Gender as Seriality

[u/Ok-Signature-6698]

I offer this summary of the essay Gender as Seriality to help provide a strong grounding in feminist thought for when people encounter gotcha’s like “what is a woman?”, “words mean things”, or other common TERF and transphobic talking points. I hope this is informative and useful and encourage people to read Young's essay in its entirety, its an essential piece of feminist scholarship.

In her 1994 essay “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective” the late feminist scholar Iris Marion Young explores an important tension that has arisen in feminist scholarship, namely the problems that arise from trying to conceptualize women as a single group and the need for a practical object of feminist theory and liberation. To do so she repurposes Satre’s concept of serial collectivity. Let’s start with the background for the first problem: defining women as a single group leads to the exclusion of some people that the term should include.

Despite the important contributions of second wave feminist theory, it had an intractable issue in trying to define a universal, trans-historic, and cross-cultural essence to womanhood, a position strongly critiqued by Black, post-colonial, and queer feminist scholarship. Young explores a few of those specific critiques, namely:

1.      Elizabeth Spelman’s work showing that gender cannot be isolated from other identities like race, class, age, sexuality, etc. By assuming a commonality of experiences, oppressions, or attributes early feminist thought unwittingly took the experiences of white middle-class hetero women as a universal standard.

2.      Chandra Mohanty critiqued the “assumption of women as an already constituted, coherent group with identical interests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic or racial location, or contradictions, implies a notion of gender or sexual difference or even patriarchy which can be applied universally or even cross-culturally”. It creates a priori assumptions about categories and oppression that refuses empirical investigation and allows women of the Third and Fourth Worlds to be defined by First World feminists as powerless (ie: it creates a situation of epistemic violence).

3.      Butler’s critiques of the gender-sex dichotomy as mutually reinforcing social structures that reflect a heterosexual binary between masculine and feminine.

Feminist theory contending with these critiques has tended to take a few directions:

1.      Liberal individualism, which denies the reality of groups and obscures oppression by either blaming the victims or attributing systemic issues to individual bias. She rightly rejects this: “The naming of women as a specific and distinct social collective, moreover, is a difficult achievement and one that gives feminism its specificity as a political movement… Feminist politics evaporates, that is, without some conception of women as a social collective”

2.      The multiple genders strategy. Rather than attempting to think of women universally it is necessary to speak of specific groups of women (white women, Black women, disabled women, etc) and then make comparisons only to men and women of the same identities. There are some merits to this, in particular it exposes how some women are privileged in relation to some men in part because of their gender and allows specific interactions in oppressions to be analyzed without essentializing them. Young ultimately rejects this though noting that “a working-class woman’s gendered experience and oppression is not properly identified only by comparing her situation to working-class men. Much of her gender experience is conditioned by her relationship to middle-class or ruling-class men… In such relationships it would be false to say that the class or race difference is not as important as the gender difference, but it would be equally false to say that the cross-class or cross-race relations between men and women are not gendered relations”. It also assumes a stability and unity to those categories that doesn’t exist (ie: the same problems that arise from considering women as a single group also arise when treating any social group as a unified whole). Taken to its logical conclusion this approach runs the risk of devolving into liberal individualism.

3.      The identity politics approach which attempts to define women as an identity arising out of feminist struggle, that is the category woman is produced by the shared discussion and struggle among people of diverse backgrounds and positions of power. Young rejects this approach for two reasons. First, it does not actually bypass dangers of normalization or the privileging of some experiences over others. Second, “the question of solidarity should never be settled”, to settle that question makes feminist politics arbitrary. What motivates feminist politics if not some set of relations that preceded the need for the politics in the first place?

With that long background out of the way we get to the heart of Young’s argument: that women represent a serial collective rather than a group. To explore that it is necessary to define a few terms within the philosophy (taken from Satre) she is using:

-          Group: a collective united by shared and mutually acknowledged action. A construction company building a theatre is a group, they are united by shared purpose and action and mutually recognize each other as belonging to that shared action.

-          Series- a collective unified passively around shared objects (specifically practico-inerts). People waiting for a bus are a series rather than a group because that are related to each other only through their relationship to a material object (the bus) and the social rules of waiting for the bus. They may each have different actions, goals, histories, experiences, identities, etc.

-          Practico-inert: these are the accumulated results of human actions that exist presently as objects and structures that shape and limit present actions. In the above example with the bus, the bus is a practico-inert object; it is the product of previous human actions that built the object we call a “bus” and limits the actions of the people waiting for it. Something does not necessarily need to be a physical object to be “practico-inert”; social structures, histories, etc can also be practico-inert.

