ESSAY ON GENDER: 1) First, please write 2-3 sentences answering this question: What is Lorber's (pdf article, attached) central argument about the reason we distinguish people by gender? 2) Then, please write a well-developed essay in which you describe in detail what you have learned about the concept of gender through watching the Role Reversal documentary and reading each of these articles. What feels familiar to you? What surprised you? Please reference both the documentary and each of the 7 readings (including the article by Lorber) in your essay. It may be useful to use what you saw in the documentary to offer support for the ideas from the articles. Zara and Tyler: As promised I have left the Role Reversal video in my mailbox in the College of Education Deans' Office (HH 304) for you to pick up so you may watch it. The receptionist, Mylin, knows you will be coming, and your names are on the video. Please let me know if you have questions, and please note: you will need a VHS player to watch the video. If you don't have access to one, you can use one either in the Educational Technology Center on the 2nd floor of Hawkins Hall or in the Media Center of the Cook Library. please make reference to EACH of the 7 articles and the Role Reversal documentary in your essay. The 1st article in another attached 2) http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/08/09/210251404/why-arent-moregirls-attracted-to-physics 3) http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/12/stop-blaming-women-for-holding-themselvesback.html 4) http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/12/09/gender_bias_in_student_evaluations _professors_of_online_courses_who_present.html 5) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/upshot/a-child-helps-your-career-if-youre-aman.html?abt=0002&abg=0&_r=4 6) http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2014/08/21/342164460/lets-be-cops-but-thenwhat 7) http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2014/02/10/274652475/defining-masculinitydown-the-mans-mangame?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=DailyDigest&utm_campaign=20140210 SEX AND GENDER Reading 9 THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER JUDITH LORBER alking about gender for most people is the equivalent of fish talking about water. Gender is so much the routine ground of everyday activities that questioning its taken-for-granted assumptions and presuppositions is like thinking about whether the sun will come up.' Gender is so pervasive that in our society we assume it is bred into our genes. Most T Judith Lorber. (1994). "Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender." From Paradoxes of Gender, Yale University Press, 1994, pp. 13-15, 32-36. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press. 112 Sex and Gender people find it hard to believe that gender is constantly created and re-created out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and order of that social life. Yet gender, like culture, is a human production that depends on everyone constantly doing gender" (West and Zimmerman 1987). And everyone "does gender"without thinking about it. Today, on the subway, I saw a well-dressed man with a year-old child in a stroller. Yesterday, on a bus, I saw a man with a tiny baby in a carrier on his chest. Seeing men taking care of small children in public is increasingly common-e-at least in New York City, But both men were quite obviously stared at-and smiled at, approvingly. Everyone was doing gender-the men who were changing the role of fathers and the other passengers, who were applauding them silently. But there was more gendering going on that probably fewer people noticed. The baby was wearing a white crocheted cap and white clothes. You couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl. The child in the stroller was wearing a dark blue T-shirt and dark print pants. As they started to leave the train, the father put a Yankee baseball cap on the child's head. Ah, a boy- I thought. Then I noticed the gleam of tiny earrings in the child's ears, and as they got off, I saw the little flowered sneakers and lace-trimmed socks. Not a boy after all. Gender done. Gender is such a familiar part of daily life that it usually takes a deliberate disruption of our expectations of how women and men are supposed to act to pay attention to how it is produced. Gender signs and signals are so ubiquitous that we usually fail to note them-unless they are missing or ambiguous. Then we are uncomfortable until we have successfully placed the other person in a gender status; otherwise, we feel socially dislocated. In our society, in addition to man and woman, the status can be transvestite (a person who dresses in opposite-gender clothes) and transsexual (a person who has had sex-change surgery). Transvestites and transsexuals construct their gender status by dressing, speaking, walking, gesturing in the ways prescribed for women or men-whichever they want to be taken for-e-and so does any "normal" person. For the individual, gender construction starts with assignment to a sex category on the basis of what the genitalia look like at birth.2 Then babies are dressed or adorned in a way that displays the category because parents don't want to be constantly asked whether their baby is a girl or a boy. A sex category becomes a gender status through naming, dress, and the use of other gender markers. Once a child's gender is evident, others treat those in one gender differently from those in the other, and the children respond to the different treatment by feeling different and behaving differently. As soon as they can talk, they start to refer to themselves as members of their gender. Sex doesn't come into play again until puberty, but by that time, sexual feelings and desires and practices have been shaped by gendered norms and expectations. Adolescent boys and girls approach and avoid each other in an elaborately scripted and gendered mating dance. Parenting is gendered, with different expectations for mothers and for fathers, and people of II Judith Lorber 113 different genders work at different kinds of jobs. The work adults do as mothers and fathers and as low-level workers and high-level bosses, shapes women's and men's life experiences, and these experiences produce different feelings, consciousness, relationships, skills-ways of being that we call feminine or masculine.' All of these processes constitute the social construction of gender. Gendered roles change-today fathers are taking care of little children, girls and boys are wearing unisex clothing and getting the same education, women and men are working at the same jobs. Although many traditional social groups are quite strict about maintaining gender differences, in other social groups they seem to be blurring. Then why the one-year-old's earrings? Why is it still so important to mark a child as a girl or a boy, to make sure she is not taken for a boy or he for a girl? What would happen if they were? They would, quite literally, have changed places in their social world. To explain why gendering is done from birth, constantly and by everyone, we have to look not only at the way individuals experience gender but at gender as a social institution. As a social institution, gender is one of the major ways that human beings organize their lives. Human society depends on a predictable division of labor, a designated allocation of scarce goods, assigned responsibility for children and others who cannot care for themselves, common values and their systematic transmission to new members, legitimate leadership, music, art, stories, games, and other symbolic productions. One way of choosing people for the different tasks of society is on the basis of their talents, motivations, and competence-their demonstrated achievements. The other way is on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity-ascribed membership in a category of people. Although societies vary in the extent to which they use one or the other of these ways of allocating people to work and to carry out other responsibilities, every society uses gender and age grades. Every society classifies people as "girl and boy children," "girls and boys ready to be married," and "fully adult women and men," constructs similarities among them and differences between them, and assigns them to different roles and responsibilities. Personality characteristics, feelings, motivations, and ambitions flow from these different life experiences so that the members of these different groups become different kinds of people. The process of gendering and its outcome are legitimated by religion, law, science, and the society's entire set of values. GENDER