Institutions Theories of gender, with hardly an exception, focus either on one — to-one relationships between people or on the society as a whole. Apart from discussions of the family, the intermediate level of social organization is skipped. Yet in some ways this is the most important level to understand. We live most of our […]

Setting out this account of multiple structures risks a new kind of reductionism, implying a coherence and completeness in each which earlier was denied to gender relations as a whole. Certainly the exercise of separating structures is pointless unless there is some gain in coherence. But it is important that none of the three structures […]

To recognize a social structure in sexuality it is necessary first to see sexuality as social. The following analysis therefore presupposes the argument, made in Gagnon and Simon’s Sexual Conduct, Foucault’s History of Sexuality and Weeks’s Sexuality and its Discontents, that sexuality is socially constructed. Its bodily dimension does not exist before, or outside, the […]

Particular transactions involving power are easy enough to observe. Mr Barrett the Victorian patriarch forbids his daughter to marry; parliament makes homosexual intercourse a crime; a bank manager refuses a loan to an unmarried woman; a group of youths rape a girl of their acquaintance. It is often difficult to see beyond individual acts of […]

The sexual division of labour at its simplest is an allocation of particular types of work to particular categories of people. It is a social structure to the extent that this allocation becomes a constraint on further practice. This happens in several interrelated ways. First, the prior division of work among people becomes a social […]

The concept of‘social structure’, though fundamental to the social sciences, is ambiguous. Its usages range from the tight and sophisticated models of Piaget, Levi-Strauss and Althusser to the much more numerous cases where anything that shows a detectable pattern at all is called a ‘structure’. Most writing about gender is well towards the latter end […]

The argument so far has traced the domain of the social theory of gender and its gradual emergence in Western social thought. I have argued that this theory is autonomous: it cannot derive its logic from a source outside itself, whether natural difference, biological reproduction, the functional needs of society or the imperatives of social […]

Even to speak of contradiction between social process and the body is not to have moved far enough from doctrines of natural difference and biological determination. For this is still to treat the body as unmoved mover, as what is fixed in relation to what is fluid, as what gives meaning and does not receive […]

To speak of‘transcendence’ is to imply the production of something qualitatively different. The social is radically unnatural. (‘Non — natural’ might be a more neutral term but I think the stronger overtones are correct.) Its structure can never be deduced from natural structures. What undergoes transformation is genuinely trans-formed. But this unnaturalness does not mean […]

The Knot of Natural Difference ‘Female’ and ‘male’ are biological categories arising in a specific system of reproduction. Humans share this division with a vast array of animal and plant species. Non-sexual reproduction is characteristic of simpler life forms, and some relatively complex ones up to the fungi, algae and sponges. Some more complex species, […]