Feminist Perspectives on Relationships

The Social Construction of Gender

As a central component of their theorizing, feminist scholars view gender as a social construct that embodies cultural views of femininity and masculinity; in this view, gender is created through everyday practices, interactions, and institutions that shape our ideas and enactment of what it means to be male and female, masculine and feminine. These gender constructions are inextricably interwoven into both social structures (such as work, family) and the distribution of privileges, resources, and power.

Whereas gender is a social status that organizes many aspects of relational and familial life, it is also enacted continuously in interpersonal relationships (often described as “doing gender”). Such a conceptualization of the ongoing construction and performance of gender sharply contrasts with biological notions of gender (which place gender into the realm of the natural, inextricably linked with anatomical sex), and gender-role perspectives (which emphasize gender as a social role that is marked by a well-articulated set of behaviors and attitudes that through socialization become integral to one's self-conception). Such biological and role perspectives emphasize gender difference and may overemphasize differences between men and women. Research on whether and to what degree men and women evidence divergent patterns of interpersonal communication (e.g., men use more interruption, self-display, and assertion; women are more relational in their speech and attuned to nonverbal cues) is a case in point here, to the extent that the [Page 680]researcher either states or implies a biological basis for the differences, or treats the differences as so inherent to men versus women as to naturalize them. Feminist researchers on the other hand, seek to deconstruct the observation of gendered patterns of communication by examining how these patterns are constituted in the first place, how they play out in interpersonal interactions, and how they reflect and reinforce the structural inequities of men's and women's lives. Feminist perspectives further emphasize how individuals subvert and remake such gender constructions and seek to understand how both exaggerating and obscuring gender differences are constructions in and of themselves.

Feminist scholars also deconstruct sex and sexuality, with an emphasis on challenging binaries to understand the diversity of sexual identities, orientations, and practices. Here, the binary construction of heterosexuality as “normal” and other sexualities as deviant or pathological is critiqued, as are ways in which sex and sexuality are essentialized and inextricably linked with gender. Feminist analyses have given visibility to the ways in which heterosexuality, masculinity, femininity, and family ideology are so tightly intertwined and coconstructed as to make them nearly impossible to conceptualize separately. Thus, feminist theorists also contest heteronor-mativity (the ways in which heterosexual models of relationships are assumed to be so normal and natural that they go unquestioned and unrecognized).

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