jenny said "I disagree that what pain means is subjective. What pain is, what we mean when we tell each other that we are experiencing pain, when we set out to inflict pain, what that means has an explicit meaning that is not subjective. We all mean the same thing. It is universal. Describing the level of pain you are in is subjective, but what the word pain means is not."
I think this raises an interesting issue, and I think it is based around a common confusion between the word 'subjective' and the concept of something as socially or culturally constructed. I am not sure where this confusion comes from but it is very, very common. I have heard it repeated by academics all over the place.
If we go back to the seventeenth century and to Descartes, we can see the foundations of what has become a very modern theory of mind. It's based on a central doubt: what if my sensory perceptions aren't accurate? What if they don't 'reflect' a world out there around me, but are in fact illusory? We all have dreams - sometimes when we are ill or have taken drugs, we hallucinate things that aren't there. Who's to say that this isn't happening all the time? How do we KNOW that what we perceive as reality is 'really' there?
Descartes thought about this and said 'Aha! But there is one thing I cannot doubt - and that is that I am sitting here and thinking! I have absolute certainty about that!' (Cogito ergo sum). And a theory of mind was born which pictured the mind as something inner and the world as something outer, and then worried about how we connect the two to have certainty in our knowledge. Note that the idea of a perceiving 'subject' is changed by this: 'subjective' here is the way that the mind turns in on itself, and cannot be certain of things empirically 'out there'.
Now if you have this Cartesian (Descartesean) view, pain is something that we know 'internally' - it is, by nature, a private experience. We know it, apparently, by identifying it within ourselves and isolating it. ('Oh, this sensation in my finger, let me call that pain' and then when I have a pain in my foot 'Oh, let me check back in my memory bank - yes, this feels like pain too'). We build a kind of 'pain sample' to which we refer ourselves, and we point to it internally, we refer to it when we are talking about feelings of hurt. The problem is: how do I know that my pain sample is the same as your pain sample? How do we know that we are 'really' experiencing the same thing?
Now I'm going to skip forward through 200 years of pretty important history in which these ideas are challenged in various ways to the mid C20. Along comes Ludwig Wittgenstein. And he says 'What a load of bollocks, Descartes!'. And he enters into a long demolition of this position, of which I am only giving you a faint-hearted summary here (I seriously, seriously recommend reading it for yourself - it is in the Philosophical Investigations, which is a beautiful and wonderful book of thinking that is utterly, utterly therapeutic to read). Anyway, Wittgenstein starts by looking at the way we act around pain and he disagrees with Descartes. At no point, he says, when we are in agony do we say 'Excuse me for a second while I check my current sensation against my mental database to see whether I can call this 'pain' or not'. The mere fact of using the word 'pain' slots us into a shared experience of pain.
In other words, pain behaviour and language is conventional, and a matter of use, and use is public and not private. We don't have private languages: the very concept of meaning is something social. In understanding pain, we insert ourselves into a set of social and cultural conventions about pain: it is not simply a private matter. Think about the word 'Ouch!'. It's a pretty weird word, right? There is no reason why we should say 'ouch' when we burn a finger, rather than 'oimoi' or 'aiiiieeeeee'? Yet we use it in place of crying of screaming when we are in pain. For Wittgenstein, the crucial thing is that we DO talk about pain and pain behaviour in this social way, without there being an issue about checking my pain against yours - not only do we not need to look within for verification, but we are already talking about the same thing. There is no 'essence' or 'internal definition' of pain - it is something that is already part of the world. (This is part of a bigger and more brilliant attack on the book between the mind/world dualism that Descartes set up).
The post-structuralists would take this position further, arguing that all of our understanding happens in socio-cultural frameworks that are very much 'within' society and that are always therefore political. This does NOT mean that they are 'subjective' in the sense that Descartes uses the word, to mean a kind of solipsism. In fact they are 'objective' in the sense of being outside of the subject, in the culture. But they are not 'objective' in the way that word has come to describe some kind of scientific truth that is supposed to be transcendentally and universally true - they are culturally specific and relative.
So what does this mean for gender? Well, we can see it in a Wittgensteinean kind of a way, as something that is inevitably social - or we can go further and see it in a post-structuralist way as something that is inevitably social and political. Either way, the idea that it can be described as either simply 'subjective' or simply 'objective' needs to be exchanged for a more sophisticated series of concepts!