After feminist scholars called attention to this particular doctrinal problem, there
was a move away from a “reasonable man” and toward a “reasonable person” standard.
However, a mere lexical substitution may not do the trick if the unmarked category “per-
son” still tends (as unmarked categories often do) to indicate the assumptions associated
with the hegemonic stereotype of a typical “person,” that is, a male. On marked and un-
marked categories, see Silverstein, “Language and the Culture of Gender”; Mertz, “Beyond
Symbolic Anthropology.” On the issue of how these unconscious assumptions infiltrate
the notion of the reasonable man or person, see, e.g., De Cosse, “Simply Unbelievable:
Reasonable Women”; Nourse, “Passion’s Progress.”
Some anthropologists and others may doubtless insist that what I describe as
“gender” here should properly be denominated “sex.” I have chosen to follow the domi-
nant convention used in the legal literature, from formal doctrines regarding gender dis-
crimination through the scholarly literature on gender in law and law schools, partially
with an eye to rendering the text more accessible. On issues of essentialism, see, e.g.,
Spelman, Inessential Woman; Harris, “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory”;
Obiora, “Neither Here nor There.” For a summary of this problem as it affects debates
over international human rights, see Higgins, “Anti-Essentialism, Relativism, and Human
Rights.”
As Fineman explains, her conception of a gendered life
begins with the observation that women’s existences are constituted by a variety of
experiences—material, psychological, physical, social, and cultural—some of which
may be described as biologically based while others seem more rooted in culture and
custom.... My difference argument... is grounded in empirical realizations, in
gendered experiences, and therefore, in women’s lives as constructed in society and
culture. (Fineman, The Neutered Mother, 48)
Fineman underscores the difficulties that inhere in struggles to encompass some
aspects of gendered experience under equality models: “What are we feminists to do with
motherhood, both as a practice and an ideological structure?... There is no autonomy to
be found in motherhood. Motherhood is mired in dependency—the dependency of the
child, in the first instance, and the dependency of that person assigned responsibility for
caretaking, in the second instance.” Fineman, The Autonomy Myth, 169. Here, as Fineman
so sharply delineates for us, the supposedly clear lines between biological and social roles
blur, posing a difficult theoretical dilemma. The combination of women’s biological role
in human reproduction and of standard sociocultural allocations of caretaking roles in
many societies does create a pattern in which those who are biologically women wind up
differentially responsible at the social level for caretaking. Men, of course, can wind up
being allocated caregiving responsibility as well, hence Fineman’s provocative metaphorical
move to denominate men who are primary caretakers “mothers,” extending to them the
same protections and supports as would be extended to female mothers. Fineman, The
Neutered Mother, 234–235. Her insistence on looking at social context to provide mean-
ing for arguments over sameness and difference is echoed in my work by a focus on the
complex and varied strands of linguistic patterning that overlap but also diverge, depend-
ing on context. I take seriously Calhoun’s injunction that it is in the tension between
sameness and difference that we find one of the core issues facing this generation of social
theorists. Calhoun, Critical Social Theory. Feminist theorists like Fineman, along with criti-
cal race theorists, have taken us a long way in rethinking this conceptual puzzle.
In this conception of a double edge, I draw on Moishe Postone’s interpretation
of Marx. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination. This issue is discussed in more detail
at the end of Chapter 6. There I discuss a parallel between the “double character” that
