Strong and Weak Constructivism: Gender and Sexuality

Gender theory and contemporary psychoanalysis enjoy a kind of unholy alliance.   While here, I want to make the argument that they share ontological assumptions, I am especially interested in showing how what is socially constructed may also be seen, felt, and experienced as essential difference.  I will argue that these debates might be enriched by altogether abandoning the distinctions and oppositions between constructivism and essentialism and consider instead differing commitments to strong and weak constructivism (Longhofer & Floersch, 2012; Sayer, 1997).  In discussing these commitments, I will refer specifically to the social theorist and philosopher of social science, Margaret Archer, and her thinking about downward, upward, and central conflation (2010).  These ideas are at the heart of nearly all understandings of contemporary psychoanalysis, gender theory, and personhood (Smith, 2010): some settle, though not often consciously or explicitly, into the essentialist or the constructivist camps.  Others (e.g., Reis, 2003) straddle the fence (e.g., McCall, 2005) arguing for a kind of uneasy dialectic or intersection, or chaos (Harris, 2005; McCall, 2005).  The latter inevitably confront the problem of central conflation (Archer 2010): the confusion of action with conditions for action; or where actions cannot be separated from the conditions for action or otherwise distinguished from one another, or causal accounts cannot be separated and assigned significance. Almost always this leads to ontological, epistemological, and potentially troubling forms of value relativism and often to what Roy Bhaskar (1997) calls the “epistemic fallacy”: the reduction of what we know to how we know it.   

In much of contemporary psychoanalysis subjectivity may be seen as the result of what Archer calls “downward conflation”: where actions are reduced to conditions for action.  In this case, the self is reduced to the social or desire to the intersubjective: the person is a simple outcome or assortment of potential interactions.  Lacan and his followers have offered a powerful articulation of this position.  Here, for example, one finds myriad versions of relational dialectics of desire; gender and object choice are formed (e.g., Corbett, 2009) and developed, sometimes strongly constructed, and sometimes weakly constructed. Adrienne Harris (2005) calls the weaker version “soft assembly.”  Some contemporary psychoanalysts have referred to this as dialectical constructivism (Reis, 2003).  And more recently there has been a call for a return to a weak, essentialist, materialism (Coole & Frost, 2010; O’Mahoney, 2012).   Here, what is most often left unstated or untheorized is the necessity for developmental processes and their essential qualities.   

Weak and strong constructivism have profound political implications: what has been constructed can be just as easily deconstructed or the conditions for action can simply be altered to produce new action (e.g., right wing spins on conversion/reparative therapy or where reassignment surgeries are encouraged and legal in some theocratic states to allow for a “proper” alignment of the body with the normative constructions of desire).  These political alignments are also differentially shared and leveraged within and among identity claiming communities (Bob, 2012).  Here, the right and left often perfectly align and religious conservatives find a convenient philosophical place to situate their thinking, political practice, and rhetoric’s of resistance: social constructivism becomes radical empiricism, that is, because it is assumed that we can see and directly experience the malleability of  gender or sexual desire, it can therefore be socially constructed for particular strategic purposes.   

And these debates, all of them, refer to more than mere social positionings or identity claims.  They are also descriptions of personhood, sense of self, embodied experience.  With strong social construction, the self is a bit like a computational system: bits and pieces are added or subtracted in the flow of social time and space, leaving no enduring qualities (i.e., downward conflation, the psychic is reduced to the social).

What neither contemporary psychoanalysis nor gender theory successfully accomplish, however, is a sufficient description and theorization of how some qualities of desire, object choice, and sexual experience are socially constructed (i.e., have developmental sequela) but are finally felt, experienced, and enacted in essential ways (weak constructionism) and others are not;  this, no doubt, is one of the many ways that shame is inscribed in the psyche and intersubjective worlds of those who feel sexual desire not just as a part of the self and experience but as saturating the entire self (Longhofer, 2013).   And others feel little shame or disgust about the body and desire, based upon early development and  intersubjective dynamics and forms of recognition (Benjamin, 2010, 2013; Honneth, 2012). 

Clearly not everything that is socially constructed is experienced as essential or finally felt as indubitable, while other things are.  Or as Andrew Sayer (1997) argues, not everything that is socially constructed matters in the same ways.  Race and racism, gender and gender inequalities, nation and nationalism, all matter in very different ways for different people.  And when they intersect, they matter in ways for some people very differently than for others.  And it is no doubt the case that some social constructions, even of the same realities, are partial and even contradictory. This is especially true for sexual desire, object choice, and practice, which accounts for the diversity of experience.  Some, for example, may have desire for, fantasize and seek anal pleasures to the exclusion of all other pleasures (Sedgwick, 1990).  Some desires, moreover, when weakly constructed, may be easily reformulated or reimagined and others, when strongly constructed, not.  Gender inequalities for white women or white gay men are experienced very differently and in most cases more easily reimagined.  Race and racism, for example, do not simply give way to new imaginings or social repositioning, narrative reconstructions, or new identity claims.   Race may be strongly internalized by some and not by others (Young-Bruehl, 1998) and felt and experienced as essential difference.  Likewise, sexual desires and object choices are only contingently subject to change. Some feel their desires as essential, innate, biological, genetically determined (i.e., born that way) and others feel desire and seek objects in fluid and easily constructed ways without feeling essential difference (Sedgwick, 1990).   No doubt for some our deepest longings and desires, are constructed (strongly) so early in life (i.e., through attachment relations, object relations) that they escape language, feel inexorable, and emerge as essential qualities of the self.   Lacan and others have described these desires as beyond our comprehension in language.   

Some things that are socially constructed matter little to the self or to others.  Other things matter a great deal; and identities, no doubt, are socially constructed and continuously undergo various agential reformulations in response to changing historical conditions and opportunities.  And identities (straight, gay, queer, trans), once constructed, do make a difference in how some live and experience their desires and object choices and may be felt as essential difference.

Moreover, in the everyday life of gender/sexuality activism and in the experience of living, there are many and confused epistemological and ontological twists and turns (sometimes strongly essentialist, sometimes strongly constructivist) which often fail to align comfortably with the actual experience of those claiming queer identities (Vogel, 2011).   And in identity social movements, weak and strong constructivism have been used instrumentally to accomplish specific strategic action and political outcomes (Jasper, 2010; Lichterman, 1999).  I would argue that it is with our sense of self that we suffer, socially and psychologically, and not with our identity claims and while our identity claims may produce forms of exclusion, they do not in and of themselves produce human suffering.  They contain and require, as well, important value claims: not mere descriptions of what is (descriptions of experience) but also what ought to be (i.e., normative claims about proper bodies and desire). 

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