AS PROCESS, STRATIFICATION. AND STRUCTURE As a social institution, gender is a process of creating distinguishable social statuses for the assignment of rights and responsibilities. As part of a stratification system that ranks these statuses unequally, gender is a major building block in the social structures built on these unequal statuses. Sex and Gender 114 As a process, gender creates the social differences that define "woman" and man." In social interaction throughout their lives, individuals learn what is expected, see what is expected, act and react in expected ways, and thus simultaneously construct and maintain the gender order: "The very injunction to be given gender takes place through discursive routes: to be a good mother" to be a heterosexually desirable object, to be a fit worker, in sum, to signify a multiplicity of guarantees in response to a variety of different demands all at once" Butler 1990, 145). Members of a social group neither make up gender as they go along nor exactly replicate in rote fashion what was done before. In almost every encounter, human beings produce gender, behaving in the ways they learned were appropriate for their gender status, or resisting or rebelling against these norms. Resistance and rebellion have altered gender norms, but so far they have rarely eroded the statuses. Gendered patterns of interaction acquire additional layers of gendered sexuality, parenting, and work behaviors in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Gendered norms and expectations are enforced through informal sanctions of gender-inappropriate behavior by peers and by formal punishment or threat of punishment by those in authority should behavior deviate too far from socially unposed standards for women and men. Everyday gendered interactions build gender into the family, the work process" and other organizations and institutions, which in turn reinforce gender expectations for individuals." Because gender is a process, there is room not only for modification and variation by individuals and small groups but also for institutionalized change (J. W. Scott 1988, 7). As part of a stratification system, gender ranks men above women of the same race and class. Women and men could be different but equal. In practice, the process of creating difference depends to a great extent on differential evaluation. As Nancy Jay (1981) says: "That which is defined, separated out, isolated from all else is A and pure. Not-A is necessarily impure, a random catchall, to which nothing is external except A and the principle of order that separates it from Not-A" (45). From the individual's point of view, whichever gender is A, the other is Not-A; gender boundaries tell the individual who is like him or her, and all the rest are unlike. From society's point of view, however, one gender is usually the touchstone, the normal, the dominant, and the other is different, deviant, and subordinate. In Western society, "man" is A, "wo-man" is Not-A. (Consider what a society would be like where WOlTIan was A and man Not-A.) The further dichotomization by race and class constructs the gradations of a heterogeneous society's stratification scheme. Thus, in the United States, white is A, African American is Not-A; middle class is A, working class is NotA, and "African-American women occupy a position whereby the inferior half of a series of these dichotomies converge" (p. H. Collins 1990). The dominant categories are the hegemonic ideals, taken so for granted as the way things should be that white is not ordinarily thought of as a race, middle class as a class, or men as a gender. The characteristics of these categories define the Other as that which lacks the valuable qualities the dominants exhibit. 11 a. ;.~ . .,.' Judith Lorber 115 In a gender-stratified society, what men do is usually valued more highly than what women do because men do it, even when their activities are very similar or the same. In different regions of southern India, for example, harvesting rice is men's work, shared work, or women's work: "Wherever a task is done by women it is considered easy, and where it is done by [men] it is considered difficult" (Mencher 1988, 104). A gathering and hunting society's survival usually depends on the nuts, grubs, and small animals brought in by the women's foraging trips, but when the men's hunt is successful, it is the occasion for a celebration. Conversely, because they are the superior group, white men do not have to do the" dirty work," such as housework; the most inferior group does it, usually poor women of color (Palmer 1989). Freudian psychoanalytic theory claims that boys must reject their mothers and deny the feminine in themselves in order to become men: "For boys the major goal is the achievement of personal masculine identification with their father and sense of secure masculine self, achieved through superego formation and disparagement of women" (Chodorow 1978, 165). Masculinity may be the outcome of boys' intrapsychic struggles to separate their identity from that of their mothers, but the proofs of masculinity are culturally shaped and usually ritualistic and symbolic (Gilmore 1990). The Marxist feminist explanation for gender inequality is that by demeaning women's abilities and keeping them from learning valuable technological skills, bosses preserve them as a cheap and exploitable reserve army of labor. Unionized men who could easily be replaced by women collude in this process because it allows them to monopolize the better-paid, more interesting, and more autonomous jobs: "Two factors emerge as helping men maintain their separation from women and their control of technological occupations. One is the active gendering of jobs and people. The second is the continual creation of sub-divisions in the work processes, and levels in work hierarchies, into which men can move in order to keep their distance from women" (Cockburn 1985, 13). Societies vary in the extent of the inequality in social status of their women and men members, but where there is inequality, the status "woman" (and its attendant behavior and role allocations) is usually held in lesser esteem than the status "man." Since gender is also intertwined with a society's other constructed statuses of differential evaluation-race, religion, occupation, class, country of origin, and so on-men and women members of the favored groups command more power, more prestige, and more property than the members of the disfavored groups. Within many social groups, however, men are advantaged over women. The more economic resources, such as education and job opportunities, are available to a group, the more they tend to be monopolized by men. In poorer groups that have few resources (such as working-class African Americans in the United States), women and men are more nearly equal, and the women may even outstrip the men in education and occupational status (Almquist 1987). 116 Sex and Gender As a structure, gender divides work in the home and in economic production, legitimates those in authority, and organizes sexuality and ernotionallife (Connell 1987, 91-142). As primary parents, women significantly influence children's psychological development and emotional attachments, in the process reproducing gender. Emergent sexuality is shaped by heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and sadomasochistic patterns that are gendered-different for girls and boys, and for women and men-so that sexual statuses reflect gender statuses. When gender is a major component of structured inequality, the devalued genders have less power, prestige, and economic rewards than the valued genders. In countries that discourage gender discrimination, many major roles are still gendered; women still do most of the domestic labor and child rearing, even while doing full-time paid work; women and men are segregated on the job and each does work considered "appropriate"; women's work is usually paid less than men's work. Men dominate the positions of authority and leadership in government, the military, and the law; cultural productions, religions, and sports reflect men's interests. In societies that create the greatest gender difference, such as Saudi Arabia, women are kept out of sight behind walls or veils, have no civil rights, and often create a cultural and emotional world of their own (Bernard 1981). But even in societies with less rigid gender boundaries, women and men spend much of their time with people of their own gender because of the way work and family are organized. This spatial separation of women and men reinforces gendered differences, identity, and ways of thinking and behaving (Coser 1986). Gender inequality-the devaluation of "women" and