reproduces the gender binary by ignoring anomalies and assuming anatomical congruence with outer appearance. Genitalia may be the signs used in the initial assignment of an infant to a sex category, but in gender attribution, the genitalia under clothing are assumed; Kessler and McKenna call them “cultural.” In their ethnomethodological account of gender construction, Kessler and McKenna focus on the role of the “other” in the validation of gender, but they end their book by coming back to the doer: “All persons create both the reality of their specific gender and a sense of its history, thus at the same time creating the reality of two, and only two, natural genders” (1978: 139).
Garfinkel did not address the question of the extent of consciousness and complicity in the construction of gender because he did not know until years after that Agnes had been lying about the source of her bodily anomalies (breasts and a penis). In a feminist re-analysis of the story of Agnes, Mary Rogers (1992) argued that Garfinkel was an unwitting “gender collaborator” who displayed the masculinity Agnes needed as a contrast. Although most cisgender people present themselves as women or men without the deliberate impression management of transgender people, there were times when Garfinkel was well aware that he played up to Agnes’s emphasized femininity by a complementarily emphasized masculinity – holding doors open, seating her in a car, and so on. What were below the surface of his awareness, according to Rogers, were the power differentials in his relationship with Agnes. He was older, a professional, in control of the interview sessions, and with the other men in the research/clinic situation, the ultimate decider of whether Agnes would get the sex-change surgery she desired. And so, like other western women in the 1950s, Agnes had to be manipulative and secretive to get what she wanted from men who had power over her.
Constructionist feminist theory and research subsequently focused on how girls and women consciously learn heterosexual gender displays and subservient behavior as strategies to attract a husband, but seemed to assume that boys and men absorbed the attitudes of patriarchal privilege much less consciously. Since consciousness raising was at one time a radical feminist political strategy, it would seem that without the “click” of self-awareness, women are no more conscious of the gender construction of their lives than men are.
The use of Agnes in the feminist literature as a model of the production of femininity by “normal, natural females” greatly expanded the concept of gender construction. A huge body of empirical research shows how girls and women in western societies are made docile, submissive, emotional, and nurturant through socialization by parents, teachers, peers, and imitation of constantly presented media depictions of heterosexual attractiveness. Later work on masculinity shows that the same process takes place in the making of assertive, emotionally repressed, sexually aggressive boys and men, with the addition of sports as an arena for reward and emulation of violent behavior (Messner 2002).
Doing gender
The signature term in constructionist gender studies is “doing gender.” West and Zimmerman argued that:
gender is not a set of traits, not a variable, nor a role, but the product of social doings of some sort. . . . Doing gender means creating differences between girls and boys and women and men, differences that are not natural, essential, or biological. Once the differences have been constructed, they are used to reinforce the “essentialness” of gender. (1987: 129, 137)
Given membership in a sex category, doing gender is inevitable and unavoidable in a gendered society. One’s gender performance is evaluated by others and one is accountable for its appropriateness. The end result is not only personal and interpersonal gendering, but gendered workplaces, politics, medical and legal systems, religions, and cultural productions: “Doing gender furnishes the interactional scaffolding of social structure, along with built-in mechanisms of social control” (1987: 147).
To the extent that women conform to norms of femininity, they are complicit in their own oppression, just as men who benefit from the privileges of masculinity are complicit in reproducing that oppression (Martin 2001, 2003). The pressures of accountability for doing gender properly create family–work conflicts among successful women (Blair-Loy 2003; Hochschild 1997). These pressures constrain their career and family choices in ways that are often not of their own choosing. The discourse shaping the norms of work and family reflects invidious gendered assumptions and values. Julia Nentwich (2004), a Swiss psychologist, suggests alternative language to construct different realities. Within a work organization, she says, women can be different – exotic, not the norm, a problem to integrate. Or they can be similar, so that treating them differently is discrimination. In the family, the language of the traditional division of labor puts children and jobs in conflict, makes a paid job a privilege for mothers and spending time with the family a privilege for fathers. In contrast, the language of equal partnership assumes that her paid work is important to the woman, that fathers take care of their children, and that both participate in work and family. On full-time versus part-time work, the dominant language framework is that full-time has to be the norm because the demands of the job come first, performance is measured by time spent at the job, and work and private life are two separate spheres. In an alternative language framework, performance is measured by fulfilling objectives, jobs can be partitioned, and work, family, and other life concerns are overlapping spheres (Epstein et al. 1999).
Gender as performativity
If “doing gender” has been the touchstone of gender construction in the social sciences, Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, from Gender Trouble (1990), has been the prevailing concept in the humanities. Conceptually based in philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Butler’s concept of performativity encompasses the unconscious process of making gendered selves that reiterate social norms of femininity and masculinity and inscribe femaleness and maleness on the body and heterosexuality on the psyche. Performance and identity are one and the same; one does not precede or exist without the other. And there lies the possibility for “gender trouble.” Gendering has to be done over and over, almost ritualistically, to reproduce the gendered social norms. But different ways of gendering produce differently gendered people. So, with conscious deliberation, one might create oneself differently gendered, and indeed, transgender people do just that. By 1993, Butler was rethinking aspects of gender performativity. In Bodies That Matter (1993), she took up the materiality or bodiedness of gender performativity and analyzed the ways that it encompassed sex and sexuality as well.
Butler ended Gender Trouble by arguing for the subversive political possibilities inherent in gender performativity. She said, “The loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations, destabilizing substantive identity, and depriving the naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: “man” and “woman”’ (1990: 146).
Constructing gendered structures
Structuration is the congealing of the situationally based rules of interactive processes and practices and their enforced application across time and space (Giddens 1984). Concepts of gendered organizations, gender regimes, and gender as an institution convey stability and solidity, in contrast to the fluidity and mutability of doing gender and gender performativity. Gendered structures are not just the accumulation of gender processes; they constitute and organize a major part of the social order. With structuring, gendered practices (process) are imposed on by institutionalized patterns of social interaction embedded in legal and bureaucratic rules and regulations. Most significantly, these institutionalized patterns are imbued with domination and power.
A prime arena for research on gender structuration is the organization of workplaces (Acker 1990; Britton 2000; Ferguson 1984). A workplace is more or less structurally gendered on several levels. One is the extent of the division into women’s and men’s jobs; another is the steepness or flatness of the hierarchy of authority and prestige and the gender clustering at each level; still another is the range of wage and benefits scales and where women and men workers fall
