Quality and Quantity, 13 ( 1 9 7 9 ) 4 4 3 - 4 4 5 443 �9 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in The Netherlands

B O O K R E V I E W S

Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach. John Wiley and Sons, New York and Chichester, xv + 233 pp.

Gender is fundamental to our everyday thinking about ourselves and others. For most of the time most of us rely on basic, unquestioned assumptions: for instance, that there are two and only two genders; that a person belongs unambiguously to one or other gender, and that that is an unchanging personal characteristic; that everybody belongs to one or other gender; that genders are naturally given catego- ries. The suspension of such a "natural att i tude" on the other hand suggests that gender is achieved. This was well illustrated by Garfinkel's celebrated study with Agnes - a person with male genitals, who professed a female identity and who claimed to have developed female secondary characteristics, quite naturally, at puberty. The case of Agnes sometimes evokes a rather ribald response - partly, one suspects, as a reaction to the sexual ambiguity which s/he represents, and partly because Agnes "fooled" the researchers. It transpired that s/he had not developed female characteristics "naturally", but had been taking hormones. It is sometimes forgotten by critics that in duping the researchers Agnes made Garfinkel's basic point even more strongly - illustrating how "normal appearances" of gender are members' accomplishments, while they are normally treated as "naturally" given.

It was a logical step for Kessler and McKenna to develop Garfinkel's work into a full-blown ethnomethodological account of gender attribution - and a very worth- while development it should have been. But this book, as a whole, does not really meet the requirements of such a project. Garfinkel demonstrated how normal gender is produced by concentrating on the "strange" case of the transsexual. Kessler and McKenna also focus on transsexuals, and the central part of their work is based on depth interviews with fifteen transsexuals. As with Garfinkel's original research, the interest is not in the phenomenon of transsexualism as such, but in how it can illustrate normal gender construction. In fact, however, the authors do seem to get sidetracked into a discussion of the management of transsexualism - for instance, on "passing" - which is interesting and valuable in its own right, but not in keeping with the avowed intentions of the book.

Kessler and McKenna declare their interest to be in "gender construction in everyday life". But apart from the special case of transsexuals, they in fact provide little or no evidence or speculation on the actual (or possible) methods used by members in "doing gender" in everyday contexts. The work, too, lacks that preci- sion and detail one has come to expect from the best ethnomethodological work. The authors appear to have been inspired as much by general social-psychological perspectives of the "social construction of reality" sort as by ethnomethodology as such.

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A significant proportion of the book is devoted to a general discussion of cross- cultural, biological and developmental aspects of gender. These cover pretty famil- iar ground in establishing the essentially social character of gender, and contain little that is novel or distinctively ethnomethodological. When the discussion becomes more characteristically informed by ethnomethodology the results are a little thin. The authors report an ingenious experimental study, based on pictures which mixed "male" and "female" physical attributes. The conclusions are, how- ever, less than startling: genitals are the main cues used by respondents in gender attribution. Actually, it is a bit more interesting than that: the presence of a penis is, apparently, sufficient to define a male, while there is no corresponding cue which determines female attribution. Nevertheless, it is hard to see how this, and the transsexuals study, can be made to sustain a full-length monograph on gender, or lead "toward a theory of gender", as the final chapter is entitled.

Ethnomethodologists will find this book disappointing insofar as it is not a sus- tained piece of work in that tradition, as it claims. Antiethnos will probably find their worst suspicions confirmed. The conclusion that gender attribution is over- whelmingly genital attribution will look like one of those maddeningly trivial "findings" which ethnomethodology all too often seems to generate. There's nothing much wrong with this book, and the sections dealing with the authors' own research deserve to be read by anyone interested in the area, but overall I do not think it gets us much further than Agnes did.

PAUL ATKINSON University College, Cardiff

Roger Taylor, Art, an Enemy of the People, Harvester Press, Hassocks, Sussex, 1978, 155 pp., s 8.50 or s 3.50.

