In teaching about women's art, I find that as soon as students detect any biological essentialism, they ricochet over to poststructuralist ideas that deny biology altogether. It's tricky.
So, I wrote a THREAD. I have almost no followers so it may go ignored but never mind!

The thing is, the students are right to recoil from biological essentialism and determinism - i.e. the idea that the reality of women's bodies determines certain fates and reinforces specific cultural and psychological norms. So how to talk about the body and avoid this??

Today I've been reading Toril Moi's essay 'What is a Woman' (1999), and it offers a good answer to this problem. I've been making notes as I go in the form of this thread.
My notes mix her words with mine, so with unreserved apologies to Toril Moi, here we go:

Since the 1960s, English theory has understood "sex" to mean material human bodies and "gender" to mean social norms (crudely: what's between the legs vs what's in the head).
Poststructuralists such as Judith Butler are supposedly unhappy w these binaries.
Fine! So should we be!

Moi says that poststructuralist theorists of sex and gender (like Judith Butler) are rightly against turning sex into an ahistorical entity divorced from historical and social meanings. To this end, their critique of the sex/gender distinction has two main aims:

1) to avoid biological determinism;
2) to develop a fully historical and non-essentialist understanding of sex & the body.
These aims are good feminist aims!
But there's a problem w the poststructuralist critique. Not a problem with its aims, but with its starting assumptions..

Their assumption is that anyone who says 'sex' must be thinking of it as a pre-verbal, ahistorical essence. In particular, they often imply that anyone who thinks of biology as producing valuable and reliable insights must be an essentialist too.

Second, poststructuralists seem to
think of anything "natural" as fixed & unchanging. So they assume that sex, unlike gender, lies outside history/discourse/politics.

What's more, poststructuralists precisely DO tend to believe in biological determinism. They believe that IF we accept the existence of biological fact, then those facts WILL inevitably become the ground of social norms.

And in their flight from this unpalatable idea,

they run to the other extreme, insisting that biological facts must be erased.

So, Butler seems to think unless she can show that sex is not a material fact, she will be be stuck with biological essentialism.

In short: "poststructuralist theorists of sex and gender are
held prisoners by theoretical mirages of their own making" (my fave quote, it's p46).

That is to say, they try to avoid determinism by treating sex as "as culturally constructed as gender" (Butler).

But this is absurd, says Moi. There's nothing to say that the concept of sex MUST be ahistorical, essentialist, determining.

Of course the material structure of our bodies impacts our way of being in the world, says Moi. But - and here's the simple answer

- bodily structures have no absolute meaning.

The answer isn't banning the word "woman". It's about examining what the word is made to do.

So what instead?

Moi suggests the 20th C feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir as offering a powerful alternative to contemporary gender theories, that avoids essentialism.
For de Beauvoir: the body is not a thing. It is a situation, a grasp on the world, a sketch of our projects.

For de Beauvoir, the body founds my experience of myself and the world. It's my way of being in the world. There are innumerable ways of living with one's bodily potential as a woman (even when not everything is a choice). The body is constantly in dialogue with the world,

constantly negotiating with the world.
So the body is extremely important. It shapes how we live in the world. But it's NOT a destiny.
[end]
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Is this not a complex academic framing of very basic ideas? In some ways, yes. But

But it's nice to read a longer essay from time to time, and know that these ideas we debate on Twitter do take a scholarly form too, and have a long history.
And it's good to know that Simone de Beauvoir's on my side.