Any time I want to say something profound, it’s worth it to consider that Mother Contrapoints may have already spoken on it and spoken better, and this is definitely the case on the concepts of gender, sexuality, and equality as engaged in her latest video on Twilight. Still, since I’ve been thinking about this since at least 2015, I’m going to try to articulate my intellectual journey anyway.
First, I want to give you some history of the image heading this piece. I made this collage years ago on a now-defunct website called Polyvore, where I made many of the graphics for my zine. Polyvore was a website that collected images from across the internet and made them transparent and manipulatable, mainly to make fashion or interior design collages. However, art collage and zine subcultures sprouted up quickly on the platform. When I was working on this issue in 2018, I found the central image with the words “Reflection Shadow Fantasy Absence” without much attribution or explanation, and immediately upon seeing it on a few posters and t-shirts, I knew it framed my own thoughts about sex and gender pretty well. What I didn’t know until March 2024 is where the phrase itself came from.
In researching the phrase, I found the source of “Reflection Shadow Fantasy Absence” to be a book called Speculum of the Other Woman by Luce Irigaray, which examines femininity/the feminine through psychoanalysis. A serendipitous connection, if there ever was one, and a text I will explore (though not necessarily agree with) as we go further in this series.
I see “Reflection Shadow Fantasy Absence” as several interlocking frameworks for understanding the bundle of ideas we call {gender/sex/sexuality} and their corresponding real-world experiences.
Again, I’m asking you to join me on a short journey through memory. The year was 2018, and I was running a multi-issue perzine called “caro”. I was just beginning to discover the Side B community and was on the tail end of reconciling my faith, sexuality, and politics. As my introduction to this collective space, I want to share a few essays from The Femme Issue series that never saw publication (see Part 1 here).1
Reflection
The most popular Christian understanding of human sex is that of reflection, the reflection of relationships. There are two sexes (gender and sex are conflated and interchangeable here): male/man and female/woman, and those sexes/genders both reflect the image of God and, in some schools of thought, the relationship between God and humanity.
I’ve been diving as deep as I can (without inducing regular panic attacks) into queer theories of gender and sexuality, traditional Church teachings about the same, and everything in between. What I have found was that I was pulled between two seemingly contradictory ideas that have proven to me reliable and true: first, that {gender/sex/sexuality} are innate and universal to the human experience (therefore somehow objective and sacred), and second, that {gender/sex/sexuality} are subjective, socially constructed, and more complex and flexible than male♂man and female♀woman.
What I mean by this is that the relationship between biological sex and gender is differently construed with various meanings throughout different cultures and even throughout different periods in the same culture. Beth Allison Barr explores the changes to the idea of “Biblical Womanhood” or “Christian Womanhood” in her book The Making of Biblical Womanhood. I highly recommend it to get a taste of the historical context underlying this discussion in the Christian world.
What this looked like to me as a child was that it was more godly and more suited to women’s temperament to be homemakers and for men to work outside the home. Men were the authoritative decision-makers of the home and the church, and women were the supportive executors of those decisions in the home and followers of those decisions in the church. Men dreamed of making a difference in the world; women dreamed of supporting and raising difference-makers. Women were soft, delicate, and graceful; men were strong and protective. As inversions of each other (reflections, perhaps?), men and women complete each other and desire that completion with each other.
What I’m summing up here is an experiential summary of complementarianism, especially as it was taught in conservative Christian culture in the 1980s.2 While there were some important cultural caveats in my own African American family (such as an emphasis on the importance of everyone, including women, getting an education, meaning a bachelor’s degree and several advanced degrees if at all possible), the expectation on what it meant to be a woman in my own family was the same.
But that doesn’t get into the universality I’m speaking of. What I mean here is the fact that gender as a concept seems to be inescapable in human experience. It seems as if humans are always going to place importance on the role one plays in society, in family, and in romantic and/or sexual relationships and link that role to how our bodies are configured for reproduction, leading to a dualistic spectrum of human behavior that we call masculine and feminine. This is a wheel that humans continue to recreate, even if what that importance means, how it is expressed, and the contingent expectations change among culture, time, and place.
