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My presidential address looked back at the gendered imagery of American heroes and warriors, Muslim terrorists, and oppressed Islamic women as they appeared in comparatively sophisticated media sources in the first 6 months after September 11. The imagery was conventionally gendered, but the actions of women and men reported in the same sources showed multiple gendering—heterogeneity within homogeneity. Making this multiplicity of gendering visible blurs and undermines gender lines and the inequities built on them. The social constructions of heroism, masculinity, and Islamic womanhood are core parts of the gender politics of September 11, a politics deeply embedded in the current debates over the causes and consequences of terrorism and war.

Recently, one of my honors students wrote a paper on the socialization of doctors (Lancey, 1974). A feminist, she used the generic ''she" throughout, which I found incongruous because I remembered the published studies of medical education as concentrating exclusively on men. When I reviewed both the classic and more recent sociological studies of medical training for this paper Mei-ton et al., 1957; Miller, 1970; Mumford, 1970), my memory was confirmed: Women were virtually invisible.

My presidential address looked back at the gendered imagery of American heroes and warriors, Muslim terrorists, and oppressed Islamic women as they appeared in comparatively sophisticated media sources in the first 6 months after September 11. The imagery was conventionally gendered, but the actions of women and men reported in the same sources showed multiple genderingheterogeneity within homogeneity. Making this multiplicity of gendering visible blurs and undermines gender lines and the inequities built on them. The social constructions of heroism, masculinity, and Islamic womanhood are core parts of the gender politics of September 11, a politics deeply embedded in the current debates over the causes and consequences of terrorism and war.

Twenty-one years ago, Judith Stacey and Barrie argued that feminists had not been able to produce a transformation of existing conceptual frameworks in sociology, but rather had been contained by conventional categorization that just added gender as another variable. Their work was co-opted by theoretical frameworks that relegated women to family studies.

Feminist theory and research have shown us that gender is a linchpin of social orders, but they have not seriously envisaged a social order without gender. Examination of the various bases of gender demonstrates that gender is essentially a social construction, and the relations between women and men are essentially social relations. What is socially constructed can be reconstructed, and social relations can be rearranged. A social order is possible without gender as an organizing principle. This paper takes forward tendencies and policies in postindustrial societies to show how, if carried through, they could be used to construct a nongendered social order.

Women’s status in the Western world has improved enormously, but the revolution that would make women and men truly equal has not yet occurred. I argue that the reason is that gender divisions still deeply bifurcate the structure of modern society. Feminists want women and men to be equal, but few talk about doing away with gender divisions altogether. From a social constructionist structural gender perspective, it is the ubiquitous division of people into two unequally valued categories that undergirds the continually reappearing instances of gender inequality. I argue that it is this gendering that needs to be challenged by feminists, with the long-term goal of doing away with binary gender divisions altogether. To this end, I call for a feminist degendering movement.

Judith Lorber and Patricia Yancey Martin. 2011. “The Socially Constructed Body: Insights from Feminist Theory.” In Illuminating Social Life: Classical and Contemporary Theory Revisted, 5rd edition, edited by Peter Kivisto. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
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We can think about families, work, political regimes, and political action from the perspective of multiple gendering. I have said that these multiplicities challenge the solidity of the binary gender order and provide examples of degendering practices. Now I would like to think beyond gender to the possibilities of a totally nongendered social order.

Lorber argues that the emergence of multiple gender identities in Western countries is not revolutionary; they resist but do not restructure the persistently gendered binary social structure. The erosion of gender boundaries – degendering --  can undercut gendered power inequalities and sustain the thrust toward a gender-equal social order. Multiple genders can degender if they alter the interactive processes that sustain gendered social action and diminish gendered practices in workplaces, families and other social institutions. But the multiplicity of genders does not seem to have a consistent gender-bending interactive or a structural effect. Multiple gendering could affect the structure of the gender binary if there were a concerted effort to abolish bureaucratic gender identification and to legally recognize the range of sexed bodies. However, “multiple gender” is not a unified identity around which proponents have rallied to make structural change. With gender-altering personal presentations and pronoun use, gender rebels have challenged some face-to-face interaction but will not disrupt the structure of the gender binary without a political movement. A concerted effort to degender bureaucracies and legal entities can have a positive effect on gender equality. Research shows that countries with the greatest adoption of degendered norms also have the greatest equality between women and men.

My focus is the continuities and discontinuities in recent feminist ideas and perspectives. I am going to discuss the development of feminist theories as to the sources of gender inequality and its pervasiveness, and the different feminist political solutions and remedies based on these theories. I will be combining ideas from different feminist writers, and usually will not be talking about any specific writers. A list of readings can be found at the end.

Talking about gender for most people is the equivalent of fish talking about water. Cender is so much the routine ground of everyday activities that questioning its taken-far-granted assumptions and presuppositions is like thinking about whether the sun will come up.1 Cender is so pervasive that in our society we assume it is bred into our genes. Most people find it hard to believe that gender is constantly created and re-created out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and order of that social life. Yet gender, like culture, is a human production that de pends on everyone constantly "doing gender " (West and 'Zimmerman 1987) An\ ~ everyone "does gender " without thinking about it. Today, on the subway, I saw a well-dressed man with a year-old child in a stroller. Yesterday, on a bus, I saw a man with a tiny baby ina carrier on his chest. Seeing men taking care of small children in public is increasircgly common-at least in New York C...

