolic value.” In other words, most people still find it unthinkable to imagine a world without sex, even though we’re eager to think of a world without gender or a world where gender traits get all mixed up. We want to keep the sexual divisions for various reasons Delphy cites, but she understands these divisions to be a social act that creates the hierarchy of gender and sex roles. Delphy concludes with a dream: “We do not know what the values, individual personality traits, and culture of a non-hierarchical society would be like… But to imagine it we must think that it is possible” (67). In the end, she sounds a lot like bell hooks.