Table of Contents
Short Introductions
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Preface
1: The question of gender
Noticing gender
Understanding gender
Defining gender
Note on sources
2: Gender research: five examples
Case 1: The play of gender in school life
Case 2: Manhood and the mines
Case 3: Bending gender
Case 4: Women, war and memory
Case 5: Gender, marginality and forests
3: Sex differences and gendered bodies
Reproductive difference
Conflicting accounts of difference
Facts about difference: ‘sex similarity’ research
Social embodiment and the reproductive arena
4: Gender theorists and gender theory
Introduction: Raden Adjeng Kartini
Imperial Europe and its colonies: from Sor Juana to Simone de Beauvoir
From national liberation to Women's Liberation
Queer, post-colonial, Southern and global
5: Gender relations and gender politics
Patterns in gender
Gender relations in four dimensions
Interweaving and intersection
Change in gender relations
Gender politics
6: Gender in personal life
Personal politics
Growing up gendered: sex role socialization and psychoanalysis
A better account: embodied learning
Discourse and identity
Transition, transgender and transsexual
7: Gender and environmental change
Ecofeminism: debating the nature of women
Gender, development and environmental justice
Gender and environmental management
Continuing the search for feminist sustainability
8: Economies, states and global gender relations
Gendered corporations
Gendered states
The stakes in gender politics
Gender in world society
Gender politics on the world scale
Coda
References
Author Index
Subject Index
SHORT INTRODUCTIONS
Copyright © Raewyn Connell & Rebecca Pearse 2015
The right of Raewyn Connell & Rebecca Pearse to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition first published in 2002 by Polity Press
Second edition first published in 2009 by Polity Press
This third edition first published in 2015 by Polity Press
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In memory of Pam Benton 1942–1997
She, who had Here so much essentiall joy
As no chance could distract, much lesse destroy;
… she to Heaven is gone,
Who made this world in some proportion
A heaven, and here, became unto us all,
Joy, (as our joyes admit) essentiall.
Preface
Gender is a key dimension of personal life, social relations and culture. It is an arena in which we face hard practical issues about justice, identity and even survival.
Gender is also a topic on which there is a great deal of prejudice, myth and outright falsehood. Research and theory in the human sciences provide vital tools for understanding the real issues. This book tries to present an accessible, research-based, globally informed and theoretically coherent account of gender.
For people new to the study of gender, we introduce key examples of gender research, describe the main findings on important topics, and provide a map of debates and ideas. For people already familiar with gender issues, we propose an integrated approach that links issues ranging from the body and personality difference to the global economy and world peace. The book draws on a spectrum of the human sciences, from psychology and sociology to political science, cultural studies, education and history.
Modern research on gender was triggered by the women's movement for gender equality. There is a simple reason for this: most gender orders, around the world, privilege men and disadvantage women. Yet the details are not simple. There are different forms of privilege and disadvantage, and the scale of gender inequality varies from place to place. The costs of privilege may be high. Even the definition of who is a man and a woman can be contested.
Gender issues are about men quite as much as they are about women. There is now extensive research about masculinities, fatherhood, men's movements, men's violence, boys' education, men's health and men's involvement in achieving gender equality. We have woven this knowledge into the picture of gender.
We have also emphasized a world perspective. The view from the global North is important, but most people live in other places and have a different social experience. Therefore we give considerable attention to gender research and theory in countries outside the global metropole, places as diverse as Latvia, Chile, Australia, western and southern Africa, Indonesia and Japan.
The world faces urgent issues about gender. Indeed, a whole new realm of gender politics is emerging, with sharp questions about human rights, global economic injustice, environmental change, relations between generations, violence, both military and personal, and the conditions for living well.
If emerging gender orders are to be just, peaceful and humane – which is by no means guaranteed – we need well-founded knowledge and a sophisticated understanding of gender issues. To produce this understanding means sharing knowledge around the globe. Previous editions of this book have been translated into Chinese, Italian, Greek, Japanese, German and Polish. We hope this new edition will be as useful.
This edition includes a wholly new chapter on gender and environment, brings all chapters up to date with current research, includes a new case study, revises the treatment of gender theory, and tries to make the presentation throughout as clear and concise as possible.