the social domination of "men"-has social functions and social history. It is not the result of sex, procreation, physiology. anatomy, hormones, or genetic predispositions. It is produced and maintained by identifiable social processes and built into the general social structure and individual identities deliberately and purposefully. The social order as we know it in Western societies is organized around racial, ethnic, class, and gender inequality. I contend, therefore, that the continuing purpose of gender as a modern social institution is to construct women as a group to be the subordinates of men as a group. ~-;" ~@J THE PARADOX OF HUMAN NATURE \,1 To say that sex, sexuality, and gender are all socially constructed is not to minimize their social power. These categorical imperatives govern our lives in the most profound and pervasive ways, through the social experiences and social practices of what Dorothy Smith calls the "everday / evernight world" (1990). The paradox of human nature is that it is always a manifestation of cultural meanings, social relationships, and power politics; "not Judith Lorber 117 a. biology, but culture, becomes destiny" Butler 1990, 8). Gendered people emerge not from physiology or sexual orientations but from the exigencies of the social order, mostly from the need for a reliable division of the work of food production and the social (not physical) reproduction of new members. The moral imperatives of religion and cultural representations guard the boundary lines among genders and ensure that what is demanded, what is permitted, and what is tabooed for the people in each gender is well known and followed by most (c. Davies 1982). Political power, control of scarce resources, and, if necessary, violence uphold the gendered social order in the face of resistance and rebellion. Most people, however, voluntarily go along with their society's prescriptions for those of their gender status, because the norms and expectations get built into their sense of worth and identity as [the way we] think, the way we see and hear and speak, the way we fantasy, and the way we feel. There is no core or bedrock in human nature below these endlessly looping processes of the social prod uction of sex and gender, self and other, identity and psyche, each of which is a "complex cultural construction" (J. Butler 1990, 36). For humans, the social is the natural. Therefore, "in its feminist senses, gender cannot mean simply the cultural appropriation of biological sexual difference. Sexual difference is itself a fundamental-and scientifically contested--construction. Both sex' and gender' are woven of multiple, asymmetrical strands of difference, charged with multifaceted dramatic narratives of domination and struggle" (Haraway 1990, 140). I I NOTES 1. Gender is, in Erving Coffman's words, an aspect of Felicity's Condition: "any arrangement which leads us to judge an individual's ... acts not to be a manifestation of strangeness. Behind Felicity's Condition is our sense of what it is to be sane" (1983:27). Also see Bern 1993; Frye 1983, 17-40; Coffman 1977. 2. In cases of ambiguity in countries with modem medicine, surgery is usually performed to make the genitalia more clearly male or female. 3. See J. Butler 1990 for an analysis of how doing gender is gender identity. 4. On the "Iogic of practice," or how the experience of gender is embedded in the norms of everyday interaction and the structure of formal organizations, see Acker 1990; Bourdieu [1980] 1990; Connell 1987; Smith 1987. REFERENCES Acker, Joan. 1990. "Hierarchies, jobs, and bodies: A theory of gendered tions," Gender & Society 4: 139-58. Almquist, Elizabeth M. 1987. "Labor groups," Gender & Society 1: 400-14. market gendered inequality organiza- in minority Bern, Sandara Lipsitz. 1993. The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality. New Haven: Yale University Press. 118 Sex and Gender Bernard, Jessie. 1981. The Female World. New York: Free Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. [1980] 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. Chodorow, Nancy, 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University fornia Press. . of Cali- Cockburn, Cynthia. 1985. Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men and Technical KnowhO'W.London: Pluto Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990., "The social construction 14: 745-73. of black feminist thought," Signs Connell, R. [Robert] W. 1987. Gender and PO'Wer:Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Coser, Rose Laub. 1986. "Cognitive structure and the use of social space," Sociological Forum 1: 1-26. Davies, Christie. 1982. "Sexual taboos and social boundaries," Sociology 87: 1032-63. American Journal of Dwyer, Daisy, and Judith Bruce (eds.). 1988. A Home Divided: Women and Income in the Third World. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Frye, Marilyn, 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press. Gilmore, David D. 1990. Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Coffman, Erving. 1977. "The arrangement between the sexes," Theory and Society 4: 301-33. Haraway, Donna. 1990. "Investment strategies for the evolving portfolio of primate females," in Jacobus, Keller, and Shuttleworth. Jacobus, Mary, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (eds.). (1990). Body/politics: Women and the Discourse of Science. New York and London: Routledge. Jay, Nancy. 1981. "Gender and dichotomy," Feminist Studies 7: 38-56. Mencher, Joan. 1988. "Women's work and poverty: Women's contribution to household maintenance in South India/ in Dwyer and Bruce. Palmer, Phyllis. 1989. Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Scott, Joan Wallach. 1988. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. --. 1990. The Conceptual Practices of PO'Wer:A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. West, Candace, 125-51. and Don Zimmerman. 1987. "Doing gender." Gender & Society 1: ESSAY ON GENDER: 1) First, please write 2-3 sentences answering this question: What is Lorber's (pdf article, attached) central argument about the reason we distinguish people by gender? 2) Then, please write a well-developed essay in which you describe in detail what you have learned about the concept of gender through watching the Role Reversal documentary and reading each of these articles. What feels familiar to you? What surprised you? Please reference both the documentary and each of the 7 readings (including the article by Lorber) in your essay. It may be useful to use what you saw in the documentary to offer support for the ideas from the articles. Zara and Tyler: As promised I have left the Role Reversal video in my mailbox in the College of Education Deans' Office (HH 304) for you to pick up so you may watch it. The receptionist, Mylin, knows you will be coming, and your names are on the video. Please let me know if you have questions, and please note: you will need a VHS player to watch the video. If you don't have access to one, you can use one either in the Educational Technology Center on the 2nd floor of Hawkins Hall or in the Media Center of the Cook Library. please make reference to EACH of the 7 articles and the Role Reversal documentary in your essay. The 1st article in another attached 2) http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/08/09/210251404/why-arent-moregirls-attracted-to-physics 3) http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/12/stop-blaming-women-for-holding-themselvesback.html 4) http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/12/09/gender_bias_in_student_evaluations _professors_of_online_courses_who_present.html 5) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/upshot/a-child-helps-your-career-if-youre-aman.html?abt=0002&abg=0&_r=4 6) http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2014/08/21/342164460/lets-be-cops-but-thenwhat 7) http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2014/02/10/274652475/defining-masculinitydown-the-mans-mangame?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=DailyDigest&utm_campaign=20140210 SEX AND GENDER Reading 9 THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER JUDITH LORBER alking about gender for most people is the equivalent of fish talking about water. Gender is so much the routine ground of everyday activities that questioning its taken-for-granted assumptions and presuppositions is like thinking about whether the sun will come up.' Gender is so pervasive that in our society we assume it is bred into our genes. Most T Judith Lorber. (1994). "Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender." From Paradoxes of Gender, Yale University Press, 1994, pp. 13-15, 32-36. