Interpreting Gender

Abstract

In this article the author deconstructs dominant understandings of two concepts central to feminist analysis itself: gender and woman. Much of post-1960s feminist scholarship has relied on the distinction between “sex” and gender. Although this distinction has served many useful purposes (particularly that of allowing feminists to challenge biological determinism), it has also enabled feminists to preserve a type of dualistic thinking about women's identity. It has allowed feminists to think of differences among women as separable from that which women share. The author argues that this polar framework has enabled feminists to stress the deep differences between women's and men's culture-generated experiences. But, because the polar framework of contemporary society is neither completely stable or hegemonic nor links perfectly male and female experiences with male and female identified bodies, employing it as an unquestioned element of one's analysis also leads to problems. This framework falls to capture the gender deviance of many of us, reinforces cultural stereotypes of the meaning of female and male experience, and acts politically to suppress modes of being that challenge gender dualisms.