What is Gender Again?
Sociological Meanderings Towards Collective Well-Being
We are weeks-deep into studying the Sociology of Gender. Often, I wonder: do any of you still sometimes sit and think, “what, exactly, is gender”? We are here to study sex and gender, which sometimes feel really concrete and graspable, and other times, totally elusive. So I suppose now is a good time to say that this class really shouldn’t be named “the Sociology of Sex and Gender.” So, then, what should it be called?
The Sociology of (Economic) Patriarchy.
What is sex without gender, and what is gender without patriarchy? If there was no inequality, what would we be studying? And further, outside of a political conversation about rights, I’m not sure that we’d even care that much about sex and gender (other than maybe in the context of intimacy).
For example, notice how we don’t care that much about whether or not straight people are “born that way” or if cisgender folks are “born into” their identities? Their rights are protected, and not in any imminent risk of the loss of those rights, and thus, we don’t explore those questions. But, given the lack of rights for transgender people and the limited and fragile rights of gays and lesbians, we still regularly ponder, both in social life and in science, whether or not someone is “born” trans* or gay, or, if it’s a choice.
This question itself emerged from a socio-political context: when the LGBTQ right movement of the 20th Century took off, the biggest detractors were from the religious community. So, the activists in the LGBTQ rights movement attempted to deflate the sails of their detractors by arguing that they were born gay, or born transgender: thus, they were as God made them. This in turn, however, created space to then argue that no one would choose being LGBTQ, as if that was a bad, horrible choice. A double-bind indeed. Sara Ahmed puts it this way: “What we could call presumed heterosexuality means that not to be presumed as heterosexual, you have to unbecome one. Such an unbecoming is narrated as the loss of the possibility of becoming happy” (p.49). But really the problem here isn’t the person, rather, it’s the system of inequality that enforces such “traffic systems” (Ahmed, p. 44).
Absent the inequality, what questions would we ask?
As we’ve discussed in the past, and will explore further in the coming weeks, there are life and death reasons as to why we are talking about gender now: because women are sexually harassed at work; because the trans*community doesn’t have access to adequate health care (specifically in regards to the health needs of the trans*community, because really, none of us has access to adequate health care); because Black, Indigenous and Latinx men are harassed and killed by the police; because Black, Indigenous and Latinx women are killed by the police but then also ignored in the public outcries, as Kimberle Crenshaw points out. To say something is a social construct is not to deny its importance: after centuries of being embedded in institutional policies and cultural ideologies the social construct of the gender binary is most significant in it’s impact.
If you look at each week in overview, the focus of the week is on some kind of inequity, of which sex/gender/sexuality is the social-symbolic basis of organizing that specific inequity. Week Two looked at the abuse that the trans*community experiences at the hands of medical professionals and sports, along with the extra labor that women do in their families. Week Three looked at how the gender binary produces heteronormativity, and how women are so often silenced. Week Four looks at how “breadwinners” are exploited in capitalism and how “homemakers” are exploited and oppressed, lacking wages for their socially necessary labor. Week Five looked at how gender intersects with colonization and slavery and thus, racism. Week Six explored the ways in which social “outsiders” are punished as not being “enough,” and of the social pressures to conform to societal and cultural expectations. Week Seven looked at the dangerous expectations placed on men/fathers to deny their emotions and on women/mothers to be perfect. Week Eight explored wage gaps and glass ceilings and other mechanisms that inhibit social advancement in the workforce, while Week Nine explored the various ways that women of all races are harassed in their workplaces, how that racism produces variance in how women experience harassment, and the psychological and material impact of such harassment. Week Ten explored the hidden curriculum and the ways in which the education system reinforces patriarchal white supremacy. We also explored, through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic, how the education system functions as child care and how that impacts maternal employment, thus reinforcing male dominance (Collins, et. al, 2021).
Each week we’ve been focused on exploring how gender is institutionalized and that gender inequality is an outcome of these institutionalized patterns, and not an inevitable outcome of our bodies or our genetics.
For example, though C.J. Pascoe’s work focuses in the interactional dynamic that produces and shapes the “gendered homophobia” of the “fag discourse” (2005), it’s important to recognize that all these interactions happened in a school with institutionalized policies. For example, most educational institutions have a student code of conduct, and yet these policies were not deployed to stop the “fag discourse” or the homophobic consequences that emerge from it. Teachers and administrators bear witness to these happenings every day, and yet they continue uninterrupted. I wonder: did you see something similar in your high school? If you did — I know that I did — what does it mean that this pattern happens at many (most?) schools, across many decades (I saw it in High School in the early 1990s)? What does it mean that no matter the specific kids, or the specific teachers, or the specific school, we see this patterned gendered homophobia play out? It means that it’s built into the fabric of the social institution itself; in the ways that teachers and administrators are trained to do their jobs, as well as in the ways that more generally, adults and peers socialize kids into hegemonic gendered norms. We will see in the coming weeks how this plays out in the criminal justice system as well.
So, I ask again, absent the inequality, what would we be learning about sex and gender? Barbara Risman wrote that “gender is so endemic because unless we see difference, we cannot justify inequality” (430). Further, we must “do gender” (West and Zimmerman) in order to produce these differences. As Hutson and Garrison point out, our bodies don’t do that work without cultural adornment and cultural discourse.
The social function of gender is to organize patriarchal inequality. Patriarchy comes first, gender comes second. Just as historians have asserted that slavery and our construction of a racial caste system in the United States preceded the idea of race. Race — the idea that there are different and unequal races — emerged as an idea to justify the organization of slavery and the system of white supremacy. Thus, the gender binary is an idea that emerged to organize and justify a system of patriarchal dominance.
For me, coming to understand the institutionalized aspect of gender inequality is really a practice of care. I know it seems contradictory, because getting to a deeper knowledge about patriarchal white supremacy — and the violence it engenders — is hard. It’s heart-breaking. It means we have to revisit our own traumas and bear witness to the trauma of others. But with care for ourselves and for others we can do this learning, so that we are more effectively positioned to engage in social change practices.
Let me conclude with the words of Sharon Salzberg:
“Opening to the suffering of others may bring us uneasiness, but we, and potentially the world, are transformed by that opening. We become empowered to respond to the suffering with an unfathomable love, rather than with fear or aversion. Only love is big enough to hold all the pain of this world” (p. 109).