A book that attempts to synthesize knowledge across a broad field of study rests on the labour of many people – researchers, theorists, social movement activists, and the many people who participate in research studies.
Most of our intellectual debts are acknowledged in the text. Rebecca owes particular thanks to: James Hitchcock, Bronislava Lee, Stuart Rosewarne and Tim Hitchcock. Raewyn owes particular thanks to: Kylie Benton-Connell, Christabel Draffin, John Fisher, Patricia Selkirk, Carol Hagemann-White, Robert Morrell, Ulla Müller, Taga Futoshi, Teresa Valdés, Toni Schofield, Lin Walker and Kirsten Gomard.
The book is dedicated to the memory of Pam Benton. The epigraph at the start of the book is from Pam's favourite poet, John Donne, and can be found in the poem ‘The Second Anniversary’.
Raewyn Connell and Rebecca Pearse
Sydney, December 2013
1
The question of gender
One night a year, the attention of the TV-watching world is focused on Hollywood's most spectacular event, the Oscar awards ceremony. Famous people are driven up in limousines in front of an enthusiastic crowd, and in a blizzard of camera flashes they walk into the auditorium – the men in tuxedos striding easily, the women going cautiously because they are wearing low-cut gowns and high-heeled shoes. As the evening wears on, awards are given out for film scores, camera work, script writing, direction, best foreign film, and so on. But in the categories that concern the people you see on screen when you go to the movies, there are two awards given: best actor and best actress; best supporting actor and best supporting actress.
The internet is saturated with images of glamorous people, from models in advertisements to all kind of celebrities and public figures. When pop star Mylie Cyrus performed at the MTV Music Video Awards (VMA) in 2013, the images of her sexually provocative dancing travelled at incredible speed across the world. After the event, Cyrus tweeted, ‘Smilers! My VMA performance had 306.000 tweets per minute. That's more than the blackout or Superbowl! [sic].’ Major news and entertainment websites, social media, blogs and YouTube channels sent waves of chatter through cyberspace. Much of it was discussion about whether the public was prepared for the transformation of Cyrus from child star to sex symbol.
Whilst women's bodies are common elements of the visual images we consume on the web, women are much less likely to be producing web content. In a recent member survey, Wikipedia discovered that less than 15 per cent of people who write content for the online encyclopedia are women. Internet access is also uneven. In 2013 the multinational computer technology firm Intel found that nearly 25 per cent fewer women internationally have internet access than men. Whilst in a small number of affluent nations like France and the United States women actually have slightly higher rates of internet access, the gender gap reaches nearly 45 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.
In politics women continue to be the minority. Every year a ‘family photo’ is taken at G20 meetings where heads of government and their senior finance and central bank representatives meet to discuss the international financial system. In 2013, four women stood among the twenty national leaders in the photo, representing Germany, Brazil, South Korea and Argentina. The imbalance is commonly more pronounced. There has never been a woman head of government in modern Russia, China, France, Japan, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa or Mexico. There has only been one each in the history of Brazil, Germany, Britain, India, Indonesia and Australia. Statistics from the Inter-Parliamentary Union showed that in 2013 79.1 per cent of members of the world's parliaments were men.
Among senior ministers the predominance of men is even higher. In 2012, only four countries in the world had women making up half of a national ministry (Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland). More typical figures for women in ministerial roles were 21 per cent (Australia, Mexico), 11 per cent (China, Indonesia, Japan), 6 per cent (Malaysia) and 0 per cent (Lebanon, Papua New Guinea). The few women who do get to this level are usually given the job of running welfare or education ministries. Men keep control of taxation, investment, technology, international relations, police and the military. Every Secretary-General of the United Nations and every head of the World Bank has been a man.
Women's representation in politics has changed slowly over time, and with difficulty. French lawyer Christine Lagard was the first woman ever to head the International Monetary Fund in 2011. The world average number of women in parliaments increased from 10 per cent in 1995 to 20 per cent in 2012. Australia's first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, served for three years with a record eight women in ministry and five in cabinet. She was then thrown out of power in a party coup. The new conservative government elected in 2013 had only one woman in cabinet.