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press. 112 Sex and Gender people find it hard to believe that gender is constantly created and re-created out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and order of that social life. Yet gender, like culture, is a human production that depends on everyone constantly doing gender" (West and Zimmerman 1987). And everyone "does gender"without thinking about it. Today, on the subway, I saw a well-dressed man with a year-old child in a stroller. Yesterday, on a bus, I saw a man with a tiny baby in a carrier on his chest. Seeing men taking care of small children in public is increasingly common-e-at least in New York City, But both men were quite obviously stared at-and smiled at, approvingly. Everyone was doing gender-the men who were changing the role of fathers and the other passengers, who were applauding them silently. But there was more gendering going on that probably fewer people noticed. The baby was wearing a white crocheted cap and white clothes. You couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl. The child in the stroller was wearing a dark blue T-shirt and dark print pants. As they started to leave the train, the father put a Yankee baseball cap on the child's head. Ah, a boy- I thought. Then I noticed the gleam of tiny earrings in the child's ears, and as they got off, I saw the little flowered sneakers and lace-trimmed socks. Not a boy after all. Gender done. Gender is such a familiar part of daily life that it usually takes a deliberate disruption of our expectations of how women and men are supposed to act to pay attention to how it is produced. Gender signs and signals are so ubiquitous that we usually fail to note them-unless they are missing or ambiguous. Then we are uncomfortable until we have successfully placed the other person in a gender status; otherwise, we feel socially dislocated. In our society, in addition to man and woman, the status can be transvestite (a person who dresses in opposite-gender clothes) and transsexual (a person who has had sex-change surgery). Transvestites and transsexuals construct their gender status by dressing, speaking, walking, gesturing in the ways prescribed for women or men-whichever they want to be taken for-e-and so does any "normal" person. For the individual, gender construction starts with assignment to a sex category on the basis of what the genitalia look like at birth.2 Then babies are dressed or adorned in a way that displays the category because parents don't want to be constantly asked whether their baby is a girl or a boy. A sex category becomes a gender status through naming, dress, and the use of other gender markers. Once a child's gender is evident, others treat those in one gender differently from those in the other, and the children respond to the different treatment by feeling different and behaving differently. As soon as they can talk, they start to refer to themselves as members of their gender. Sex doesn't come into play again until puberty, but by that time, sexual feelings and desires and practices have been shaped by gendered norms and expectations. Adolescent boys and girls approach and avoid each other in an elaborately scripted and gendered mating dance. Parenting is gendered, with different expectations for mothers and for fathers, and people of II Judith Lorber 113 different genders work at different kinds of jobs. The work adults do as mothers and fathers and as low-level workers and high-level bosses, shapes women's and men's life experiences, and these experiences produce different feelings, consciousness, relationships, skills-ways of being that we call feminine or masculine.' All of these processes constitute the social construction of gender. Gendered roles change-today fathers are taking care of little children, girls and boys are wearing unisex clothing and getting the same education, women and men are working at the same jobs. Although many traditional social groups are quite strict about maintaining gender differences, in other social groups they seem to be blurring. Then why the one-year-old's earrings? Why is it still so important to mark a child as a girl or a boy, to make sure she is not taken for a boy or he for a girl? What would happen if they were? They would, quite literally, have changed places in their social world. To explain why gendering is done from birth, constantly and by everyone, we have to look not only at the way individuals experience gender but at gender as a social institution. As a social institution, gender is one of the major ways that human beings organize their lives. Human society depends on a predictable division of labor, a designated allocation of scarce goods, assigned responsibility for children and others who cannot care for themselves, common values and their systematic transmission to new members, legitimate leadership, music, art, stories, games, and other symbolic productions. One way of choosing people for the different tasks of society is on the basis of their talents, motivations, and competence-their demonstrated achievements. The other way is on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity-ascribed membership in a category of people. Although societies vary in the extent to which they use one or the other of these ways of allocating people to work and to carry out other responsibilities, every society uses gender and age grades. Every society classifies people as "girl and boy children," "girls and boys ready to be married," and "fully adult women and men," constructs similarities among them and differences between them, and assigns them to different roles and responsibilities. Personality characteristics, feelings, motivations, and ambitions flow from these different life experiences so that the members of these different groups become different kinds of people. The process of gendering and its outcome are legitimated by religion, law, science, and the society's entire set of values. GENDER AS PROCESS, STRATIFICATION. AND STRUCTURE As a social institution, gender is a process of creating distinguishable social statuses for the assignment of rights and responsibilities. As part of a stratification system that ranks these statuses unequally, gender is a major building block in the social structures built on these unequal statuses. Sex and Gender 114 As a process, gender creates the social differences that define "woman" and man." In social interaction throughout their lives, individuals learn what is expected, see what is expected, act and react in expected ways, and thus simultaneously construct and maintain the gender order: "The very injunction to be given gender takes place through discursive routes: to be a good mother" to be a heterosexually desirable object, to be a fit worker, in sum, to signify a multiplicity of guarantees in response to a variety of different demands all at once" Butler 1990, 145). Members of a social group neither make up gender as they go along nor exactly replicate in rote fashion what was done before. In almost every encounter, human beings produce gender, behaving in the ways they learned were appropriate for their gender status, or resisting or rebelling against these norms. Resistance and rebellion have altered gender norms, but so far they have rarely eroded the statuses. Gendered patterns of interaction acquire additional layers of gendered sexuality, parenting, and work behaviors in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Gendered norms and expectations are enforced through informal sanctions of gender-inappropriate behavior by peers and by formal punishment or threat of punishment by those in authority should behavior deviate too far from socially unposed standards for women and men. Everyday gendered interactions build gender into the family, the work process" and other organizations and institutions, which in turn reinforce gender expectations for individuals." Because gender is a process, there is room not only for modification and variation by individuals and small groups but also for institutionalized change (J. W. Scott 1988, 7). As part of a stratification system, gender ranks men above women of the same race and class. Women and men could be different but equal. In practice, the process of creating difference depends to a great extent on differential evaluation. As Nancy Jay (1981) says: "That which is defined, separated out, isolated from all else is A and pure. Not-A is necessarily impure, a random catchall, to which nothing is external except A and the principle of order that separates it from Not-A" (45). From the individual's point of view, whichever gender is A, the other is Not-A; gender boundaries tell the individual who is like him or her, and all the rest are unlike. From society's point of view, however, one gender is usually the touchstone, the normal, the dominant, and the other is different, deviant, and subordinate. In Western society, "man" is A, "wo-man" is Not-A. (Consider what a society would be like where WOlTIan was A and man Not-A.) The further dichotomization by race and class constructs the gradations of a heterogeneous society's stratification scheme. Thus, in the United States, white is A, African American is Not-A; middle class is A, working class is NotA, and "African-American women occupy a position whereby the inferior half of a series of these dichotomies converge" (p. H. Collins 1990). The dominant categories are the hegemonic ideals, taken so for granted as the way things should be that white is not ordinarily thought of as a race, middle class as a class, or men as a gender. The characteristics of these categories define the Other as that which lacks the valuable qualities the dominants exhibit. 