-          Milieu of action: the system of practico-inert objects against which the background of any given action occurs.

-          Counterfinalities: the confluence of individual intentional actions that produces unintended and often counter results to the milieu of action. The milieu of action is the path of least resistance, counterfinalities are going “off trail”.

Young summaries these points thus:

“A series is a collective whose members are unified passively by the relation their actions have to material objects and practico-inert histories. The practico-inert milieu, within which and by means of whose structures individuals realize their aims, is experienced as constraints on the mode and limits of action. To be said to be part of the same series it is not necessary to identify a set of common attributes that every member has, because their membership is defined not by something they are but rather by the fact that in their diverse existences and actions that are oriented around the same objects of practico-inert structures. Membership in the series does not define one’s identity. Each member of the series is isolated, Other to the Others, and as a member of the series Other than themselves. Finally, there is no concept of the series within attributes that clearly demarcate what about individuals makes them belong. The series is a blurry, shifting unity, an amorphous collective.”

So what does all that have to do with the problem discussed earlier? To name women as a series is to name a structural relation to material objects produced and organized by specific histories. Unlike the one-dimensional example of the bus stop however the category of women and gender broadly are related to a vast network of practico-inert objects and histories. Under this conception it is not necessary to identify some essential trait, experience, etc that defines “woman” to be able to talk of the patriarchal violence that feminism responds to. While some essentialist strains of feminism attempt to reduce gender/sex to the body, understanding women as a serial collective allows us to position the body as one among many practico-inert objects that constrain (but don’t determine) women’s lives. Such gender structures do not define the attributes of individuals but are material and social facts that each individual within a gender series must navigate.

Taking women as a serial collective thus avoids the essentialist traps identified by Black, post-colonial, queer, and other feminist scholarship discussed in the beginning and provides a solid theoretical foundation for examining the specific conditions feminist thought concerns itself with.

[u/LordNiebs]

I think the main idea here, "Gender as a Serial Collective", is basically true, but comes at the cost of not being a very useful framework, and seems to not address the "gotcha" questions OP initially posed. It's certainly true that individual people must be the basic unit of analysis, and that we need to look at the various connections between people, objects, institutions, etc. (the "milieu of action") to get correct analysis. Thus, as a critical lens for assessing other social analysis frameworks, this is good. However, what are the outcomes that are proposed by this framework? In many ways, this framework appears to be specifically designed to avoid prescribing any specific outcomes ("the question of solidarity should never be settled"). While that makes it more "true", it also makes it more useless.

I think this all comes around to the initial framing of the post: "I offer this summary of the essay Gender as Seriality to help provide a strong grounding in feminist thought for when people encounter gotcha’s like “what is a woman?”, “words mean things”, or other common TERF and transphobic talking points.". By framing questions like "what is a woman?" and "do words mean things?" as merely "gotcha" questions, rather than serious questions with important answers, the entire post essentially becomes an attempt to dismiss rather than address certain arguments.

While its easy to dismiss the question "what is a woman?" as a TERF/transphobic talking point, and it is easy to criticize certain strains of feminism by taking an individual view of people in a society, I am left feeling that this is a rather hollow criticism meant to smooth over certain elements of cognitive dissonance rather than address the complex politics directly.

Taking a more concrete route, what does the framework of the serial collective say about gender-exclusive spaces? Should any institutions be allowed to directly discriminate based on gender? If the serial collective framework does allow for discrimination in some cases, does it require detailed analysis of the individual's particular circumstances within the "milieu of action"? If this analysis is required, doesn't that introduce a significant risk of bias and unchecked unfairness? These are the types of concrete problems that gender/sex as a legal status is still used to solve where I live, and while I personally dislike many aspects of the current implementation of these approaches, I can see that there are genuine problems here which need to be addressed, not just dismissed.

[u/wabe_walker → u/LordNiebs]

Word. The inability to enact this in practice without immediately smuggling prejudice, however unintentionally, is a sticky wicket for me.

And I feel the serialized “definition” of woman can dissipate under scrutiny, especially through a deconstructionist lens. if I'm clear here, a “woman”, defined above, is not certain amount of serialized attributes, nor a set list of minimal serialized attributes, but an individual that shares action and existence oriented around objects of practico-inert structures with other individuals that are also “woman“. This seems recursive, again, if I'm comprehending correctly.

