Gender

Gender is commonly understood to refer to the culturally constructed behaviors, roles, and identities associated with men and women. Simone de Beauvoir's claim that one is not born one but rather becomes a woman is frequently invoked to capture the sense in which what it means to be a man or a woman derives from the social and historical context in which we live rather than from natural or biological fact.

Gender is an important question for political theory. Theorists are concerned with how political institutions and concepts used in political theory are gendered—that is, how their development and definitions have operated to construct and perpetuate gender divisions. In addition, how we understand the concept of gender is itself an important focus for political theorists.

Feminist theorists have pointed out that much traditional political theory, while purporting to be neutral, is gendered. Perhaps most important, feminist theorists have argued that the concept of the person or the individual that underpins much political theory turns out, on closer inspection, to equate to an individual who possesses characteristics—such as rationality, impartiality, and independence—traditionally associated with masculinity. This gendering of the individual was once explicit, as in the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), but it continues implicitly in the work of much political theory. It persists precisely because of this history of exclusion of women from participation in the political sphere. Although the formal limitations on women's participation in public life have been removed, many feminists contend that this historical exclusion has continued effects. This history has contributed to our understanding of the characteristics associated with masculinity and femininity. The ideals guiding public-sphere participation—reason, impartiality, exercising judgments in accord with universal rules, not sentiment—come to be associated with masculinity and to be defined against the attributes associated with femininity. Thus, publicity, reason, universality, and masculinity are aligned in opposition to privacy, emotion, particularity, and femininity.

How we are to understand what the term gender refers to is also a matter of substantial debate within political theory. One interpretation of the meaning of gender is to understand it in terms of a distinction between sex and gender. On this social constructivist understanding, sex is natural or bio-logical—maleness or femaleness—whereas gender is culturally constructed meanings attached to these biological facts—masculinity and femininity.

Other interpretations of gender have challenged the adequacy of the sex/gender distinction, arguing that the idea that sex is a natural fact is not self-evidently true but is itself a culturally constructed notion. An alternative to this understanding of sex as natural and gender as cultural is Judith Butler's influential theory of gender performativity. This theory argues that sex is as constructed a notion as gender is. Performativity theory is a more thoroughgoing version of social constructivism, arguing that there is no natural sex—instead, it is the repeated performance of gender that produces, over time, the effect of a natural sex that underlies these performances. The constant repetition of gender congeals over time to give the appearance of a natural truth underlying these performances. On this understanding, the order of primacy is reversed—it is not sex that dictates or shapes our performance of gender, but rather the repeated performance of gendered behavior that accretes, over time, to produce the idea of an underlying sex.

...