Sex and Simulacrum

I want to talk about the relationship between gender and “essential” masculinity/femininity, but before I get to that I need to lay a little groundwork in the form of a brief introduction to one of my favourite postmodern thinkers: Jean Baudrillard.

Baudrillard is mostly known as a social critic, and one of his most interesting analyses involves the idea of simulation and simulacrum. The basic concept is that when you represent a thing there’s a kind of declension away from reality that takes place. Baudrillard describes a four step process that goes like this:

1. The thing itself – reality.

2. Representation – the thing is represented in a way that draws attention to its reality.

3. Simulation – the thing is represented in a way that is draws attention away from the reality.

4. Simulacrum – the representation completely replaces the reality, producing a kind of hyperreality that becomes (subjectively) more real than the real.

To give an example, we might consider the process by which myth becomes idolatry. You start out with a mystical experience of God, which becomes represented in a myth. At this point, the myth draws attention towards the reality, and there is a recognition that the myth is incomplete, that it’s representational as opposed to real.

The next step is to represent the myth through ritual action, to simulate the myth. At this point the reality of mystical encounter starts to be obscured, now it is the representation that is being represented. This is also the point at which style starts to become an important consideration – what matters is not that myth be transparent to the divinity, but rather that it create a stylized sense of divine action.

Finally, a perfect simulacrum is achieved when the simulation completely replaces the divine encounter, when the representation becomes a god in its own right. Traditional idolatry, where a representation in stone is literally worshipped as a divine being, is a great illustration of this principle.

We might at this point consider that in the case of Jove (etymologically, “Jupiter” is derived from the words for god + father), there actually came to be a historic moment when worshippers of God the Father were literally put to death for failing to offer the correct rites before the statue. The simulacrum literally tends towards the annihilation of any acknowledgement of the reality.

So what does this have to do with sex and gender? Well, I’m going to argue that within many areas of contemporary Western society (including, among others, the “Biblical masculinity” and “Biblical femininity” movements), what has occurred is basically a devolution from the reality of sex to a simulacrum of sex. I would chart that movement something like this:

1. Reality: male and female as reproductive and biological categories which are essential for the perpetuation of the human species.

2. Representation: gender, man and woman, expresses sexual difference in the social sphere. At the first stage, gender is a positive thing because it provides artistic ways of expressing sexual difference and illuminates human sexuality with a series of meanings and significations (yin and yang, polarity, complementarity, fecundity, etc.)

3. Simulation: gender roles become increasingly stylized and solidified. They no longer have a direct association with the biological realities of sex but are rather a means of reifying the representations and signifiers associated with gender.

4. Simulacrum: Gender replaces sex as the new reality of human sexuality. Conformity, or non-conformity, with gender roles becomes significant in and of itself without any reference to sexual biology. Among hard traditionalists, this manifests in an insistence on socially constructed gender roles, as though the roles themselves really are essential masculinity and femininity. Among queer theorists, it manifests in a celebration of gender divorced from any consideration of sex. Among gender theorists, it results in a complete rejection of sexual difference under the belief that sex can be collapsed into gender – and that gender ought to be abolished.

Note that a number of apparently contradictory ideologies vie against one another within the systematic logic of the simulacrum. This is important. In order for the simulacrum to maintain itself, it’s necessary that it manifest as a system of multiplicity and complexity. Disagreement, conflict and critique must be able to take place within the system without compromising its fundamental assertion of its own reality.

Indeed, the hyperreal discourse has to be more complicated than the relatively simple reality that it replaces because it must sustain itself solely through a system of significations – since the signs no longer point to anything in reality, it’s necessary to produce a continual string of significations and counter-significations to conceal the fundamental lack of real referents within the system. The discussion must reduce towards absurdity, because its bases are absolutely undiscoverable.

Does this mean that we should abolish gender entirely? No. Every demands that I’ve ever seen for the abolition of gender comes either out of radical feminist gender theory (a system in which gender is constructed as the overarching bogey-man of “patriarchy”), or out of a hard sexual essentialist system that seeks to essentialize traditional gender roles. Clearly neither of these approaches is actually able to break out of the system that is being critiqued.

A simulacrum cannot be simply dismantled by an abrupt return to reality, because we are incapable of accessing reality itself. Our engagement with the real demands representation (for the sceptical Catholic reader, Aquinas’ formulation of this principle involves a discussion of the relationship between material things, the senses, the phantasms and the intellect. “The Philosopher says (De Anima iii, 4) that “things are intelligible in proportion as they are separate from matter.” Therefore material things must needs be understood according as they are abstracted from matter and from material images, namely, phantasms.” (Summa, 1st part, Q 85, A 1) Phantasms, in Aquinas, are basically mental representations derived from sense-data.)

Rather, the problem of gender can only be adequately addressed by returning to an acknowledgement that the practices associated with gender are in fact cultural practices, that they are a mode of representation and not the thing in itself. This involves a willingness to approach sex, maleness and femaleness, as a mystery, as something which can be preserved in its reality only if we accept that that reality must always ultimately transcend our representations, expectations, roles and ideals.

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