What is true of politics is also true of business. Of the top 200 businesses listed on the Australian stock exchange in 2012 (including those that publish the mass-circulation magazines), just seven had a woman as CEO. Of the 500 giant international corporations listed in Fortune magazine's ‘Global 500’ in 2013, just 22 had a woman CEO. Such figures are usually presented by saying that women are now 4.4 per cent of the top business leadership around the world. It's more informative to say that men compose 95.6 per cent of that leadership.
Women are a substantial part of the paid workforce, lower down the hierarchy. They are mostly concentrated in service jobs – clerical work, call centres, cleaning, serving food, and professions connected with caring for the young and the sick, i.e. teaching and nursing. In some parts of the world, women are also valued as industrial workers, for instance in microprocessor plants, because of their supposedly ‘nimble fingers’. Though the detailed division between men's and women's work varies in different parts of the world, it is common for men to predominate in heavy industry, mining, transport, indeed in most jobs that involve any machinery except a sewing machine. World-wide, men are a large majority of the workforce in management, accountancy, law and technical professions such as engineering and computers.
Behind the paid workforce is another form of work – unpaid domestic and care work. In all contemporary societies for which we have statistics, women do most of the cleaning, cooking and sewing, most of the work of looking after children, and almost all of the work of caring for babies. (If you don't think childcare is work, you haven't done it yet.) This work is often associated with a cultural definition of women as caring, gentle, self-sacrificing and industrious, i.e. as good mothers. Being a good father is rarely associated with cutting school lunches and wiping babies' bottoms – though there are now interesting attempts to promote what in Mexico has been called ‘paternidad afectiva’, emotionally engaged fatherhood. Normally, fathers are supposed to be decision-makers and bread-winners, to consume the services provided by women and represent the family in the outside world.
Women as a group are less likely to be out in the public world than men, and, when they are, have fewer resources. In almost all parts of the world, men are more likely to have a paid job. Conventional measures of the economy, based on men's practices, exclude women's unpaid domestic work. By these measures, the world ‘economic activity rate’ for women has crept up, but is still just over two-thirds of the rate for men. The main exceptions are Scandinavia and parts of West Africa, where women's paid labour force participation rates are unusually high. But in some Arab states women's participation rates are one-quarter the rate for men, and in much of South Asia and Latin America they are about half.
Once women are in the paid workforce, how do their wages compare? Over thirty years after the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW, 1979), nowhere in the world are women's earned incomes equal to men's. Women are often engaged in low-wage employment, and still receive 18 per cent less than men's average wages. In some countries, the gender pay gap is much bigger. Zambia has the largest gender pay gap at almost 46 per cent (2005), followed by South Korea with 43 per cent (2007) and Azerbaijan with 37 per cent (2008). Part of any gender gap in income can be explained by the pattern of women being more likely to work fewer hours and more likely to be unemployed. Other reasons relate to discriminatory wage practices and to women's overrepresentation in low-paid jobs.
Therefore most women in the world, especially women with children, are economically dependent on men. Some men believe that women who are dependent on them must be their property. This is a common scenario in domestic violence: when dependent women don't conform to demands from their husbands or boyfriends, they are beaten. This creates a dilemma for the women, which is very familiar to domestic violence services. They can stay, and put themselves and their children at high risk of further violence; or go, and lose their home, economic support, and status in the community. If they go, certain husbands are so infuriated that they pursue and kill the wives and even the children.
Men are not beaten up by their spouses so often, but they are at risk of other forms of violence. Most assaults reported to the police, in countries with good statistics on the matter, are by men on other men. Some men are beaten, indeed some are murdered, simply because they are thought to be homosexual; and some of this violence comes from the police. Most of the prisoners in gaols are men. In the United States, which has the biggest prison system in the world, the prison population in 2011 was 1.59 million, and 93 per cent of them were men. Most deaths in combat are of men, because men make up the vast majority of the troops in armies and militias. Most industrial accidents involve men, because men are most of the workforce in dangerous industries such as construction and mining.
