The Oxford Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism

Wayne H. Brekhus (ed.) et al.

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190082161.001.0001
Published: 2021 Online ISBN: 9780190082178 Print ISBN: 9780190082161

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CHAPTER

Gender and Embodiment as Negotiated Relations 

S. L. Crawley, Ashley Green

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190082161.013.19
Published: 13 October 2021

Abstract
Gender pervades every part of life, from identity and embodied practices to institutional and
transnational social order. An interactionist approach recognizes that gender is constituted by
pervasive, thoroughgoing, situational organizing practices of meaning-making pervading our worlds,
which are always relational and emergent among people in institutional contexts at historical
moments. Gender identities are not a feature of “types” of individuals but, rather, comprise negotiated
relations between and among us—which can be normalizing or resistant. This chapter examines the
development of sociological theory on gender and embodiment. It begins by looking at a brief timeline
of the last 150 years of the everyday (US) “queer” lexicon to demonstrate how academic concepts seem
to intertwine with the proliferation of everyday identities in the mundane world. The chapter then
outlines its beginnings in microsociology, the connections between micro and macro theorizations,
and emergent masculinities, femininities, transgender, and non-binary identity practices, pointing to
various paradigm shifts along the way including feminisms, intersectionality, and queer theory.
Constantly in production for everyone, gender proliferates as negotiated relations, made especially
visible by resistance identities. We conclude brie y with future directions.

Keywords: gender theory, ethnomethodology, interpretive sociology, resistance, embodiment, queer

Subject: Social Theory, Sociology
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

Recently, the New York Times published an article on “How Queer Women Powered the Su rage Movement”
(Salam 2020). Attempting to redress the erasure from history of participation by women with same-sex
intimate relationships, the article o ers a laudable e ort to write an inclusive history of su rage. The
problem is “queer women” most certainly did not participate in the su rage movement. The term queer
women is a late twentieth-century invention. While women with same-sex intimate partnerships of the
early twentieth century ought to be documented, they would not have called themselves queer—an epithet
of an earlier era, which queer theorists and activists have tried to reclaim nearly a hundred years later. This
anachronism points to a common tendency to assume the xity of sexual and gender identities across time.
Indeed, it points to the very need to trace the malleability of sexual and gender identity lexicons,
demonstrating how gender and embodiment are negotiated, relational, localized, and constantly in ux.
This chapter begins by tracing the twenty- rst-century gender-identity revolution and its historical
underpinnings to waves of intellectual movements, illustrating the interpretive character of identity work.
We then trace the development of gender theory including some of the theoretical skirmishes among gender
scholars that are also common throughout sociology and across disciplines. We conclude by brie y
suggesting potential future directions.

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Identity Proliferation, Negotiation, and Resistance

In the everyday world, gender is often referenced as an identity—a personal characteristic. Yet for
1
interpretive scholars, it is identity work—the practice of announcing “I am non-binary” or being held
accountable to “you are a woman”—which constitutes gendered embodiments. Gender then is constituted
by pervasive and thoroughgoing situational organizing practices of meaning-making in our worlds that are
always relational and emergent among people in institutional contexts at historical moments, and not a
feature of individuals. Identities do not denote types of people but, rather, comprise organizing practices
constantly produced between and among us—which can be normalizing or resistant. Every day
interactively, people make meaning of the bodies and embodiments we encounter. Of course, gendered
embodiment is also always intersectional, transnational, racializing, and class based, and it comprises
complex connections between bodies, language, and practices under governmental and medical
surveillance. Gender, sexuality, and bodies reference di erent yet connected concepts in complex,
historically speci c, and localized ways. The recent proliferation of identity terms demonstrates how gender
is constantly in ux, processual, and subject to resistance, though deeply connected to local stocks of
knowledge and intertwined with academic lexicons. Here, we ask: what can the changing lexicon of non-
heteronormative identities tell us about identity work?

A basic premise of queer theory is that identities emerge in history relative to the discursive and material
context of moments (Crawley & Broad 2008; D’Emilio 1993; Foucault 1978). Terms emerge as self-
reference, epithets, and/or markers of collective identity. Figure 1 (below) shows a Timeline of the (US)
“Queer” Lexicon, which—though not exhaustive—demonstrates the propinquity between modernist
science and mundane identities. “Thought bubbles” place academic ideas chronologically in relation to (US)
identities taken up in everyday usage over about 150 years. The timeline demonstrates the inextricable links
between genders, sexualities, and bodies (wherein the terms above the timeline are related to gender, the
terms below it are related to sexuality or bodies, and the italicized terms emerge from racial minority
communities). This timeline shows waves, recessions, and sometimes recursions of identities in moments.
Figure 1

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Timeline of (US) “Queer” Lexicon

In the late 1860s, newly minted modernist scientists “discovered” hermaphrodites (a term now recognized
as an epithet, referred to by the 1990s as intersex)—people whose bodies do not t the binary medical
classi cation system of female and male (Dreger 1998). About the same time, the homosexual was
“invented” followed by the classi cation of the heterosexual in early 1890s (Foucault 1978). Female sexual
inverts were recognized about the same era but not referred to as lesbian until about the 1920s, roughly in
coincidence with Freud’s “discovery” that women have sexual desire (Faderman 1991). In the 1930s and
1940s, as the early homophile movement began advocating that homosexuals were good people deserving
of civil rights, gay—meaning all things pleasurable—became associated with male communities who
practiced drag, camp, and “impersonation,” but who were not referred to as gay men—until after WWII
(Chauncey 1994). Butch and femme were self-references as well as erotic identities and community-
organizing devices, among primarily white lesbians about the same era (Kennedy and Davis 1993).
Masculine African American women often used stud and bulldagger—an epithet turned self-reference—
rather than butch. In the 1950s, doctors began using medical science to manipulate bodies and subsequently
de ned the term transsexual—an early medicalizing term that recognized disjunctures between
essentialized notions of bodies and self-de nition (Stryker 2008). As it becomes clear that gender and
sexual identities emerge and change in historical context, subsequent monikers illuminate how academic
lexicons also pave the way for new identity categories and identity work.

