Masculinities and Femininities Research Paper

1. ‘Sex’ vs. ‘Gender’

Much popular discourse assumes that biological sex determines one’s gender identity, the experience and expression of masculinity and femininity. Instead of focusing on biological universals, social and behavioral scientists are concerned with the different ways in which biological sex comes to mean different things in different contexts. ‘Sex’ refers to the biological apparatus, the male and the female—our chromosomal, chemical, anatomical, organization. ‘Gender’ refers to the meanings that are attached to those differences within a culture. ‘Sex’ is male and female; ‘gender’ is masculinity and femininity—what it means to be a man or a woman. While biological sex varies very little, gender varies enormously. Sex is biological; gender is socially constructed. Gender takes shape only within specific social and cultural contexts.

2. Why Use the Plural?

The use of the plural—masculinities and femininities—recognizes the dramatic variation in how different groups define masculinity and femininity, even in the same society at the same time, as well as individual differences. Although social forces operate to create systematic differences between men and women, on average on some dimensions, even these differences between women and men are not as great as the differences among men or among women.

The meanings of masculinity and femininity vary over four different dimensions; thus four different disciplines are involved in understanding gender.

First, masculinity and femininity vary across cultures. Anthropologists have documented the ways that gender varies cross-culturally. Some cultures encourage men to be stoic and to prove masculinity, especially by sexual conquest. Other cultures prescribe a more relaxed definition of masculinity, based on civic participation, emotional responsiveness, and collective provision for the community’s needs. Some cultures encourage women to be decisive and competitive; others insist that women are naturally passive, helpless, and dependent. What it means to be a man in France or among Aboriginal peoples in the Australian outback are so far apart that it belies any notion that gender identity is determined mostly by biological sex differences. The differences between two cultures’ version of masculinity or femininity is often greater than the differences between the two genders.

Second, definitions of masculinity and femininity vary considerably in any one country over time. Historians have explored how these definitions have shifted, in response to changes in levels of industrialization and urbanization, position in the larger world geopolitical and economic context, and with the development of new technologies. What it meant to be a woman in seventeenth-century France or in Hellenic Greece is certainly different from what it might mean to be a French or Greek woman today.

Third, definitions of masculinity and femininity change over the course of a person’s life. Developmental psychologists have examined how a set of developmental milestones led to difference in our experience and our expression of gender identity. Both chronological age and life-stage require different enactments of gender. In the West, the issues confronting a man about proving himself and feeling successful will change as he ages, as will the social institutions in which he will attempt to enact those experiences. A young single man defines masculinity differently than will a middle-aged father and an elderly grandfather. Similarly, the meanings of femininity are subject to parallel changes, for example, among prepubescent women, women in child-bearing years, and postmenopausal women, as they are different for women entering the labor market and those retiring from it.

Finally, the meanings of masculinity and femininity vary considerably within any given society at any one time. At any given moment, several meanings of masculinity and femininity coexist. Simply put, not all American, Brazilian, or Senegalese men and women are the same. Sociologists have explored the ways in which class, race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, and region all shape gender identity. Each of these axes modifies the others. Imagine, for example, two ‘American’ men, one, an older, black, gay man in Chicago, the other, a young, white, heterosexual farm boy in Iowa. Wouldn’t they have different definitions of masculinity? Or imagine a 22-year old wealthy Asian– American heterosexual woman in San Francisco and a poor white Irish Catholic lesbian in Boston. Wouldn’t their ideas about what it means to be a woman be different? Yet each of these people is deeply affected by the gender norms and power arrangements of their society.

If gender varies so significantly—across cultures, over historical time, among men and women within any one culture, and over the life course—we cannot speak of masculinity or femininity as though they were constant, universal essences, common to all women and to all men. Thus, gender must be seen as an everchanging fluid assemblage of meanings and behaviors and we must speak of masculinities and femininities. By pluralizing the terms, we acknowledge that masculinity and femininity mean different things to different groups of people at different times.

3. Gender and Power

Recognizing diversity ought not obscure the ways in which gender definitions are constructed in a field of power. Simply put, all masculinities and femininities are not created equal. In every culture, men and women contend with a definition that is held up as the model against which all are expected to measure themselves. This ‘hegemonic’ definition of masculinity is ‘constructed in relation to various subordinated masculinities as well as in relation to women,’ writes sociologist Connell (1987). As Goffman (1963, p. 128) once described it:

In an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant, father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports … Any male who fails to qualify in any one of these ways is likely to view himself—during moments at least—as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior.

