Gender 101 - gender explained through crisps

 For the past months a debate raged hard in Sweden. The catalysmic event was that the Sweden parliament was going to vote on simplyfing a the process of doing a judicial change of gender and lowering the age-limit to 16. The right-wing populist, followed by the christian right, made a call for their supporters to gather under a banner which aimed to stop this legislation from being passed. A call that however not suceeded since the parliament finally, after hours of debate, managed to passed the bill. 

As a historian of sexuality I closely followed this debate, as filled with scientific errors it was. However, one of the right-wings MEP asked the following question: when are you woman? A question, that though aiming at ridiculing the supporters of the bill actually pin-points what many gender historians have asked themselves. It also shows the need to educate on what exactly gender theory is, and how it operates. A task which is not simple, nor have a clear-cut answer. In this post I will therefore try to clarify from a popular science description what gender is, and which school of thoughts that invoked gender theory's founder Judith Butler to present her idea of gender. 

The basis is of gender is the notion of social constructivism, which have it's foundation in early 20th century philosophy. This school does not view human nature as something essential, rather we become humans through our interaction with eachother. Sound tricky? It is. But a common exercise I do with my students when explaining social constructivism is this:

I have 2 dollars and am hungry. In our society I can use my two dollars in an exchange where a cashier at my local supermarket gets my 2 dollars and I get a bag of potatoe chips. In this particularly situation we have decided that a piece of paper, with the sum two dollars written on it and is produced by the government largely translate into a bag of potatoe chips (unless you are at seven/eleven, but thats the free-market).

Let's think about this again. I have two dollars, a pair of socks worth one dollar and am hungry. I however is at an abonded island where my neighboor need a pair of socks. From the plane crash my neighbour have managed to salvage chips from the wreckage. Since my two dollars are worth one bag of potatoe chips, I first try to pay him with these. Since it is not sure that we will get rescued, my neighbour is not intrested in my two dollars. Instead we trade the chips for the pair of socks, worht only one dollar. All of a sudden the social situation have changed, and once society is gone, my moneys not worth anything concrete. 

The point of this exercise is not to discuss the worth of money or socks in themselves. Instead the point is that what we attributes value change over time and thus is bound to a social situation. This school of thought have been applied to different situations all over the world, from understanding how nations are created to how we establish an idea of more abstract values. In those abstract values, gender exists. 

Our bodies are probably the most personal thing we will ever have. But in different societies, we as a collective attribute different value and ideas towards the body. What Butler actually did was to translate the notion of moneys worth (roughly speaking) to bodies. A more concrete way of describing gender theory is thus that our idea of what different bodies can do, is dependent on the social situation. A perhaps clear example of this can be found in one of the most extreme gender-regimes ever created: the third reich. 

During the first thirteen years of Hitlers reign, women in the third reich were asked to meet a standard were they would not leave home. Instead their primary function within the third reich was to produce children and care for them and their home. This all worked well for the first thirteen years, until the many fallen at the eastern front invoked a shortage of labour. Women were thus called into the industry, where they did work previously assigned to men. Towards the end of the war, in the spring of 1945, some young women were even drafted into military service during the final battle of Berlin. 

Female members of the Volksturm - a clear breach
of gender contract in the third reich. Berlin 1945. 

What we can see here is that one social situation, the expanding reich and the none-need for labour created a notion of what it meant to be a woman. In this social situation, women were not supposed to take part of the war effort. In the new social situation, after 1943, societies need changed and therefore also what a woman according to the social contract could do. Through a re-configuration of the concept of woman, new boundaries were set and new gender was done. 

What gender-theory actually does is highlighting this aspect. Whilst your body (much like two dollars) remain the same, our idea of what the body can and should do varies over time. Therefore, you are not a woman or a man in the same way through different social settings. Thus the category of gender is unstable, and through highlighting this gender can be seen at work. The social value of gender - much like money - is dependent on social settings, thus being permanly unstable. 

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