Both feminisms and self-styled gay and lesbian studies developed through the 1970s and 1980s. Radical or
lesbian feminisms generated women-centered, politicized identities such as women-loving women and
androgyny—political strategies to ght patriarchy, even against gay men (Faderman 1991). Women’s and
men’s communities were often separate, until the AIDS epidemic coalesced women and men to ght for
their lives—resulting in references to gay and lesbian communities, which by the mid-1990s had morphed
into LGBT (adding bisexual and transgender). Transgender (as opposed to transgendered) indicates that gender
identity is a pervasive and thoroughgoing identity, not an adjectival modi er or a variable characteristic.
MTF or FTM recognized that the gender experiences of trans people are di erent based on sex assigned at
birth.

Meanwhile, though Black feminist thought (Hill Collins 1990; hooks 1989: Lorde 1984) was catching on in
the academy even among many white academics, African American communities wishing to distance
themselves from racism within white LGBT communities instead used terms such as WSW and MSM
(women-seeking-women and men-seeking-men) and same gender loving—terms used to avoid totalizing
identities and rather focused on desire and sexual practices. Especially during the early part of the AIDS
epidemic, clinical care workers often focused on those terms to entice the widest audience possible to see
themselves potentially at risk and get testing and treatment. Today some men reject the MSM subjectivity
because it seems to come from healthcare workers more so than community members (Liu 2020).

Around the early 1990s, as a critique of Western binary thinking and normalizing regimes of power, queer
theory encouraged the proliferation of identities as well as the refusal to claim identity. Counterintuitively,

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queer became an anti-identity along with genderqueer and gender nonconforming. Terms for sexuality like
pomosexual (postmodern, unclassi able sexuality) and pansexual (which points to sexual freedom) rejected
focus on a desired body/object. Intersex activism began in earnest about that time, recognizing that
embodiment exists in nuances far beyond the binary medical classi catory scheme of female versus male,
later morphing into terms such as DSD (di erences of sex development), which purposefully desexualizes
the body generated to quell fears of parents of intersex children (Davis 2015).

Subsequent to queer theory’s wide reception in academia, by the late 2000s identity terms included not only
queer and transgender but trans* (the asterisk referencing online search nomenclature), cisgender (people
whose gender matches their expectations assigned at birth [Schilt and Westbrook 2009]), and asexual and
autosexual (those not in search of a partner; taking pleasure in one’s own body), and the community
acronym grew to LGBTQQIAA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual,
allies, and more). Building on Black feminist thought, critiques of the whiteness of queer scholarship such
as Black queer studies (Cohen 1997; Johnson and Henderson 2005) and queer of color studies (Ferguson
2004; Muñoz 1999) as well as work focused on transnational migration and coloniality pointed out the
insularity of US scholarship (Patil 2018) by introducing terms like amigas y amantes (“sexually
nonconforming Latinas” [Acosta 2013]) among many other important works. As of the mid 2010s, even
more common terms include non-binary (which rejects “the binary” as one who is neither man nor woman
but may be masculine or feminine appearing), AFAB/AMAB (assigned female or male at birth), masculine- or
feminine-of-center, and agender (no gender identity, rather than one at odds with gender assigned at birth),
which seem to point directly to gender theory. While some terms common from the mid-1990s like MTF
(male to female) and FTM (female to male) seem to have retracted from common usage, new terms like
cisgender and endosex (not intersex) arise to mark the previously unmarked category (Brekhus in this
volume), and other terms reference the production of identities within virtual realities like altersex
(imaginative, ctional, and fantastical body types that are not physically possible). And, of course, after the
mid-2000s and beyond, one should never assume a pronoun, as public discourse and etiquette now
regularly draws on frames of gender neutrality and gender inclusivity (Saguy and Williams 2019).

Though straight emerged in the early 1940s, the unmarked identities of heterosexual woman and man are not
included on this timeline, in part because the lexicon of the neutral category has not changed considerably.
What is understood to comprise normative femininity and masculinity, however, has changed dramatically
over 150 years, becoming somewhat more egalitarian, exible, and uid, as exempli ed by the newer terms
metrosexual (urban straight men who dress fashionably) and hetero exible (largely but not entirely straight-
identi ed). It is telling that the heteronormative lexicon remains unchanged while the normative
expectations of the unmarked category change demonstrably.

This timeline demonstrates gender identity as negotiated relations speci c to historical moments and speci c
communities. Ultimately about negotiating a livable life in a culture of normativity and surveillance,
identity work can engage accommodation to normativity or political resistance (Cook 2006). We return to
this point shortly, but rst outline a very brief history of gender theory in sociology.
The Origins of Gender Sociology, or Why “Socialization” and “Gender
Roles” Donʼt Work

Rooted in structural functionalism, early theories of gender focused on “socialization,” which was
purported to result in two distinct “gender roles” (Parsons 1943), claiming that agents of socialization such
as families, peers, schools, and the media teach children from an early age what is expected of them based
on their sex assigned at birth—women as gentle, quiet, caregivers; men as strong, leaders and
breadwinners of the family—and no recognition of variability. Under the socialization model, roles are