11 a. ;.~ . .,.' Judith Lorber 115 In a gender-stratified society, what men do is usually valued more highly than what women do because men do it, even when their activities are very similar or the same. In different regions of southern India, for example, harvesting rice is men's work, shared work, or women's work: "Wherever a task is done by women it is considered easy, and where it is done by [men] it is considered difficult" (Mencher 1988, 104). A gathering and hunting society's survival usually depends on the nuts, grubs, and small animals brought in by the women's foraging trips, but when the men's hunt is successful, it is the occasion for a celebration. Conversely, because they are the superior group, white men do not have to do the" dirty work," such as housework; the most inferior group does it, usually poor women of color (Palmer 1989). Freudian psychoanalytic theory claims that boys must reject their mothers and deny the feminine in themselves in order to become men: "For boys the major goal is the achievement of personal masculine identification with their father and sense of secure masculine self, achieved through superego formation and disparagement of women" (Chodorow 1978, 165). Masculinity may be the outcome of boys' intrapsychic struggles to separate their identity from that of their mothers, but the proofs of masculinity are culturally shaped and usually ritualistic and symbolic (Gilmore 1990). The Marxist feminist explanation for gender inequality is that by demeaning women's abilities and keeping them from learning valuable technological skills, bosses preserve them as a cheap and exploitable reserve army of labor. Unionized men who could easily be replaced by women collude in this process because it allows them to monopolize the better-paid, more interesting, and more autonomous jobs: "Two factors emerge as helping men maintain their separation from women and their control of technological occupations. One is the active gendering of jobs and people. The second is the continual creation of sub-divisions in the work processes, and levels in work hierarchies, into which men can move in order to keep their distance from women" (Cockburn 1985, 13). Societies vary in the extent of the inequality in social status of their women and men members, but where there is inequality, the status "woman" (and its attendant behavior and role allocations) is usually held in lesser esteem than the status "man." Since gender is also intertwined with a society's other constructed statuses of differential evaluation-race, religion, occupation, class, country of origin, and so on-men and women members of the favored groups command more power, more prestige, and more property than the members of the disfavored groups. Within many social groups, however, men are advantaged over women. The more economic resources, such as education and job opportunities, are available to a group, the more they tend to be monopolized by men. In poorer groups that have few resources (such as working-class African Americans in the United States), women and men are more nearly equal, and the women may even outstrip the men in education and occupational status (Almquist 1987). 116 Sex and Gender As a structure, gender divides work in the home and in economic production, legitimates those in authority, and organizes sexuality and ernotionallife (Connell 1987, 91-142). As primary parents, women significantly influence children's psychological development and emotional attachments, in the process reproducing gender. Emergent sexuality is shaped by heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and sadomasochistic patterns that are gendered-different for girls and boys, and for women and men-so that sexual statuses reflect gender statuses. When gender is a major component of structured inequality, the devalued genders have less power, prestige, and economic rewards than the valued genders. In countries that discourage gender discrimination, many major roles are still gendered; women still do most of the domestic labor and child rearing, even while doing full-time paid work; women and men are segregated on the job and each does work considered "appropriate"; women's work is usually paid less than men's work. Men dominate the positions of authority and leadership in government, the military, and the law; cultural productions, religions, and sports reflect men's interests. In societies that create the greatest gender difference, such as Saudi Arabia, women are kept out of sight behind walls or veils, have no civil rights, and often create a cultural and emotional world of their own (Bernard 1981). But even in societies with less rigid gender boundaries, women and men spend much of their time with people of their own gender because of the way work and family are organized. This spatial separation of women and men reinforces gendered differences, identity, and ways of thinking and behaving (Coser 1986). Gender inequality-the devaluation of "women" and the social domination of "men"-has social functions and social history. It is not the result of sex, procreation, physiology. anatomy, hormones, or genetic predispositions. It is produced and maintained by identifiable social processes and built into the general social structure and individual identities deliberately and purposefully. The social order as we know it in Western societies is organized around racial, ethnic, class, and gender inequality. I contend, therefore, that the continuing purpose of gender as a modern social institution is to construct women as a group to be the subordinates of men as a group. ~-;" ~@J THE PARADOX OF HUMAN NATURE \,1 To say that sex, sexuality, and gender are all socially constructed is not to minimize their social power. These categorical imperatives govern our lives in the most profound and pervasive ways, through the social experiences and social practices of what Dorothy Smith calls the "everday / evernight world" (1990). The paradox of human nature is that it is always a manifestation of cultural meanings, social relationships, and power politics; "not Judith Lorber 117 a. biology, but culture, becomes destiny" Butler 1990, 8). Gendered people emerge not from physiology or sexual orientations but from the exigencies of the social order, mostly from the need for a reliable division of the work of food production and the social (not physical) reproduction of new members. The moral imperatives of religion and cultural representations guard the boundary lines among genders and ensure that what is demanded, what is permitted, and what is tabooed for the people in each gender is well known and followed by most (c. Davies 1982). Political power, control of scarce resources, and, if necessary, violence uphold the gendered social order in the face of resistance and rebellion. Most people, however, voluntarily go along with their society's prescriptions for those of their gender status, because the norms and expectations get built into their sense of worth and identity as [the way we] think, the way we see and hear and speak, the way we fantasy, and the way we feel. There is no core or bedrock in human nature below these endlessly looping processes of the social prod uction of sex and gender, self and other, identity and psyche, each of which is a "complex cultural construction" (J. Butler 1990, 36). For humans, the social is the natural. Therefore, "in its feminist senses, gender cannot mean simply the cultural appropriation of biological sexual difference. Sexual difference is itself a fundamental-and scientifically contested--construction. Both sex' and gender' are woven of multiple, asymmetrical strands of difference, charged with multifaceted dramatic narratives of domination and struggle" (Haraway 1990, 140). I I NOTES 1. Gender is, in Erving Coffman's words, an aspect of Felicity's Condition: "any arrangement which leads us to judge an individual's ... acts not to be a manifestation of strangeness. Behind Felicity's Condition is our sense of what it is to be sane" (1983:27). Also see Bern 1993; Frye 1983, 17-40; Coffman 1977. 