Gender(s), Stockton

Last updated on 22 Jul 2022.

Review and notes on Gender(s) by Kathryn Bond Stockton.

An interesting and accessible overview of gender theory, centering around the particularly provocative claim that “gender is queer for all”. Crucially explores the involvement of race and capital in the formation of gender, but could go deeper. Makes for thought-provoking reading, but in my opinion falls short of full theoretical strength. Understandable for its introductory context.

Introduction: Is Gender a Piece of Cake?

• Gender reveal party - literally makes gender a cake.
• Why no cake for race, class?
• What is a gender, exactly? Genders are words as much as anything - the literary is the real. Reality is structured textually.
• Gender is not quite a ‘buffet’ either. Do modern ‘gender buffets’ really reflect the nature of gender?
• What does the ‘abolition of gender’ mean?
  • References Haraway and the end of gender. To what extent is gender a class? Can we apply Marxian ‘end of [class] history’ analysis to the ‘end of [gender] history]?
• If a man wears a dress, does the definition of a man change?
• Gender is “word and system” - gender is forged as the scales of word and system.
• We do not fully control our gender. It emerges as a construct from this system.
• How is gender embedded into our language? Gender emerges as a linguistic concept for masculinity and femininity.
• What is the ‘trans’ in ‘transgender’? Transition from poles of a binary?
• Gender is queer in that it is irredeemably strange and ‘not normal’ - gender as it is lived is never as it is ‘supposed to be’.
• Gender is made not ‘just’ of gender, but race and capital.
• The soldier as a fundamentally feminine body - docile, dominated, subjugated, made to move at whim.
  • And what is femininity really, here?
  • “The soldier was a fragment of mobile space”

\[\text{Woman} + \text{Man} = \text{Woman}?\]

• In which ways is the traditional dichotomy of gender subverted and turned topologically inside of itself by the experience of gender?
• “Gender creativity” - does this concept make sense?
• ’\(X\) marks the spot’ - the significance of Latinx which does not just encompass an a/o but something wider, richer.

Gender’s Queer for Everyone?

• Queer - irredeemably strange, grasp, out of sync with the normative.
• Imagine a white working class educated woman and a white working class educated man who dress the same, share the same etiquette, have the same salary. Are these two ‘homosexual’ in the sense of sharing the same gender but not the same sex?
• How do race and money define sexual orientation? Same-sex sex, same-class sex, same-race sex? How is the homo- and the hetero- distributed in sexual interaction across axes of identity?
• The word ‘woman’ - is this ‘gender’ or ‘sex’?
• *Gender shapes the sex we think precedes it.
• Is sex ‘beneath’ gender? There are layers of sex.
  1. Chromosomal sex
  2. Fetal gonadal sex
  3. Fetal hormonal sex
  4. Internal reproductive sex
  5. Genital sex
  6. Gender
• When people ‘see’ sex, they see one layer.
• Personal objection - aren’t these layers generally aligned? If they are aligned, can we not collapse them indeed into two general binaries? It does not appear that the male sex/female sex dyad convincingly deconstruct themselves in the biological context.
• Brain sex
• There is limited evidence to support the narrative that testosterone can strongly demarcate male and female, in any biological or social context.
• The masculien ideal makes you docile to it.
• “Heerosex has a ‘homo sex’” (p. 67) - sex becomes socialized talk.
• In being masculine, one becomes unmasculine.
• The queerness of heterosexual sex: boys have sex with girls for boys, women have sex with men for shoes - consumption becomes the heart of desire.
• Gender is always racialized.

When was Gender?

Page 94

Who’s My Opposite

Alluring Surface, Mysterious Depth