This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
Gender
Gender is a concept that comes up in feminist theory and queer theory and trans theory, and all the academic disciplines related. It’s an account of how we live our bodies in the world in relationship to masculine and feminine or other possible categories.
I think at the time that I wrote Gender Trouble in the late 1980s, people treated gender as if it was a natural fact or a sociological reality, but they didn’t treat it as something that you could make and remake or that was open to any number of historical revisions.
I was part of a movement of people who were rethinking gender during that time. So it was a moment in which we asked questions like, what has society made of us, and what can we make of ourselves? At the time, I think there were some feminists who believed that women had very specific reproductive capacities and that their capacity to give birth defined who they are in the world. At the same time, there were feminists who said biological capacity does not determine who you are, biology is not destiny. Maybe some women have that capacity, maybe some women don’t. Maybe now we would say some trans men have that capacity, some don’t. But we shouldn’t think that that capacity determines who we are or how we’re supposed to live or even who we’re supposed to love.
Now some people thought that I was denying nature or denying material reality. Like surely there are differences between men and women, would you deny the biological differences? We have a whole range of differences, biological in nature, so I don’t deny them, but I don’t think they determine who we are in some sort of final way. They’re part of what Simone de Beauvoir called our situation, and how we live that situation has to do with how history moves us and how our own freedom moves us, and what’s the relationship between our historical formation and our self formation.
Sex and Gender Identity
At the heart of these controversies is the distinction between sex and gender, but what is that distinction? How do we think about it? Can we make a distinction between the two that’s clear and that everyone can agree upon? And it turns out people never agree on how that’s supposed to be.
But if you say that social norms are operating at the moment that an infant is assigned to sex, you’re saying that gender norms are there in the determination of sex. At the moment that you are named a sex or given a sex, assigned one, you’re already in the grip of social power. Sex is generally a category that is assigned to infants upon birth on the basis of observational, observed features, observation of anatomical features.
As infants, we have no say about it, right? So it’s a passively received assignment. If we’re talking about gender identity, the gender we feel ourselves to be, the gender that we become in time, gender is a mix of cultural norms, historical formations, family influence, psychic realities, desires and wishes over which we may not have a lot of control and some ways of living in the world over which we may have some control.
So gender is the socially formed reality in which we live, and we have a say in that. So sex is the passive reception of an assignment, and gender is the question of how you live out that assignment. Do you accept it? Do you refuse it? Do you rework it? Do you reassign yourself?
No Single Definition
I would never define the category of women, and I think what’s really most important about the category of women is that it remains open-ended. It meant something a couple of centuries ago that it doesn’t mean now, and probably it will mean something different in the future. And if we look across the world, it means something very different in various cultures, in various times and places. So it would probably be a mistake to come up with a single definition of what a woman is. It would be parochial. It would be coming from a very specific perspective. It would be freezing a time and place into a definition and then imposing it on the rest of the world.
So I insist that what it is to be a woman or indeed what it is to be a man or any other gender is an open-ended question. It’s why we have gender studies because we have an open-ended question that we can study for a very long time.