Social control and the censure(s) of sex

Abstract

Sex/gender is a primary social censure which is fundamental to social relations of organization and control. This paper explains the concept of social censure — a new heuristic tool enabling the social theorist to move beyond an outmoded and distorting focus on “deviance”—and illustrates how social censures may be utilised as part of a critique of societies (exemplified by our own) which are “deeply entrenched in the ideological censure of women, femininity and subversive masculinities”.¹ Hegemonic masculinity is characteristically (re)created and (self)affirmed in the censure of femininities and subordinate masculinities. It is (re)constituted and consolidated through a complex network of formal and informal mechanisms, rooted in the construction of individual subjectivities and reproduced at the interweaving levels of collectivity and institution. Sex/gender censures are mediated by other primary censures such as race and socio-economic class. In struggling against censure we need to comprehend the pervasiveness, complexity and diversity of censuring practices, and the fixity of censure in social relations and individual psyches: the limits to resistance and the potentialites for change.