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Social Construction of Gender

The social construction of gender is a theory about the operation and performance of gender, and gender differences in societies. This theory is most common in fields of feminism and sociology. According to this theory, society and its culture creates gender roles. These gender roles are then prescribed by the society as the ideal or appropriate behaviour for a person of each sex, making them become enforced as social norms. Some theorists argue that behavioural differences between males and females are purely social conventions, while others believe these behavioural differences to be influenced by a combination of biological factors and and social conventions.

Social constructionism

Social constructionism is related to the criticism of the objectivism assumed by a positivist/empiricist concept of knowledge . Among the most popular of the social constructionist theories is the gender role theory, considered by Alsop, Fitzsimons and Lennonas an early form of social constructionism. Their focus on power and hierarchy shows a marxist inspiration, utilised for instance by materialist feminism. Social constructionism, put briefly, is the concept that there are many things that people "know" or take to be "reality" that are at least partially, if not completely, socially situated. For example, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker writes that "some categories really are social constructions: they exist only because people tacitly agree to act as if they exist.

For the basic assumptions of social constructionism, see Marecek, Crawford & Popp.

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Gender

Gender, according to West and Zimmerman, is not a personal trait but "an emergent feature of social situations: both as an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements, and as a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions of society." Historically, the term gender was adopted as a means of distinguishing between biological sex and socialised aspects of femininity and masculinity. Moreover, gender was considered achieved and more or less stable after it is acquired in early childhood. The contemporary constructionist perspective, as proposed by Fenstermaker and West, treats gender as an activity ("doing") of utilising normative prescriptions and beliefs about sex categories based on situational variables. These "gender activities" constitute our belonging to a sex as based on the socially accepted dichotomy of "women" and "men". It is noted, however, that these activities are not always perceived as being either "masculine" or "feminine", they are at constant risk of being assessed as more or less "womanly" or "manly". Ultimately, any behaviour may be judged based upon its "manly" or "womanly" nature. "Doing gender" is in fact based on these interactions that are constituted of ongoing assessments in various situations. This in turn points to the situational nature of gender rather than its inherent, essentialist and individual nature.

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Gender roles

Gender roles are often centred around the conceptions of femininity or masculinity. [added links]

Empirical investigations suggest that gender roles are "social constructs that vary significantly across time, context, and culture".

Gender roles, according to Berkowitz, are an acceptance of social construction as it pertains to gender and the roles we perform. "The gender order is hierarchical in that, overall, men dominate women in terms of power and privilege; yet multiple and conflicting sources of power and oppression are intertwined, and not all men dominate all women. Intersectionality theories how gender intersects with race, ethnicity, social class, sexuality, and nation in variegated and situationally contingent ways".

The constructionism of gender and stereotyped roles can be examined through a given environment. This reality is negotiated into each interaction we have. For example, based on a simulation discussed in “Walk Like a Man, Talk Like a Woman”, the simulation used “demonstrates the social constructiveness of gender, maintaining that gender should be conceptualised and portrayed as a process, system of stratification, and social structure”. The perceptions of the social world in which these students view the world around them is as an “objective reality rather than as a product of human interaction and interpretation that is institutionalised and transformed over time”. One of the most powerful notions that this simulation encourages is teaching from a constructionist perspective that requires instructors to “challenge perceptions by requiring students to unpack the “hows and whys” of sociological phenomena”.

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Gender identity

Lisa M. Diamond argues that gender identity is not a stable, fixed trait – rather, it is socially constructed and may vary over time for an individual. A study by Bandura and Bussey shows that kids want to be like others of their sex and social conformity has been widely studied on adolescents. A study showed that 6-year-old children tend to conform to choices that their peers find more popular. They begin labelling objects as "for girls" or "for boys" and conform to what is expected of them . West and Zimmerman argue that the notion of womanhood or femininity is accomplished through an active process of creating gender through interacting with others in a particular social context.

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Gender performance

Gender, according to West and Zimmerman, is not simply what one is, but what one does. It is actively produced within social interactions. Sometimes this is referred to as "doing" gender: "the activity of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one's sex category". People do not have to be in mixed gender groups or in groups at all for the performance of gender to occur. "Doing" gender is not just about conforming to stereotypical gender roles; it is the active engagement in any behaviour that is gendered, or behaviour that may be evaluated as gendered. The performance of gender varies depending on the context of time, space, social interaction, etc. The enactment of gender roles is context dependent – roles are "situated identities" instead of "master identities".

These performances normalise and reinforce sex categories. In other words, by doing gender, we reinforce the essential dichotomous categories of gender. The idea that men and women are essentially different is what makes men and women behave in ways that appear essentially different. Though sex categorisation is based on biological sex, it is maintained as a category through socially constructed displays of gender (for example, you could identify a transgender person as female despite her being assigned male at birth).

Institutions also create normative conceptions of gender. In other words, gender is simultaneously created and maintained, "both a process and a product, medium and outcome of such power relations". In his examination of blue and white-collar workers, Mumby argued that hegemonic or dominant masculinity provides a standard of acceptable behaviour for men, and at the same time, is the product of men's behaviour. This can be said for constructions of any identity in certain contexts (e.g. femininity, race, Black femininity, etc.).

The term "gender performativity" was first coined in American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler's 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity , in which she sets out to criticise what she considers to be an outdated perception of gender. This outdated perception is limiting in that it adheres to the dominant societal constraints that label gender as binary. In her paper, Performativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics Butler reiterates that gender is performative in that it is acted out in our interactions and appearances. Gender is prescribed by the binary norms of a society and these norms are reproduced through power relationships. She also proposes that gender would not exist without this cycle of performance and reproduction of norms.

In demystifying this concept, Butler sets out to clarify that there is indeed a difference in the terms gender performance and gender performativity. In doing so, Butler states in an interview: "When we say that gender is performed, we usually mean that we've taken on a role; we're acting in some way…To say that gender is performative is a little different…For something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman…we act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or simply something that is true about us. Actually, it is a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time." Butler is, however, not stating that gender is a sort of performance in which an individual can terminate the act; instead, what Butler is stating is that this performance is ongoing and out of an individual's control. In fact, rather than an individual producing the performance, the opposite is true. The performance is what produces the individual.

On Butler's hypothesis, the socially constructed aspect of gender performativity is perhaps most obvious in drag performance, which offers a rudimentary understanding of gender binaries in its emphasis on gender performance. Butler understands drag cannot be regarded as an example of subjective or singular identity, where "there is a 'one' who is prior to gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender decides with deliberation which gender it will be today". Consequently, drag should not be considered the honest expression of its performer's intent. Rather, Butler suggests that what is performed "can only be understood through reference to what is barred from the signifier within the domain of corporeal legibility".

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