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purportedly necessary in order to keep the family unit in a state of equilibrium (Jackson and Scott 2002), are
characterized by assumed “innate processes” that are overly deterministic (Stanley and Wise 1983: 277),
and presume consensus by individuals to the roles and between women and men (Stacey and Thorne 1985).
None of this can explain varied gendered expectations by culture and across time, widely varying individual
practice, or even social change within the United States. Further, the socialization model continues to put
the focus on gender acquisition as individual development rather than recognizing the social ordering and
production of gender (Connell 1987, 1995; Thorne 1993). More determinist of a binary notion of
(heteronormative) gender than explanatory of extant variability (and entirely silent on sexuality), there was
little “social” about the androcentric sociological gender theory of the early twentieth century. Challenging
these functionalist perspectives, early feminist sociologists argued that gender is much more pervasive
throughout social experience—not simply consensus-based gender roles. Following the critical turn,
feminist scholars challenged early androcentric sociology, seeking to theorize ways in which gender is
ordered by power dynamics, interactionally, institutionally, and structurally (Mann 2012).

Opening a now vast literature about women and work, Komarovsky (1946) identi ed inconsistencies in
women’s “sex roles” between that of the homemaker and the “career girl.” Bernard (1972, 1976) examined
the restructuring of sex roles, challenging the assumption that roles could be preassigned at birth, and
recognized that marriage for men was more bene cial than marriage for women. Smith (1974, 1987)
critiqued mainstream sociological theorizing as implicitly gendered because, as a conceptual practice, it is
abstracted from material, situated practices in everyday life, especially the feeding, cleaning, and healthcare
of bodies, which is typically prescribed as women’s work. Smith (1990:18–19) explains:

It has been a condition of a man’s being able to enter and become absorbed in the conceptual
mode, and to forget the dependence of his being in that mode upon his bodily existence, that he
does not have to focus … upon his bodily existence. … At almost every point women mediate for
men … the relationship between the conceptual mode of action … and the actual material
conditions upon which it depends.

Some of the most productive early critiques of androcentric and individualist gender theory came in terms
of unsettling beliefs in the supposed naturalness of bodies and practices by microsociologists. Not so much
interested in gender as in writing a unique theory of self, Go man (1979) articulated the performance of
gender—a social arrangement that was not of individual choice or volition but of ritualized “impression
management” (Brickell 2006; Treviño 2003:10–11). Gender was simply one empirical example shoring up
Go man’s thesis of how the “interaction order” is established through cooperative performances. Using his
dramaturgical metaphor (Go man 1959), gender was unhinged from expectations of innate expression or
personal choice and taken up as constitutive of the interaction order.

Similarly, Gar nkel’s (1967) ethnomethodology contributes to gender theorizing via his archetypal case of
Agnes: a young male-bodied person who lived successfully as a woman (e.g., West and Zimmerman 1987;
Stokoe 2006; O’Brien 2016). Gar nkel’s goal was not to study bodies or gender but rather to create a new
sociology—one that focuses on how people as active and pragmatic agents use common-sense reasoning to
make sense of their worlds. Hence, his interest in Agnes was not whether she “really” was or was not a
woman, but the illustrative case of social order superseding what had been seen as putatively biological:
that is, how it was possible for anyone to accomplish woman or man. Assuming no inherent truth,
Gar nkel’s focus on Agnes allowed him to “understand how membership in a sex category is sustained
across a variety of practical circumstances and contingencies, at the same time preserving the sense that
such membership is a natural, normal moral fact of life” (Zimmerman 1992:195). Ethnomethodology
o ered just the theory needed for gender scholars to overturn essentialist logics of the innateness of gender.
Rather than servants to a functionally necessary survival system, people produce gender relationally and in
situated social contexts (O’Brien 2016). Though neither theorized with feminist intentions, Go man’s and

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Gar nkel’s new schools of thought—both based in everyday life—o ered much for feminist scholars
seeking to articulate a critique of gender, and nascent feminist gender theory began to proliferate.

Gender as Interactional Accomplishment

Following Gar nkel, Kessler and McKenna (1978) explicitly utilized ethnomethodology to show how people
make gender attributions every time they meet someone new—assuming that the person is either a man or
a woman based on perceived characteristics, such as manner of dress, length of hair, and body size and
shape. Pushing beyond Gar nkel and turning the “science” of gender on its head, Kessler and McKenna
(1978:163) posit that “our seeing of two genders leads to the ‘discovery’ of biological, psychological, and
social di erences.”

Subsequently engaging a combination of Go man’s and Gar nkel’s insights, West and Zimmerman
(1987:137) explicate a comprehensive theory of “doing gender” as pervasive, everyday accomplishment in
which gender as a practice is “unavoidable” because it is not just individual but relational. Gender is not
what one is but what one does in coordination with others. Gender is a relational engagement wherein each of
us produces gender displays or performances—that is, “doing gender”—of which others take account and
hold us accountable—hence, it is interactional—between us, among us. Because the physiology of our
actual bodies typically cannot be known in everyday interaction unless stated outright (or unless people are
unclothed such as during sex or a medical examination), others tend to base gender attribution not on
actual physiology but rather based on assumed “sex category”—a binary assumption of maleness or
femaleness. Once sex category is assigned (regardless of its alignment with bodily features), individuals are
then held accountable by others for engaging in appropriate displays of gender and giving accounts of gender
appropriateness (Hollander 2013). “The man ‘does’ masculinity by, for example, taking the woman’s arm to
guide her across a street, and she ‘does’ being feminine by consenting to be guided and not initiating such
behavior with a man” (West and Zimmerman 1987:135). Additionally, West and Zimmerman claim that, by
doing gender, men and women are in fact reinforcing that idea that sex-based di erences are natural. West
and Zimmerman never speci cally take opinion on the “realness” of so-called biological sex, except to note
that male and female are merely medical classi cations. Individuals can o er conformist gender displays or
they can resist, however, they will be assessed in every instance. Now-classic ethnographies demonstrate
gender as an accomplishment in a wide variety of situated practices, especially schooling (Cahill 1986; Thorne
1993).
Judith Butler and Queer Theory
Gaining notoriety at nearly the same time as ethnomethodological gender theories, queer theory turned
toward an even more radical, poststructuralist approach to the in uence of language and discourse, calling
into question categories like “woman” altogether (Butler 1990). Whereas early feminist theorists
championed the importance of women’s standpoint, Butler argued that it was the (compulsory) discursive
practice of reiteratively citing gendered categories that produced their existence. Queer theory is situated in
a poststructuralist project that seeks to deconstruct regulatory discourses, in which power is situated,
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especially with regard to sexuality (Foucault 1975). Borrowing from speech-act theory, Butler (1990, 1993)

