what is gender?
gender = identity + desire + expression + culture
Welcome back, #NUwitches! You might have noticed that this class is listed as “Women in Western Religion,” but we’re going to think about gender in more expansive terms than that. Especially since — as you know from today’s readings — people of all genders are witches.
What we’re reading
- Butler, from Bodies That Matter (on Canvas)
- Planned Parenthood, “Sex, Gender, and Gender Identity”
- Doyle, “The Woman at the Edge of the Woods” (on Canvas)
- Donovan, “Witchcraft is Empowering Queer & Trans People”
Recommended
I can’t freaking believe I forgot to assign this to y’all. It’s way easier than Butler! Oh well. Butler is important and foundational in critical theories of gender, and you are smart cookies. But in case you need a more, uh, straightforward (no pun intended) introduction to gender theory, here you go.
Keywords
- gender
- sex
- sexuality
- social construct
- patriarchy
- intersectionality
- perfomativity
- voluntarism
- agency
- abjection
Gender and gender theory: some basics
Gender is meaning we make on and about our bodies. But when we’re talking about gender, we’re never just talking about gender. We’re also talking about sex and sexuality, and how people assume that they know what the parts of our body are for (that is, making more bodies) before we’ve even discovered, like, our own noses. People see pictures of babies on sonograms, look for protruding bits in specific areas and go “Ah, I know what they want to be when they grow up.”
This gets complicated pretty quickly, so if you have questions, please ask!!
gender = sex + desire + expression + culture
“Gender” is how we and others make sense of the identity assigned to us at birth and our assumptions about what that identity means we should be doing with our bodies and what we want to do (or not) with our bodies based on those identities and assumptions. That’s a messy confusing tangle of ideas, so let’s break this down.
Sex = identity assigned at birth, which might or might reflect your actual identity, bc the doctor is just taking a guess about who you are based on what your body looks like
Sexuality (desire) = what/who/how/if you want to do with that body for the purposes of procreation, recreation, commodification, etc.
Expression = how you signal how everybody else should make sense of your body
Culture = how everybody else signals how you should make sense of your body
gender: we made it up
Gender is a social construct, which means we learn how to do gender from other people. We learn how to do gender from the folks around us and how they think we should do gender.
Even when we choose how to do our gender, we’re never starting from a blank slate. Breaking with convention still requires there to be a convention to break with. For example: as Judith Butler — whomst you read for today — famously theorized, drag both troubles and reinforces traditional femininity, because drag has people who (for the most part) are not women quite literally performing an exaggerated kind of femininity.
And now, just because we can, let’s take a short drag break.
Okay, we’re back. We’ve established that gender is a social construct. Social constructs are meanings we make on and about our bodies and the bodies of others. Just because we made — constructed — those meanings does NOT mean gender or other social constructs like race, class, or ability don’t have real world consequences.
Social construct does not equal fake or unimportant. Doing gender has real-world consequences.
gender = control
Gender is a form of social ordering and hierarchy. Some theorists (including me) have argued that gender isn’t just meaning; it’s violence. People literally murder other people for doing gender “wrong.” And doing gender wrong has particularly severe consequences if you are also a member of a minoritized race; the homicide rate for black trans women is horrifying (CW for violence against Black trans women).
Most cultures value identities, behaviors, qualities, traits, and practices associated with masculinity over identities, behaviors, qualities, traits, and practices associated with other genders. This valuing of masculinity over other genders is called patriarchy.
Patriarchy can be explicit, like people insisting women are too emotional to be president. But more often patriarchy operates subtly. We don’t have to explicitly or consciously discriminate against non-cismen in order to perpetuate patriarchy, but we can see its effects when we count up how many non-cismen run corporations or represent states in the US Congress.
gender is not enough
People are made up of more than gender! And how they experience and perform gender is shaped and constrained by their other identities and experiences of privilege and oppression (race, class, age, ability, etc.). This is a concept called intersectionality, first theorized by Prof. Kimberlé Crenshaw. We also have an episode for this, if you want to know more.
Finally and most importantly for this class…
gender and religion are co-constitutive
We learn how to do gender in part through religious frameworks, and, we learn how to do religion in ways that are specific to our gender / genders. And, gender and religion influence and reinforce and shape and reshape each other, world without end, amen.
Even if you yourself are not religious, how you think about what bodies should do and what we should do with bodies has been shaped by religious thinking. In what’s currently the United States, that religious thinking is overwhelmingly white european christianity. Even if you are doing gender in complete defiance of how white mainstream christianity thinks you should do it, you’re always doing your gender in relationship to that norm.
And if we’re explicitly going to study religion — which, spoilers, we are — we absolutely have to pay attention to gender. This is because all of the people who do religion have gender, even if their gender is no thank you, please.
As religious studies scholar Malory Nye puts it,
“it is intellectually dishonest, and also incomplete, to assume that what is being said from talking mainly to men, or reading texts written predominantly by men about male experiences, is somehow representative in an inclusive way of [all genders].”
In part, we’re going to pay attention to religion because religion can and does both challenge and reinforce patriarchy — and witches do both. We’ll come back to how witches help us understand the relationship between religion and gender all semester long. But first, let’s take a look at the Empress of Gender Theory herself.