2. In cases of ambiguity in countries with modem medicine, surgery is usually performed to make the genitalia more clearly male or female. 3. See J. Butler 1990 for an analysis of how doing gender is gender identity. 4. On the "Iogic of practice," or how the experience of gender is embedded in the norms of everyday interaction and the structure of formal organizations, see Acker 1990; Bourdieu [1980] 1990; Connell 1987; Smith 1987. REFERENCES Acker, Joan. 1990. "Hierarchies, jobs, and bodies: A theory of gendered tions," Gender & Society 4: 139-58. Almquist, Elizabeth M. 1987. "Labor groups," Gender & Society 1: 400-14. market gendered inequality organiza- in minority Bern, Sandara Lipsitz. 1993. The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality. New Haven: Yale University Press. 118 Sex and Gender Bernard, Jessie. 1981. The Female World. New York: Free Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. [1980] 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. Chodorow, Nancy, 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University fornia Press. . of Cali- Cockburn, Cynthia. 1985. Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men and Technical KnowhO'W.London: Pluto Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990., "The social construction 14: 745-73. of black feminist thought," Signs Connell, R. [Robert] W. 1987. Gender and PO'Wer:Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Coser, Rose Laub. 1986. "Cognitive structure and the use of social space," Sociological Forum 1: 1-26. Davies, Christie. 1982. "Sexual taboos and social boundaries," Sociology 87: 1032-63. American Journal of Dwyer, Daisy, and Judith Bruce (eds.). 1988. A Home Divided: Women and Income in the Third World. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Frye, Marilyn, 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press. Gilmore, David D. 1990. Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Coffman, Erving. 1977. "The arrangement between the sexes," Theory and Society 4: 301-33. Haraway, Donna. 1990. "Investment strategies for the evolving portfolio of primate females," in Jacobus, Keller, and Shuttleworth. Jacobus, Mary, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (eds.). (1990). Body/politics: Women and the Discourse of Science. New York and London: Routledge. Jay, Nancy. 1981. "Gender and dichotomy," Feminist Studies 7: 38-56. Mencher, Joan. 1988. "Women's work and poverty: Women's contribution to household maintenance in South India/ in Dwyer and Bruce. Palmer, Phyllis. 1989. Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Scott, Joan Wallach. 1988. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. --. 1990. The Conceptual Practices of PO'Wer:A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. West, Candace, 125-51. and Don Zimmerman. 1987. "Doing gender." Gender & Society 1: ESSAY ON GENDER: 1) First, please write 2-3 sentences answering this question: What is Lorber's (pdf article, attached) central argument about the reason we distinguish people by gender? 2) Then, please write a well-developed essay in which you describe in detail what you have learned about the concept of gender through watching the Role Reversal documentary and reading each of these articles. What feels familiar to you? What surprised you? Please reference both the documentary and each of the 7 readings (including the article by Lorber) in your essay. It may be useful to use what you saw in the documentary to offer support for the ideas from the articles. Zara and Tyler: the Role Reversal video please make reference to EACH of the 7 articles and the Role Reversal documentary in your essay. The 1st article in another attached 2) http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/08/09/210251404/why-arent-moregirls-attracted-to-physics 3) http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/12/stop-blaming-women-for-holding-themselvesback.html 4) http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/12/09/gender_bias_in_student_evaluations _professors_of_online_courses_who_present.html 5) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/upshot/a-child-helps-your-career-if-youre-aman.html?abt=0002&abg=0&_r=4 6) http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2014/08/21/342164460/lets-be-cops-but-thenwhat 7) http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2014/02/10/274652475/defining-masculinitydown-the-mans-mangame?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=DailyDigest&utm_campaign=20140210 SEX AND GENDER Reading 9 THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER JUDITH LORBER alking about gender for most people is the equivalent of fish talking about water. Gender is so much the routine ground of everyday activities that questioning its taken-for-granted assumptions and presuppositions is like thinking about whether the sun will come up.' Gender is so pervasive that in our society we assume it is bred into our genes. Most T Judith Lorber. (1994). "Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender." From Paradoxes of Gender, Yale University Press, 1994, pp. 13-15, 32-36. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press. 112 Sex and Gender people find it hard to believe that gender is constantly created and re-created out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and order of that social life. Yet gender, like culture, is a human production that depends on everyone constantly doing gender" (West and Zimmerman 1987). And everyone "does gender"without thinking about it. Today, on the subway, I saw a well-dressed man with a year-old child in a stroller. Yesterday, on a bus, I saw a man with a tiny baby in a carrier on his chest. Seeing men taking care of small children in public is increasingly common-e-at least in New York City, But both men were quite obviously stared at-and smiled at, approvingly. Everyone was doing gender-the men who were changing the role of fathers and the other passengers, who were applauding them silently. But there was more gendering going on that probably fewer people noticed. The baby was wearing a white crocheted cap and white clothes. You couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl. The child in the stroller was wearing a dark blue T-shirt and dark print pants. As they started to leave the train, the father put a Yankee baseball cap on the child's head. Ah, a boy- I thought. Then I noticed the gleam of tiny earrings in the child's ears, and as they got off, I saw the little flowered sneakers and lace-trimmed socks. Not a boy after all. Gender done. Gender is such a familiar part of daily life that it usually takes a deliberate disruption of our expectations of how women and men are supposed to act to pay attention to how it is produced. Gender signs and signals are so ubiquitous that we usually fail to note them-unless they are missing or ambiguous. Then we are uncomfortable until we have successfully placed the other person in a gender status; otherwise, we feel socially dislocated. In our society, in addition to man and woman, the status can be transvestite (a person who dresses in opposite-gender clothes) and transsexual (a person who has had sex-change surgery). Transvestites and transsexuals construct their gender status by dressing, speaking, walking, gesturing in the ways prescribed for women or men-whichever they want to be taken for-e-and so does any "normal" person. For the individual, gender construction starts with assignment to a sex category on the basis of what the genitalia look like at birth.2 Then babies are dressed or adorned in a way that displays the category because parents don't want to be constantly asked whether their baby is a girl or a boy. A sex category becomes a gender status through naming, dress, and the use of other gender markers. Once a child's gender is evident, others treat those in one gender differently from those in the other, and the children respond to the different treatment by feeling different and behaving differently. As soon as they can talk, they start to refer to themselves as members of their gender. Sex doesn't come into play again until puberty, but by that time, sexual feelings and desires and practices have been shaped by gendered norms and expectations. Adolescent boys and girls approach and avoid each other in an elaborately scripted and gendered mating dance. Parenting is gendered, with