Gender is an organizing principle of social orders that divides people into two major categories: "men" and "women." They are expected to be different and are treated differently and often unequally, with men usually more privileged. The social construction perspective explains the historical and cross-cultural variability of gender differences by social processes. Gendered behavior and practices, according to social constructionists, emerge from group norms and expectations, institutionalized patterns of social interaction, organizational policies, and legal and bureaucratic rules and regulations. People can modify, resist, or actively rebel against gendered norms and expectations, but for the most part, gendering proceeds without much thought or visibility. Gendered processes reproduce and are reinforced by gendered structures: organizations, regimes of nation-states, and the effects of the institutionalization of gender. Change is possible, but difficult. Judith Lorber Page 2 2/25/2023 CONSTRUCTING GENDER: THE DANCER AND THE DANCE "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" W. B. Yeats In the course of everyday life, gender is a constant part of who and what we are, how others treat us, and our general standing in society. Our bodies, personalities, and ways of thinking, acting, and feeling are gendered. Because we are gendered from birth by naming, clothing, and interaction with family, teachers, and peers, our identity as a boy or girl, and then as a man or woman, is felt as, and usually explained as, a natural outcome of the appearance of our genitalia, the signs of our biological sex. Just as our anatomy was determined by XX or XY chromosomes and grew in utero in response to fetal hormones, we believe that our brains and therefore our subsequent behavior also has to be determined by physiology. Then how can women and men be so different over time and space? Sex differences proponents attribute variation to cultural overlays and social environments that don't affect an immutable baseline of sex differences. Social constructionists argue that gender is not sex. Rather, gender is an organizing principle of social orders that divides people into two major categories: "men" and "women." They are expected to be different, are treated differently, and so become different. Social constructionists explain the historical and cross-cultural variability of gender differences by social processes and by hierarchical power differences between women and men. These social processes are carried out without thinking: because we are gendered, we "do gender," and doing gender constructs our behavior, identities, and work and family lives (West Judith Lorber Page 3 2/25/2023 & Zimmerman, 1987). Throughout our lives, we dance a gendered dance, and through the dance we are gendered. These social processes reflect and sustain the gendering of all the institutions of society. The invidious effect of gender divisions is the disadvantageous status of women in most societies. Although societies can insure that differences are not used to legitimate unequal legal rights or discriminatory practices, there is always debate over how equal women and men can be, given what seems to be a substantially wide and unbridgeable gap between female and male "natures." If, as social constructionists argue, the gendered social order and its constant reproduction and maintenance are the source of the differences between women and men, then the gendering processes can be altered, reversed, diminished, or erased altogether.

Talking about gender for most people is the equivalent of fish talking about water. Cender is so much the routine ground of everyday activities that questioning its taken-far-granted assumptions and presuppositions is like thinking about whether the sun will come up.1 Cender is so pervasive that in our society we assume it is bred into our genes. Most people find it hard to believe that gender is constantly created and recreated out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and order of that social life. Yet gender, like culture, is a human production that de pends on everyone constantly "doing gender" (West and 'Zimmerman 1987) An\~ everyone "does gender" without thinking about it. Today, on the subway, I saw a well-dressed man with a year-old child in a stroller. Yesterday, on a bus, I saw a man with a tiny baby ina carrier on his chest. Seeing men taking care of small children in public is increasircgly common-at least in New York City. But both men were quite obviously stared at-and smiled at, approvingly. Everyone was doing gender-the men who were changing the role of fathers and the other pas sengers, who were applauding them silently. But there was more gendering going on that probably fewer people noticed. The baby was wearing a white crocheted cap and white clothes. You couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl. The child in the stroller was wearing a dark blue T-shirt and dark print pants. As they started to leave the train, the father put a Yankee baseball cap 011 the child's head. Ah, a boy, I thought. Then I noticed the gleam of tiny earrings in the child's ears, and as they got off, I saw the little flowered sneakers and lace-trimmed socks. Not a boy after all. Cender done. Cender is such a familiar part of daily life that it usually takes a deliberate dis ruption of our expectations of how women and men are supposed to act to pay at tention to how it is produced. Cender signs and signals are so ubiquitous that we usually fail to note them-unless they are missing or ambiguous. Then we are un comfortable until we have successfully placed the other person in a gender status; otherwise, we feel socially dislocated....

Most sociological research designs assume that each person has one sex. one sexuality, and one gender, congruent with each other and fixed for life. Postmodern feminists and queer theorists have been interrogating bodies, desires, and genders, but sociology has not. Deconstructing sex, sexuality. and gender reveals many possible categories embedded in social experiences and social practices. As researchers, as theorists, and as activists, sociologists have to go beyond paying lip service to the diversity of bodies, sexualities, genders. The sociologist's task should be to deconstruct the conventional categories of sex, sexuality, and gender and build new complex, cross-cutting constructs into research designs. There are revolutionary possibilities inherent in rethinking the categories of gender, sexuality, and physiological sex. Sociological data that challenge conventional knowledge by reframing the questions could provide legitimacy for new ways of thinking. Data that undermine the supposed natural dichotomies on which the social orders of most modern societies are still based could radically alter political discourses that valorize biological causes, essential heterosexuality, and traditional gender roles in families and workplaces. We'll have a swashing and a martial outside, As many other mannish cowards have That do outface it with their semblances. (I, iii, 122-124)