Revised Blog

Revised Response to Beyond the Binary Chapters 9-12

The prompt that I am responding to is: How sympathetic are you to social construction theses as they apply to sex, gender, womanhood, manhood, femininity, and masculinity? On your own view, how much of our gendered reality is socially constructed? How much is inevitable?

Again, I want to limit this post to just a discussion about gender. I would say that I am now the most sympathetic that I have ever been to social construction theses of gender, manhood, womanhood, femininity, and masculinity.  Not only do I believe that gender is a social construct, but I would go as far as to adopt the radical view that gender should be done away with entirely.

In his book, The Social construction of What? Ian Hacking discusses social construction claims. They argue that when considering social construction claims it is not enough to just answer the question of whether or not something is socially constructed, instead we must ask what is the point in pointing out that something is socially constructed. To help answer this question he provides three grades of commitment that are associated with social construction claims about any X:

1. X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is, X, or X as it is at present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not inevitable.

2. X is quite bad as it is.

3. We would be much better off if X were done away with, or at least radically transformed.  (Hacking 6).

I find these grades of commitment to be useful, so I will use them to judge my own commitment to the social construction of gender. 

I fully agree with the first claim. I do not think that gender is in the nature of things at all, it need not have existed, and it is not inevitable. I would wager that this level of commitment is agreed upon by anyone who would have the wherewithal to come across this blog post, so  I will not spend to much time on it. While sexual differences between male and female humans are products of nature, the category of gender is not. Gender can be understood as the set of social expectations and roles pertaining to femininity. What these roles and expectations are is not set in stone, they can and have changed over time. One is not truly born as a gender either, but is assigned one, and is raised to meet the expectations of that gender. This is what Simone de Beauvoir meant when she famously expressed her belief that one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one. (Mikkola). Since no one is born with an essence that predisposes them to act in expectations of one of our gendered categories, being a member of a particular gender (and thus the concept of gender itself) is not inevitable, but rather entirely a product of society. 

I also agree with the second grade of commitment. Gender is quite bad as it is. Maintaining our current attitudes toward gender is harming us as a society. Currently we place expectations on how people should behave based on their gender. This makes people feel limited. For example, we discourage men from engaging in gentle platonic touch to for no better reason than it's just not what men do, which results in harmful and disastrous consequences. (Greene). Although it is a social construct, we place value on one's gender and treat it as an important part of their identity. This places people in a box that they are hesitant to leave out of fear of being ostracized by society. I think that trans and non-binary people are a good example of this. They are people who do not conform with the gender norms associated with their assigned gender, and opt instead to adopt a different set of norms. As a result they are mocked, harassed, and biased against. This is even true for my own college, which all things considered is a relatively progressive area. In a 2017 survey, 100% of transgender students at Siena said that they experienced bias/harassment/discrimination on campus. (Boyd). Clearly people are being harmed by our current views regarding gender, both in obvious and subtle ways. 

When it comes to the third grade of commitment, I think that we would be better off if gender were done away with entirely. I do not think that radically transforming it is enough. This is because gender only exists insofar as gender norms exist. After all if there were no expectations or roles associated with being a man, then the category of man would be meaningless, just like how right now the social category of "blapper" (a nonsense word I just made up) is meaningless because there is no rubric for what it means to be one. So what I am really saying is that we should do away with all gender norms, which means we should stop associating all traits with a particular gender. What do we gain by perpetuating the idea that certain qualities are masculine while others are feminine? The answer is nothing. All we are doing is putting people in gender boxes and telling them they should act in a certain way or else they won't be a "real man" or "real woman." If a trait is desirable, then society would be better off if half of the population were not discouraged from acquiring it. And likewise, if a trait is undesirable, then it should not be expected to be adopted by half the population. Those who want to merely change our understanding of gender presumably want to do so in order to make the two genders equal, but I would argue that as long as there is a distinction, there will never be true equality. As long as there are categories, there will be inequalities between the categories. As long as there is "man" there will be limiting expectations that define what it means to be one as well as what it means to not be one. So we should get rid of these expectations and the limits that go along with them, and collectively decide that "man" and "woman" are meaningless properties.

Works Cited

Boyd, Nora. “Blog Post Prompt.” Reading & Blog Post Assignment: Transgender Survey, "Trans Feminism", and "Whose Feminism Is It Anyway?" , 2020, canvas.siena.edu/courses/6086/assignments/98517.

Greene, Mark. “The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men's Lives Is a Killer.” Medium, Medium, 5 July 2019, remakingmanhood.medium.com/the-lack-of-gentle-platonic-touch-in-mens-lives-is-a-killer-5cc8eb144001. 

Hacking, Ian. “The Social Construction of What.” The Social Construction of What? -Larval Subjects, 2011,  

 Mikkola, Mari. “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 25 Oct. 2017, plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/.