Gender as performance or as innate essence

@CraftyNavySeal

Do you believe Money's work proved this? That's more what I was getting at.

Yes, that's why feminists stressed that gender referred to the social expectations and limitations placed on each sex by the prevalent society.

It's easy to show that the vast majority of these are, indeed, social constructs: they vary wildly by location and era, therefore they aren't innate.

An inner sense of one's sex is easy to understand. Most people, having never questioned their society's gender constructs, find it hard to separate a "sense of one's sex" from "social stereotypes".

Then there's an ill-defined grey area in the middle, where some behavioural patterns are sex-linked. It's easiest to identify these in the area of mating-related behaviours and that, again, is rather grey because some people don't have any mate-attracting behaviours and some display those more usually associate with the opposite sex.

Going further, there are possible sex-linked behaviour patterns in other areas of life. Controlled studies to try and establish such patterns would be unethical, so we have no real idea whether they're all socially imposed or not.

From my extremely limited and selective reading of Butler's opus, she was originally talking about this grey area. A woman crossing and uncrossing her legs, for instance, is "performing [feminine] gender" as part of a flirtatious performance. A gay man walking with an exaggerated wiggle is "performing [feminine] gender" to communicate sexual availability. A man with his feet planted apart and shoulders squared is "performing [masculine] gender" to convey power, and so is a woman doing the same.

In feminism, gender performance is used to describe any gendered behaviour. I'm "performing gender" when I show up to an event with my hair and makeup done - I'm not sexually interested but, instead, am showing respect for the gathering's general expectations of female appearance.

Whether Butler took it further, I don't know, but it's easy to see how a superficial grasp of both concepts could lead to a hypothesis that all gendered behaviours are innate. Conveniently, this is exactly what people who never think about it think, so it's an easy sell.

From there it is a very small step to suppose that someone with an affinity for the usual behaviours of the opposite sex must really be the opposite sex, in character at least. Again conveniently, this dovetails with the popular intuition that the wiggling man "is a woman" and the dominating woman "is a man".

It's really bloody annoying!

If that was true you could raise a boy as a girl and they would think they are a girl, but the little boy in the study knew he was a boy all along.

That's because gender and sex are two totally different things.

Performing gender is never ever the same as biological reality.

They believed that gender and gender differences were socially constructed not innate.

If that was true you could raise a boy as a girl and they would think they are a girl, but the little boy in the study knew he was a boy all along.

Arguably it just demonstrated that we have an innate sense of what our sex is but it was used to justify this wibbly wobbly internal gender identity.

@CraftyNavySeal

Sorry, could you clarify what you mean when you say feminists were proved wrong?

To be fair he didn’t separate it from sex, but the second wave feminists had been proved wrong so the gender studies theorists had to make up gender wang.

John Money. In the 80s a baby boy had a botched circumcision and Money had the idea that the baby should be brought up as a girl.

Some feminists at the time espoused that gender was a social construct and we think we are men/women because society tells us we are, so arguably this should work. The poor lad knew all along he was a boy no matter what his parents said which proved that idea wrong, so the idea of an innate gender identity was born.

Well, if it's not your male or female body that determines whether you're a man or a woman, it must be something else.