Although the binary principle of gender remains the same, its content changes as other major aspects of the social order change. The gendered division of work has shifted with changing means of producing food and other goods, which in turn modify patterns of childcare and family structures. Gendered power imbalances, which are usually based on the ability to amass and distribute material resources, change with rules about property ownership and inheritance. Men’s domination of women has not been the same throughout time and place, but varies with political, economic, and family structures. In the sense of an underlying principle of how people are categorized and valued, gender is differently constructed throughout the world and throughout history. The prevailing tenet is that men dominate women, although the extent of domination fluctuates.
As pervasive as gender is, because it is constructed and maintained through daily interaction, it can be resisted and reshaped by gender troublemakers (Butler 1990). The social construction perspective argues that people create their social realities and identities, including their gender, through their interactions with others – their families, friends, colleagues. Gender is a constant performance, but its enactment is hemmed in by the general rules of social life, cultural expectations, workplace norms, and laws. These social restraints are also amenable to change, but not easily, because the social order is structured for stability (Giddens 1984). Many aspects of gender have been changed through individual agency, group pressure, and social movements. But the underlying binary structure has not.
Gender is built into the western world’s overall social system, interpenetrating the production of goods and services, kinship and family, sexuality, emotional relationships, and the minutiae of daily life. Gendered practices have been questioned, but the overall legitimacy of the gendered social order is deeply ingrained and currently bolstered by scientific studies on supposed inborn differences between females and males. The ultimate touchstone is pregnancy and childbirth. Procreative and other biological differences are part of the constructed gendered social order, which is so pervasive that the behavior and attitudes it produces are perceived as natural, including women’s greater predisposition to nurturance and bonding. This belief in natural – and thus necessary – differences legitimates many gender inequalities and exploitations of women.
As the concept of gender has developed in the social sciences, it has moved from an attribute of individuals that produces effects in the phenomenon under study (e.g., men’s and women’s crime rates, voting patterns, labor force participation) to a major building block in the social order and an integral element in every aspect of social life (e.g., how crime is conceptualized and categorized is gendered, political power is gendered, the economy and the labor force are gender-segregated and gender-stratified). Feminist social scientists have mapped out the effects of gendering on daily lives and on social institutions and have produced reams of data on how these processes maintain inequality between women and men.
Feminist theories have linked gendered social structures with gendered personalities and consciousness. Nancy Chodorow (1978) links the division of parenting in the heterogendered western nuclear family to the objectification and emotional repression in men’s psyches and the emotional openness and nurturance of women’s psyches. Both emerge from the primacy of women in parenting. Boys’ separation from their mothers and identification with their fathers and other men leads to their entrance into the dominant world but also necessitates continuous repression of their emotional longings for their mothers and fear of castration. Girls’ continued identification with their mothers makes them available for intimacy; their heterosexual coupling with emotionally dissatisfying men produces their desires to become mothers and reproduces the gendered family structure from which gendered psyches emerge.
As for the sources of women’s oppression, multicultural and postcolonial feminists claim that there are complex systems of dominance and subordination, in which some men are subordinate to other men, and to some women as well (Collins 2000; Trinh 1989). All men may have a “patriarchal dividend” of privilege and entitlement to women’s labor, sexuality, and emotions, but some men additionally have the privileges of whiteness, education, prosperity, and prestige (Connell 1995). A gender analysis sees gender hierarchies as inextricable from other hierarchies, but conversely argues that hierarchies of class, race, and achievement must be seen as substantively gendered (Acker 1999; Glenn 1999). In this sense, difference is expanded from men versus women to the multiplicities of sameness and difference among women and among men and within individuals as well, these differences arising from similar and different social locations (Braidotti 1994; Felski 1997; Frye 1996).
Despite these intersecting multiplicities, the western social world is divided into only two genders, and the members of each of these categories are made similar enough to be easily identifiable and different enough from the members of the other category to be allocated separate work and family responsibilities, and to be economically rewarded and culturally valued in significantly non-equivalent ways.
Social constructionist structural feminist theory argues that the gendered social order is constantly restabilized even when disrupted by individual and collective action, while postmodern feminism has shown how individuals can consciously and purposefully create disorder and categorical instability, opening the way to change (Flax 1987). The social order is an intersectional structure, with socially constructed individuals and groups ranged in a pyramidal hierarchy of power and powerlessness, privilege and disadvantage, normality and otherness. Because these social statuses and the rationales that legitimate their inequality are constructed in the interaction of everyday life and in cultural representations and solidified in institutional practices and laws, they can all be subverted by resistance, rebellion, and concerted political action.
But most people do gender all the time, usually without thinking. Whether they are privileged or oppressed, people do gender because not to do so is to be shamed as unmanly or unwomanly. In this dual sense of doing and done to lies the power of gender as a socially constructed system of inequality. This power is enormously strengthened by the invisibility of gender processes, the lack of reflection in doing gender, and the belief that the gender order is based on natural and immutable sex differences.
This bi-gendered social structure is what is currently being fragmented in multiple ways – by choosers of non-binary identities and those who queer or question its foundations and by transgender people who may straddle traditional understandings of women’s and men’s identities, by intersex activists and athletes, and by those erasing gendered language use. At the same time, bi-gendering is being upheld by beliefs in the biological source of gendered brains and behavior, research based on only two gender categories, standpoint stances that valorize women, hegemonic masculinity, the #MeToo movement, gender-based violence, and sexualities dependent on gendered partners.
Ethnomethodological insights into gender construction
Gender as a construct first appeared in Harold Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) in the story of Agnes. Agnes was a 19-year-old with fully developed breasts, penis, and testicles who came to a UCLA center for the study of people with “severe anatomical irregularities.” She presented as intersexual but in actuality was a normal boy who had been taking female hormone pills stolen from her mother since the age of twelve. What was important to Garfinkel was the way that Agnes achieved the gender display of a “natural, normal female” through voice pitch, gestures, dress, and other mannerisms that today we would call “emphasized femininity.” We never hear from Agnes, but the construction of gender identity by transgender people has subsequently been described in many of their own accounts and is now a staple of the constructionist literature (Bolin 1988; Devor 1997; Ekins 1997).
Buried in Garfinkel but subsequently spotlighted by gender studies analysts is the idea that it is not only transgender individuals who create a gender identity; everyone produces a version of masculinity or femininity socially and culturally acceptable enough to meet the expectations of normality in the eyes of others in their social groups. Building on Garfinkel, Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna, in Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (1978), showed that gender is produced as a social