different expectations for mothers and for fathers, and people of II Judith Lorber 113 different genders work at different kinds of jobs. The work adults do as mothers and fathers and as low-level workers and high-level bosses, shapes women's and men's life experiences, and these experiences produce different feelings, consciousness, relationships, skills-ways of being that we call feminine or masculine.' All of these processes constitute the social construction of gender. Gendered roles change-today fathers are taking care of little children, girls and boys are wearing unisex clothing and getting the same education, women and men are working at the same jobs. Although many traditional social groups are quite strict about maintaining gender differences, in other social groups they seem to be blurring. Then why the one-year-old's earrings? Why is it still so important to mark a child as a girl or a boy, to make sure she is not taken for a boy or he for a girl? What would happen if they were? They would, quite literally, have changed places in their social world. To explain why gendering is done from birth, constantly and by everyone, we have to look not only at the way individuals experience gender but at gender as a social institution. As a social institution, gender is one of the major ways that human beings organize their lives. Human society depends on a predictable division of labor, a designated allocation of scarce goods, assigned responsibility for children and others who cannot care for themselves, common values and their systematic transmission to new members, legitimate leadership, music, art, stories, games, and other symbolic productions. One way of choosing people for the different tasks of society is on the basis of their talents, motivations, and competence-their demonstrated achievements. The other way is on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity-ascribed membership in a category of people. Although societies vary in the extent to which they use one or the other of these ways of allocating people to work and to carry out other responsibilities, every society uses gender and age grades. Every society classifies people as "girl and boy children," "girls and boys ready to be married," and "fully adult women and men," constructs similarities among them and differences between them, and assigns them to different roles and responsibilities. Personality characteristics, feelings, motivations, and ambitions flow from these different life experiences so that the members of these different groups become different kinds of people. The process of gendering and its outcome are legitimated by religion, law, science, and the society's entire set of values. GENDER AS PROCESS, STRATIFICATION. AND STRUCTURE As a social institution, gender is a process of creating distinguishable social statuses for the assignment of rights and responsibilities. As part of a stratification system that ranks these statuses unequally, gender is a major building block in the social structures built on these unequal statuses. Sex and Gender 114 As a process, gender creates the social differences that define "woman" and man." In social interaction throughout their lives, individuals learn what is expected, see what is expected, act and react in expected ways, and thus simultaneously construct and maintain the gender order: "The very injunction to be given gender takes place through discursive routes: to be a good mother" to be a heterosexually desirable object, to be a fit worker, in sum, to signify a multiplicity of guarantees in response to a variety of different demands all at once" Butler 1990, 145). Members of a social group neither make up gender as they go along nor exactly replicate in rote fashion what was done before. In almost every encounter, human beings produce gender, behaving in the ways they learned were appropriate for their gender status, or resisting or rebelling against these norms. Resistance and rebellion have altered gender norms, but so far they have rarely eroded the statuses. Gendered patterns of interaction acquire additional layers of gendered sexuality, parenting, and work behaviors in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Gendered norms and expectations are enforced through informal sanctions of gender-inappropriate behavior by peers and by formal punishment or threat of punishment by those in authority should behavior deviate too far from socially unposed standards for women and men. Everyday gendered interactions build gender into the family, the work process" and other organizations and institutions, which in turn reinforce gender expectations for individuals." Because gender is a process, there is room not only for modification and variation by individuals and small groups but also for institutionalized change (J. W. Scott 1988, 7). As part of a stratification system, gender ranks men above women of the same race and class. Women and men could be different but equal. In practice, the process of creating difference depends to a great extent on differential evaluation. As Nancy Jay (1981) says: "That which is defined, separated out, isolated from all else is A and pure. Not-A is necessarily impure, a random catchall, to which nothing is external except A and the principle of order that separates it from Not-A" (45). From the individual's point of view, whichever gender is A, the other is Not-A; gender boundaries tell the individual who is like him or her, and all the rest are unlike. From society's point of view, however, one gender is usually the touchstone, the normal, the dominant, and the other is different, deviant, and subordinate. In Western society, "man" is A, "wo-man" is Not-A. (Consider what a society would be like where WOlTIan was A and man Not-A.) The further dichotomization by race and class constructs the gradations of a heterogeneous society's stratification scheme. Thus, in the United States, white is A, African American is Not-A; middle class is A, working class is NotA, and "African-American women occupy a position whereby the inferior half of a series of these dichotomies converge" (p. H. Collins 1990). The dominant categories are the hegemonic ideals, taken so for granted as the way things should be that white is not ordinarily thought of as a race, middle class as a class, or men as a gender. The characteristics of these categories define the Other as that which lacks the valuable qualities the dominants exhibit. 11 a. ;.~ . .,.' Judith Lorber 115 In a gender-stratified society, what men do is usually valued more highly than what women do because men do it, even when their activities are very similar or the same. In different regions of southern India, for example, harvesting rice is men's work, shared work, or women's work: "Wherever a task is done by women it is considered easy, and where it is done by [men] it is considered difficult" (Mencher 1988, 104). A gathering and hunting society's survival usually depends on the nuts, grubs, and small animals brought in by the women's foraging trips, but when the men's hunt is successful, it is the occasion for a celebration. Conversely, because they are the superior group, white men do not have to do the" dirty work," such as housework; the most inferior group does it, usually poor women of color (Palmer 1989). Freudian psychoanalytic theory claims that boys must reject their mothers and deny the feminine in themselves in order to become men: "For boys the major goal is the achievement of personal masculine identification with their father and sense of secure masculine self, achieved through superego formation and disparagement of women" (Chodorow 1978, 165). Masculinity may be the outcome of boys' intrapsychic struggles to separate their identity from that of their mothers, but the proofs of masculinity are culturally shaped and usually ritualistic and symbolic (Gilmore 1990). The Marxist feminist explanation for gender inequality is that by demeaning women's abilities and keeping them from learning valuable technological skills, bosses preserve them as a cheap and exploitable reserve army of labor. Unionized men who could easily be replaced by women collude in this process because it allows them to monopolize the better-paid, more interesting, and more autonomous jobs: "Two factors emerge as helping men maintain their separation from women and their control of technological occupations. One is the active gendering of jobs and people. The second is the continual creation of sub-divisions in the work processes, and levels in work hierarchies, into which men can move in order to keep their distance from women" (Cockburn 1985, 13). Societies vary in the extent of the inequality in social status of their women and men members, but where there is inequality, the status "woman" (and its attendant behavior and role allocations) is usually held in lesser esteem than the status "man." Since gender is also intertwined with a society's other constructed statuses of differential evaluation-race, religion, occupation, class, country of origin, and so on-men and women members of the favored groups command more power, more prestige, and more property than the members of the disfavored groups. Within many social groups, however, men are advantaged over women. The more economic resources, such as education and job opportunities, are available to a group, the more they tend to be monopolized by men. In poorer groups that have few resources (such as working-class African Americans in the United States), women and men are more nearly equal, and the women may even outstrip the men in education and occupational status (Almquist 1987). 