Читать книгу The New Gender Paradox - Judith Lorber - Страница 8

Gender as a construct first appeared in Harold Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) in the story of Agnes. Agnes was a 19-year-old with fully developed breasts, penis, and testicles who came to a UCLA center for the study of people with “severe anatomical irregularities.” She presented as intersexual but in actuality was a normal boy who had been taking female hormone pills stolen from her mother since the age of twelve. What was important to Garfinkel was the way that Agnes achieved the gender display of a “natural, normal female” through voice pitch, gestures, dress, and other mannerisms that today we would call “emphasized femininity.” We never hear from Agnes, but the construction of gender identity by transgender people has subsequently been described in many of their own accounts and is now a staple of the constructionist literature (Bolin 1988; Devor 1997; Ekins 1997).

Buried in Garfinkel but subsequently spotlighted by gender studies analysts is the idea that it is not only transgender individuals who create a gender identity; everyone produces a version of masculinity or femininity socially and culturally acceptable enough to meet the expectations of normality in the eyes of others in their social groups. Building on Garfinkel, Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna, in Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (1978), showed that gender is produced as a social fact by presenting a self that is acceptable to others. Gender attribution reproduces the gender binary by ignoring anomalies and assuming anatomical congruence with outer appearance. Genitalia may be the signs used in the initial assignment of an infant to a sex category, but in gender attribution, the genitalia under clothing are assumed; Kessler and McKenna call them “cultural.” In their ethnomethodological account of gender construction, Kessler and McKenna focus on the role of the “other” in the validation of gender, but they end their book by coming back to the doer: “All persons create both the reality of their specific gender and a sense of its history, thus at the same time creating the reality of two, and only two, natural genders” (1978: 139).

Garfinkel did not address the question of the extent of consciousness and complicity in the construction of gender because he did not know until years after that Agnes had been lying about the source of her bodily anomalies (breasts and a penis). In a feminist re-analysis of the story of Agnes, Mary Rogers (1992) argued that Garfinkel was an unwitting “gender collaborator” who displayed the masculinity Agnes needed as a contrast. Although most cisgender people present themselves as women or men without the deliberate impression management of transgender people, there were times when Garfinkel was well aware that he played up to Agnes’s emphasized femininity by a complementarily emphasized masculinity – holding doors open, seating her in a car, and so on. What were below the surface of his awareness, according to Rogers, were the power differentials in his relationship with Agnes. He was older, a professional, in control of the interview sessions, and with the other men in the research/clinic situation, the ultimate decider of whether Agnes would get the sex-change surgery she desired. And so, like other western women in the 1950s, Agnes had to be manipulative and secretive to get what she wanted from men who had power over her.

Constructionist feminist theory and research subsequently focused on how girls and women consciously learn heterosexual gender displays and subservient behavior as strategies to attract a husband, but seemed to assume that boys and men absorbed the attitudes of patriarchal privilege much less consciously. Since consciousness raising was at one time a radical feminist political strategy, it would seem that without the “click” of self-awareness, women are no more conscious of the gender construction of their lives than men are.

The use of Agnes in the feminist literature as a model of the production of femininity by “normal, natural females” greatly expanded the concept of gender construction. A huge body of empirical research shows how girls and women in western societies are made docile, submissive, emotional, and nurturant through socialization by parents, teachers, peers, and imitation of constantly presented media depictions of heterosexual attractiveness. Later work on masculinity shows that the same process takes place in the making of assertive, emotionally repressed, sexually aggressive boys and men, with the addition of sports as an arena for reward and emulation of violent behavior (Messner 2002).