What is Gender?

Gender is ubiquitous; everybody* has one, and it seems to determine many things about ourselves and our relation to the world. Yet most of us -- excepting professionals like scholars, scientists, and historians -- rarely discuss it. Still, various traits and norms are ascribed to one gender or the other. We seem to have a common understanding of gender, to which we act in accordance in our day-to-day activities, though an explicit answer to the question "what is gender?" is difficult to articulate.

In the 1970s, sexologists and second-wave feminists alike sought to popularize the notion that "sex" and "gender" are separate categories. Sex, they argued, is a physical/biological fact determined by one's bodily composition, while gender is constituted in social expression, the interplay between one's psychological convictions and their resultant behaviors. Is this distinction really so clear-cut? As Anne Fausto-Sterling claims, the reality is much more complex than the sex/gender dichotomy would indicate:

Our bodies are too complex to provide clear-cut answers about sexual difference. The more we look for a simple physical basis for "sex," the more it becomes clear that "sex" is not a pure physical category. What bodily signals and functions we define as male or female come already entangled in our ideas about gender.

If gender is not clearly something biologically given or socially constructed, then how do we account for it? Any comprehensive picture of gender must explain both these aspects, since we have recognized that neither physiology nor sociality is entirely responsible for the formation of gender categories. The philosopher Judith Butler gives us a radical view on what constitutes gender:

Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceede; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time -- an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.

In Butler's formulation, gender is not a natural category to which our bodies conform, nor is it a trait of the body which is acted out socially. Rather, gender for Butler arises within a "social temporality"; gender appears to be substantive because people consistently perform according to gender roles. Any individual could, at any time, choose to behave in some way that is contrary to their established gender identity; usually, however, this does not even appear as an option, or at least not a serious one. Butler's view of gender identity as performative -- that is, as constituted in the fact that it is enacted -- satisfies our need for an account which explains its apparent socio-biological nature. Performative gender identity takes place upon the social stage, and it is also necessarily embodied.

But if we are to understand gender as something constituted in the actions of an embodied self, why then does gender seem so compulsory? Why are there only two genders, if people can behave however they choose? The answer is that we have been disciplined into such ways of thinking and behaving. For historian Michel Foucault, "discipline" in this context means both "a form of control or punishment" as well as "an academic body of knowledge." Through seemingly objective processes of scientific inquiry, medical professionals in the early 19th century and beyond characterized and systematized a picture of the gender binary that still frames many aspects of our lives today. Disciplinary power functions through normalization, and acts upon the physical, psychological, and social components of our lives in order to maintain a requisite level of standardization; this normalizing force, according to Foucault, is the function of sovereign power in the modern state. Standardized modes of gendered existence, founded upon "natural" biological traits, lend themselves best to the industrialized society in which our concepts about gender came to be formed; the nuclear family, anchored by the relation of man and woman as ideal categories, served as the foundation in a society oriented around production.

Our stable and enduring categories of gender identity arise from the interplay between the lived body as performance and these disciplinary forces of normalization. Because gender is an overriding norm, we expect to see it everywhere, and we expect to see it in its typical forms. This expectation results in subconscious policing of ourselves and others, inducing a panoptic effect that holds us all accountable for making our bodies conform to our gender roles. That our categories of gender identity endure in this way allows us to make sense of our gendered world; if we didn't have a consistent understanding of "woman," for instance, we would not be able to make knowledge claims or conjectures about the needs, roles, and desires of women in society. Thus we see that gender represents a particular socio-political problem: while categories of gender identity operate by imposing an oppressive (and often hierarchical) set of restrictive norms, they also provide us with the political foundation necessary for affecting social change against such oppressions.

The central issue will always be that of naming. Any label we give to ourselves is going to be more or less restrictive depending on its commonality. A gender designation of "David Bowie" may be more liberating but less useful than one like "genderqueer," and either of these has the advantage of being a personal (and political?) conviction rather than an imposition like "man" or "woman." Not to say that such terms are never willfully taken up as personal identifiers; they are, after all, the norm, and most people are content to operate within the gender binary. I only mean to say that if, as Fausto-Sterling asserts, gender "is a somatic fact created by a cultural effect," I believe it follows that a radical re-thinking and re-naming of our gendered selves is one way in which to deconstruct the gender binary and to dismantle the oppressive social structures which rely upon its insolubility.

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*Perhaps not. Is "agender" a gender or a lack thereof?

Sources:
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Dueling Dualisms. (Chapter 1 of her book Sexing the Body)
Butler, Judith. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.

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