116 Sex and Gender As a structure, gender divides work in the home and in economic production, legitimates those in authority, and organizes sexuality and ernotionallife (Connell 1987, 91-142). As primary parents, women significantly influence children's psychological development and emotional attachments, in the process reproducing gender. Emergent sexuality is shaped by heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and sadomasochistic patterns that are gendered-different for girls and boys, and for women and men-so that sexual statuses reflect gender statuses. When gender is a major component of structured inequality, the devalued genders have less power, prestige, and economic rewards than the valued genders. In countries that discourage gender discrimination, many major roles are still gendered; women still do most of the domestic labor and child rearing, even while doing full-time paid work; women and men are segregated on the job and each does work considered "appropriate"; women's work is usually paid less than men's work. Men dominate the positions of authority and leadership in government, the military, and the law; cultural productions, religions, and sports reflect men's interests. In societies that create the greatest gender difference, such as Saudi Arabia, women are kept out of sight behind walls or veils, have no civil rights, and often create a cultural and emotional world of their own (Bernard 1981). But even in societies with less rigid gender boundaries, women and men spend much of their time with people of their own gender because of the way work and family are organized. This spatial separation of women and men reinforces gendered differences, identity, and ways of thinking and behaving (Coser 1986). Gender inequality-the devaluation of "women" and the social domination of "men"-has social functions and social history. It is not the result of sex, procreation, physiology. anatomy, hormones, or genetic predispositions. It is produced and maintained by identifiable social processes and built into the general social structure and individual identities deliberately and purposefully. The social order as we know it in Western societies is organized around racial, ethnic, class, and gender inequality. I contend, therefore, that the continuing purpose of gender as a modern social institution is to construct women as a group to be the subordinates of men as a group. ~-;" ~@J THE PARADOX OF HUMAN NATURE \,1 To say that sex, sexuality, and gender are all socially constructed is not to minimize their social power. These categorical imperatives govern our lives in the most profound and pervasive ways, through the social experiences and social practices of what Dorothy Smith calls the "everday / evernight world" (1990). The paradox of human nature is that it is always a manifestation of cultural meanings, social relationships, and power politics; "not Judith Lorber 117 a. biology, but culture, becomes destiny" Butler 1990, 8). Gendered people emerge not from physiology or sexual orientations but from the exigencies of the social order, mostly from the need for a reliable division of the work of food production and the social (not physical) reproduction of new members. The moral imperatives of religion and cultural representations guard the boundary lines among genders and ensure that what is demanded, what is permitted, and what is tabooed for the people in each gender is well known and followed by most (c. Davies 1982). Political power, control of scarce resources, and, if necessary, violence uphold the gendered social order in the face of resistance and rebellion. Most people, however, voluntarily go along with their society's prescriptions for those of their gender status, because the norms and expectations get built into their sense of worth and identity as [the way we] think, the way we see and hear and speak, the way we fantasy, and the way we feel. There is no core or bedrock in human nature below these endlessly looping processes of the social prod uction of sex and gender, self and other, identity and psyche, each of which is a "complex cultural construction" (J. Butler 1990, 36). For humans, the social is the natural. Therefore, "in its feminist senses, gender cannot mean simply the cultural appropriation of biological sexual difference. Sexual difference is itself a fundamental-and scientifically contested--construction. Both sex' and gender' are woven of multiple, asymmetrical strands of difference, charged with multifaceted dramatic narratives of domination and struggle" (Haraway 1990, 140). I I NOTES 1. Gender is, in Erving Coffman's words, an aspect of Felicity's Condition: "any arrangement which leads us to judge an individual's ... acts not to be a manifestation of strangeness. Behind Felicity's Condition is our sense of what it is to be sane" (1983:27). Also see Bern 1993; Frye 1983, 17-40; Coffman 1977. 2. In cases of ambiguity in countries with modem medicine, surgery is usually performed to make the genitalia more clearly male or female. 3. See J. Butler 1990 for an analysis of how doing gender is gender identity. 4. On the "Iogic of practice," or how the experience of gender is embedded in the norms of everyday interaction and the structure of formal organizations, see Acker 1990; Bourdieu [1980] 1990; Connell 1987; Smith 1987. REFERENCES Acker, Joan. 1990. "Hierarchies, jobs, and bodies: A theory of gendered tions," Gender & Society 4: 139-58. Almquist, Elizabeth M. 1987. "Labor groups," Gender & Society 1: 400-14. market gendered inequality organiza- in minority Bern, Sandara Lipsitz. 1993. The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality. New Haven: Yale University Press. 118 Sex and Gender Bernard, Jessie. 1981. The Female World. New York: Free Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. [1980] 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. Chodorow, Nancy, 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University fornia Press. . of Cali- Cockburn, Cynthia. 1985. Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men and Technical KnowhO'W.London: Pluto Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990., "The social construction 14: 745-73. of black feminist thought," Signs Connell, R. [Robert] W. 1987. Gender and PO'Wer:Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Coser, Rose Laub. 1986. "Cognitive structure and the use of social space," Sociological Forum 1: 1-26. Davies, Christie. 1982. "Sexual taboos and social boundaries," Sociology 87: 1032-63. American Journal of Dwyer, Daisy, and Judith Bruce (eds.). 1988. A Home Divided: Women and Income in the Third World. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Frye, Marilyn, 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press. Gilmore, David D. 1990. Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Coffman, Erving. 1977. "The arrangement between the sexes," Theory and Society 4: 301-33. Haraway, Donna. 1990. "Investment strategies for the evolving portfolio of primate females," in Jacobus, Keller, and Shuttleworth. Jacobus, Mary, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (eds.). (1990). Body/politics: Women and the Discourse of Science. New York and London: Routledge. Jay, Nancy. 1981. "Gender and dichotomy," Feminist Studies 7: 38-56. Mencher, Joan. 1988. "Women's work and poverty: Women's contribution to household maintenance in South India/ in Dwyer and Bruce. Palmer, Phyllis. 1989. Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Scott, Joan Wallach. 1988. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. --. 1990. The Conceptual Practices of PO'Wer:A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. West, Candace, 125-51. and Don Zimmerman. 1987. "Doing gender." Gender & Society 1:
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