Gender Construction Theory

1
Gender Construction Theory

• Lecture 3
• Beyond the Binaries
• COM 490
• Professor Ralina Joseph

2
Terms for the day

• Gender
• Sex
• Performance

3
5-minute writing

• List 10 gendered binaries

4
Turn to opening anecdote

• How do we end up as gendered human beings?
• Why are people divided into the binary of men and
  women?
• How are bodies important in constructing the
  gendered binary?

5
Heads Together

• For your assigned section
• How is gender understood and explained?
• What binaries can you identify, if any?
• Any parts that go beyond the binaries?
• Links from your section to racial
  formation/racial construction?

6
Nature John Locke

• 1. world divided into natural, essential kinds
• 2. world divided into what people construct as
  like and unlike

7
Sex vs Gender

• Sex differences seen as biological
• Gender differences seen as socially constructed

8
MTV Clips

• How is masculinity constructed?
• How is femininity constructed?

9
Judith Butlers Theories of Gender
Constructedness (starts w/ critique of 2nd wave
feminism)

• Feminism made a mistake by trying to assert that
  'women' were a group with common characteristics
  and interests
• Feminism reinforced a binary view of gender
  relations humans divided into women and men.
• Rather than opening up possibilities for a person
  to form and choose their own individual identity,
  feminism closed options down.
• Feminists rejected idea that biology is destiny
  (like Graves on race being destiny), but
  developed account of patriarchal culture which
  assumed that masculine and feminine genders would
  inevitably be built, by culture, upon 'male' and
  'female' bodies (still destiny). No room for
  choice, difference or resistance.

10
Instead

• Rather than a fixed attribute, gender is a fluid
  variable which shifts and changes in different
  contexts and at different times (like racial
  formation theory)
• Sex (male, female) is seen to cause gender
  (masculine, feminine) which is seen to cause
  desire (towards the other gender). Butler's says
  NO gender and desire flexible, free-floating and
  not 'caused' by other stable factors.
• There is no gender identity behind the
  expressions of gender ... identity is
  performatively constituted by the very
  expressions that are said to be its results.
  (Gender Trouble, p. 25). In other words, gender
  is a performance it's what you do at particular
  times, rather than a universal who you are.

11
More Butler on Gender

• Certain cultural configurations of gender have a
  hegemonic hold (i.e. have come to seem natural)
  -- but, it doesn't have to be that way.
• Butler calls for gender trouble --
  mobilization, subversive confusion, and
  proliferation of genders -- and therefore
  identity.
• We all put on gender performance, whether
  traditional or not, anyway, and so it is not a
  question of whether to do a gender performance,
  but what form that performance will take. By
  choosing to trouble gender, we might work to
  change gender norms and the binary understanding
  of masculinity and femininity.

12
Links to Queer Theory

• Idea of identity as free-floating, not connected
  to an 'essence', but instead a performance. Our
  identities do not express some authentic inner
  "core" self but are the dramatic effect (rather
  than the cause) of our performances.
• Not just relevant re sexuality, or gender. It
  also suggests that any identity can potentially
  be reinvented by its owner...
• And finally -- what has this got to do with media
  and communication studies? Well, the call for
  gender trouble has obvious media implications,
  since the mass media is the primary means for
  alternative and traditional images to be
  disseminated.
• The media is therefore the site upon which this
  'semiotic war' (a war of symbols, of how things
  are represented) would take place.