On androgynous caring: A response to Sayers

Abstract

Sayers raises two significant issues in her paper. First, she emphasizes the importance of using psychoanalytic theory to examine the fate of behaviors and impulses within a person that are socially associated with the opposite sex. Second, she begins to take issue with the notion of women as relational and caring by starting to explore whether there might not be contrary impulses expressed when women care for others. My purpose here is to question Sayers’ use of Freud as justification for what is essentially a notion of androgynous wholeness and to think about motherhood one of women’s caring relationships in terms of the androgyny she prescribes. Although Sayers is correct to advocate the use of psychoanalytic theory to study gender development, she herself is remarkably unFreudian. Instead of sustained attention to the impact of early experience, to sexuality or the presence of male and female bodies, and to the fact that repressed material is repressed because it is in some sense deeply problematic, Sayers seems to be suggesting that boys and girls naturally have characteristics of both sexes. The presence of these characteristics is never explained. What is worthy of explanation is the fate of those characteristics that are socially unacceptable because of one’s gender but which continue to be expressed in “neurotic” form. Sayers’ own interests seem to revolve around the potential for peaceable, androgynous wholeness, particularly as might be achieved by women able to express their individualistic, masculine intentions as well as their feminine, caring predispositions. This move to androgyny is simplistic. First, Sayers ignores the extent to which women’s need for autonomy and men’s for connection might in complicated and unfortunate fashion perpetuate existing gender arrangements. This is Flax’s (1978) point when she speaks of women depending upon their daughters to provide the support for autonomy strivings which they themselves did not get as children. In the process, their daughters remain similarly needy. This is also Benjamin’s (1980) point in suggesting that we examine relationships between already polarized males and females. Although Benjamin sees both sexes looking for the side lost to them, she elaborates upon the way men, often violently, search for limits in women while women, searching for experiences of mastery, often vicariously identify with the men that master them. Second, although Sayers’ question could lead to an examination of the notion of the person as a unified subject, she herself subscribes to a view of post-