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Doing Gender, Undoing Sex - Coggle Diagram
Doing Gender, Undoing Sex
Sex
Introducing Sex
Biological binary marked by different internal and external genitalia, chromosomes, and hormones
'Biological determinism' is the notion that 'biological sex' can account for different dispositions, capacities, and behaviours in men and women
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Is biology consequential, or is it the assignation of social meaning to biology that is consequential?
Troubling Sex
Human bodies have well-differentiated reproductive systems, but are otherwise not 'dimorphic'
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Gender
What is Gender?
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The terminology of gender was then appropriated by psychologists researching trans-gender individuals
Thereafter, gender was commonly used by feminists to distinguish between biological and socio-psychological features of the man/woman binary
'One is not born a woman, but becomes one' Simone de Beauvoir, 1949
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Gender is an 'unintended product of a social practice' Haslanger, 1995:97, cited in Mikkola, 2019
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Gender Socialisation
Gender is a product of primary and secondary social learning, primarily in childhood
Via parenting, peers, schooling, or popular culture, etc
The gender norms into which we are socialised are shaped by, and used to justify, gender inequality
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Gender Realism
'Social Learning Theory' and 'Gender and Dominance' theory represent gender as relatively static and fixed
Despite gender's social ontology, it becomes something we are and cannot escape
Struggles to fully accommodate particularity (e.g. gender variance, queerness, and intersectionality)
Presumes a 'golden nugget of woman-ness' Spelman (1988, 159)
The categories of women and men are delimited by exposure to particularised experiences or conditions
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Judith Butler (1989) says we should pay attention to what gender does, not what gender is
Doing Gender
Gender is not something we are, it is something we do (e.g. via dress, hobbies, conduct, or contingent physicality)
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Judith Butler (1989) mobilises the concept of 'performativity' to capture the realisation of something in its doing
Trans-folk, therefore, have equal claim to whichever gender they identify with, because they 'do' that gender
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