Women contend with an equally exaggerated ideal of femininity, which Connell calls ‘emphasized femininity.’ Emphasized femininity is organized around compliance with gender inequality, and is ‘oriented to accommodating the interests and desires of men.’ One sees emphasized femininity in ‘the display of sociability rather than technical competence, fragility in mating scenes, compliance with men’s desire for titillation and ego-stroking in office relationships, acceptance of marriage and childcare as a response to labor-market discrimination against women’ (Connell 1987). Emphasized femininity exaggerates gender difference as a strategy of ‘adaptation to men’s power’ stressing empathy and nurturance; ‘real’ womanhood is described as ‘fascinating’ and women are advised that they can wrap men around their fingers by knowing and playing by the ‘rules.’

4. Gender Identity as Relational

Definitions of masculinity and femininity are not constructed simply in relation to the hegemonic ideals of that gender, but also in constant reference to each other. Gender is not only plural, it also relational. Surveys in Western countries indicate that men construct their ideas of what it means to be men in constant reference to definitions of femininity. What it means to be a man is to be unlike a woman; indeed, social psychologists have emphasized that while different groups of men may disagree about other traits and their significance in gender definitions, the ‘antifemininity’ component of masculinity is perhaps the single dominant and universal characteristic.

Gender difference and gender inequality are both produced through our relationships. Chodorow (1979) argued that the structural arrangements by which women are primarily responsible for raising children creates unconscious, internalized desires in both boys and girls that reproduce male dominance and female mothering. For boys, gender identity requires emotional detachment from mother, a process of individuation through separation. The boy comes to define himself as a boy by rejecting whatever he sees as female, by devaluing the feminine in himself (separation) and in others (male superiority). Girls, by contrast, are bound to a pre-Oedipal experience of connection to the same-sex parent; they develop a sense of themselves through their ability to connect, which leads to a desire to become mothers themselves. This cycle of men defining themselves through their distance from, and devaluation, of femininity can end, Chodorow argues, only when parents participate equally in child rearing.

5. Gender as an Institution

Although recognizing gender diversity, we still may conceive masculinities or femininities as attributes of identity only. We think of gendered individuals who bring with them all the attributes and behavioral characteristics of their gendered identity into genderneutral institutional arenas. But because gender is plural and relational, it is also situational. What it means to be a man or a woman varies in different institutional contexts. Those different institutional contexts demand and produce different forms of masculinity and femininity. ‘Boys may be boys,’ cleverly comments feminist legal theorist Rhode, ‘but they express that identity differently in fraternity parties than in job interviews with a female manager’ (Rhode 1997, p. 142).

Gender is, thus, not only a property of individuals, some ‘thing’ one has, but a specific set of behaviors that are produced in specific social situations. And thus gender changes as the situation changes.

Institutions are themselves gendered. Institutions create gendered normative standards, express a gendered institutional logic, and are major factors in the reproduction of gender inequality. The gendered identity of individuals shapes those gendered institutions, and the gendered institutions express and reproduce the inequalities that compose gender identity. Institutions themselves express a logic—a dynamic—that reproduces gender relations between women and men and the gender order of hierarchy and power.

Not only do gendered individuals negotiate their identities within gendered institutions, but also those institutions produce the very differences we assume are the properties of individuals. Thus, ‘the extent to which women and men do different tasks, play widely disparate concrete social roles, strongly influences the extent to which the two sexes develop and or are expected to manifest widely disparate personal behaviors and characteristics.’ Different structured experiences produce the gender differences which we often attribute to people (Chafetz 1980).

For example, take the workplace. In her now-classic work, Men and Women of the Corporation Kanter (1977) argued that the differences in men’s and women’s behaviors in organizations had far less to do with their characteristics as individuals, than it had to do with the structure of the organization and the different jobs men and women held. Organizational positions ‘carry characteristic images of the kinds of people that should occupy them,’ she argued, and those who do occupy them, whether women or men, exhibited those necessary behaviors. Though the criteria for evaluation of job performance, promotion, and effectiveness seem to be gender neutral, they are, in fact, deeply gendered. ‘While organizations were being defined as sex-neutral machines,’ she writes, ‘masculine principles were dominating their authority structures.’ Once again, masculinity—the norm—was invisible (Kanter 1977, 1975). For example, secretaries seemed to stress personal loyalty to their bosses more than did other workers, which led some observers to attribute this to women’s greater level of personalism. But Kanter pointed out that the best way for a secretary—of either sex—to get promoted was for the boss to decide to take the secretary with him to the higher job. Thus, the structure of the women’s jobs, not the gender of the jobholder, dictated their responses.

