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COPYRIGHT 1998 Transaction Publishers, Inc.
The social order of any society is usually justified by those in power as being lodged in rational principles. Even in times of disruption, social order is usually based on positioning people according to characteristics such as sex, age, nationality and race, in various institutional positions (e.g., statuses and roles), and physical locations. Of course, these are regarded as rational and reasonable, resting on empirical regularities that flow from human nature, scientific knowledge, and common sense.
The division of society by sex, in particular, through much of the world, is regarded as reasonable although its form differs. Only in recent times has attention turned to the intentional coercive social processes that hold physical segregation or symbolic segregation by sex in place (Epstein, 1988). Although these divisions and often the underlying ideologies that are attached to them, are regarded more or less universally as rational because they are natural, or natural because they are reasonable and rational, I argue in this article, that rationality is employed in contested ideological and political terrains.
All social orders segregate: some boundaries are visible and others are not; in some, the boundaries are fiercely maintained, in others they are looser. But forms of segregation, and their accompanying ideological rationales change as investments in them rise and fall according to a market, although certainly not a free market. These efforts occur at all levels - from the institutional to the casual. Further, they are complicated because clusters of boundaries intersect and ideologies may integrate or clash. Thus, the social demarcations of a number of boundaries and their accompanying ideologies may be brought to bear on a specific issue, for example, when a boundary issue focusing on sex in employment may overlap with class and race boundaries.
It is the task of social scientists to deconstruct the behaviors and intentions of actors who participate in the processes of boundary control. These actors, driven by ideology, by beliefs in inevitability, and by naked self-interest (a useful, if underemployed category), package their actions in the rhetoric of rationality. This is understandable since all distinctions are invidious and many of the mechanisms employed are tried and true, developed by the powerful to maintain their advantage. Yet, strangely, even the disadvantaged participate in some of the most subordinating activities, become seduced by the rhetorical contrivances and ideologically based representations of things and the way they change.
Definitions of rationality change, as do interests and values. However, there is always heavy investment in the status quo, even though rhetorical devises often conflate investment in the status quo and the power structures that support it with appeals to other values widely shared, such as educational advancement and protection of the disadvantaged. Legitimation in this rhetoric has a postmodern quality, referring to and embodying a nostalgic or contrived past with a vision of a future that absorbs the past but converts it into a new image.
The cases of the Virginia Military Academy and the Citadel, until recently male-only undergraduate colleges built on a military model, illustrate the complexity of the negotiation of boundaries.
In the United States, Supreme Court rulings interpreting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as race, national origin and ethnicity, have effectively removed the formal barriers to sex integration from many institutions of higher learning(2) and places of employment,(3) particularly the professions and crafts. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution(4) that ensures citizens due process before the law is another tool used to argue against segregation.
Yet, segregation remains in many spheres in spite of the changes in formal policies and also because there have been different interpretations as to what constitutes discrimination. Determining which kinds of segregation are legitimate extensions of "genuine" differences between the sexes also has a base in U.S. Constitutional interpretation that permits a level of "intermediate" rather than "strict" scrutiny (Curtis Craig v. David Boren, 1976). It moved to a level of "heightened scrutiny" in the Supreme Court VMI Decision (United States v. Virginia, 1996) used in issues of race. Sentiment abounds in the common culture and even within the academy that policies regarding segregation are rational responses to "natural distinctions" in spheres from the allocation of toilet facilities to the assignment of women to combat positions in the military, and the provision of separate-sex educational institutions.
One of the most recent debates in the United States centered on two state supported military colleges that deny women the right to attend. These schools, the Virginia Military Academy (VMI) and the Citadel, located in the two southern states of Virginia and South Carolina, were founded in the 1800s (prior to...
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