Note: From Gender as Love (Baker 2023). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
I think that [Sarah] Coakley is basically correct in her claim that gender is defined by that which makes us who we are, our identities, something that cannot be separated from our basic orientation to God, the one in whom our identities are made whole. But “desire” is not the right word for what shapes identity, or at least it must be specified quite heavily. Rather, gender is love, for love makes us who we are.
Recall from the previous chapter that we are created as lovers by nature, for our weight is our love (a property with which we were created even before any creaturely relations into which we enter). We were created with the ability to love and with a proper object of ultimate love: God. Only when we are properly ordered to the love of God, brought about by the Holy Spirit, are we genuinely happy. Or, in [Harry] Frankfurt’s terms, only when we love God with undivided wills can we be wholehearted. But this does not preclude the love of earthly goods, for we can love God in these goods, recognizing them as gifts from the Divine Gift Giver.
All of our objects of love are stamped into our memories and give coherence to a narrative that details our true selves, making us who we are. Loving rightly sanctifies us; loving wrongly makes us into dominators of the beloved. Communities and social identities are forged by those who share common objects of love, for they share similar identities. We love when our second- and first-order desires align toward an object that implants in our memories, shapes our stories and forms our social identities. When the Holy Spirit indwells us, our second-order desires are radically recalibrated toward God, and the slow and sanctifying process of having our first-order desires come into alignment begins. Altering Coakley’s theology of desire to an Augustinian theology of love, as I plan to do, is no slight modification, in the end. It carries with it implications for the order she invokes and for the kinds of transformation undergone by gender.
So then, what is the model of gender that I am presenting? Gender is ultimately about the organization of goods by which the sexed body is socially manifested, in which the lover identifies with the beloved, shaping who she is. A helpful way to think about this is with recourse to Eleonore Stump’s notion of “the offices of love.” To love something is inherently a relation, as Augustine maintained, something that binds lover and beloved together. But something must be said about how relationships of love differ from one another. We can do so with recourse to the offices of love, which are “differing kinds of relationship of love.” “The nature of an office,” says Stump, “circumscribes the sort of union that is appropriate to the love of that office, and so it also delimits the sort of love appropriate within that office.” [Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness, p. 98]
Love relationships obtain between, for example, a mother and son, a student and her school and a hungry person and his food. Stump refers to these as offices of love. Such offices specify just what kinds of acts of love are appropriate to obtain within the relationship as well as what kinds of goods are needed for that office to obtain. To love food like one loves a child, for example, is categorically mistaken. All of us occupy many different offices of love in our lives, all at once, even in a single day. On my model, one such office of love, in fact one very sizable office that takes into account many different objects of love, is our gender.
Gender as Love: What Do We Love, and How Do We Love It?
There are many things we love because we are sexed beings. The relation of love in question is the one that obtains between us as sexed individuals (or, at least, as perceived sexed individuals) and the objects of our love. Just as I love some goods in virtue of being a professor, a fan of Stephen King novels and a Brazilian, I love some goods in virtue of possessing a sexed body.
As we love these things, moreover, we acquire a social role by means of new norms that are attached to it. For instance, there are primary goods we love as sexed individuals. These include other people – in marriage, reproduction or sexual attraction – but also things like clothing, the roles we play in jobs or in the household, the food we choose to consume or the music to which we listen.
Gender cannot be reduced to sexual love, and it must involve the rich array of cultural goods we encounter in ordinary experience. There are also secondary goods we love in order to facilitate the primary goods we love as sexed beings. Someone might love an activity they had previously disliked, for example, to facilitate the love they have for a particular partner, maybe to impress them.
When we take into account the complex web of goods that are loved in order to facilitate primary goods, we see just how large this office of love can be. A variety of secondary objects of love have ties to the primary relation of love. Imagine a brand-new father who feels like everything about his life connects back to the primary love relationship he has with his baby, whether it is the activities with which he is involved day to day, or those from which he feels he must refrain or the way he spends his money. The father, in virtue of his sexed body, loves a particular primary good – namely, his child – and loves many secondary goods that are informed by the primary good. A separate question, applicable more broadly, has to do with whether the things we love in virtue of our sexed bodies are appropriately loved, for it remains true that very many things are loved in virtue of sexed bodies.
The basic point is this: our gender is an office of love when we love various things in virtue of our sexed bodies.
Are there inherently gendered goods that serve as appropriate objects of love for sexed human beings, or can any good be loved in this office? It seems to me that, most of the time, it is the latter, though I do not wish to close the door on the existence of intrinsically gendered goods (goods whose definitions necessarily include gender). There are particular jobs that have historically been intrinsically gendered, like the occupation of a wet nurse. It is part of the definition of a wet nurse to include some kind of sex or gender index. But, by and large, goods are gendered when we give to them a social meaning by loving them as sexed beings. There is nothing, for instance, intrinsically gendered about wearing dresses, but doing so is gendered insofar as it has been an object of love with which a particular sex identifies. This, I should say, is where social constructionist views are exactly right – many, if not most, of the goods we love in virtue of our sex are not intrinsically gendered but acquire a social meaning that is gendered.
