Judith Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender
Chapter: 'Night to His Day': The Social Construction of Gender. (PDF)
Yale University, 1994.
Lorber, p. 13
What I find most interesting is that last phrase: The onlookers who have opinions about how another man parents his baby are also doing gender. They're reading, interpreting, judging, maybe imposing gender on him.
Lorber says that
“bending gender rules and passing between genders does not erode but rather preserves gender boundaries. In societies with only two genders, the gender dichotomy is not disturbed by transvestites, because others feel that a transvestite is only transitorily ambiguous—is ‘really a man or woman underneath.’ After sex-change surgery, transsexuals end up in a conventional gender status—a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ with the appropriate genitals (Eichler 1989). When women dress as men for business reasons, they are indicating that in that situation, they want to be treated the way men are treated; when they dress as women, they want to be treated as women...” (p. 21)
There is no escape. If you change your clothes, you’re signaling your gender, or others believe you are. If you change your body, you’re signaling your gender, or others believe you are. Everyone else is always trying to figure you out. There may be nothing you can do to stop them from trying to figure you out.
Furthermore, simply by attempting to manage where you fit within the given gender map, others see you as attempting to preserve the map itself. If you attempt to say anything about being a man or woman (including frustration with those categories), someone will blame you for believing in the categories.
”Although the possible combinations of genitalia, body shapes, clothing, mannerisms, sexuality, and roles could produce infinite varieties in human beings, the social institution of gender depends on the production and maintenance of a limited number of gender statuses and of making the members of these statuses similar to each other. Individuals are born sexed but not gendered, and they have to be taught to be masculine or feminine. As Simone de Beauvoir said: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman…; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature…which is described as feminine.’ (1952, 267).” (p. 22)
Lorber says:
“My son attended a carefully nonsexist elementary school, which didn’t even have girls’ and boys’ bathrooms. When he was seven or eight years old, I attended a class play about ‘squares’ and ‘circles’ and their need for each other and noticed that all the girl squares and circles wore makeup, but none of the boy squares and circles did. I asked the teacher about it after the play, and she said, ‘Bobby said he was not going to wear makeup, and he is a powerful child, so none of the boys would either.’ In a long discussion about conformity, my son confronted me with the question of who the conformists were, the boys who followed their leader or the girls who listened to the woman teacher. In actuality, they both were, because they both followed same-gender leaders and acted in gender-appropriate ways.”
(Although, I’d argue, if all of them had agreed to wear makeup or to forgo it, or to split up on certain teams that wore makeup or didn’t, this itself would have been a kind of conformity.)
This line is really interesting: ”In the social construction of gender, it does not matter what men and women actually do; it does not even matter if they do exactly the same thing. The social institution of gender insists only that what they do is perceived as different.” (p. 26) And: “All men and all women can enact the behavior of the other, because they know the other’s social script: ‘’Man’ and ‘woman’ are at once empty and overflowing categories. Empty because they have no ultimate, transcendental meaning. Overflowing because even when they appear to be fixed, they still contain within them alternative, denied, or suppressed definitions.’ (J. W. Scott 1988a, 49). Nonetheless, though individuals may be able to shift gender statuses, the gender boundaries have to hold, or the whole gendered social order will come crashing down.” (p. 27)
I do not care for this
Lorber, p. 27
My problems with it:
Lorber is here making an assumption that "reconstruct[ing] genitalia" is done for the sole purpose of "match[ing] identity." A way to question this assumption: If there were no social gender differences between men and women, could someone still want to modify any part of their bodies. Presumably yes; they would simply have motivations other than controlling their gender presentation. Someone might want their nose reconstructed because they have a sense of what nose shape would be more beautiful for them, or because they have a medical need to reshape their nose, or both.
Why, then, should genitalia be excluded from the list of modifiable body parts? A person may want their own genitals to look or feel a certain way. They have needs and interests related to urination and reproduction. They feel sexual pleasure a certain way, or want to experience it differently, or they want to align something about their own brain–body communication, or they want to experience something that's more like what they believe people experience with Genital Type A rather than Genital Type B. This is not necessarily about the social construction of gender (at least, not as we know it today). People should be allowed to have autonomy over all parts of our bodies. And so we should be careful not to disparage this autonomy in ways that might lend support to those trying to criminalize auotnomy. It is autonomy like any other; if we insult it and fail to recognize its importance, we won't have it.
This points to a broader issue. If gender is eliminated — I mean its social aspects, not physical sex characteristics — life will be different for everyone. True, transgender narratives would be radically different, but so would cisgender narratives. To the extent there'd be no gender, there'd be no transgender or cisgender. Lorber is having us imagine a world with no trans people, but this is a world with no cis people. Everything in this world is different. So it is really getting overly specific to congratulate this hypothetical world for having no transsexual narratives of "of always having felt like" a man or a woman. There's a lot of other things this hypothetical world wouldn't have.
Lorber then goes on to to generalize that “women who become men rise in the world and men who become women fall” and to approvingly quote Janice Raymond as a source of insight about trans people's privilege (p. 28), so that should give some context on how many grains of salt are needed.
Remember: Onlookers, whether applauding or frowning, are doing gender. So, if you don't want to do gender, stop doing it.
I'm intrigued by this list:
Lorber, p. 30
Lorber, p. 31
Also noted:
“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.
As a process, gender creates the social differences that define ‘woman’ and ‘man.’ ... 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.” (p. 32)
Under the social construction of gender, “there is no core or bedrock human nature.” (p. 36)
Lorber did revise this book (I haven’t read the revised edition)...
...and publish another book that I suppose contains a drastically revised thesis.
