Gender Reckonings

New Social Theory and Research

James W. Messerschmidt, Michael A. Messner, Raewyn Connell, Patricia Yancey Martin

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479837359
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Vivid narratives, fresh insights, and new theories on where gender theory and research stand today Since scholars began interrogating the meaning of gender and sexuality in society, this field has become essential to the study of sociology. Gender Reckonings aims to map new directions for understanding gender and sexuality within a more pragmatic, dynamic, and socially relevant framework. It shows how gender relations must be understood on a large scale as well as in intimate detail. The contributors return to the basics, questioning how gender patterns change, how we can realize gender equality, and how the structures of gender impact daily life. Gender Reckonings covers not only foundational concepts of gender relations and gender justice, but also explores postcolonial patterns of gender, intersectionality, gender fluidity, transgender practices, neoliberalism, and queer theory. Gender Reckonings combines the insights of gender and sexuality scholars from different generations, fields, and world regions. The editors and contributors are leading social scientists from six continents, and the book gives vivid accounts of the changing politics of gender in different communities. Rich in empirical detail and novel thinking, Gender Reckonings is a lasting resource for students, researchers, activists, policymakers, and everyone concerned with gender justice.

Part I

Points of Departure

Gender and Power and Its Sequels

The chapters in part I address the structural theory of gender, the well-recognized consequences of structural theory for the study of masculinity, and the theory’s unrecognized implications for understanding transsexuality.

Reviewing the historical and geopolitical contexts in which contemporary gender theorizing developed, Myra Marx Ferree notes a shift from an emphasis on gender’s relation to social class to an emphasis on gender’s relation to national context and global location. Ferree reviews Connell’s conceptualization of gender as a social structure and spells out how the 1987 volume prompted others to employ and build upon it. Her assessment draws attention to multiple aspects of differentiation and evaluation, particularly as related to globalization, but more specifically in regard to race/ethnic structures, the influence of social class, and intersectionality. Ferree emphasizes the necessity of using an intersectional perspective to study gender at the local, societal, and global levels. She compares U.S. and German universities on their efforts to improve gender equality and shows how comparable global forces were reshaped by local conditions and thus produced different outcomes. She emphasizes gender as dynamic—involving situation and practice, as historically changing, and as geographically variable.

The chapter by James W. Messerschmidt and Michael A. Messner summarizes Raewyn Connell’s well-known and popular framework on hegemonic and nonhegemonic masculinities, as well as the reformulation of the concept of hegemonic masculinity. They show how “new” masculinities can best be conceptualized by building on both Connell’s original formulation and the reformulation by Connell and Messerschmidt. They review historical and recent scholarship on masculinities and show how this work expands upon Connell’s ideas. In particular, they address confusions about the concept of hegemonic masculinity and contrast it with applications that misrepresent it. Finally, the authors discuss contemporary scholarly developments, including the variety of ways hegemonic masculinity is represented and practiced. They also identify numerous “new” masculinities—for example, dominant, dominating, positive, “female,” and hybrid masculinities, among others.

Finally, Kristen Schilt explores issues related to transgender identities. Schilt considers how the term “transsexual” evolved in both life and scholarship, moving from the purview of medicine, biology, and psychiatry to an issue that sociology as a discipline first depicted as a social problem. She maps out Connell’s initial work on this topic and contrasts it with predominant perspectives of the time. To show how Connell’s approach suggested a “roadmap” for studying transgendered people as subjects in their own right rather than as problematic cultural objects to be explained, she examines the brief passages in the book that speak directly to what was then termed “transsexuality” and links this with Connell’s wider approach to gender as practice. Schilt ends by showing how current work in transgender studies concentrates on people’s understandings of their gender identities and lived experiences, and rejects the kind of categoricalism that depicts trans people as deviants who fall outside of the “normal” gender order.

