Constructionist arguments oppose essentialism by proposing that gender is about conforming to social expectations. Goffman is a pioneer in considering the social construction of the body, especially in his work on stigma (Goffman, 1968), but his contribution to thinking about gendered bodies (Goffman, 1979) is sometimes overlooked (see Chapter 2). Goffman’s work shows how distinctions between ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ are crucial in how bodies are controlled and experienced. For Goffman gender is a form of tribal stigma, which marks half the population as having deviant bodies and determines that they must be interacted with in particular ways that reinforce the idea that men are ‘naturally’ supe — rior. Yet he was not the first to consider that gender was a social rather than a ‘natural’ distinction.
Simone de Beauvoir (1988/1949), without the aid of the concept of gender, proclaimed in the 1940s what can be taken as the fundamental idea behind constructionism: that one becomes a woman. It is rather more recently that sociologists of gender have considered how one becomes a man (see Morgan, 1993). A classic example of early sociological thinking about gender as a social construction is Oakley’s 1972 book Sex, Gender and Society, which is credited with bringing the term gender into the social sciences (Oakley, 1997: 32), although the concept does appear in some of the widely read classics of second wave feminist literature (see Greer, 1970; Millet, 1972/1970). Oakley’s book is discussed in Chapter 3, but very briefly the key points on social construction are repeated here.
To say that gender is socially constructed was to resist ideas about women which assumed that differences between women and men were biological and therefore unchangeable. There was the need for ‘a way of separating the bodies of human beings from their social fates’ (Oakley, 1997: 29). Oakley did this by distinguishing ‘sex’ as ‘the biological differences between male and female: the visible difference in genitalia, the related difference in procreative function. “Gender” however is a matter of culture: it refers to the social classification into masculine and feminine’ (Oakley, 1972: 16). Gender as a concept therefore focused initially on how social factors, not bodies, determined people’s behaviour. This involved investigating to what extent the sexes are physically different, and whether those differences are a product of environment (see Chapter 2). Evidence is presented of different ways of expressing
femininity and masculinity across history and cultures. Oakley (1972: 30) refers to many studies, one being Geoffrey Gorer’s accounts of the similarities between men’s and women’s bodies in Bali. She also notes the huge range of anthropological work indicating that in most cultures women do the bulk of the work, usually including the carrying of heavy burdens. Biological accounts which see how women and men use their bodies as the result of innate, ‘natural’, biological forces cannot explain such variation. For constructionists, social context is crucial in producing gendered bodies.
Constructionism might explain variations in how gender is done in different cultures as a product of different socialization and social institutions, but it can struggle to account for variations within the same culture. Sometimes biology is simply replaced by social environment as the all-powerful determining factor in how bodies are gendered. Too much focus on gender socialization, especially in the early years, assumes children passively accept gender norms and tends to cast those who do not as imperfectly socialized, rather than resisting (Stanley and Wise, 1983). Socialization theory also fails to deal effectively with the part that bodies play in the social construction of gender. Sociologists took up that challenge, initially through symbolic interactionism, as was discussed in Chapter 3. However, I would argue that the most important ideas about how gendered bodies are socially constructed emerged within second-wave feminist literature, as insights produced there continue to appear in the work of feminist sociologists of the body.