Men are involved disproportionately in violence partly because they have been prepared for it. Though patterns of child rearing differ between cultures, the situation in Australia is not unusual. Australian boys are steered towards competitive sports such as football, where physical dominance is celebrated, from an early age – by their fathers, by schools, and by the mass media. Boys also come under peer pressure to show bravery and toughness, and learn to fear being classified as ‘sissies’ or ‘poofters’ (a local term meaning effeminate or homosexual). Being capable of violence becomes a social resource. Working-class boys, who don't have the other resources that will lead to a professional career, become the main recruits into jobs that require the use of force: police, the military, private security, blue-collar crime, and professional sport. It is mainly young women who are recruited into the jobs that repair the consequences of violence: nursing, psychology and social work.
So far, we have listed an assortment of facts, about mass media, about politics and business, about families, and about growing up. Are these random? Modern thought about gender starts with the recognition that they are not. These facts form a pattern; they make sense when seen as parts of the overall gender arrangements, which this book will call the ‘gender order’, of contemporary societies.
To notice the existence of the gender order is easy; to understand it is not. Conflicting theories of gender now exist, as we shall see in chapter 4, and some problems about gender are genuinely difficult to resolve. Yet we now have a rich resource of knowledge about gender, derived from decades of research, and a fund of practical experience from gender reform. We have a better basis for understanding gender issues than any previous generation had.
In everyday life we take gender for granted. We instantly recognize a person as a man or woman, girl or boy. We arrange everyday business around the distinction. Conventional marriages require one of each. Mixed-doubles tennis requires two of each, but most sports require one kind at a time.
Most years, the most popular television broadcast in the United States is the American Super Bowl, which, like the Oscars, is a strikingly gendered event: large armoured men crash into each other while chasing a pointed leather bladder, and thin women in short skirts dance and smile in the pauses. Most of us cannot crash or dance nearly so well, but we do our best in other ways. As women or men we slip our feet into differently shaped shoes, button our shirts on opposite sides, get our heads clipped by different hairdressers, buy our pants in separate shops, and take them off in separate toilets.
These arrangements are so familiar that they can seem part of the order of nature. Belief that gender distinction is ‘natural’ makes it scandalous when people don't follow the pattern: for instance, when people of the same gender fall in love with each other. So homosexuality is frequently declared ‘unnatural’ and bad.
But if having sex with a fellow-woman or a fellow-man is unnatural, why have a law against it? We don't provide penalties for violating the third law of thermodynamics. Anti-gay ordinances in US cities, police harassment of gay men in Senegal, the criminalization of women's adultery in Islamic Sharia law, the imprisonment of transsexual women for violating public order – such things only make sense because these matters are not fixed by nature.
These events are part of an enormous social effort to channel people's behaviour. Ideas about gender-appropriate behaviour are constantly being circulated, not only by legislators but also by priests, parents, teachers, advertisers, retail mall owners, talk-show hosts and disc jockeys. Events like Oscar Night and the Super Bowl are not just consequences of our ideas about gender difference. They also help to create gender difference, by displays of exemplary masculinities and femininities.
Being a man or a woman, then, is not a pre-determined state. It is a becoming, a condition actively under construction. The pioneering French feminist Simone de Beauvoir put this in a famous phrase: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ Though the positions of women and men are not simply parallel, the principle is also true for men: one is not born masculine, but has to become a man.
This process is often discussed as the development of ‘gender identity’. There are some questions to raise about this concept (see chapter 6), but it will serve for the moment as a name for the sense of belonging to a gender category. Identity includes our ideas of what that belonging means, what kind of person we are, in consequence of being a woman or a man. These ideas are not presented to the baby as a package at the beginning of life. They develop (there is some controversy about exactly when), and are filled out in detail over a long period of years, as we grow up.
As de Beauvoir further recognized, this business of becoming a gendered person follows many different paths, involves many tensions and ambiguities, and sometimes produces unstable results. Part of the mystery of gender is how a pattern that on the surface appears so stark and rigid, on close examination turns out so complex and uncertain.