Roger Taylor's claim is that to the question, "What is art?" there is no essen- tialist answer. Rather, art is whatever has been classified as art by the ruling bour- geois class. Art is thus an ideological and practical weapon in the class struggle, specifically by being associated with a set of values and a way of life which not only exclude the majority of people but at the same time emphasise their inferiority. As the class struggle develops, art changes, and it must therefore be examined histori- cally, not philosophically. Taylor clearly has a potentially worthwhile project, but his methodological handling of it is less than satisfactory.

Chapter 1 is concerned with questions about language and method. Taylor warns us against certain conceptual practices, especially philosophy and art, which work against the interests of most people by fixing the world in a static framework that supports the existing hierarchical social order. Instead, he would have us see lan- guage as "indicating, pointing to, signalling towards the processes of the world" which cannot be "categorised by means of static definitions, simply because they are processes" (p. 13). But Taylor is being misled by a purely verbal contrast between stasis and process. We can give necessary and sufficient conditions for pro- cesses like the rusting of iron, but only sufficient conditions for processes like class struggle or art. But this is not because the latter are processes but because the con-

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cepts are open-ended. In this they are similar to rose, which is certainly not a pro- cess but also not amenable to "static definition". Thus, although Taylor's anti- essential/st conclusion about art may be correct, his argument is confused, leaning too heavily on the vague notion of process.

Having disposed of art's essence, Taylor moves on in chapter 2 to claim that art is only what is socially constructed as art. But there is scant attempt to demonstrate this. Taylor, having accused aestheticians of proceeding a priori, himself puts for- ward an a priori, and indeed confused, sociology: "art, now, is nothing over and above what the bourgeoise (high-bourgeoisie, really in the sub-class of the class, the group that manufactures the ideology of the class) calls art" (p. 49). This typical example of Taylor's prose style makes it apparent that he is operating with a crudely simplistic model of society and an outdated notion of ideology. Instead of rigorous sociological analysis, paying careful attention to the difficult methodologi- cal problems involved, we are offered only impressionistic generalities.

In chapter 3 Taylor criticises Marxist theories of art. Marxists have supposed that art can be freed from the bourgeois hegemony to become true, revolutionary or working-class art. "But, of course, the 'high' ideal which art is, is simply the set of social practices of bourgeois society; the whole of these practices cannot be thrown away without dispensing altogether with the 'high' ideal" (p. 72). It thus follows, purely as a matter of definition, that there can be no non-bourgeois art. But there have been activities of painting, composing, writing, etc., in various social forma- tions, though with differing classifications and evaluations attached to them, so pre- sumably these activities could continue in socialist society, shorn of their present elitist associations. But Taylor is obscure on this point, as he is on the whole notion of "popular culture". But it does emerge that genuine popular culture must repudi- ate art, and that it is often threatened by art. This is illustrated in chapter 4, a his- tory of the recuperation of jazz by the art world.

Although Taylor can hardly be said to have effectively supported it, his main claim about art is not without interest. Nevertheless, it is odd that he should wish to warn against art, which has a negligible social role compared with that of televi- sion and the other popular media; these, with their cosy mindlessness, are really pervasive and effective ideological apparatuses. The book is published in the Har- vester Press series "Philosophy Now". It is indeed a sad commentary on the state of philosophy that the book, which surely would never have found its way into a sociological series, should be offered as an example of contemporary philosophy. Quite apart from being filled with innumerable infelicities of style, grammatical mistakes and misprints, the book shows no sign at all of acquaintance with recent developments in cultural studies and semiology; it is as if Berger, Barthes, Althusser, Macherey and Eagleton had never written. (The introduction to the series specifi- cally castigates British philosophy for being isolated from contemporary continen- tal thought.) Taylor insists that his book is written not for academics but for those to whom he condescendingly refers as "the masses". It is to be hoped that he will not in attempted self-justification offer the ultimate condescension and claim that rigour, clarity and detail are beyond the capabilities of the masses.

ANDREW BELSEY University College, Cardiff