Sociologist Joan Acker has expanded on Kanter’s early insights, and specified the interplay of structure and gender. It is through our experiences in the workplace, Acker maintains, that the differences between women and men are reproduced and by which the inequality between women and men is legitimated. Institutions are like factories, and one of the things that they produce is gender difference. The overall effect of this is the reproduction of the gender order as a whole (see Acker 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990).

Institutions accomplish the creation of gender difference and the reproduction of the gender order through several gendered processes. Thus, ‘advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine.’ We would err to assume that gendered individuals enter gender-neutral sites, thus maintaining the invisibility of gender-ashierarchy, and specifically the invisible masculine organizational logic. On the other hand, we would be just as incorrect to assume that genderless ‘people’ occupy those gender-neutral sites. The problem is that such genderless people are assumed to be able to devote themselves single-mindedly to their jobs, have no children or family responsibilities, and may even have familial supports for such single-minded workplace devotion. Thus, the genderless jobholder turns out to be gendered as a man.

Take, for example, the field of medicine. Many doctors complete college by age 21 or 22, medical school by age 25–27, and then face three more years of internship and residency, during which time they are occasionally on call for long stretches of time, sometimes, even two or three days straight. They thus complete their residencies by their late 20s or early 30s. Such a program is designed for a male doctor—one who is not pressured by the ticking of a biological clock, for whom the birth of children will not disrupt these time demands, and who may even have someone at home taking care of the children while he sleeps at the hospital. No wonder women in medical school— who number nearly one-half of all medical students today—began to complain that they were not able to balance pregnancy and motherhood with their medical training.

In a typical academic career, a scholar completes a Ph.D. about six to seven years after the BA, roughly by age 30, and then begins a career as an Assistant Professor with six more years to earn tenure and promotion. This is usually the most intense academic work period of a scholar’s life, and also the most likely childbearing years for professional women. The tenure clock is thus timed to a man’s rhythms—not just any man, but one with a wife to relieve him of family obligations as he establishes his credentials. To academics struggling to make tenure, it often feels that publishing requires that family life perish.

Embedded in organizational structures that are gendered, subject to gendered organizational processes, and evaluated by gendered criteria, then, the differences between women and men appear to be the differences solely between gendered individuals. When gender boundaries seem permeable, other dynamics and processes can reproduce the gender order. When women do not meet these criteria (or, perhaps more accurately, when the criteria do not meet women’s specific needs), we see a gender segregated workforce and wage, hiring, and promotional disparities as the ‘natural’ outcomes of already-present differences between women and men. It is in this way that those differences are generated and the inequalities between women and men are legitimated and reproduced.

6. ‘Doing Gender’

There remains one more element in the sociological explanation of masculinities and femininities. Some psychologists and sociologists believe that early childhood gender socialization leads to gender identities that become fixed, permanent, and inherent in our personalities. However, many sociologists disagree with this notion today. As they see it, gender is less a component of identity—fixed, static—that we take with us into our interactions, but rather the product of those interactions. In an important article, West and Zimmerman (1987, p. 140) argued that ‘a person’s gender is not simply an aspect of what one is, but, more fundamentally, it is something that one does, and does recurrently, in interaction with others.’ We are constantly ‘doing’ gender, performing the activities and exhibiting the traits that are prescribed for us.

Doing gender is a lifelong process of performances. As we interact with others we are held accountable to display behavior that is consistent with gender norms, at least for that situation. Thus, consistent gender behavior is less a response to deeply internalized norms or personality characteristics, and more a negotiated response to the consistency with which others demand that we act in a recognizable masculine or feminine way. Gender is less an emenation of identity that bubbles up from below in concrete expression; rather, it is an emergent property of interactions, coerced from us by others.

Understanding how we do masculinities and femininities, then, requires that we make visible the performative elements of identity, and also the audience for those performances. It also opens up unimaginable possibilities for social change; as Kessler points out in her study of ‘inter-sexed people’ (hermaphrodites, those born with anatomical characteristics of both sexes, or with ambiguous genetalia):

If authenticity for gender rests not in a discoverable nature but in someone else’s proclamation, then the power to proclaim something else is available. If physicians recognized that implicit in their management of gender is the notion that finally, and always, people construct gender as well as the social systems that are grounded in gender-based concepts, the possibilities for real societal transformations would be unlimited (Kessler 1990, p. 25).

Kessler’s gender Utopianism raises an important issue. In saying that we ‘do’ gender we are saying that gender is not only something that is done to us. We create and recreate our own gendered identities within the contexts of our interactions with others and within the institutions we inhabit.

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