in the biological underpinnings of the behavior of women and men. The concept of gender in this book rests on social construction – the contention that gender differences are made through socialization of children and maintained through surveillance of adults (West and Zimmerman 1987). The norms of a binary society coalesce into a gender regime supported by familiar interaction and legal strictures.
People construct gender for themselves and those they interact with by doing or performing gender. These processes institutionalize as gender structures (Martin 2004). Gender as process and structure are both complementary and in conflict. They are complementary in that process creates and maintains structures. They are in conflict because structuration delimits process. With the simultaneous fragmentation and persistence of the gender binary, process is not changing structure.
Politically, gender fragmented long before the current popularity of multiple genders. Under liberal feminism in the 1970s, the pressure was to treat women and men alike. In order to do so, women were allowed and encouraged to enter men’s professions, such as law and medicine, and to run for political office. Today, in the United States, the ceilings still being broken by women include space travel, combat, and being elected president. Other countries have chosen women heads of state.
The problem with this route to gender equality was that women were emulating men but men were not emulating women. The unspoken implication of gender neutrality was that women deserved the rights and privileges men had as long as they acted like men (Mackinnon 1987; Saguy, Williams, and Rees 2020). On the other hand, many of the most successful legal cases in the United States gave men rights, such as child custody, without their having to demonstrate women’s capabilities.
The counterargument to women’s perfect equality with men was to focus on women’s special qualities, particularly nurturance and emotional empathy. Women’s bodies and sexualities, which had been downplayed by liberal feminism, came to the fore. Radical feminism valorized women’s behavior and experiences and, in women’s studies, explored women’s history and sources of oppression in different gender regimes. Politically, the focus was on women rather than gender per se.
It soon became clear that women were not a global category of people. Intersectionality broke them up by racial and ethnic identity, social class, occupation, sexuality, relationship status, place of residence, age, bodily integrity, and so on. Each of these groups of women had its own political battles to fight, some of which involved allying with the men of their group rather than always envisaging them as the enemy. (See Lorber 2012 for a review of feminist theory and politics.)
In addition to intersectional fragmentation of gender, people today are finding different ways of doing gender, further fragmenting the binary. Multiple genders may seem revolutionary, but they are not changing the binary structure of most gender regimes. They are personal identities, not legal or bureaucratic statuses. Politically, their individualistic rebelliousness does not encourage a unified gender-resistant movement (Lorber 2018). The binary persists and is bolstered by much normative gendered behavior.
After a review of the premises of the social construction of gender, this book will explore both sides of the current paradox of gender – processes in the fragmentation of gender that are undermining the binary and processes in the performance of gender that reinforce the binary’s persistence. After that, I’ll explore why we aren’t having a gender revolution.
My focus and sources are mostly western societies with relatively egalitarian and individualistic gender regimes. Looking at similar issues in societies with different gender regimes would of necessity find different imbalances between fragmentation and persistence of binary genders.
Terms
While there are many variations in nomenclature, the terms I will be using are:
sex – referring to internal and external anatomy, hormones, chromosomes, and variations of each. Terms are male, female, intersex (having mixtures of the biological components of sex).
sexuality – referring to physical attraction and sexual behaviors, emotional involvement, relationships. Terms are heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual.
gender – referring to identity, self-presentation, performance, legal status. Terms are man, woman, cisgender (gender identity assigned at birth), transgender man (man assigned female at birth), transgender woman (woman assigned male at birth), non-binary (no gender), genderqueer (neither woman nor man, various combinations of gender presentation).
1 How Gendered People, Organizations, and Societies Are Constructed
We live in a world that is divided by gender in every way. Gender is a constant part of who and what we are, how others treat us, and our general standing in society. Our bodies, personalities, and ways of thinking, acting, and feeling are gendered. Because we are gendered from birth by naming, clothing, and interaction with family, teachers, and peers, our identity as a boy or girl, and then as a man or woman, is felt as, and usually explained as, a natural outcome of the appearance of our genitalia, the signs of our biological sex. The assumption is that it is biology that produces two social categories of different people, “females” and “males,” and that it is inevitable that societies will be divided along the lines of these two categories and that the people in those categories will be different.
It’s a twentieth-century doxa – that which “goes without saying because it comes without saying” (Bourdieu 1977: 167; emphasis in original). Despite its taken-for-grantedness, the search for the biological sources of gender differences fuels the glut of scientific studies on genetic, hormonal, or other physiological origins for all sorts of gendered behavior (Jordan-Young 2010; Van den Wijngaard 1997). Actually, there are very few gender differences, as meta-analyses of compilations of those studies has shown. One research team (Zell, Krizan, and Teeter 2015) had 106 meta-analyses, incorporating data from 12 million people. Most of the gender differences they found were small, with few that were medium (11.9%), large (1.8%), or very large in size (0.8%).
Yet we live in societies structured by gender differences, so, since they are not natural, they need to be constructed. Gender divides people into contrasting social categories, “girls” and “boys” and “women” and “men.” In this structural conceptualization, gendering is the process and the gendered social order the product of social construction. Through interaction with caretakers, socialization in childhood, peer pressure in adolescence, and gendered work and family roles, people are divided into two groups and made to be different in behavior, attitudes, and emotions. The content of the differences depends on the society’s current culture, values, economic and family structure, and past history. The resultant gendered social order is based on and maintains these differences. Thus there is a continuous loop-back effect between gendered social institutions and the social construction of gender by individuals (West and Zimmerman 1987). In societies with other major social divisions, such as race, ethnicity, religion, and social class, gender is intricately intertwined with these other statuses (West and Fenstermaker 1995). Despite these crosscutting statuses, the contemporary western world is a very bi-gendered world, consisting of only two legal categories – “female” and “male.”
For individuals, gender is a major social status that is intersected with other major social statuses (racial and ethnic group, social class, religion, sexual orientation, etc.) and so gender is actually not a binary status, even though it is treated as such legally, socially, and in most social science research. On an individual basis, gender fragments; from a societal perspective, gender overrides these multiplicities and simply divides people into two categories.
The binary divisions of gender are deeply rooted in every aspect