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de ned gender performativity as more than merely performing what one understands to be traits attributed
to “man” or “woman.” Rather, it is the continual repetition of such acts and the citing of such acts as
“naturally” binary that produce the perception that gender feels innate, thus reinforcing the discourse.
Outlining gender as “a kind of imitation for which there is no original” (Butler 1991:20–21), Butler points
out that there is no authentic, bodily origin of gender: only reiterations of discursive practices. The “limits
[of gendered possibilities] are always set within the terms of a hegemonic cultural discourse predicated on
binary structures” (Butler 1990:13)—hence, it is gender performativity that creates the belief in the thing we
call sex di erence. Butler’s work has received wide appeal among feminists outside sociology and some
appeal within sociology. Still some sociological critics argued that Butler’s largely literary focus falls short
of understanding how gender is actively produced as practice in interaction especially as relational, joint
action, rather than individual, discursive acts (Burkitt 1998; Jackson and Scott 2000).

Gender as Institution or Social Structure

The linguistic and performative focus of both queer and ethnomethodological work caused more traditional
sociologists to balk, suggesting that such work is limited to a micro-level analysis. In particular, some
theorists argue that, by analyzing gender as a social institution, sociologists can better understand the
pervasiveness of gender as a structural system of oppression. Lorber (1994:1) argues that gender is “an
institution that establishes patterns of expectations for individuals, orders the social processes of everyday
life, is built into the major social organizations of society … and is also an entity in and of itself.” Though not
disagreeing with interactionist theorists, Lorber (1994:10) argues that “real change would mean a conscious
reordering of the organizing principles of social life … [and that] change is unlikely to be deep-seated unless
the pervasiveness of the social institution of gender and its social construction are made explicit.” Similarly,
Risman (2004:433) refers to gender as social structure, stating that it “has consequences on three
dimensions: (1) At the individual level, for the development of gendered selves; (2) during interaction as
men and women face di erent cultural expectations even when they ll the identical structural positions;
and (3) in institutional domains where explicit regulations regarding resource distribution and material
goods are gender speci c.” Thus, Risman (2004) argues that it is not enough to merely look at gender as an
interactional achievement, sociologists of gender must also attend to the ways in which gender exists as
part of a larger social structure rooted in power dynamics. Flipping the causal direction, Ridgeway and
Smith-Lovin (1999) claim that gender as a social institution has created an unequal relationship between
men and women, which always permeates gendered interactions as a result. Ridgeway and Correll (2004)
argue that, like all social institutions, gender is internalized and thus reconstituted through interaction,
which is what allows it to persist across time.

Though an institutional focus is warranted, many criticisms of the ethnomethodological focus of West and
Zimmerman’s de nitional article are wrongheaded, seemingly based on various misreadings of the
3
theoretical underpinnings of ethnomethodology. Some readings of ethnomethodology falsely dichotomize
it as merely a micro theory. However, ethnomethodology was always focused on the connections between
interaction and broader social order, in particular presuming that face-to-face interactions are always
already of the institutional order (Fairchild 2004; Hollander 2013; West and Zimmerman 2009). Similarly, a
series of criticisms focusing on “undoing gender” (Deutsch 2007; Risman 2009) wrongly critiqued
ethnomethodology for focusing only on gender conformity, suggesting that it left no room for
understanding social change or resistance. These critiques tend to fall into a language that assumes a
liberal, rational, individuated actor making willful choices. Ethnomethodology does not assume a rational
actor, but rather a di erent vision of the social actor—a practical actor—one who uses available mundane,
common-sense truth narratives but puts them together in artful ways: in practice, in interaction, relationally.

More productive approaches might be termed synthesis approaches in which gender is envisioned as process

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and practice, which connects interaction to institutional settings. Martin (2004) argues that a mutually
constitutive understanding of institutions and interactions should be included in the criteria for
establishing “gender as social institution,” positing that it is imperative to deconstruct the false binary
created between micro and macro theories in order to understand how gendered expectations are embedded
in institutionalized systems of power. For Martin, social institutions are organized by rules and norms,
ordered by power relations, and internalized and embodied by members of social groups, hence persist
across time yet also constantly changing. Similarly, Connell (1995:71) articulates “gender as a structure of
social practice” in which, imbedded in historical process, “Gender is social practice that constantly refers to
bodies and what bodies do, it is not social practice reduced to the body.” In this rendering, gender
4
importantly is understood as an order of relations, not individualized acts. Because gender as practice
remains a salient direction for gender theory, we turn to some of the speci cities of practices of femininities
and masculinities before we return to future directions for gender theory.

