SOCI 4031 Assignment #6

Degendering Womyn and Men (Myn?)
Assignment #6 Question
On
Judith Lorber’s Book
Breaking The Bowls: Degendering and Feminist Change.

Sabrina Hickey
SOCI 4031


Degendering is the process or acts that attempt to create gender interaction between women and men and eliminating reference to gender or sex by not using these as division categories or difference markers. It is an attempt towards gender equality and with this equality comes the dismantling of structures of dominance. Structures of dominance are structures that work in such a way that creates divisions by sex and gender.
Although the term itself is a recent term in feminist analysis, the idea around it has been questioned by others, like Michael Kimmel. Kimmel in his book: The Gendered Society, questions the idea of a degendered society in his epilogue. Kimmel states that Degendering is not about a, “gender convergence in behavior or attitudes…[therefore it is not] androgyny….” (Kimmel 265). Degendering is not about blending the masculine and feminine, where everyone is the same androgynously. It is keeping both masculine and feminine, realizing that both are important and should not be separated nor blended. It is the degendering of traits and behaviors while not degendering people is what is important.

Degendering is an important concept for feminism, because it allows for us to actually ‘hear’ what women’s choices mean, through gender visibility recognition and implementation in social practices. Degendering can direct attention to what are the oppressing forces on women are overall by focusing on women’s individual voices. Further degendering allows for feminist women to overcome the possibility of developing dichotomous thinking in their own work on issues of sexual inequalities, which otherwise would create a perpetuation of backlash against them. Degendering can also provide feminists with the ability to not give up or lose their own gender distinction. Maijan H. al- Ruwaili says that, “…the more ‘women’ rely on gender to attack ‘male’ epistemological dominance, the more they sacrifice their own ‘gender’ distinction.” (Husayn al-Ruwaili 1999: 16). This example describes how women addressing dominant masculinized knowledges by using gender, are in effect further undermining there own gender. Further, she goes on to point out the importance that gender, as a social construct, has become to “feminism and women studies” and why it has become so,

“This concentration on gender has illuminated the hierarchical valorization of men over against women and exposed the priviledge of the male ‘individal,’ whose concerns are said to be nothing less than truth, science, and pure knowledge. This ideological valorization has tightly bound gender to feminism and women studies, and made it decisive in interrogating and demystifying the classic prejudice of attaching knowledge and its valued attributes to the “male individual.” Nevertheless, while gender’s close alliance with with feminism provides a culture for gender’s scholarship, this very relation constrains and orients the choices gender studies has to make.”

The orientation of gender use in women studies and feminist theory, from this perspective then, seems doomed from the start, no matter the attempt it’s being used for. Husayn al-Ruwaili’s ideas seems to tie in with the idea of degendering by not using gender as an attack means and further creating divisions between genders to use against one another.

Degendering can have benefits for women and feminism in the way that it can find new ways of moving beyond just formal equality and getting degendering to work from a top down positioning in institutions in order to change gender schemas. (Lorber 2005). By doing so we can use gender to degender institutional parts of the whole of society. Judith Lorber feels that, “…as we participate in different social institutions and organizations throughout our lives, our gendered behavior changes.” (Lorber 2005: 17). The more exposure we have as individuals to various institutions, our gendered behaviors fall away and we become less gendered and so we become freed from the constraints of socialized gender patterns.

Degendering can have the potential of also benefiting boys and men. Using Lorber’s analysis on sex and gender as social constructs, in relation to bodies, we can see bodies differ in many ways physiologically, but it is social practices that transform them to fit into salient categories of societies, the most pervasive of which are ‘female’ and ‘male’ and ‘women’ and ‘men’ (Collins1999). A degendering of the social practices that transforms bodies could break down the dominant notions of the hypermasculine body and behaviors, end notions of what is considered to be a male or female ways of acting and can also limit the violence ensued on those who are not seen as conforming to what their ‘sex’ says they should act like.

Raine Dozer (2005) found that that social construction of gender relies on both sex appearance and gender behavior and that for “trans” men, when secondary sex characteristics do not align with gender behavior, gender behavior becomes important to gender expression; and when they do align, gender behavior then is given greater fluidity in asserting gender. In this case, the social perception of sex is relevant to the interpretation of either masculine or feminine behaviors. This example clearly shows that gendered social practices can support one’s prescribed ‘sex’ and that gendered behaviors can be taken on to change perceptions of one’s sex. But this only points out how sex and gender as so closely intertwined in people’s perceptions of what it means to be male or female. Only by degendering social behaviors we can erode the importances placed on the sex in relation to such things as social privledges given to one over the other and also take away the pressure to perform in stereotypical, hypermasculine and hyperfeminine ways.

Other ways that degendering can be a potential benefit to boys and men, can be in the roles that single father’s or single mother’s play in a boy’s life. Degendering parenting roles has the potential for boys to be raised without notions of divided gender roles between the sexes, in that they do not presume a divided divison of labour based on gender or sex. The same could be said for two parent families as well. Boys and men can learn that even without compromised masculinities that parenting and nuturance is something that ‘grownups’ do not just mothers or female adults. Also boys and men can fully experience full ranges of emotions, both masculine and what is now still labeled as feminine that could end the need for groups and movements, like the Promise Keepers or mythopoetic movements, where men divide themselves off from women into men only groups. Degendering in my opinion is a turn towards humanism, where men and women can feel the full valorization of emotions and experiences without discreting these based on nature of the sexes or even allow such gender inequalities to continue because of the privledging of dominant masculine gender qualities.



Sources


Dozer, R. 2005. “Beards, Breasts and Bodies: Doing sex in a Gendered World.” Gender

and Society. 19(3): 297-316.

Hill-Collins, P. 1999. “Moving Beyond Gender: Intersectionality and Scientific

Knowledge.” In Revisioning Gender, edited by Myra Marx Ferree; Judith Lorber

and Beth B. Hess. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications Inc.

Husayn al-Ruwaili, M. 1999. “Dengendering Knowledge/Bridging the Sexual

Difference?” Alif: Journal of Comparitive Poetics. Cairo, Egypt: University of

Cairo Press. Retrieved Oct. 13, 2006. JSTOR.

Kimmel, M. 2000. “A Degendered Society?” In The Gendered Society. New York, NY:

Oxford Univeristy Press.

Lorber, J. 2005. Breaking The Bowls: Degendering and Feminist Change. New York,

NY: W. W. Norton and Company Inc.