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Acknowledgments
I want to thank Jonathan Skerrett, Polity editor, for suggesting this book. I’d also like to thank Susan Farrell, Kathleen Gerson, and Patricia Yancey Martin for their reviews at various stages and the anonymous reviewers of the first draft for their astute comments. Much of the book was written during the various levels of the COVID-19 lockdowns. That should have given me the gift of time, but anxiety over the pandemic often ate away at my ability to concentrate and write. I thank friends and East End Temple Sisterhood members for their psychological support.
The inspiration for the book came from J. Lorber (2018), “Paradoxes of Gender Redux: Multiple Genders and the Persistence of the Binary,” in J. W. Messerschmidt, P. Y. Martin, M. A. Messner, and R. Connell (eds), Gender Reckonings: New Social Theory and Research, New York: New York University Press.
Some material in the book is adapted from J. Lorber (2005), Breaking the Bowls: Degendering and Feminist Change, New York: W. W. Norton, and these articles and reviews: “Using Gender to Undo Gender: A Feminist Degendering Movement,” Feminist Theory 1 (2000): 101–18; “Constructing Gender: The Dancer and the Dance,” in J. A. Holstein and J. F. Gubrium (eds), Handbook of Constructionist Research, New York: Guilford Publications, (2008); “Review Essay: Gendered and Sexed Brains,”’ Contemporary Sociology 40 (2011): 405–9; “Review Essay: Why Do Bathrooms Matter?,” Contemporary Sociology 41 (2012): 598–602.
New York
March 31, 2021
Introduction
Recently, I received an email urging everyone to use gender-neutral pronouns – they, their, them. A longtime proponent of doing away with gender, I nonetheless found myself resisting the erasure of my identity as a woman, even at the cost of maintaining the gender binary that I believed was the source of women’s oppression. So I refused. I want to be identified as a woman – she, hers, her. I want women to be visible. Others responded similarly to the email and to an article in Scientific American (Saguy and Williams 2019a), especially women of color. They noted the need for visibility and recognition of accomplishments as well as identifying continued areas of discrimination (Hanna et al. 2019). At that point, I realized that one of the reasons for the persistence of the gender binary is the necessity of the continued valorization of women, especially those of denigrated groups.
Today, in western countries, we are seeing both the fragmentation of the gender binary (the division of the social world into two and only two genders) and its persistence. Multiple genders, gender-neutral pronouns and bathrooms, X designations on official documents and other manifestations of degendering are increasingly prevalent, and yet the two-gender structure of most social worlds persists.
The main gender paradox I explored over twenty-five years ago in Paradoxes of Gender (Lorber 1994) focused on the rhetoric of gender equality made meaningless by a total system that rendered women unequal and exploited. Today’s new gender paradox is a rhetoric of gender multiplicity undermined by a continuing bi-gendered social structure that supports continued gender inequality. Underneath the seeming erasure of a rigid gender binary and its discriminatory norms lurks the persistence of men’s power and patriarchal privilege.
When the concept of gender emerged in the early 1970s, it presented a contrast with the prevailing belief in the biological underpinnings of the behavior of women and men. The concept of gender in this book rests on social construction – the contention that gender differences are made through socialization of children and maintained through surveillance of adults (West and Zimmerman 1987). The norms of a binary society coalesce into a gender regime supported by familiar interaction and legal strictures.
People construct gender for themselves and those they interact with by doing or performing gender. These processes institutionalize as gender structures (Martin 2004). Gender as process and structure are both complementary and in conflict. They are complementary in that process creates and maintains structures. They are in conflict because structuration delimits process. With the simultaneous fragmentation and persistence of the gender binary, process is not changing structure.
Politically, gender fragmented long before the current popularity of multiple genders. Under liberal feminism in the 1970s, the pressure was to treat women and men alike. In order to do so, women were allowed and encouraged to enter men’s professions, such as law and medicine, and to run for political office. Today, in the United States, the ceilings still being broken by women include space travel, combat, and being elected president. Other countries have chosen women heads of state.
The problem with this route to gender equality was that women were emulating men but men were not emulating women. The unspoken implication of gender neutrality was that women deserved the rights and privileges men had as long as they acted like men (Mackinnon 1987; Saguy, Williams, and Rees 2020). On the other hand, many of the most successful legal cases in the United States gave men rights, such as child custody, without their having to demonstrate women’s capabilities.
The counterargument to women’s perfect equality with men was to focus on women’s special qualities, particularly nurturance and emotional empathy. Women’s bodies and sexualities, which had been downplayed by liberal feminism, came to the fore. Radical feminism valorized women’s behavior and experiences and, in women’s studies, explored women’s history and sources of oppression in different gender regimes. Politically, the focus was on women rather than gender per se.
It soon became clear that women were not a global category of people. Intersectionality broke them up by racial and ethnic identity, social class, occupation, sexuality, relationship status, place of residence, age, bodily integrity, and so on. Each of these groups of women had its own political battles to fight, some of which involved allying with the men of their group rather than always envisaging them as the enemy. (See Lorber 2012 for a review of feminist theory and politics.)
In addition to intersectional fragmentation of gender, people today are finding different ways of doing gender, further fragmenting the binary. Multiple genders may seem revolutionary, but they are not changing the binary structure of most gender regimes. They are personal identities, not legal or bureaucratic statuses. Politically, their individualistic rebelliousness does not encourage a unified gender-resistant movement (Lorber 2018). The binary persists and is bolstered by much normative gendered behavior.
After a review of the premises of the social construction of gender, this book will explore both sides of the current paradox of gender – processes in the fragmentation of gender that are undermining the binary and processes in the performance of gender that reinforce the binary’s persistence. After that, I’ll explore why we aren’t having a gender