Hegemonic Masculinity and Emphasized Femininity as Relational

Practice

What speci cally does it mean to “do” masculinity or femininity? In what ways can masculinity and
femininity reinforce or subvert gendered expectations? Much current scholarship builds on Raewyn
Connell’s (1987) concepts of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity as relational practice.
Centering the critique around the Gramscian concept of hegemony, hegemonic masculinity is a practice of
masculinity as the accepted form of patriarchal dominance to which both women and men acquiesce. In any
setting, the speci c practice of masculinity is simply the commonly assumed (hence, hegemonic) form for
that setting. Connell (1987:183) asserts, “there is an ordering of versions of femininity and masculinity at
the level of the whole society … [and] their interrelation is centered on a single structural fact, the global
dominance of men over women,” thus recognizing both the dominance of masculinity as well as its
necessary relation to practices of femininity as a world order. Connell (1987:183) argues that subordinate
masculinities are constructed in relation to hegemonic masculinity—some that are compliant and others
that are subordinated or marginalized—while no form of femininity can be hegemonic because femininities
are either “de ned around compliance with this subordination [to men]” or de ned by “strategies of
resistance or forms of noncompliance.”

Hegemonic and Subordinate Masculinities

Speci cally, masculinity as practice encourages boys and men to constantly and consciously measure their
physical embodiment against each other, especially through the requisite teaching of sports (Connell
1983:19, 27, emphasis added):

To be an adult male is distinctly to occupy space, to have a physical presence in the world. Walking
down the street, I square my shoulders and covertly measure myself against other men … what it
 means to be masculine is, quite literally, to embody force, to embody competence.

Further, masculinity as homophobia is the practice and surveillance of a speci c masculine ideal by men for
men (Kimmel 1994), not homophobia in the traditional sense of fear or hatred of homosexuals, but men’s
fear that other men will emasculate them. Importantly, masculinity is not only in hegemonic form but
rather multiple experiences of masculinity produced as a result of struggles in relations to the hegemonic
standard—“white, middle-class, early middle aged, heterosexual men with a recent record in sports”
(Kimmel 1994:125), as well as attempts to resist normative gendered expectations. Some forms of
masculinity may be complicit in maintaining the dominance of the gender system without replicating

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hegemonic masculinity. For example, Crawley (1998, 2011; Crawley, Foley, and Shehan 2008) coins the term
vicarious masculinity to describe non-athletic men’s propensity to align themselves with elite male athletes’
bodies to suggest some connection, not of actual physical ability but simply by virtue of maleness.
Importantly, the relational character of the concept of hegemony suggests that there is no xed substance
of hegemonic masculinity; it is simply the agreed-upon standard of dominance within a particular cultural
space (Messerschmidt 2019)—which ensures the exibility of practices as well as their nimbleness to retain
dominance. For example, Ward (2015) points out that many common practices among men who identify as
heterosexual involve touching other men’s genitals, all the while vehemently declaring they are “not gay.”

Yet there is room for resistance. Connell (1992:748) argues that homosexual masculinity resists normative
expectations of hegemonic masculinity. Gay men’s masculinity is a form of resistance—“in these men’s
lives a condition of freedom” (Connell 1992:748)—that subverts normative, hegemonic expectations of
masculinity. However, this subversion of hegemonic masculinity has its limitations. Connell (1992) also
notes that gay men still upheld gendered expectations by doing traditional masculinity in other ways,
particularly by engaging in monogamous relationships, and by being dismissive or hostile toward feminists.
Drawing on the Bhabhian notion of “hybridity,” Demetriou (2001:348) o ers up the concept of “hybrid
masculinities,” which are a “constant appropriation of diverse elements from various masculinities that
makes the hegemonic bloc capable of recon guring itself and adapting to the speci cities of new historical
conjunctures.” An example of one such hybrid masculinity is suggested by Bridges (2014:79) in his study of
straight men who “appear to blur the boundaries between gay and straight through assimilating a variety of
gay aesthetics,” though he cautions against seeing this as “an indication of declining levels of gender and
sexual inequality.” Additionally, scholars such as Halberstam (1998:9) have theorized female masculinity as
having the potential to “challenge hegemonic models of gender conformity,” as has Crawley (2002) and
Crawley and Willman (2018).

Whereas homosexual masculinity may be posited as subverting hegemonic masculinity, homophobia

impacts in the “appropriate” doing of masculinity. In her study of high school boys, Pascoe (2007:13) found
that “masculinity is an identity that respondents think of as related to the male body but as not necessarily
speci c to the male body.” In other words, respondents believe masculinity can only be achieved in relation
to “male-ness,” but not all people who are perceived as male-bodied can achieve masculinity. More
speci cally, those who are not able to achieve this goal of masculinity are faced with “the threatening
specter of the fag” (Pascoe 2007:81). While this devalued understanding of masculinity is often feminized, it
is not always related to sexual identity. According to Pascoe (2007:58), “while it was not necessarily
acceptable to be gay, at least a man who was gay could do other things that would render him acceptably
masculine. A fag, by the very de nition of the word, could not be masculine.”

An important advantage in theorizing gender as practice(s) is the potential for engaging intersectionality to
focus on the speci city of practices across genders as they intersect with race, class, sexuality, religious
background, nation/location, age, ability, and so forth. Building on the work of Connell (1992) and Bridges
(2014), scholars have analyzed Black masculinity (Dow 2016), emotions and masculinity in migrant men
from Guatemala in the United States (Montes 2013), understandings of Western masculinity outside of
Western contexts (Liu 2019), and the relationship between women and the construction of masculinity in
Mexico (Gutmann 1997), just to name a few. Collectively, these scholars challenge the notion of a static
masculinity, demonstrating instead that understandings of masculinities are constantly changing and being
renegotiated in relation to a hegemonic ideal as well as femininities and many other forms of masculinities.