So, we love a variety of primary and secondary goods as sexed beings, creating offices of love, which are our genders. Through our love of these goods as sexed beings, our sexes acquire a social meaning.
Gender as Love in Context: Carrying Out the Office
But what is this social meaning? Recall Charlotte Witt’s distinction between feeding and dining. Feeding is a biological function, one that requires only biological features like mouths, digestive systems and the like. Dining, by contrast, is what happens when feeding acquires new social roles and norms to which it is responsive and under which it is evaluable. To feed, all one needs are biological organs; dining is feeding when it takes place in a particular context, with additional norms and processes and for a different purpose. Dining occurs in appropriate rooms (e.g., a dining room), is governed by norms of propriety (e.g., politeness) and accomplishes a different purpose (e.g., gathering friends for a time of fellowship). It would be incorrect to say that dining is entirely different from feeding. Rather, feeding is “elaborated” into dining; it is what results when feeding is socially manifested.
So it is with gender as an office of love. Sexed bodies are objective entities, something we possess apart from any creaturely social relations, but they acquire social meaning by relating to social goods that provide for them new norms, contexts and purposes. When a male loves a social good like a particular style of dress, he acquires a new social role as a man and is evaluable under such a role by virtue of the way he appropriates that good to himself by that love.
It would be misguided to say that here the gender is constructed, for it cannot occur apart from the sex from which it is elaborated, nor is the process by which it occurs strictly social. The love that guides us to appropriate goods according to our sexed bodies is a part of our human nature in a way that particular social goods are not, and a full explanation of the process by which gender arises could not occur merely by recourse to social explanations. In chapter 2 I distinguished between subjective social construction (where the process by which a social entity comes into being is social) and objective social construction (where the entity itself is social). On neither level is gender merely social. This is a view of gender in which social considerations are key, but just because something has a social meaning does not mean that it is socially constructed. On my view, an account of gender restricted only to social explanations would be incomplete. Claims about nonsocial human features, like the capacity to love and the sexed body, must be included, both in the process and in the result.
All the same, gender is not just a matter of occupying roles and being evaluable according to norms, without knowing where or when these things exist or how they are identity forming. Such a construal would appear somewhat lifeless. As the intransigence and vehemence of cultural debate indicates, gender is about who we are. It is about our identities, those aspects of who we are about which we care most deeply.
This is why it is important to talk about it in terms of our loves. As Augustine and Frankfurt tell us, if we want to know someone’s identity, we must inquire about what they love. If we want to inquire about someone’s gender identity, therefore, we must see what gendered goods they love and how loving those goods gives coherence to their gendered selves. These goods, loved qua sexed body, are brought into the individual’s very self and implanted in their memory, forming the individual’s personal narratives. As we care about these goods they are incorporated into the stories we tell about ourselves that provide our lives with their thematic coherence.
The variety of objects of gendered loves interweave to guide our action in the world and persist in our lives to mold our stories. We find ourselves desiring certain goods in virtue of our sexed bodies, and we affirm those desires within ourselves, incorporating them and allowing them to persist as who we are. Interestingly, on this view, we might think of gender dysphoria as a particular kind of division within the system of first- and second-order gendered desires a person finds themselves having. Perhaps a person with gender dysphoria might desire a particular kind of gendered good but wish they could have other desires for different gendered goods. Such a conflict disintegrates the self, highlighting just why dysphoria is so difficult for individuals.
Gender as Love in Our Context: What Are Our Veils?
I must reiterate that this is not a view attempting to specify gender apart from contextual location, even if contexts do not confine gender. We do not have to try to be gendered, nor do we have to wonder which are those social goods that make up our genders. We walk out of our doors in the morning and encounter them directly, often with force. The goods are right there to be loved, and this is why I am not taking any time to specify which gendered goods constitute masculinity and femininity. Such a task would be impossible, for those goods will differ contextually.
Rather than imagining the theological task as one in which we draw up gender from the ground up, theologies of gender instead have a two-fold task: first, they must be descriptively accountable, making sense of the gendered lives we already live. What are the gendered goods encountered by the individuals in these contexts?
For Paul and the church in Corinth, they were veils. What are they for us?
What has just been elaborated, I posit, accomplishes the descriptive task. Second, they must be normatively accountable, telling us not just what gender is but what it ought to be, or how to engage these goods rightly, as we encounter them simply by living our lives. It was the case that head veils were a gendered good, but the manner in which they were appropriated into the lives of Corinthian Christians needed reordering. The normative task is not completed by providing definitions of gender that are not descriptive. Rather, the normative task must take into account the descriptions already provided and work within those to love rightly.
So, turning to the normative task, we must ask, As we are encountered by these goods, how should we love them?
Content taken from Gender as Love by Fellipe do Vale, ©2023. Used by permission of Baker Academic.
