Gender by Ivan Illich

Author:Ivan Illich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Women, Sexual division of labor, Sexism, Sex role, Femmes, Discrimination à l'égard des femmes, Rôle selon le sexe, Sekserol, Vrouwendiscriminatie
Publisher: New York : Pantheon Books
Published: 1982-04-11T19:00:00+00:00

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Gender Domains and Vernacular Milieu

guishes these from roles, status, and rank. She examines, also from a woman's perspective, the "architecture" of farms and the farmers' schedules; she collects proverbs and photographs, interprets old paintings and ethnologists' reports in order to reconstruct from surviving patterns what things must have been like in the middle of the nineteenth century. What she finds is a relationship between men and women much less governed by family and kinship than by the demands of the household based on the matched interdependence of men's and women's hands. She describes how men and women did their daily work as members of their own gender rather than as individual constituents of a couple who are married to form a pair. The coupled pair carried little weight in the nineteenth-century French peasant household. Both the myth of rough male dominance and the idyll of a romantic peasant couple miss the mark completely. The body of gender still survived.*^

According to Segalen, it is the household that mediates between the individual and the village community, not the twosome,

80 THE SEXED BODY

The body as a clinical entity is something other than the living flesh of men and of women that constitutes a social and vernacular reality. Some languages, like German and French, have distinct terms for the two: Korper and Leib, le corps and la chair. Since 1972, the new Ethnologic Frangaise has published a series of essays that attempt a history of the vernacular body as a social reality: e.g., J.P. Desaive, "Le nu hurluberlu" 6, nos. 3 and 4 (1976): 219-26; Frangoise Piponnier and Richard Bucaille, "La bete ou la belle? Remarques sur I'apparence corporelle de la paysannerie me-dievale" 6, nos. 3-4 (1976): 227-32; Frangoise Loux and Philippe Richard, "Alimentation et maladie dans les proverbes frangais: un exemple d'analyse de contenu" 2, nos. 3-4 (1972): 267-86. Also see F. Loux, Le jeune enfant et son corps dans la medicine traditionelle (Paris: Flam-marion, 1978). For further access to the literature: John Blacking, The Anthropology of the Body, monograph 15 (London: Association of Social Anthropology, 1977; New York: Academic Press, 1978); Michel Fou-cault, ^Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception (New York: Pantheon, 1973); and, by the same author, A History of Sexuality 1, An Introduction (New York: Random House, pbk., 1978) has pioneered the historical research on the process by which the body of the new subject of the welfare state has been constituted through the professional discourse about his or her body. The judicial attempt to observe and control men's sexual functioning precedes by more than a century clinical control over women's genital organs. Pierre Darmon, Le tribunal de I'impuissance:

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GENDER

the parents, the couple. If the household breaks down and its members do not act in accordance with the demands of their respective genders, then the village community will discipline the offending individual directly. For example, in northern France the kitchen garden ought to be hoed in April; and this is woman's work. If by

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