Further Reading Research

Ian Burkitt Social Selves

Gender, Sexuality and Identity (chapter 5)

-          “sex and gender are more like statuses we have to attain, or identities attributed by ourselves and others, rather than natural and inescapable facts” (p111)

-          Sex and gender revolve around three areas, “how we relate to our bodies, what we make of them and how we inhabit the world” (p111)

-          Where biology may be used to explain the exclusive categorisations of male and female, social scientists have become more aware in the last 15-20 years, of individuals who are intersexed, “people born with a physiology and biology that are neither clearly male nor female”

-          These individuals are challenging the gender binary as they show it is difficult for modern biological science to maintain divisions between men and women, and additionally as some individuals are now asserting that they want to be neither male nor female.

ANALYSIS Ian Burkitt places focus on intersex individuals as helping blur the line between categorising of only male and female gender, while the BBC comments on the rise in publicity and coverage around transgender individuals and issues as helping propel this ambiguity around gender further.

Sex and gender as identity and performance

-          Following the publication of Sex, Gender and Society in 1972 by Ann Oakley, sex and gender have been distinguished by social scientists (pg 112)

-          Sex has always been considered as a “biological given”, whilst gender refers to the roles and characteristics, something which is “dependant on culture and is variable and malleable” (p112)

-          Both psychologist Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna argued that gender is not determined through the individual’s physiology, but rather their gender performance in social interactions. They claim that gender is a social construct and that gender is determined through both the individual’s gender performance, and the cultural rules we have learnt from childhood to create the basis from which we regard feminine and masculine attributes. 

 

-          Genitals are commonly argued as the biological determinant of whether someone is male or female, but as these are hidden most of the time, people will attribute a gender to an individual they meet through other means: “movement, behaviour, speech, dress, hairstyle, facial structure, body shape and build, and other physical features”

-          Kessler and Mckenna refer to ‘cultural genitals’, a comment on how once an individual has attributed “a gender to someone based on cultural criteria”, we assume their physiology matches the assumption made. = like correlating suits to the male gender 

 

-          If the first dimension of gender is the attribution of gender by individuals on others, the second is the gender we attribute to our own selves. “This may differ radically from the attributions that others make about us” (p 114)

 

-          Harold Garfinkel conducted an ethnomethodological study of a male to female transexual ‘Agnes’: The natural attitude of an individual, being how they behave in line with the gender they identify with, must be sustained for others to take the gender displayed “as a natural, biological given” (p. 114)

-          In the West, in order for people to ‘pass’ as the gender they wish to present, we feel we must have the “correct anatomy to go with the gender we attribute to ourselves” (p. 115)

-          Many transexuals therefore take hormones to change their body.

-          Although scientists determine individuals as male or female through their biological properties, Kessler and McKenna argue that the basis from which they are able to make this distinction is “everyday cultural processes of gender attribution” (p. 115)

 

-          Babies with a sex that is not easily determined at birth are as much as a product of nature as those who are assigned the category male or female. Those who argue people born without a distinguished gender only do so on the basis of a cultural or religious belief that there are and should only be two sexes.

 

-          While intersex children are socially excluded in Western society, cultures such as indigenous American tribes welcomed their birth. These children often took up positions of power and important in the social group” (p. 118)

-  By medically intervening, the Western world is producing a “two-gendered world”

- Intersex individuals have been forming various groups, such as the Intersex Society of North America in 1990s, to campaign for their right to live as intersexuals.

- This contributes to the gender politics of the modern world: that “people should not be forced to live as either men or women, but some people should be recognized as intersexuals, transgender, or transpeople” (p. 119)

 

- Erving Goffman produced a similar analysis of gender as Kessler and McKenna, in that it is produced “by ritualized displays, or performances, in particular social settings” (p. 120)

 

Performance, power and context in the production of sex and gender

 

- Judith Butler has a performative theory on gender, in that gender is understood through the “performance of actions, behaviours and gestures that have gendered characteristics” (p. 121)

- She asserts in her book ‘Gender Trouble’ that these performative acts constrain the body within the “categories of sex”, and that there is a “disciplinary technology of gender that governs bodies” (p. 121)

- “Gender is also a precondition for the production and maintenance of a legible humanity” (p. 121): If an individual cannot be read as male or female, the status of this individual as a human being is questioned.

- Drag illustrates the performative nature of gender, as an ironic commentary on how body gestures and acts are used to portray masculinity and femininity.

- It also hints at the instability of the boundaries in the categories of male and female, straight and gay.  

 

- Interview drag queen about gender?

 

- We do not come into the world as non-gendered, non-sex individuals who develop a gender identity, but from the earliest days begin performing as male or female according to the rules of our culture on what being a man and woman is.

- Playfulness and experimentation around gender is tolerated in young children, who can cross-dress in the hidden confines of their home, but once they get older this behaviour is condoned as they are expected to perform more along “the norms of their assigned gender and sex” (p. 122)

- Like a musician may improvise on a tune, individuals are constantly repeating and improvising on the gender norms that are standard in society, or ‘gender-bending’ between the male and female indicators.

