West and Zimmerman’s well-known (1987) article on ‘doing gender’ argues that gender is best understood as a routine we must work at in everyday interaction. This means that despite finding Goffman extremely useful, they think that the emphasis on display looks too much at gender as happening at the periphery of interactions (in bracket rituals) and fails to see how gender is central to all interaction. People take their cues on how to do gender from others and people are constantly held accountable for whether their performance of gender is ‘appropriate’. However, they argue that the terminology surrounding gender needs to be more precisely defined.
West and Zimmerman suggest that ‘gender’ refers to acting the part, to the work involved in behaving as feminine or masculine. They argue that ‘gender’ in this sense must be distinguished from ‘sex’ and from ‘sex category’. ‘Sex’ should denote biological criteria, such as chromosomes and genes, used to decide who is male and who female. However, these are things that ordinary people cannot see, therefore we need the term ‘sex category’ to refer to the classification of someone’s sex that we make based on them looking the part. For example, do they have a beard to help classify them as male? ‘Gender’ should therefore refer to how people manage being classified into a sex category, ‘male’ or ‘female’. West and Zimmerman go on to argue that doing gender means constantly engaging with socially circulating ideas which encourage women and men to look and act in certain ways that declare their ‘sex category’. There is considerable work involved in this, but this work is central to social interaction. Most of us find it almost impossible to know how to interact with individuals if we are unable to decide which ‘sex category’ they belong in. However, we usually very quickly make a decision, or get some information to convince us whether they are ‘male’ or ‘female’ so we can then ‘do’ gender in interacting with them.
West and Zimmerman therefore disagree with Goffman’s argument that gender displays are optional. They illustrate much of this with reference to a well-known study by Garfinkel (1967) of a supposedly intersex person known as Agnes. In terms of sex Agnes was hard to define, she had a penis, but at puberty developed breasts, and hormonally appeared female. In terms of sex category, Agnes was ‘passing’ as a woman. She wore women’s clothing and had a boyfriend. Agnes had to work particularly hard to do femininity, as she had spent most of her early years as a boy and could not take it for granted that she would get it ‘right’.Yet as West and Zimmerman argue, Agnes was only doing more consciously what most women do without thinking (see also Kessler and
McKenna, 1978). Even where we feel clear about someone’s gender, and indeed our own, we are always managing the classification. We are all constantly working at presenting ourselves as feminine or masculine in relation to others, and through this interactive work gender is produced.
Melissa Tyler and Pamela Abbott’s (1998) research on ‘ordinary’ women such as flight attendants further illustrates the kind of work involved in ‘doing’ gender. They draw on West and Zimmerman’s ideas to show that:
the labour which is involved in performing and maintaining the appearance of a flight attendant is not perceived as work, but as an aspect of just “being a woman”, from which women are deemed to derive both pleasure and a sense of identity. As such this labour is neither recognised nor remunerated. (Tyler and Abbott, 1998: 434)
They suggest that this commodification of women as bodies is an illustration of how women are subordinated throughout contemporary western societies. In respect of flight attendants, the women’s bodies were seen to symbolically represent the airline and expected to embody the company image: for example, by looking sleek and efficient. Women flight attendants are expected to groom themselves and work on their bodies to maintain the standards of appearance that the airline dictates, and yet to make it look like they have put no effort into it, but are ‘naturally’ poised and feminine. Airlines routinely weighed their women attendants, but not male attendants or pilots. The women were told to lose weight if they did not fit the strict height to weight ratios. Men were expected only to be clean and neat. Women’s uniforms and cosmetics were also checked. The women internalized these demands and disciplined their bodies to try to conform. They dieted, visited hairdressers and gyms, bought expensive make-up, but were given no more financial allowance for this than male peers. They were expected to look flawlessly professional yet constantly felt deficient compared to colleagues, and that they must therefore work harder to look and be feminine in the way dictated. One attendant thought her airline were keen to employ less attractive women, because they thought they would ‘work harder to be exactly what [the airline] want us to be. Not just looks-wise, but being nice to passengers and so on’ (quoted in Tyler and Abbott, 1998: 447). Thus, trying to live up to expectations of feminine beauty and behaviour do not come ‘naturally’ but involve considerable amounts of work not just for flight attendants but for most women. Yet many believe that symbolic interactionism remains too descriptive and does not adequately account for why large-scale social inequalities (such as those between women and men) continue to be reproduced (for example, Crossley, 1995: 135). There are many who have suggested that more
structural accounts of doing femininity and masculinity are needed in order to understand gender inequalities.