Femininities
Quite the opposite of bodily empowerment, the embodiment of emphasized femininity is inhibited

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intentionality (Young 1980)—the tendency of girls to concentrate motion in one body part, rather than fully
extending the entire body. Young (1980:153) posits, “The girl learns actively to hamper her movements. She
is told that she must be careful not to get hurt, not to get dirty, not to tear her clothes.” Whereas masculinity
is the competitive control and acquisition of space, femininity is intended to be passive compliance in favor
of becoming an object to be viewed, not an active agent. Femininity, then, is not hegemonic but rather an
emphasized display of beauty that serves as an ideal relation to hegemonic masculinity. Similarly, it is not
requisite practice for all women but rather establishes a normative, hierarchal relation with those who do
not achieve it.

A number of scholars have theorized power relations that exist within and between di ering experiences of
femininity. Schippers (2007:94) theorizes what they term hegemonic femininity that “consists of the
characteristics de ned as womanly that establish and legitimate a hierarchical and complementary
relationship to hegemonic masculinity and that, by doing so, guarantee the dominant position of men and
the subordination of women.” Schippers (2007) o ers up three pariah femininities: the Lesbian, the Bitch,
and the Slut. Pariah femininities are “simultaneously stigmatized and feminized” (and notably all
sexualized) and are regarded as “contaminating to the relationship between masculinity and femininity”
(Schippers 2007:95–96); “When a woman is authoritative, she is not masculine; she is a bitch—both
feminine and undesirable” (2007:95). Pariah femininities are neither feminine nor masculine, because
when a woman takes on traits that are associated with masculinity, they are no longer desirable. However,
Schippers’s “pariah femininities” are limited to white, Western understandings of femininity.

Pyke and Johnson (2003:50–51) posit that there is a hegemonic femininity among other femininities that is
racialized as white. The Korean-American and Vietnamese-American women they interviewed “treat
gender as a racialized feature of bodies” and resist the racialized stereotypes of Asian women by conforming
to the hegemonic standard (Pyke and Johnson 2003:50). Hamilton et al. (2019) attempt a pivot away from
Connell’s notion of gender order by arguing that Connell’s work cannot accommodate intersectional
relations. Instead, they posit theories of white femininities as domination among women and some men
based on Hill Collins’s notion of the matrix of domination. Messerschmidt (2020) responds by arguing that
Hamilton and colleagues (among others) critique Connell’s work improperly based on a misreading that
Connell’s work was always only about gender as a single axis form of oppression, citing many ways in which
Connell’s work has been read and used as relations among women and men in variously intersectional
contexts. Similarly, both Bettie (2003) and Trautner (2005) explicate unequal relations of class among
women’s embodiments of femininities. O ering a transnational, intersectional lens, Lara (2005:12) argues
that “la bruja” has been constructed by colonizers as evil, in which “ ‘la bruja’ [is] a female practitioner of
spiritual, sexual, and healing knowledge” that “symbolizes power outside of patriarchy’s control that
potentially challenges a sexist status quo.” This construction of femininity resists colonial constructions of
la bruja in a way that embraces positive representations of femininity. Other scholars have focused on
racialized femininity in the context of embodiments of nationalism (Balogun 2012), as well as
commodi cation of femininity and Brazilian “body culture” by Brazilian women entrepreneurs (Malheiros
and Padilla 2014).
Furthermore, scholars have theorized resistance and embodied femininity in relation to non-heterosexual
identities. According to Eves (2004:481), “the status of butch/femme as the most recognizable lesbian
archetype is important in establishing lesbian visibility and space.” But when embodied by bi or queer
women who are not in relationships with women, femininity can lead to invisibility of their queer identity.
In her study on cisgender women who are in relationships with trans men, Pfe er (2014:31) demonstrates
that “many cis women participants described being (mis)recognized as heterosexual as not only personally
invalidating but as alienating from queer communities of social support and belonging.” Daly, King, and
Yeadon-Lee (2018) found that some bisexual women are “style chameleons” who often switch between

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what participants referred to as “lesbian” style and femininity, depending on the setting or who they are
dating at the time. To a lesser extent, the concept of “femme-ness” has been theorized as a conscious
embodiment of femininity by those who do not seek to t the hetero/cis-normative ideal (Hoskin 2017;
Nestle 1992). According to Hoskin (2017:100), “femme is the abnormal occupation of feminine normality,
meaning femininity embodied by those to whom recognition as feminine is culturally denied or who do not
comply with norms of ‘proper womanhood.’” Speci cally, Hoskin (2017:99) is referring to “sassy queer
men; unapologetically sexual straight women; trans women; crip bodied femmes who refuse to be
desexualized or degendered; and femmes of colour who refuse to approximate white beauty norms,” as well
as the cisgender lesbian women who have historically identi ed as femme (Nestle 1992).