While biology and evolution do their part in reinforcing this dualistic narrative, I don’t want to brush past the way gender has felt mystical and sacred to many (most? all?) people groups. To me, the explanatory power for that phenomenon comes from Genesis 1:27, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (NIV). This experience feels innate and inescapable because humans are together a reflection of the Creator and something about how we reproduce is important to that reflection.3
If this feels gender essentialist, it is. The reflection part of this framework is very much about both what we as humanity consider the essence of {gender/sex/sexuality} to be and what we consider essential to the structure of human society.
I first began to incorporate both frameworks because the feminist and Queer Theory understandings still have difficulty accounting for this essentialism: the universality of the experience and linked-ness of sex and gender and the importance that we as humans have placed on that difference, which I think includes but goes beyond a struggle for power, where traditional Christian understandings account for that universality and its purpose. However, traditional Christian understandings of gender don’t account for the diversity of gender through time and culture and certainly didn’t account for my own existence/experiences as a Black woman.
It is my understanding that when two contradictory ideas seem reliable and true at the same time, it indicates that something of the fuller picture, the organizing principle, has not yet been understood. So, this series attempts to place my understanding and experiences of sex, gender, and sexuality in a sieve to see if I can sift out an organizing principle. I give no guarantees on the results, though. I will also share more on this in the next section titled “Shadow.”
As an aside: throughout this process, meditation and contemplation of Scripture have become a strong part of my spiritual practice and an experience that I wish I could give anyone looking for a meeting between intellectual inquiry and ecstatic experience. Doing research, then meditating on Scripture, and doing my best to hear from the Holy Spirit has maintained a through-line of solid ground under my feet while sifting through quite personal and disorganized feelings. I highly recommend this approach for Christians who feel anxious about investigating their beliefs and the evidence and arguments for other beliefs, especially on this topic.
For a broader discussion of ideas about sex and gender complementarity both within and beyond a strictly evangelical Christian scope, I will again refer you to a section of the latest video by Natalie Wynne/Contrapoints - Twilight - Default Heterosexual Sado-Masochism
I won’t go into exactly what that importance is only because there are many several theological viewpoints and the space and time it would take to discuss them all would eclipse this essay by far.
I've often felt a similar tug, cus whilst it's obviously true that how people experience their gender and their sex varies between societies and cultures, it has still seemed quite striking to me that as you said "humans are always going to place importance on the role one plays in society, in family, and in romantic and/or sexual relationships and link that role to how our bodies are configured for reproduction, leading to a dualistic spectrum of human behavior that we call masculine and feminine". It seems no coincidence to me that, as far as I'm aware, every society has male and female as basic categories and often links that to bodies.
Growing up the distinction I made was between gender and gender roles, so that even if it's true that in our society men are expected to be "strong and protective" whilst women are expected to be "soft, delicate, and graceful", that this is not something that is inherent to masculinity or femininity, this is just the roles that our society attributed to this. That was how I made sense of my "effeminacy" (for wont of a better word) as a gay kid as my masculinity - I might like dolls and dancing and singing more than football or fighting, but that didn't make me any less of a boy, I was just a boy that happened to like things that girls often like/are taught to like more. My sense was that my maleness was something essential that stuck (and something that I attributed to my sex, even as I did recognise that there were trans people, who I just saw to be "in the wrong body" (once again for wont of a better term)), but that the gender roles were what were social constructed
That made sense to me at the time, but it seems that when people that I read talked about gender as socially constructed, it seems that they elided gender and gender roles. I.e. they would point to gender being socially constructed by the fact that pink was previously seen as a boys colour and blue a girls colour, or that girls in the past were not allowed to act in the theatre or whatever. But in my head these things all fell under the category of "gender roles" - it was not the maleness or the femaleness that was constructed, just what was expected of men and women respectively. So I dunno whether social constructivist accounts of gender (like queer theory) are merely failing to recognise such a possible distinction (between gender and gender roles), or if they think that gender doesn't exist beyond the gender roles.
The other thing I wonder is when people talk about "third genders" existing in different cultures, is this just a category mistake, a conflation of two different category types between different cultures?
Much of these thoughts are merely questions and uncertainties - I genuinly just don't know - don't know what different views think, what categories are actually usefully distinct etc. But I guess my main idea is that it seems to me that your observation about gender as an almost universal (in always existing in some form, as almost always being related to sex in some form etc.) does seem to me to throw a spanner in the works in some way to the idea that gender is entirely socially constructed, and so the question is, "what is the category of gender exactly", and "what aspects of it (e.g: the categories itself, merely the gender roles etc.) are socially constructed?"