Sex differences, on almost every psychological trait measured, are either non-existent or fairly small. Certainly they are smaller than the differences in social situations that are commonly justified by the belief in psychological difference â such as unequal incomes, unequal responsibilities for child care and drastic differences in access to social power.
Nonetheless, gender appears important; there is a cultural insistence on knowing sex. Many who have held a new-born infant in a public place will know that, âIs it a girl or a boy?â is a popular conversational gambit. Knowing the sex determines the gender rules: in this case what adjectives are appropriate to use to describe the babyâs behaviour⌠. Gender ambiguity is culturally disconcerting (probably because so many cultural ârulesâ rely on gender categorisation). Braithwaite and Orr suggest that âgender nonconformity is often viewed as threatening to social institutionsâ (2017, p. 181).
So there are tensions at play here. Gender differences between men and women appear to be fewer and less pronounced than some might suppose when researched, but notions about gender lead to cultural practices, which also create difference. Cultural practices do shape our physical and neurological make-up (Shilling 2016, p. 32). Indeed, to speak of a male or female sex is reductive, as it compresses an enormous variety of different cultural ideals into one entity. Fine (2010, p. 3) makes this point,
Every person is unique, multifaceted, sometimes even contradictory individual, and with an astonishing range of personality traits within each sex, and across contexts, social class, age, experience, educational level, sexuality and ethnicity, it would be pointless and meaningless to attempt to pigeonhole such rich complexity and variability into two crude stereotypes⌠.
An important concept to introduce here is that our experiences are also constituted by many other factors, which intersect with our having an ostensibly male or female body, such as colour, age, sexual orientation, and so forth. Thinking about intersectional aspects also allows a critical questioning of medical diagnostic classificatory tools used by mainstream psychiatry, for example, that, âcapitalist, white, hetero-patriarchal norms dictate the ways in which people are diagnosed, and therefore treatedâ (and some of these classificatory norms have an underpinning in theories which are fundamentally sexist and racist, Hogan 1997). âThis also means access [to treatment] differs depending on these intersecting aspects of identityâ (Jensen 2015, np), as do diagnostic and treatment predilections (Hogan 1997).
Our identities are created by our cultural context, intersecting with many other elements. However, to say there may be different elements, such as ethnicity, which intersect with oneâs body is potentially problematic, as such a formulation might imply a separation of elements; it is more helpful to see intersectional elements as unified aspects of selfhood, which are more or less operational depending on context. Scholars have highlighted simultaneous and multiple forms of oppression. Brah warns that âstructures of class, racism, gender and sexuality cannot be treated as âindependent variablesâ because the oppression of each is described in the other â is constituted by and is constitutive of the otherâ (1996, p. 12). OâReilly (2017) argues that motherhood should also be acknowledged in intersectional discourse as an important and often overlooked subject position.
Gendered subjects (us) are constituted through social relations. One might then go a step further and challenge the notion of us as having a fixed steady identity, though we seemingly have this â a âcoreâ sense of self, but close analysis reveals that actually we are all distinctive in different situations; we all have different repertoires of being. Context makes us different people. If I am engaging with my dog, I am likely to feel very different things compared to when I am engaging with my vice-chancellor, or a best friend. Different contexts bring out different potentialities and in so doing we are changed, often imperceptibly, moment by moment. Fine (2010, p. 7) puts it like this, âThe active self is a dynamic chameleon from moment to moment in response to its social environmentâ. Ethnographers have articulated a sense of a self in process. Rather than a fixed self that is determined by our biology coupled with early formative childhood experiences (as some psychologists would have it) a more fluid approach to identity is adopted. We are formed and reformed, made and making simultaneously through our interactions with others.4 However, we should not think of this as a passive process, as we enact or perform âgenderâ identity more or less self-consciously within certain discursive and conceptual limits (Butler 1993). The âselfâ is a work in progress, not something fixed. Moreover, we should not assume an essential sameness of human subjectivity across cultures, or even within subject positions. Furthermore, genetic theories are also potentially very reductive when deterministically applied to ideas about identity,
⌠gendered identities of masculinity and femininity cannot be reduced to any âlogicâ of genetic influence. The significance of genes and groups of genes, indeed, is codetermined by interactions within the human organism as well as by interactions that people have with the social and material environment in which they live.
(Shilling 2016, p. 36)
