Beyond the Binary: Understanding Sex Through Intersectionality
Intersectionality tells us not to think in one-dimensional spectrums, but in pluralistic manifolds. Should sex in humans be understood as a binary or as a spectrum? I want to answer neither. That it isn’t a binary is becoming clear and well-established by now. I’ve blogged about this, about how sex is a social construct in which a society adopts norms that fit in a conceptual dichotomy, that generates expectations about roles in society, and that pressures science to establish in a “natural” way. My question, rather, is whether sex falls on a spectrum.
I’m interested in noticing that concerns about intersectionality motivate a more general characterisation. Why? Because a spectrum is one-dimensional, with a range of values that fall in between two opposites. With sex, I take it that male and female are the two opposite ends of the spectrum, but that other values fall in between. What we learn from intersectionality is the shortcomings of one-dimensional thinking. A Black woman and a white man have at least two dimensions of opposition, along the sex axis and along the race axis. If we fully isolate the two axes of oppression, we create new subgroups that remain equally oppressed, if not more so, such as Black women.
Intersectionality invites us instead to think along a pluralistic manifold. To simplify the illustration, take a two-dimensional manifold that includes sex and race. On that plane, people can fall anywhere, so that a white and a Black woman fall in two different regions of the plane. Now, since sex is a social construct, what we then need to realise is that it isn’t a one-dimensional social construct. Society’s expectations, prejudice, and oppression towards Black and white women aren’t the same. Intersectionality tells us that we can’t eliminate race categorisation from sex, so that sex isn’t distributed on a spectrum, but on a plane.
This is the simplistic two-dimensional illustration, but in reality there are several dimensions (sex, race, sexuality, class, etc.) that generate not dualistic distributions over a spectrum, but pluralistic distributions over manifolds.