Are We Still Doing Gender?: The Emergence of Trans, Non-binary, and

Genderqueer Resistance

Our timeline above illustrates that, subsequent to the introduction of queer theory, scholars and activists
alike returned to Gar nkel’s original move by critiquing normative embodiment by viewing it through the
lens of those understood as non-normative. Gender theory turned to intersex, trans, and queer
embodiments to discuss and disrupt presumed connections between bodies and notions of essentialism.
Kessler (1998) and Fausto-Sterling (1993, 2000, 2005) turned the lens on how scientists and medical
doctors produce normative, binary notions about bodies and biologies that then constitute medical
“truths.” Kessler studied not intersex people, but rather the ways doctors and medical texts construct
“natural” bodies as binary femaleness and maleness, thus erasing the fairly common natural birth of people
who are not easily medically classi able as female or male. Preves (2003) and Davis (2015) interviewed
intersex people about their lived experiences of being medicalized by doctors, often in compliance with
parents. A biologist who foregrounds the body as a system rather than a collection of separable parts,
Fausto-Sterling (1993, 2000, 2005) o ered an entire body of work that challenged such notions as two
de nitive sexes, the existence of a natural body unmarked by social experience, hormones as sex-speci c
and relegated to “sex organs,” and the belief in bodily di erence as uncommon. All this work had great
impact on how people envision and practice gender in recent decades.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the term genderqueer began to grow in popularity as a way to describe
gendered experiences that did not fall within the man/woman (masculine/feminine) binary. The earliest use
of the term in academic literature was the anthology GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary,
edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Wilchins (2002). In the decade and a half since, a number of
studies have been published on people who articulate genderqueer identities or nonbinary identity, among
other identities such as agender, bigender, and gender uid, to name a few (Barbee and Schrock 2019;
shuster 2019; zamantakis 2019). For example, Darwin (2017) writes about the potential of online spaces,
such as a genderqueer speci c subreddit (a popular social-media site), which can serve as a backstage for
non-binary-identi ed individuals to try out strategies for doing non-binary gender and foster collective
identity. However, Darwin (2017:330) also notes that non-binary individuals “are held accountable to
binary misconceptions of transgender during their interactions with others and even within their own
internal dialogues.” Similarly, Saguy and Williams (2019) o er analyses of institutional attempts to assert
gender neutrality in news media and in the law (Saguy, Williams, and Rees 2020). Recently, Hord (2020:1)
argues that pairing “non-binary lesbian” as non-speci c gender identity with speci ed sexual identity,
rather than shoring up essentialist notions of bodies, has the potential to unhinge identity projects more
broadly from “sanctioned identities built on exclusions.”

Following the pervasiveness of West and Zimmerman’s (1987) classic article, several theorists o ered up
the case of transgender people as exemplars of the potential to expand beyond binary gender (R. Connell
2009; C. Connell 2010; Nordmarken 2019; Schilt and Connell 2007; Pfe er 2017; Vidal-Ortiz 2002). The

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recent theoretical turn that has placed an increased emphasis on transgender individuals’ experiences of
5
gender has occurred in juxtaposition to previous theories of transsexuals as deviant (Schilt and Lagos
2017). The “gender di erence paradigm” that gained prominence in the 1990s “challenged the framing of
transgender as a deviant gender identity … and called for empirical documentation of the ways in which …
cisgender people are constituted in the cultural practices of everyday life” (Schilt and Lagos 2017:430).
Westbrook and Schilt (2014) demonstrate how violence enacted on trans people at the point of bodily
exposure, often during sex, demonstrates the implicit heteronormativity within practices of doing gender,
as West and Zimmerman outlined. C. Connell (2010) and Schilt (2006), separately and together (2007), note
the ways in which trans people unsettle normative gender practices in work settings. Vidal-Ortiz (2009)
o ers the gure of the trans woman of color to critique the assumed whiteness of normative gender theory.

Trans theorists have o ered a critique of queer theorists’ failure to account for the lived experiences of
transgender individuals (Namaste 1996; Rubin 1999), arguing that sociologists must “learn to theorize a
desire for realness or authenticity rather than critique it” (Rubin 1999:190). Many theorists heeded a call for
more empirical documentation of the range of gender identities and practices that could challenge, shift, or
reproduce normative constructions of gender in order to make space for transgender experiences beyond
those that purport an essentialized or medicalized narrative (Mason-Schrock 1996; Namaste 1996; Rubin
1999). For example, Schilt and Westbrook (2009:451) analyze how transgender individuals disrupt gendered
expectations within interactional contexts, nding that “both cisgender men and women treat transmen as
socially male in nonsexualized public interactions,” however, during sexualized interactions, “cisgender
women regulate transmen’s sexualized behaviors through talk and gossip, whereas cisgender men police
transwomen through aggressive verbal harassment [and/or violence]” (Schilt and Westbrook 2009:459).
Additionally, Snorton (2017:8) theorizes experiences rooted in “twinned” histories of anti-Blackness and
anti-transness. Other avenues of research within transgender scholarship focus on inclusion of transgender
individuals in “queer spaces” (Stone 2013), the a rmation of transgender youth’s identities by parents
(Rahilly 2015; Meadow 2018), and the construction of families between transgender men and cisgender
women (Pfe er 2017). While some may argue that narratives of trans identities resist binary, essentialist
constructions of gender, this scholarship also highlights the ways in which transgender individuals are still
held accountable to binary gender expectations rooted in biological understandings of sex assigned at birth.
Pfe er (2017) notes the di culty of de nitions of sexuality and sexual orientation among trans men and
their partners when one’s body is transitioning.

Though frequently regarded as resisting traditional gendered expectations, there are others who suggest
that transgender men and women who identify within the binary of male and female are actually reinforcing
gendered expectations. This is, in part, a result of essentializing language often used in describing trans
experience. Narratives of identity often re ect traditional “coming out” formula stories, which tell the
narrative of “discovering a truth” (Plummer 1995:83). The “discovery narrative” is often present in
transgender life stories (Johnson 2016). Indeed, Mason-Schrock’s (1996:179) earlier study on transsexuals’
personal narratives found that the construction of the “true self” was most often achieved through learning
to tell “childhood stories” of “actual or fantasized cross-dressing experiences,” “getting caught cross-
dressing,” and “participation in sports.” At rst glance, the use of discovery narratives appears to be
operating as a regulatory regime that reinforces an understanding of gender identity as something that is
natural or inherent, however it must also be noted that the process of medicalizing trans bodies requires
providing a recognizable account of trans-ness in order to gain access to services. Johnson (2016) refers to
this coerciveness to conform to medicalized models as transnormativity. Di erentiating between trans folks
who conform to one gender as opposed to those who wish to remain non-binary, Garrison (2018) analyzes
the ways in which non-binary individuals make use of discovery narratives in an attempt to be recognized
as “trans enough.” According to Garrison (2018:615) “in order to claim public identities as trans, non-
binary respondents are often motivated to present accounts that closely re ect prevailing understandings of

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trans experience (e.g., the ‘born in the wrong body’ narrative), even when these accounts fail to capture the
nuance of their experiences.” Yet, paradoxically “those who claim identities aligned with the existing
[binary] system have the freedom to present more complicated, boundary-challenging accounts of their
experience, although they may claim less personal investment in doing so” (2018:633).