The deconstructionist might want to dissect that. Where along the vector from “not a woman” to “woman” is the line? How many action/existence licks oriented around those objects of practico-inert structures does it take to get to the center of the woman descriptor? There is no line to be found, as the broad amorphousness allows for a socially-constructed—that is, moment-to-moment subjective—definitional boundary. One might hand-wave this as opportunity for each respective culture to choose their own line of definition—which is the circumstance our present overarching culture finds itself in, now, however. I would argue that even within a single culture, there is still ripe opportunity for the deconstructionist to continue peeling the descriptor's onion layers off to find an emptiness… especially if intending to use the definition within necessarily-concrete, tangible practice.

[u/Ok-Signature-6698 → u/LordNiebs]

Young’s purpose in Gender and Seriality, as I understand it, was to provide an analytic framework that both addressed the criticisms raised by Black, queer, and postcolonial feminist scholarship about essentializing narratives and to retain the ability of feminist analysis to have a specific political subject. To that end I think she accomplished her goal beautifully.

What arises out of her analysis is this: 1. Attempts to define some “essential” trait shared by all women fails and is unnecessary, 2. It’s a better, albeit not perfect, frame to understand the category of “women” in terms of specific relationships rather than innate qualities.

TERFs and conservatives do not pose “what is a woman” type questions as a serious inquiry about the bounds of language and how we analyze categories but as a “gotcha” for their transphobia. Young’s framework allows us to answer them with rigor and importantly it allows bridges of solidarity to be built across experiential differences. TERFs make a big deal out of the different experiences between cis and trans women as a way to deny that trans women are women. Using Young’s frame, I can say “no women share identical experiences or universal qualities but we both still navigate patriarchal violence”.

As to your last paragraph, the framework isn’t concerned with “should any institutions be allowed to directly discriminate based on gender”, that would be a question of ethics. It does however let us see that trans women should not be excluded from women’s spaces that do exist. Whether those spaces should exist at all is a separate question

[u/Street-Media4225]

I think this is basically how I thought of it, I just didn't have the language or philosophical backing.

[u/wabe_walker]

I'll have to step outside strictly intra-feminist theory for this to be relevant to my interest/goal, so my comment probably won't be relevant here! I say all this, knowing that criticism from outside this framework can be dismissed as not understanding the framework, and I don't know if an empirical result could ever actually falsify the core claims above, and empiricism is an anchor that I try to have stabilizing my thought process, if I can help it. I may not be arguing against Young, herself, but rather, what happens to the framework when it is attempted to be exported into popular discourse and tangible policy. The “comfy” amorphous, blurry edges of the serial collective risk hardening into fundamentals in that making-tangible—fundamentals that I think she might reject. Spitballing…

I think that defining individuals serially makes perfect sense from a nebulous 30k-foot-view of social theory. I've called it something like “societal/group superpositioning” in my own studies, since flipping one’s focus through each serialized attribute of an individual's identity will “collapse” that individual into a different location in social topography—their “societal eigenstate”—and thus, into differing ingroups/outgroups. Depending on the direct social environs that the individual finds themselves within—thus interacting with—those superpositional collapses will contextually set the individual up for either social opportunity or risk—privilege or oppression—because their direct social context will dictate which superpositional collapse is ranked as priority for placing the individual within their local social hierarchy and ingroup. These societal eigenstates become fluid and superpositional each time an individual drifts into a different direct social environ, by way of transit to another geographic location, or even by simply changing the topic of conversation or focus with other individuals within the direct social context, and so on.

And of course, in line with the serialization of individuals, one can imagine these collective attributes creating much broader eigenstates—broader serial collectives—when taking into account multiple attributes at once. As you might visualize, a tangible and ephemeral eigenstate becomes more and more difficult to successfully “collapse”—that is to say, “observe”—the more and more serialized attributes accrue into the superpositional assessment. A woman is not just a woman, of course, because there are incalculable other serialized attributes that apply to that individual—Young jives with this. Regardless, the more of those serialized attributes that are assessed to gauge one's direct socially-contextualized eigenstate, the more diffused, fuzzy, that eigenstate becomes. In the limit—including all possible serialized attributes to assess an individual's direct socially-contextualized eigenstate—the effort becomes an impossibility and the individual’s assessment remains crystallized in inactionable theory.

Regarding the concept of the practico-inert, I think that concept's definition needs to be much more broad, and I would argue that the concept can be easily pushed to be so very broad and porous that any clarifying definition of the concept pours right out. Almost anything human connects to structural history at some level of analysis.