So we cannot think of womanhood or manhood as fixed by nature. But neither should we think of them as simply imposed from outside, by social norms or pressure from authorities. People construct themselves as masculine or feminine. We claim a place in the gender order – or respond to the place we have been given – by the way we conduct ourselves in everyday life.
Most people do this willingly, and often enjoy the gender polarity. Yet gender ambiguities are not rare. There are masculine women and feminine men. There are women in love with other women, and men in love with other men. There are women who are heads of households, and men who bring up children. There are women who are soldiers and men who are nurses. Sometimes the development of ‘gender identity’ results in intermediate, blended or sharply contradictory patterns, for which we use terms like effeminate, camp, queer and transgender.
Psychological research suggests that the great majority of us combine masculine and feminine characteristics, in varying blends, rather than being all one or all the other. Gender ambiguity can be an object of fascination and desire, as well as disgust. Gender impersonations are familiar in both popular and high culture, from the cross-dressed actors of Shakespeare's stage to movies starring transsexual women and drag queens like Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (2004) and Hairspray (2007).
There is certainly enough gender blending to provoke heated opposition from movements dedicated to re-establishing ‘the traditional family’, ‘true femininity’ or ‘real masculinity’. By 1988 Pope John Paul II had become so concerned that he issued an encyclical, On the Dignity and Vocation of Women, reminding everyone that women were created for motherhood and their functions should not get mixed up with those of men. In a Christmas address in 2012, Pope Benedict XVI criticized gender theory directly. He argued: ‘People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.’ This is a good summary of a central insight from gender theory. Of course the Pope was arguing against it, saying that an essential, biological nature should determine our personal and public lives. These efforts to maintain essentialist ideas about fixed womanhood and manhood are themselves strong evidence that the boundaries are none too stable.
But these are not just boundaries; they are also inequalities. Most churches and mosques are run exclusively by men, and this is part of a larger pattern. Most corporate wealth is in the hands of men, most big institutions are run by men, and most science and technology is controlled by men. In many countries, including some with very large populations, women are less likely than men to have been taught to read. For instance, recent adult literacy rates in India stood at 75 per cent for men and 51 per cent for women; in Nigeria, 72 per cent for men and 50 per cent for women. On a world scale, two-thirds of illiterate people are women. In countries like the United States, Australia, Italy and Turkey, middle-class women have gained full access to higher education and have made inroads into middle management and professions. But even in those countries many informal barriers operate to keep the very top levels of power and wealth mostly a world of men.
There is also unequal respect. In many situations, including the cheerleaders at the football game, women are treated as marginal to the main action, or as the objects of men's desire. Whole genres of humour – bimbo jokes, woman-driver jokes, mother-in-law jokes – are based on contempt for women's triviality and stupidity. A whole industry, ranging from heavy pornography and prostitution to soft-core advertising, markets women's bodies as objects of consumption by men. Equal-opportunity reforms in the workplace often run into a refusal by men to be under the authority of a woman. Not only do most religions prevent women from holding major religious office, they often treat women symbolically as a source of defilement for men.
Though men in general benefit from the inequalities of the gender order, they do not benefit equally. Indeed, many pay a considerable price. Boys and men who depart from dominant definitions of masculinity because they are gay, effeminate, or considered wimpish are often subject to verbal abuse and discrimination, and are sometimes the targets of violence. Differences between classes and races also affect the benefits that different groups of men gain. Men who conform to dominant definitions of masculinity may also pay a price. Research on men's health shows that men as a group have a higher rate of industrial accidents than women, have a higher rate of death by violence, tend to eat a worse diet and drink more alcohol, and (not surprisingly) have more sporting injuries. In 2012 the life expectancy for men in the United States was calculated at 76 years, compared with 81 years for women. In Russia, after the restoration of capitalism, life expectancy for men is 63 years compared with 75 years for women.
Gender arrangements are thus, at the same time, sources of pleasure, recognition and identity, and sources of injustice and harm. This means that gender is inherently political – but it also means the politics can be complicated and difficult.
Inequality and oppression in the gender order have repeatedly led to demands for reform. Movements for change include campaigns for women's right to vote, and for women's presence in anti-colonial movements and representation in independent governments. There are campaigns for equal pay, for women's right to own property, for homosexual law reform, for women's trade unionism, for equal employment opportunity, for reproductive rights, for the human rights of transsexual men and women and transgender people; and campaigns against discrimination in education, against sexist media, against rape and domestic violence.
