“independent of sex” while continuing “to think of gender in terms of sex: to see it as a social dichotomy determined by a natural dichotomy” (3; emphasis added). I want to underscore the second of these unrealized possibilities, the conceptualization of gender as the “principle of partition.” This phrase, tucked away so as virtually to pass unnoticed in the unfolding of the list, is one of the least heralded but most insightful points in Delphy’s work. U.S. feminists, theorists and empirical researchers alike, were taking gender literally as a fact or a standpoint by their preoccupation with women’s different “roles,” psychological development, and the moral “voice” or political “standpoint” this made possible. In this context, Delphy proposes something quite different. As a principle of partition, gender is active. It does not rest on, express, or in any other way presuppose difference; it “partitions” and, so, creates difference in the singular where there would otherwise be differences. Delphy (1991, 4) illustrates with a vegetable analogy: …differentiations can be, and are, multiple. Alongside cabbages and carrots, which are not “opposites” of each other, there are courgettes, melons, and potatoes. Moreover, distinctions are not necessarily hierarchical: vegetables are not placed on a scale of value. Differentiation, as a phenomenon, is multiple and plural; “difference” is already organized normatively, in relation to power, as dichotomous and more or less explicitly hierarchal. The analogy both enables and constrains her from thinking through her provocative re-conceptualization of gender as the “principle of partition.” At this point, Delphy is still primarily concerned with relations of hierarchy not with grouping per se.
predictor for other socially valued aptitudes, such as having a good sense of direction or being good at math (Favreau 1997). When we make this assumption, we are already endowing sex with the power to group. The concept “partitioning” that Delphy introduced in her 1991 essay gestures toward something like what I’m getting at here, the discursive production of not just the pre-social but also of difference as systematic or group-differentiating. Delphy does not return to that phrase in the preface but she does elaborate the insight to which I think it gestures. By way of explaining just what ought to have struck her audiences as new, she explains that “most people (including Professors at the College de France) study only relations between groups.” Thus, they “postulate without saying that the question of their constitution has been settled”: it is “natural” (29). She presents this as running contrary to the “nodal point” of her corpus: it is in the same moment and by the same moment that groups are created and created as dominant or dominated. The question of “difference” or of differences can no longer be asked: or more precisely it is to be asked in an entirely different way. One in which differences can no longer have any causal role whatsoever in hierarchy because they do not pre-exist it (29; emphasis added). Delphy has consistently maintained that differences have no “causal role” in hierarchy. But whereas she was once willing to concede that gender rendered anatomical sex difference a for hierarchy, here she makes the more radical claim that the moment we take it up as group difference sex is already gender. Gender not only by imputing “naturalness to social groups” and, thereby, naturalizing social hierarchies (Guillaumin 138). It also imbues particular differences (such as race, gender, ethnicity)
The more serious problem with Delphy’s class analysis is that she makes no mention of the need to hail women into their “class.” It is as if specifying the structures and dynamics of patriarchy is enough to constitute a unified movement of women. More generously, we could read the “women as class” argument not just literally (as a statement about how patriarchy actually positions ‘women’) but as itself a hail. This would pose its own problem, however, as the language of “class” has not worked especially well to hail women into a political movement. In fact, Delphy’s least favorite—the language of “difference”—has been more efficacious in that regard. Put differently, the power of Delphy’s work is her prizing apart the social from the natural. She falls short in theorizing the relationship between the social and the political. Whereas she fully recognizes the autonomy of society from nature, she does not come to grips with the autonomy of politics from the social. Patriarchy is a focus of her analysis because she seems to expect patriarchal oppression to give rise to democratic politics. In this context, “class” has become a short cut: it is not a natural grouping but it should give rise readily (if not entirely spontaneously) to a political grouping.