This is a groundbreaking work. Jemima Repo has written a genealogy of gender that upends common approaches to gender in feminism. Her main argument is that gender is an apparatus of power that is wielded to regulate life and govern bodies and populations. The book starts with a critique of Judith Butler and ends with a positive appraisal of radical feminist Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. Throughout, Repo’s arguments are scholarly and provocative, and they left this reader unable to think about gender in the way I had before reading the book.
The most dense and theoretical part of The Biopolitics of Gender is the introduction, which situates the book in a wide-ranging field of literature. Repo’s engagement with and challenge to Butlerian thought is perhaps the most theoretically significant. She argues that Butler dehistoricizes gender and deploys Foucaultian thought without attention to biopower. Repo’s aim is to restore biopower to understandings of sex and gender through a genealogy of gender akin to Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality.
In Chapter 1, the author begins by looking to the site in which gender was first “deployed into the sexual order” (p. 24): postwar psychological research on hermaphroditism. John Money, an American medical psychology and pediatrics professor, introduced the concept of gender in his 1950s studies of intersexed children in order to argue that one aspect of an individual’s sex was his or her learned gender. Understanding gender in this way allowed for the management of life by manipulating the behaviors of children and parents to uphold the sexual order. The importance of this concept is that gender “expand[ed] and multipl[ied] the access points of power to the body, rendering it more elastic and malleable and hence, more governable” (p. 24).
The book’s genealogy moves from Money to psychoanalyst and physician Robert Stoller in Chapter 2. Stoller headed the Gender Identity Research Clinic in Los Angeles, and his research on transsexuality led to findings that are reflected in commonplace understandings of gender today. Stoller both split sex from gender (whereas Money saw gender as an aspect of sex) and coined the term “gender identity.” Stoller’s contribution was decisive as “[t]he biology/culture split and psychoanalysis were crucial tools that extended the reach of the biopolitical apparatus of gender” (p. 51). Now both culture and individual psyches could be targeted in order to regulate sexual behavior.
At the end of Chapter 2, the issue of race directly enters Repo’s argument. She notes that Stoller’s patients were mostly white and middle class, and his attention was on controlling the postwar white nuclear family. Repo concludes, interestingly, that this genealogy reveals that gender “was squarely an apparatus to tame, normalize, and regulate White, middle-class children and parents” (p. 74).
This insight about the racial and class origins of gender is important for the author’s analysis in Chapter 3 in which she considers early, mostly Anglo-American, feminist deployments of gender. As she establishes, “feminist gender theory was modeled on a certain raced and classed biopolitics of sex in postwar America” (p. 76). Repo also examines the diverse ways in which these thinkers tied Money’s and Stoller’s ideas about gender to power and used them to serve feminist purposes. Feminists used the concept of gender to counter biological determinism and show how women’s subordination was connected to socialization.
In Chapter 4, Repo examines demographics research from the late 1960s through the 1980s to show how gender became crucial to attempts to control populations. She argues that “the entry of gender into demography would transform population control into an explicitly liberal project about equality between the sexes and women’s rights” (p. 106). Demographers argued that population rates could be controlled through altering gender roles. Repo points, for example, to American demographer Kingsley Davis, who recommended such policies as shortening paid maternity leave, raising taxes on families with children, and legalizing abortion in order to limit reproduction. Davis saw traditional gender roles and divisions of labor as things to be manipulated in order to manage fertility and promote economic development.
One thing that Repo does not spend much time considering in Chapter 4 is how gender was being deployed in different demographic contexts. She mentions in passing that “[t]here was a widening gulf in the way in which demographers examined Western ‘developed’ countries and non-Western ‘undeveloped’ societies’” (p. 120), and that this gulf had implications for the extent to which they thought that individuals could be seen as rational reproductive agents. This seems like a rather significant aspect of demographers’ deployment of gender and its biopolitical implications, but Repo does not fully explore it.
Had Repo examined this aspect of demographic research, it would have nicely set up her analysis in Chapter 5. In this chapter, she traces contemporary gender equality policy in the European Union to the demographic concern with altering gender roles in order to manage the population. She demonstrates that EU policymakers saw an opportunity to manage women’s labor and, thus, the need for immigration and immigrant labor through gender equality policies, such as parental leave, child care, and tax benefits for parents. Importantly, the European Commission noted such things as “Measures to facilitate work-life balance can have a positive impact on fertility” (quoted on p. 145), and “rigid gender roles can hamper individual choices and restrict the potential of both men and women” (quoted on p. 146). Such references show that policymakers, in neoliberal fashion, viewed individuals as rational self-managers. In this context, then, gender equality policy became a mode of neoliberal governmentality.
After Repo had spent the majority of the book examining American texts, her turn to Europe in this penultimate chapter is somewhat curious. While it is certainly a fascinating and important case study, it leaves the reader wondering how American policymakers have employed gender biopolitically. This would be an especially interesting question given the poor record of the United States on issues like maternity leave. This observation relates to a general question that the book must leave open: How would this genealogy differ if different sources had been used? Or another example: How would a genealogy that placed gender’s entanglement with issues such as transnational population control and immigration at the center have differed? These questions reveal less about the shortcomings of this book and more about its importance. As Repo rightly makes clear, a genealogy necessarily provides a selective and fragmentary account. One of the great contributions of The Biopolitics of Gender is that it has laid the theoretical groundwork for other genealogies of gender.
Another of the book’s significant contributions comes in the final chapter when Repo examines the possibility of having a feminist theory without gender. This is where she turns to the SCUM Manifesto and argues approvingly that it is an example of feminist theory that does not make recourse to gender. Once we understand gender as an apparatus of power, it becomes imperative that feminists question its emancipatory potential. Repo argues that feminists would do well to suspend their reliance on gender, which has undermined the more radical promise of feminism because “feminist gender theory must be understood as always already entangled in the liberal governmentalities that it seeks to contest” (p. 161). By the end of her book, it is difficult not to agree with this conclusion.