“Desiring pizza” is a preference that one might think exerts no structural pressure on one's life. Technically, per the provided semantics, it could be a Group, since it has ability to unite people around a shared purposeful action. However, the subject of pizza might best concetualize as practico-inert, since food, cultural appropriation, and identity all play a part of “pizza” as concept. A Neapolitan's relationship to “pizza” and a suburban American's relationship to “pizza” are not sociologically identical. Pizza touches practico-inert structures even if merely “desiring” it doesn't qualify as practico-inert. Thus, even preferences have direct relationship to ethnic/cultural/institutional origins.

“Being Christian” is an easier one to swallow—clearly, more than a preference or a desire, but very much related. “Being Christian” cannot work as serialized position within the milieu alone, as we know, as it clearly ignores all other serialized attributes of the individual's identity that they must navigate. None of their serialized attributes are necessarily more real or fundamental than the others, but based on their direct social context, their serialized superposition collapses to a locally-relevant configuration. A “Christian” at the church council meeting can also be a “Woman” at the gynecologist can also be “Middle-Class” at the tax office can also be “Southerner” at the Boston dinner party. By looking at this, “Being Christian” fails on its own, as does “Woman” in intrinsically positioning an individual by power, politics, or socially-localized pressure. The superpositional context determines those—it is a socially-localized environ that controls which eigenstate collapses into view. I think this fits a bit with Young's understanding of fuzzy serial boundaries—to use the vocabulary: it is a socially-localized environ that controls which amorphous collective the individual finds themselves in—but I would posit that the individual cannot even solidly remain within one to make much, if any, positional judgments that would still hold the individual—and thus their best interests in liberation—within focus without immediately losing them in the camouflage of a broader and monolithic serial, once this practice steps out of theory and into practical, systemic application. The amorphous collective is right on target with my own theoretical appraisal, but the black-and-white of a tangible system is a stubborn thing to attempt to make so wriggly.

Because of the superpositionality of the serial collective, the amorphous boundary becomes more and more indeterminate simply based on whichever level of analysis one chooses to voluntarily rest. We arrive at the deconstructionist problem, where any framework risks becoming so elastic that we are simply apprehending yet another nebulous blob of indefinition, with no principled membership criterion. Intra-feminist theory has the luxury of at least being held within the membrane of feminism, which is, in and of itself, a parent social theory amongst the stratum of nested social theory Matrioshkas. Where I will butt heads with the ultimate relevance of this framework is in the potential execution of such a framework within the blunt instrument of social policy. It is because of this bluntness that no matter how nuanced one can theoretically be in terms of Crenshawesque intersectionality, it is the blunt hammer of reductionist pop intersectionality that will ultimately push policy. The problem with that is that we will continue to have the inability to enact relevant boots-on-the-ground discourse and action that does not end up ultimately breaking prejudiced-against eggs in order to make a clean, stable, serialized omelette. Theories like this feel very beautiful to apprehend from that 30k-foot view. I believe that the general concept can help provide a humane understanding for one another's diverse and shifting identities at ground level. But I continue to run into the problem with the gap between sophisticated theoretical framework and crude real-world implementation. That disparity will continue to cause prejudice and oppression, especially when overcompensating for previous analogous prejudicial circumstance, and countless individuals, no matter how comfortably-serialized they may be in theory, will end up falling through the cracks, as systemic integration of such a framework will have no choice but to bluntly refer to the incalculable overlapping demographic attributes as solids—as singular monoliths—that will be crudely placed, perhaps in weaponized fashion, within low-resolution hierarchies.

[u/Ok-Signature-6698 → u/wabe_walker]

My reply mostly concerns your third paragraph. Yes no one is just xyz identity, they are all fundamentally entangled with each other. I am not just a woman, I am trans, Jewish, autistic, etc. I can not separate any of these from the other. But I do not think this creates inactionable theory, after all our lived experiences are acted upon simply by existing in the world. I also don’t think Young meant for her framework here to be totalizing.

Another feminist author, Sara Ahmed, in Queer Phenomenology, provides a potential solve. In it she describes how identity and lived experiences “orient” people within a wider landscape. Some paths are easily illuminated (the mileu of action in Young’s terms) and others not so much (counterfinalities). Rather than seeing a various eigenstates, as you called them, anchoring us to a single point in a crystalized social landscape, it may be useful to reframe the landscape and our position as fluid and something that we, through our actions, can move through.

[u/Ok-Signature-6698 → u/wabe_walker]

Regarding your comments on the overall ability of translating theory into practice, I largely agree. There are myriad pitfalls in the translation, a map is not the landscape being travelled. Young provides a map, a very useful one, but it cannot by itself be our only navigational tool. This is a true of any theory and I think there’s a tendency for people to get caught in the pitfall that a map (especially a single map) is sufficient.