Political campaigns resisting some of these changes, or seeking counter-changes, have also arisen. The scene of gender politics currently includes anti-gay campaigns, anti-abortion (‘pro-life’) campaigns, a spectrum of men's movements, and a complex international debate about links between Western feminism and Western cultural dominance in the world. One of the most striking waves of change underway now is the legalization of gay marriage. Same-sex couples are now able to marry in 13 US states and Washington DC. This is a fast-growing reform movement mostly in the global North, but also in Latin America. Of the 16 countries that permit gay men and lesbians to marry, 9 have made this reform since 2010.
In all this history, the feminist and gay movements of the 1960s–1970s were pivotal. They did not reach all their political goals, but they had a profound cultural impact. They called attention to a whole realm of human reality that was poorly understood, and thus created a demand for understanding as well as action. This was the historical take-off point of contemporary gender research. Political practice launched a deep change – which increasingly seems like a revolution – in human knowledge.
This book is an attempt to map this revolution. It describes the terrain revealed by gender politics and gender research, introduces the debates about how to understand it and change it, and offers solutions to some of the problems raised.
As a new awareness of issues developed, a new terminology was needed. Over the last 30 years the term ‘gender’ has become common in English-language discussions to describe the whole field. The term was borrowed from grammar. Ultimately it comes from an ancient word-root meaning ‘to produce’ (cf. ‘generate’), which gave rise to words in many languages meaning ‘kind’ or ‘class’ (e.g. ‘genus’). In grammar, ‘gender’ came to refer to the specific distinction between classes of nouns ‘corresponding more or less’ – as the nineteenth-century Oxford English Dictionary primly noted – ‘to distinctions of sex (and absence of sex) in the objects denoted’.
Grammar suggests how such distinctions permeate cultures. In Indo-European and Semitic languages, nouns, adjectives and pronouns may be distinguishable as feminine, masculine, neuter or common gender. Not only the words for species that reproduce sexually may be gendered, but also many other words for objects, concepts and states of mind. English is a relatively un-gendered language, but English speakers still call a ship ‘she’, even an oil well (‘she's going to blow!’), and often masculinize an abstraction (‘the rights of man’).
Language is important, but does not provide a consistent framework for understanding gender. German, for instance, has ‘die Frau’ (the woman) feminine, but ‘das Mädchen’ (the girl) neuter, because all words with such diminutives are neuter. Terror is feminine in French (‘la terreur’), but masculine in German (‘der Terror’). Other languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Yoruba, do not make gender distinctions through word forms at all. A great deal also depends on how a language is used. A relatively non-gendered language can still be used to name gender positions and express opinions on gender issues. On the other hand there are many communities where certain words or tones of voice are specifically thought to belong to men or women, or to express the speaker's masculinity or femininity.
Most discussions of gender in society emphasize a dichotomy. Starting from a biological division between male and female, they define gender as the social or psychological difference that corresponds to that divide, builds on it, or is caused by it.
In its most common usage, then, the term ‘gender’ means the cultural difference of women from men, based on the biological division between male and female. Dichotomy and difference are the substance of the idea. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.
There are decisive objections to such a definition:
Social science provides a solution to these difficulties. The key is to move from a focus on difference to a focus on relations. Gender is, above all, a matter of the social relations within which individuals and groups act.
Enduring or widespread patterns among social relations are what social theory calls ‘structures’. In this sense, gender must be understood as a social structure. It is not an expression of biology, nor a fixed dichotomy in human life or character. It is a pattern in our social arrangements, and the everyday activities shaped by those arrangements.
Gender is a social structure of a particular kind – it involves a specific relationship with bodies. This is recognized in the commonsense definition of gender as an expression of natural difference between male and female. We are one of the species that reproduce sexually rather than vegetatively like bacteria (though cloning may change that soon!). Some aspects of our anatomy are specialized for this purpose, and many biological processes in our bodies are affected by it (see chapter 3). What is wrong with the commonsense definition is not the attention to bodies, nor the concern with sexual reproduction, but the squeezing of biological complexity and adaptability into a stark dichotomy, and the idea that cultural patterns simply ‘express’ bodily difference.