We Are All Trans(itioning): The Pervasive and Negotiated Embodiment

of Gender

Taking gendered embodiment seriously across the breadth of this literature demonstrates that all gender is
meaning-making practice that becomes identity-forming (Connell 2012; Crawley, Foley, and Shehan 2008;
Crawley and Willman 2018; Meadow 2018). We all are subject to accounts, accountabilities, and
performativities every day—every moment—throughout our lives. In short, we negotiate meanings in and
as relations with each other. Gender is a constant and emergent production enveloping all of social life.
When theorists and actors in everyday life focus only on transgender or non-binary cases, we leave the
unmarked category—heteronormative gender—unquestioned. If trans is transitioning, in motion, engaging
negotiation, then we must recognize that everyone engages gender practices—sometimes con rming and
sometimes resisting heteronormative discourses. Heteronormative, cisgender people engage daily practices
of bodily shaping (working out, nutrition practices, and cosmetic work including breast augmentation,
labioplasty, penile implants, anti-aging creams, taking pharmaceuticals for erectile disfunction, or
hormone replacement) to maintain performances of binary gendered embodiment—that is, to keep looking
masculine or feminine. This is especially true as people age. Rather than relaxing comfortably into bodily
change, the typical response to aging is to work ever harder to maintain the youthful appearances that
de ne normative, binary gender. This is no less active and no less emergent than what is referred to as
gender transition among people who identify as transgender—and it is no less lifelong. We are all
imminently transitioning. Indeed, shoring up our focus on gender as relational, Meadow’s (2018) recent
study of trans children and their parents posits that gender is now more salient in everyday interaction, as
parents often actively work to advocate for their gender-variant children and work in concert to resist
gender conformity with them.

In sum, we suggest that theorists and activists re-focus on identities as negotiated social relations. In
particular, framing our work more transparently from interpretive epistemologies, we might call into
question whether social theory has made too much of a so-called micro and macro divide, whether we must
only envision willful individuated actors or the so-called death of the subject, and how a social scienti c
focus on counting or measuring types of people obscures relations. A renewed focus on relations among
gender practices enables us to see analytical connections of gender and embodiment across time and space
from particular embodiments to transnational dynamics as well as engaging intersectional analysis more
consistently, strengthening rather than dividing our academic movements. Methodologies that focus on
relations such as Smith’s (2005) institutional ethnography could o er productive directions for analysis.

Given what we have summarized, there are some engaging areas where the eld may be going. One
compelling direction is the radical potential o ered up by “femme” embodiment as resistance, particularly
given that femininity has historically been devalued, not only in heteronormative spaces, but also in LGBTQ
+ spaces. New theorizations of femininity as resistance tend to be inclusive of trans and non-binary
femininities and intersectional, as embodiments of femininity are always racialized and classed, and
intersect with sexuality, age, and ability. Another interesting direction considers how “doing” gender
happens in virtual environments. Future avenues of research should explore the ways in which online
spaces can be used as sites of identity negotiation and resistance, or possibly serve to further regulate
gendered practices. An additional challenge remains in seeing connections between local, interactional
practices and transnational contexts. Patil’s (2018) call to understand webbed connectivities and the way the

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heterosexual matrix is connected across gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation over time is an expansive
model that begins this task.

As our timeline demonstrates, identities do not denote types of people but, rather, comprise relational
organizing practices of meaning-making in speci c historical moments constantly produced between and
among us—which can be normalizing or resistant. Recognizing gender as relational and constantly in
production for everyone, whether trans-identi ed, non-binary, or cisgendered, illustrates the value of
interpretive theories in understanding intersectional gender and embodiment as negotiated relations.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the American Sociological Association 2019 meetings in
New York and the Sociologists for Women in Society 2020 Winter Meeting in San Diego, CA.
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Notes

1 We use the term interpretive social theory to invoke an epistemological alignment of several schools of thought
(constructionism, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, among others), rather than symbolic
interactionism specifically, in part because both Go man and Garfinkel defined their work as di erent from Herbert
Blumer, who coined symbolic interactionism.

2 For a summary of queer theory as it intersects sociology, see Crawley and Broad 2008.

3 While we suggest both misreadings and a general under-utilization of ethnomethodology in sociology more generally, an
exhaustive critique of this issue in the history of the discipline is beyond the scope of this article. Crawley is pursuing a
more in-depth critique in a forthcoming article.

4 Both Martinʼs (2004) and Connellʼs focus on practice as within institutions has strong a inities with ethnomethodological
ideas, but neither has a specific discussion of ethnomethodology. Both rely epistemologically on critical realism rather
than interpretivism. In a forthcoming work, Crawley discusses how interpretivist epistemological bases might advance
this work.

5 This term has fallen out of use in both academic and activist circles, as it was previously used to indicate individuals who
had undergone some form of medical transition, an experience that not all transgender individuals want or have access
to.