Despite these intersecting multiplicities, the western social world is divided into only two genders, and the members of each of these categories are made similar enough to be easily identifiable and different enough from the members of the other category to be allocated separate work and family responsibilities, and to be economically rewarded and culturally valued in significantly non-equivalent ways.
Social constructionist structural feminist theory argues that the gendered social order is constantly restabilized even when disrupted by individual and collective action, while postmodern feminism has shown how individuals can consciously and purposefully create disorder and categorical instability, opening the way to change (Flax 1987). The social order is an intersectional structure, with socially constructed individuals and groups ranged in a pyramidal hierarchy of power and powerlessness, privilege and disadvantage, normality and otherness. Because these social statuses and the rationales that legitimate their inequality are constructed in the interaction of everyday life and in cultural representations and solidified in institutional practices and laws, they can all be subverted by resistance, rebellion, and concerted political action.
But most people do gender all the time, usually without thinking. Whether they are privileged or oppressed, people do gender because not to do so is to be shamed as unmanly or unwomanly. In this dual sense of doing and done to lies the power of gender as a socially constructed system of inequality. This power is enormously strengthened by the invisibility of gender processes, the lack of reflection in doing gender, and the belief that the gender order is based on natural and immutable sex differences.
This bi-gendered social structure is what is currently being fragmented in multiple ways – by choosers of non-binary identities and those who queer or question its foundations and by transgender people who may straddle traditional understandings of women’s and men’s identities, by intersex activists and athletes, and by those erasing gendered language use. At the same time, bi-gendering is being upheld by beliefs in the biological source of gendered brains and behavior, research based on only two gender categories, standpoint stances that valorize women, hegemonic masculinity, the #MeToo movement, gender-based violence, and sexualities dependent on gendered partners.
Ethnomethodological insights into gender construction
Gender as a construct first appeared in Harold Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) in the story of Agnes. Agnes was a 19-year-old with fully developed breasts, penis, and testicles who came to a UCLA center for the study of people with “severe anatomical irregularities.” She presented as intersexual but in actuality was a normal boy who had been taking female hormone pills stolen from her mother since the age of twelve. What was important to Garfinkel was the way that Agnes achieved the gender display of a “natural, normal female” through voice pitch, gestures, dress, and other mannerisms that today we would call “emphasized femininity.” We never hear from Agnes, but the construction of gender identity by transgender people has subsequently been described in many of their own accounts and is now a staple of the constructionist literature (Bolin 1988; Devor 1997; Ekins 1997).
Buried in Garfinkel but subsequently spotlighted by gender studies analysts is the idea that it is not only transgender individuals who create a gender identity; everyone produces a version of masculinity or femininity socially and culturally acceptable enough to meet the expectations of normality in the eyes of others in their social groups. Building on Garfinkel, Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna, in Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (1978), showed that gender is produced as a social fact by presenting a self that is acceptable to others. Gender attribution 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