1

“Theories Don’t Grow on Trees”

Contextualizing Gender Knowledge

Myra Marx Ferree

Raewyn Connell’s Gender and Power profoundly influenced my thinking when it appeared in 1987, and I used it regularly in teaching until the shorter volume, Gender, came out in 2002 (and a second edition in 2005).1 Each book spoke to how gender appeared as a social structure of practice in the particular moment of its publication, and varied importantly in emphasis as a result. As Connell recently said, although asked by her publisher to write a second edition of Gender and Power, it was really not possible to do that; Gender had to be a different book, coming as it did in a different historical moment and speaking to different political and intellectual needs.

Each book speaks to the concerns both of their historical emergence and those of the present moment through their distinctively structural and historical approach to the now popular concept of intersectionality. Both Gender and Power and Gender present gender as a relationship of power and object of struggle that changes over time, but only indirectly indicate how the historically shifting set of gender arrangements in the decade and a half prior to the publication of each shape them. I argue that Connell’s dynamic, political, and historically specific understandings of intersectionality relate to the politics of class and the dynamics of nationalism in the context of globalization in the period of each book. To say that material conditions of history influenced Connell’s theoretical claims does not disparage the claims’ continued relevance, but rather highlights the shifting terrain of political struggle that feminists face.

I draw my title from Connell’s preface to Gender and Power (Connell 1987, xi): “theories don’t grow on trees; theorizing is itself a social practice with a politics.” Indeed, like all feminist practice, theorizing is a practical politics of “choice, doubt, strategy, planning, error and transformation” (61) that has to be done by situated thinkers, not all of whom are ever called theorists or hold academic positions. Theorizing is also to be understood as a form of embodied action that takes place in particular historical moments; feminist theory is work aimed not only at understanding societies but intervening in them, guided by experience and directing strategic choices with a modesty that acknowledges the doubt and error as well as transformative aspirations. Looking back at past theory and rethinking it in present conditions is an essential element of the reflexive responsibility of feminist theoretical practice.

Bringing history more centrally into the work of feminist theorizing also locates political struggles in the specific sites and circumstances that make intersectionality more than a merely academic exercise and offer insight into practices that can advance gender justice. I argue that the concept of intersectionality is weakened when it is treated primarily as operating at the meso or micro levels of group and identity formations. Drawing on Connell’s macro orientation to gender politics as historically grounded and continually contested, I present intersectionality as a matter of macro political dynamics (waves) that generate conflict (turbulence) of different sorts in different locations depending both on the history of the site (sediments) and the directions from which the “waves” come when political interventions happen (stones are thrown) from different positions.2 I use my own social location as a student of gender politics in the United States and European Union (EU) today to illustrate this approach to intersectional analysis in a historical moment in which neoliberalism often appears as the preeminent challenge.

Locating Gender and Power in History

Gender and Power is revolutionary in the sense of being oriented primarily to overthrowing dominant paradigms and figures of theoretical authority. Its approach is to challenge the assumption of binary and ahistorical gender “roles” based on the emergent practices of the feminist movements that had sprung into action in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In its time, the book offered a brilliant critique and reconceptualization of many classics of the social sciences from Karl Marx to Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and from these fragments built a new edifice, a critical theory of gender understood in structural and relational terms. To briefly recapitulate its core argument, gender is a social relation organizing action, a historically variable material framework in which collective consciousness and group coordination as well as individual performances and personalities take on their particular meanings at the micro level. However, it also defines structure and agency as recursively related, since out of the groups and identities formed by such structuring relations come the political activities that contribute to the making or unmaking of material social inequalities at a macro level.

The connections between the micro level of bodies, personalities, and emotional experience and the macro level of cultures, institutions, and societies are what Connell calls “practices,” emphasizing their active, reflexive, and political nature (Connell 1987, 61). This middle (meso) level of practice is the site where structures—macro-level material contradictions and transformations—become visible as situated agents grapple with the situations they face, as they perceive them. As socially embedded agents, both individual and collective actors make choices constrained by their separate and joint histories and enabled and informed by their ethical and political judgments (95). These choices are political: they arise from power relations, give form to power, and generate specific conflicts (or turbulences). Seeing gender theorizing as a political practice is to emphasize its choices and consequences as constituting real social facts.

