Читать книгу The New Gender Paradox - Judith Lorber - Страница 9

The signature term in constructionist gender studies is “doing gender.” West and Zimmerman argued that:

gender is not a set of traits, not a variable, nor a role, but the product of social doings of some sort. . . . Doing gender means creating differences between girls and boys and women and men, differences that are not natural, essential, or biological. Once the differences have been constructed, they are used to reinforce the “essentialness” of gender. (1987: 129, 137)

Given membership in a sex category, doing gender is inevitable and unavoidable in a gendered society. One’s gender performance is evaluated by others and one is accountable for its appropriateness. The end result is not only personal and interpersonal gendering, but gendered workplaces, politics, medical and legal systems, religions, and cultural productions: “Doing gender furnishes the interactional scaffolding of social structure, along with built-in mechanisms of social control” (1987: 147).

To the extent that women conform to norms of femininity, they are complicit in their own oppression, just as men who benefit from the privileges of masculinity are complicit in reproducing that oppression (Martin 2001, 2003). The pressures of accountability for doing gender properly create family–work conflicts among successful women (Blair-Loy 2003; Hochschild 1997). These pressures constrain their career and family choices in ways that are often not of their own choosing. The discourse shaping the norms of work and family reflects invidious gendered assumptions and values. Julia Nentwich (2004), a Swiss psychologist, suggests alternative language to construct different realities. Within a work organization, she says, women can be different – exotic, not the norm, a problem to integrate. Or they can be similar, so that treating them differently is discrimination. In the family, the language of the traditional division of labor puts children and jobs in conflict, makes a paid job a privilege for mothers and spending time with the family a privilege for fathers. In contrast, the language of equal partnership assumes that her paid work is important to the woman, that fathers take care of their children, and that both participate in work and family. On full-time versus part-time work, the dominant language framework is that full-time has to be the norm because the demands of the job come first, performance is measured by time spent at the job, and work and private life are two separate spheres. In an alternative language framework, performance is measured by fulfilling objectives, jobs can be partitioned, and work, family, and other life concerns are overlapping spheres (Epstein et al. 1999).