As a sociologist I am drawn to the idea that gender is something we do, although within social constraints. If people do gender they have to engage with ideas about how it ‘should’ be done, even if they find ways to do it differently. People also have to do gender within conditions not of their […]

The most influential current theories about gender by Judith Butler (for example, 1990), sound very similar to socialization theories (Hood- Williams and Harrison, 1998: 89) and to symbolic interactionist approaches about doing gender, but could more accurately be described as arguing that gender ‘does us’. Her work has been important because she has outlined how […]

Stoltenberg is unusual within masculinity studies in arguing that it is impossible to be a man without subordinating women (Beasley, 2005: 202). Almost all those involved in masculinity studies are highly critical of dominant forms of masculinity. However, most have some sympathy for men and are keen to point out that not all men are […]

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) […]

The dramaturgical approach to gender suggests that we are all actors, trying to give a good performance of femininity or masculinity. We know what the gendered scripts (see Gagnon and Simon, 1973) are — we know how to play the part of a woman or a man but we might each play that part slightly […]

There are three ways in which gender can be thought of as something we ‘do’.The first argues that to do gender is to perform it, as an actor performs a role. Secondly, to ‘do’ gender can mean that we have to work at it. This tends to emphasize that doing gender is more like work […]

This book will return often to explanations of how gender is done to us, or imposed on individuals, via social structures. Connells (2002: 55) defines social structures as ‘the enduring or extensive patterns among social relations’. Chapter 1 outlined Walby’s (1986; 1990) argument that gender is determined and gender inequalities are perpetuated through six structures: […]

Oakley’s efforts to get away from conventional thinking about women that focused on their bodies were important but she tended to see sexed bodies as a kind of blank slate on which social gender was written (Gatens, 1991).This distinction between sex as a clear ‘natural’ fact and gender as a shifting set of social meanings […]

Schooling has historically emphasized gender differences, with girls often disadvantaged because of the gendering of subjects, a lack of role models, sexist resources, and the way that classroom interaction operated to favour boys (Delamont, 1990). Formal education in many cultures has been available only to the privileged few until relatively recently. Compulsory primary education was […]

Oakley argues children learn what it means to be feminine and mascu­line not just from their parents (significant others) but by looking at themselves and their parents in terms of wider social expectations about gender (the ‘generalized other’). Oakley’s (1972) efforts to provide evidence about the importance of nurture were limited because she had to […]