In the course of this week’s readings, I found Carole Pateman’s critique of the social contract to be not only an enlightening exposition of contract theory’s neglect of the sexual contract, but also applicable to both Butler and Arondekar. Butler, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, argues that the socially constructed notions of gender and sex mask the true identity of the individual. This assertion is logically similar to Pateman’s understanding of the sexual contract as “displaced onto the marriage contract.” (Pateman, 110) Similarly, Arondekar’s examination in Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive seems to speak to a similar notion of historical phenomena, hidden within the confines of the colonial archive, or the imposed British “civil society.” It seems as if Arondekar, in identifying “homosexuality as the structural secret of the archive,” and calling for a reinterpretation of the use of the archive, is identifying an element of the established social structures of contract imposed by the British, and thus manifested in the archives of colonial India. (Arondekar, 16) Clearly, the context of each of this week’s readings involves an established, capitalist civil society, perpetuated through contract, as established by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
The presence of civil society, and thus patriarchal contract, in Gender Trouble and Without a Trace returns us to Pateman’s critique of the social contract and its neglect of the sexual contract. At the heart of her argument, is the classic contract theorists notion of the individual in civil society as a masculine individual. As such, civil society and the social contract, while generally interpreted as the victor over old world paternal rule ushering in freedom and equal exchange, in reality merely upholds and indeed perpetuates modern patriarchal society. Women, not being free-born individuals, can thus not enter into contract and therefore are forced to remain obedient to their husbands in exchange for protection. As such, masculine protection becomes the “wage” provided for the woman in return for the husband’s dominion over her domestic and sexual labor power. For Pateman, the pervasiveness of patriarchy, both in the private, domestic and the public, political sphere results ultimately in the continuation of the age-old male control of the female’s body, manifested both in the home and in its most glaring public example: the importance of the industry of prostitution in modern capitalist societies.
All three of this week’s authors discuss socially constructed modes of normative behavior. As Pateman implies in her concluding chapter, the story of the social contract can be applied to a variety of socially constructed confines. (Pateman, 221) In this manner, the sexual contract serves as a model for a social critique based upon the foundations of contract theory. A model which can be applied to the colonial archive as well as the concepts of gender and sex.
Leave a comment