Butler, from Bodies That Matter
I will not lie to you, friends: this is a challenging reading. If you struggled to figure out WTF she was talking about, don’t worry — you’re not alone. But there are a few really important ideas we need to establish before we get any further into this class:
- performativity
- voluntarism & agency
- abjection
performativity
Butler’s arguing in this piece (and also in pretty much everything she’s ever written on the subject) that gender isn’t something you HAVE, it’s something you DO.
“the materiality of sex is constructed through a ritualized repetition of norms.” (Butler 1993, x)
We do — we perform — gender by doing behaviors and practices associated with that gender over and over again (reiteration). Gender, Butler says, is
“a process whereby regulatory norms materialize ‘sex’ and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms. That this reiteration is necessary is a sign that materialization is never quite complete, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled.” (1993, 2)
This is a complicated way of saying that gender isn’t entirely innate or fixed; we have to keep doing things to show people what gender we are (and to avoid violence for doing gender “wrong”).
voluntarism & agency
Butler also calls gender practices “sites of critical agency,” (1993, x). Agency is a word which here means “the ability to act.” So in a way, we can do gender however we like. Billy Porter certainly does.
Butler took a lot of flack for arguing that gender was performative in her first book, Gender Trouble. As she says, her critics suggested that
“if I were to argue that genders are performative, that could mean that I thought that one woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night.” (Butler 1993, x)
Yes, gender is a thing we do on and with our bodies, and yes, we can and do choose how to dress and act about our gender. But while gender is performative (a thing we do over and over again), and while we all have agency (the ability to act), gender is never 100% voluntary. We’re never just making it up as we go along, with no preconceived notions of what’s expected of us. Billy Porter’s outfit makes such an impact in part because that’s not what we expect someone with a body like his to be wearing.
So let’s return to Butler’s definition of gender performativity as a “forcible reiteration of those norms,” (1993, 2). Agency allows us to go through our closets and pull out whatever we want and wear it however we like. But we always have culture — the people around us, the media we consume, how we were raised, where we live — telling us whether or not we’re doing it right and punishing us for doing it wrong.
This is what Butler means by “the repeated and violent circumscription of cultural intelligibility,” (1993, xii). Gender is a social construct: we learn how to do it by watching and learning from and repeating what others do; and there are consequences, sometimes deadly consequences, for not doing gender in a way other people can make sense of.
abjection
Those who do (or are perceived to do) gender wrong are abjected, Butler argues.
“‘Sex’ is, thus, not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the ‘one’ becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility.” (Butler 1993, 2)
Pay particular attention to the language of viability here — doing gender in ways people understand and recognize and can make sense of, Butler insists, is a big part of “that which qualifies a body for life.” Doing gender “correctly” means that your body matters, is culturally valued, that you are allowed to survive. If you resist or reject doing gender in ways that make sense to others, you are rendered abject, not valuable, not deserving of life or inclusion in society.
Okay, deep breath, because this is a big chunk of theory — but one we really need if we’re going to spend the rest of the semester thinking about witches.
“The abject designates here precisely those ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable’ is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which — and by virtue of which — the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life…the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, ‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation.” (Butler 1993, 3).
There’s a lot going on in this short passage, but the key to understanding it is repetition. Remember, Butler says gender is a thing we do over and over again. Part of how we demonstrate to our culture that we should be valued — that we’re subjects, in Butler’s terms — is proving over and over again that we’re invested in social order, that we’re willing to support social order by doing gender correctly. But another, equally important part of how we prove we should be valued and allowed to live is by shunning, excluding, even killing those folks who DON’T support the social order.
That shunning / excluding / killing of folks who won’t play by the rules? That’s abjection.
Guess who does gender “wrong?” Who disrupts social order? Who questions why things are the way they are and if they have to stay that way?
Yep. Witches.
Pro-tip: you can tell you’re abject if some rando from Kansas drops a damn house on you and everybody sings a song about how glad they are that you’re dead.
I know that was a lot, but here are the big take-aways:
- gender norms are how we determine who matters and who doesn’t
- gender happens through a repetition of those norms (performativity)
- we learn how to do gender — which norms to repeat — from others (social construct)
- gender can be a space of play & resistance (agency, Billy Porter)
- BUT ALSO there are material consequences for doing gender “wrong”
- folks who resist gender norms are de-valued, even killed by people committed to maintaining the existing social order (abjection)
- societies maintain order by consistently rejecting/excluding/killing people who disrupt/question/reject gender norms (abjection again)
We’re going to talk about abjection a LOT more in the next few weeks, so don’t worry if this is still a little confusing. Judith Butler has been confusing folks about gender and how we do it since 1990.
Doyle, “The Woman at the Edge of the Woods”
This piece does a lovely job of drawing together a lot of western thinking about witches, witchcraft, and what both have to do with women and femininity. It uses a lot of essentialist language, though — both in assuming that witches have to be women, and defining womanhood in terms of procreation and motherhood. We know, of course, that there are a lot of ways to be women that don’t involve making more bodies. And there are a lot of witches who aren’t women at all. We’ll come back to these conversations, too.
(Side note: since writing Bad Mothers and Dead Blondes, Doyle has since come out as nonbinary. I’m curious about how they might approach this topic now.)
Donovan, “How Witchcraft Is Empowering Queer and Trans Young People”
“Witchcraft is seeing a resurgence among queer-identified young people seeking a powerful identity that celebrates the freedom to choose who you are.”
This one is very straightforward (again, no pun intended). I just think it’s important to hear from folks of all genders about how they’re doing witchcraft and why it’s important to them.