Sometimes cultural patterns do express bodily difference, for instance when they celebrate first menstruation as a distinction between girl and woman. But often they do more than that, or less than that. Social practices sometimes exaggerate the distinction of female from male (e.g. maternity clothes), sometimes deny the distinction (many employment practices), sometimes mythologize it (computer games), and sometimes complicate it (‘third gender’ customs). So we cannot say that social arrangements routinely ‘express’ biological difference.
But we can say that, in all of these cases, society addresses bodies and deals with reproductive processes and differences among bodies. There is no fixed ‘biological base’ for the social process of gender. Rather, there is an arena in which bodies are brought into social processes, in which our social conduct does something with reproductive difference. The book will call this the ‘reproductive arena’, discussed further in chapter 3.
We can now define gender in a way that solves the paradoxes of ‘difference’. Gender is the structure of social relations that centres on the reproductive arena, and the set of practices that bring reproductive distinctions between bodies into social processes.
To put it informally, gender concerns the way human societies deal with human bodies and their continuity, and the many consequences of that ‘dealing’ in our personal lives and our collective fate. The terms used in this definition are explained more fully in chapters 4 and 5.
This definition has important consequences. Among them: gender, like other social structures, is multidimensional. It is not just about identity, or just about work, or just about power, or just about sexuality, but about all of these things at once. Gender patterns may differ strikingly from one cultural context to another, and there are certainly very different ways of thinking about them, but it is still possible to think (and act) between cultures about gender. The power of structures to shape individual action often makes gender appear unchanging. Yet gender arrangements are in fact always changing, as human practice creates new situations and as structures develop crisis tendencies. Finally, gender had a beginning and may have an end. Each of these points will be explored later in the book.
In chapter 2 we discuss five notable examples of gender research, to show how the broad issues just discussed take shape in specific investigations. Chapter 3 considers the issue of ‘difference’, the extent of sex differences, and the way bodies and society interact. Chapter 4 discusses theories of gender, worldwide, and the intellectuals who produce them. An account of gender as a social structure is presented in chapter 5, exploring the different dimensions of gender and the process of historical change. Chapter 6 discusses gender in personal life, and the politics of identity and intimate relationships. Chapter 7 discusses gender and environmental change, introducing debates between feminists about how to understand the relationship between gender and nonhuman nature. Finally, chapter 8 looks at gender relations in institutions and world society, and discusses what is at stake in movements for change.
Most of the statistics mentioned in this chapter, such as income, economic activity rates and literacy, can be found in the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report (UNDP 2013; see list of references at back of book), or online tables regularly published by the United Nations Statistics Division. Figures on parliamentary representation and numbers of ministers are from Inter-Parliamentary Union (2013), and on managers, from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, Fortune and CNN. Sources of information on men's health can be found in Schofield et al. (2000). Gender wage gap figures are taken from the International Trade Union Confederation report Frozen in Time: Gender Pay Gap Unchanged for 10 Years (ITUC 2012). The quotation on ‘woman’ is from Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949: 295). Definitions and etymology of the word ‘gender’ are in The Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 4 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1933: 100).
2
Gender research: five examples
Often a complex problem is best approached through specifics, and the results of research are best understood by looking at the actual research projects. In this chapter we discuss five notable studies of gender issues published in recent decades. They come from five continents. Three focus on everyday life in local settings – a school, a workplace, a community, a personal life. One deals with gender change in a great historical transition, and another with gender issues in the environment. Though they deal with very different questions, they reveal some of the main concerns of gender research in general.
One of the most difficult tasks in social research is to take a situation that everyone thinks they understand, and illuminate it in new ways. This is what the US ethnographer Barrie Thorne achieves in her subtly observed and highly readable book about school life, Gender Play (1993).