- Being compelled to identify within this framework of either male of female causes instability as individuals who may become ashamed of having attributes of the opposite gender. For example, men who have more feminine inclinations can feel as though this makes them less masculine and therefore less of a ‘real man’

- Individuals seek labels and classification as a form of recognition of their existence outside of themselves: “social categories signify subordination and existence at once” Judith Butler (1997) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. California:

Stanford University Press. p. 20.

- Butler claims gender can not only be performative, as some of the workings in that performance are not shown. Ian Burkitt gives the example that a very feminine woman is not only performing femininity, but also rejecting masculinity and denying homosexuality.

 

- Butler asserts it is the repudiation and denial of the ‘other’ that enforces heterosexuality and the strict categorisations of male and female only: Heterosexuality requires the rejection of homosexuality, while masculinity requires the rejection of femininity.

- Butler critiques these limited positions and “deconstructs the heterosexual order that keeps them in place” (p. 124)

- ‘Queer Theory’ follows this direction, employing the term queer to signify sexualities beyond heterosexuality.

 

- Gayle Rubin asserts that most individuals have a “home language”, a culture of their nation, that is learnt in the same way an individual acquires a gender and sexuality. These “home sexual and gender comfort zones” have little to no changes.

 

- Gender acquisition from a young age is largely nurtured through the child and caregiver relationship, as Goffman points out, children imitate the “masculine or feminine images given off by the parents caregivers” Erving Goffman (1979) Gender Advertisements. London: Macmillan.

- Imagery through the media will also influence the child (“media infused world” (p. 128)

- Children can reject the form of masculinity or femininity the parent or caregiver performed, as they desire to engage in a gender performance that feels more authentic in style.

- Goffman’s view point counters Butler’s in that he asserts an individual’s gender display shows how they align in a social setting, and how they relate to different groups within the audience.

- eg. gay bars there are a range of individuals who are fulfilling their gender and sexuality role in different ways = straight acting man, college boys, camp boys, ‘bears’ etc.

 

- “it is perfectly intelligible for any of us to ask to be valued in our own right, rather than as a social category” (p. 130)

 

- Can we as humans live without a categorisation? Intersex individuals assert that this is the case, showing that “as persons they have a sense of presence, agency and embodiment in the world that extends beyond their sexuality and gender (p. 130)

- Freud referred to gender and sex not as an identity, but femininity and masculinity as ‘attitudes’ that could be adopted

 

- Connell comments that in gender studies what is often overlooked is that women and men are more similar than they are different R. W. Connell (1987) Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics.Cambridge: Polity Press.

- Both Butler and Burkitt agree that for individuals to remain within the sphere of society, recognised and treated as human, their sex must be in some way “readable and intelligible to others” (p. 131) Not having it so risks them at worst, being subject to violence and murder.

- Those on society’s fringes of sexual being fight for the right to survive when they argue for the right to exist, driving to gain the recognition of others to be included in the ‘human’

- Sexual minorities are challenging the “ontological reality of two sexes”

- Sexual minorities assert their sense of self, as an autonomous agent, by claiming and gaining recognition through articulating their position and redefining the human.

- Mead comments that this sense of ‘I’ does not refer to identity, eg. gender, but rests on action and speech within different social settings and activities.

- Bakhtin points out that this sense of ‘I’ further enables an individual to conceptualise that they can always transcend the ‘I’ they are defined as now into something different.

 

Gender order, gender regimes and dialectical pragmatics

 

- R. W. Connell’s work on gender focuses on the notion of hegemonic masculinity, a term borrowed from the work of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci

- He points out that certain types of masculinity are valued or deemed more powerful in particular contextual settings, for example, the 18^th and 19^th centuries saw the most valued hegemonic masculinity of physical coercion and power turn into one of rational thinking and technical knowledge

- eg. Fight Club book and film presents men lamenting about this loss of hyper-masculinity based on fist-fighting and physical toughness

 

- Connell places emphasis on sport as a cultural context that reinforces the feminine and masculine ideals. For example, the act of being powerful and strong in sport becomes the relevant focus rather than the game itself

- As Connell says, for some ‘it becomes a model of bodily action that has a much wider relevance than the particular game. Prowess of this kind becomes a means of judging one’s degree of masculinity’. Ibid., p. 85.

- Iris Marion Young points out girls are taught to play sport in a more restricted way, therefore directing them towards underestimating their physical strength and sporting capabilities

- Both the work of Connell and Young show that gender is not just “regulated performances” (p. 133) but that we are connected to our “embodied performances” as they shift alongside our “experience of sex and gender”

- It is arguable then that gender cannot be fully illustrated as fictitious or illusionary, as they are made real through different practices eg. sports

 

- Gay culture has had an increasing impact on men’s fashion and style, which has created greater possibilities and shifts in masculinity, allowing within hegemonic masculinities and masculinities more on the periphery.

- Mixed social spaces allow the mingling of different masculinities, where straight and gay men can be inspired and borrow from each other’s styles 

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