The gender theory Connell advanced in 1987 was drawn from experiences in challenging the powers of that time, including the intellectuals who provided what Connell judged to be justifications for inequality’s resilience rather than a map for transforming it. Gender and Power was intended to be useful to the women’s movement that had emerged over the previous decade and a half, and was struggling to understand the specific opportunities and resistances of that period. In addition to the predictable opposition from gender traditionalists, feminists faced two particular challenges from their “friends.” One was the “sex roles” ideology of complementarity and pseudoequality with which most liberal theorists were still working. The other was the Marxist edifice of theory that defined class as the only fundamental structural contradiction, and class-based struggle as the only source from which true social equality could come (Sargent 1981). Both liberal and socialist theory informed the social sciences of the 1980s, placing gender relations into the role of being at best a “secondary” consideration.

“Radical” feminism in liberal societies (notably the US and UK) advanced an alternative view of “patriarchy” based on analysis of women and men as inherently and eternally oppositional categories. Thus, the boldest move that Gender and Power made was to translate the women’s movement’s self-understanding as a transformative social force into a theory of gender that recognized the movement’s independent historical agency without making a claim for its autonomy from other oppressions or movements mobilizing with or against them.

To connect gender with other theories of injustice and social action, a theory of socialization was needed to connect macro injustice to transformative politics. To advance an intersectional view of injustice also called for severing the institutional anchors that tied gender to the institution of the family, race to community-level institutions like education, and class to impersonal-seeming macro models of the formal economy (capital formation, market relations, and national development). Gender and Power accomplishes both these tasks by building on Connell’s research on educational institutions as sites of active stratification, an intersectional analysis in which gender and sexuality operate with and through social class to provide material and ideological resources for embedding the self in hierarchical social relations.

This empirical work on education and stratification (Connell et al. 1982; Connell 1985) was part of a larger, global theoretical project, most strongly represented by Raymond Williams (1976) in the UK and Pierre Bourdieu (1984) in France, that treated culture as a structuring force, not a mere superstructure to economics. Such class-critical theorists promoted ethnographic and historical methods as the means of capturing the cultural forces creating class relations in schools (e.g., Willis 1977) and actively producing meaningful and usable class categories (e.g., Thompson 1968). This context provided both a theoretical and methodological structure for Gender and Power to extend to gender relations.

The intersectionality of gender and class (not gender and race) that informed Gender and Power was prominent in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There was a vibrant discussion going on in the US, Australia, Canada and the UK, and in much of Europe and Latin America, about the proper relationship between Marxism and feminism, a line of empirical research and theorizing that engaged capitalist patriarchy (and patriarchal capitalism) in an intersectional way long before the term “intersectionality” itself was coined. The effort to understand patriarchy as a system of power that shaped how capitalism worked, and vice versa, focused largely on the macro level of analysis where class was theoretically situated. Gender relations were understood in historical material terms, especially among leading British Marxist feminists, such as Sheila Rowbotham (1974) and Juliet Mitchell (1971).

However, gender relations were still likely to be thought of in binary terms; studies focused only on women and their lives as sites where gender could be seen, not unlike the focus on studying Black experience as a way of understanding “race.” Empirical research, including my own in the 1970s and early 1980s, focused on studying housework as reproductive labor and reflected a normative standard frame of families as the site of (re)production of gender inequalities; many feminist critics pointed out how women were excluded in studies of shop floors, class consciousness, union mobilization, social movements, and party politics, even in who was counted as a worker (e.g., Feldberg and Glenn 1979)

By the mid-1980s, however, the “separate spheres” approach that assigned women to home, family, and reproductive labor and men to formal employment and politics was being undermined by historical and sociological studies that connected home and work as institutions. Women of color such as Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Mary Romero, Bonnie Thornton Dill, and Judith Rollins used paid domestic labor as a theoretical wedge that not only introduced race into the consideration of women’s lives and labor but also broke open the binary gendered boxes of home and work, love and money, and family and economy (Ferree 1990). But the reflexive theorizing that would specifically make use of the marginality of women of color in the US to construct “intersectionality” (Crenshaw 1989) or the “matrix of domination” (Hill Collins 1990) to bring race into macro-social models emphasizing gender and class was still to be done.

Gender and Power came at about the same time as Joan Scott’s similarly brilliant and pathb...