At the time Thorne started her work, children were not much discussed in gender research. When they were mentioned, the usual assumption was that they were being ‘socialized’ into gender roles, in a top-down transmission from the adult world. It was assumed that there are two sex roles, a male one and a female one, with boys and girls getting separately inducted into the norms and expectations of the appropriate role. This idea was based on a certain amount of research using paper-and-pencil questionnaires, but not on much actual observation of children's lives.
Thorne did that observation. Her book is based on fieldwork in two elementary (primary) schools in different parts of the United States. She spent eight months in one, three months in another, hanging about in classrooms, hallways and playgrounds, talking to everyone and watching the way the children interacted with each other and with their teachers in work and play.
Ethnography as a method sounds easy, but in practice is hard to do well. Part of the problem is the mass of information an observer can get from just a single day ‘in the field’. You need to know what you are looking for. But you also need to be open to new experiences and new information, able to see things that you did not expect to see.
As an observer, Thorne was certainly interested in transmission from older people, in the ways children pick up the details of how to do gender. Her funniest (and perhaps also saddest) chapter is called ‘Lip Gloss and “Goin' With”’, about how pre-adolescent children learn the techniques of teenage flirting and dating. She was also interested in the differences between the girls' and the boys' informal interactions – the games they played, spaces they used, words they spoke, and so on.
But Thorne was able to see beyond the patterns described in conventional gender models. She became aware of how much these models predisposed an observer to look for difference. She began to pay attention not only to the moments in school life when the boys and girls separated, but also to the moments when they came together. She began to think of gender difference as situational, as created in some situations and ignored or overridden in others. Even in recess-time games, where the girls and boys were usually clustered in separate parts of the playground, they sometimes moved into mixed activities without any emphasis on difference. There were many ‘relaxed cross-sex interactions’ in the school's daily routine. Clearly, the boys and girls were not permanently in separate spheres, nor permanently enacting opposite ‘sex roles’.
Recognizing this fact opened up a number of other issues. What were the situations where gender was emphasized or de-emphasized? Thorne noticed that, though teachers sometimes emphasized gender – for instance, arranging a classroom learning game with the girls competing against the boys – most teacher-controlled activities de-emphasized gender. This is true, for instance, of the commonest teaching technique in schools, the ‘talk-and-chalk’ method where the teacher at the front of the room demands the attention of all the pupils to an exposition of some lesson that they all have to learn. In this situation the basic division is between teacher and taught, not between groups of pupils; so girls and boys are in the same boat.
Next, how did the children establish gender difference when they did emphasize it? Thorne began to identify a kind of activity she called ‘borderwork’:
When gender boundaries are activated, the loose aggregation ‘boys and girls’ consolidates into ‘the boys’ and ‘the girls’ as separate and reified groups. In the process, categories of identity that on other occasions have minimal relevance for interaction become the basis of separate collectivities. (1993: 65)
There are different kinds of borderwork in a primary school. One of the most interesting is chasing, a kind of game that is sometimes very fluid and sometimes not. In the schools Thorne studied, boys and girls could play together, and often chased each other, playing ‘girls-chase-the-boys’ and ‘boys-chase-the-girls’. Indeed one game would often merge into the other, as the chased turned around and became the chasers. Thorne notes that often boys chased boys, or girls chased girls, but these patterns attracted little attention or discussion. However girls-chasing-boys/boys-chasing-girls often resulted in lively discussion and excitement. It was a situation in which
[g]ender terms blatantly override individual identities, especially in references to the other team (‘Help, a girl's chasin’ me’; ‘C'mon Sarah, let's get that boy’; ‘Tony, help save me from the girls’). Individuals may call for help from, or offer help to, others of their gender. And in acts of treason, they may grab someone from their team and turn them over to the other side. For example, in an elaborate chasing scene among a group of Ashton third-graders, Ryan grabbed Billy from behind, wrestling him to the ground. ‘Hey girls, get ’im,’ Ryan called. (1993: 69)
Thorne's observation of children alerts us to parallel processes among adults. Borderwork is constantly being done to mark gender boundaries, if not by chasing, then by jokes, dress, forms of speech, and so on. Gender difference is not something that simply exists. It is something that happens, and must be made to happen; something, also, that can be unmade, altered, made less important.
agency