In one of our first class discussions, we addressed Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity as way of understanding how human bodies become legible as gendered bodies through discursive practices (such as language, gestures, appearance, fashion, etc) that (re)iterate the existing relationships of the symbolic gender order in which they are situated. Butler’s argument helps us undo the naturalization of gender by showing its constructedness through repeated acts of signification within a “gender economy” that is fundamentally invested in the supremacy of white cisheteronormativity.

What fascinated me most about her argument for the social construction of gender, is the role that language plays in the process of enacting and producing real material consequences, specifically on and around the body. Along that line of logic, it seems that the possibilities of gender are contained within the bounds of the language we have to describe and explain our embodied experiences. The contemporary distinction between sex (as understood in terms of ‘biology’) and gender (as understood in terms of the ‘social’), for example, shows how language can help complicate our interpretations of what is taken for granted (or essentialized as part of our being). Furthermore, the more recent distinction between gender, and gender expression and gender identity add more layers that complicate the picture and remind us why language is crucial to our interpretations. In order to analyze this process of meaning making, I found it useful to conceptualize these theoretical layers along a continuum (which have become the terminology most often used in scientific/academic literature): starting with biology, then gender, and lastly gender identity and expression. While biology and gender seem to be more fixed, gender identity and expression seem to make room for more agency. To what extent they do this as discursive tools can be analyzed if we consider the bounds of ‘gender’ and thus the gender economy of signification, the currency of this gender economy being masculinity and femininity. If this is true, what possibilities exist outside the dominant forms of making meaning out of gender? What gender(s) exists if not limited by their discursive bounds? What does this say about the stability or universality of masculinity and femininity as we understand it? Can we change these categories and overcome their limits by talking about them differently?

Given the importance that discourse (specifically language) has in all aspects of understanding our lived experiences and how “gender” is so fundamental to our gender studies lexicon, I thought it would be helpful to contextualize the term in the history of its use and origin. After doing some quick googling, I found a concise and helpful blog post from a feminist and linguist scholar who attempts to locate the word ‘gender’ in its relevant history by tracing its use in dictionaries, American English texts, and 20th century feminists texts. According to the author, she started this project after meeting with young women at a talk in a book-fair about a feminist magazine she’d been involved with, noticing that her definition of gender (as “the socially-imposed division of the sexes”) differed from the definition that the younger women understood it as (as a form of identity “located in and asserted by individuals”).

Her research looks at the relationship between these “competing” definitions of gender: one that addresses gender as socially conditioned roles based on biological categories of sex vs. one that addresses gender as an identity and that the author states is distinct from sex and thus free from a binary division. I think it’s necessary to look at the places and historical contexts where “gender” comes from in order to understand how the category itself depends on assumptions about biology and other configurations of the body. She locates the word in an academic psychology article from 1945 where it is used in the sense of being a social expression of being male (thus basing gender on the binary of the biological categories of sex) and in the work of clinicians in the 1950s who were leading research on what we contemporarily know as “transgenderism” or gender identity. It is from these localities that “gender” emerged as a way of describing masculinity and femininity in relation to categories of biological sex (which rests on a binary logic).

To complicate my inquiry, I searched for perspectives interrogating the concept of gender from a non-western context and I came across an article that talks about studying masculinities in indigenous contexts in Mexico. The author of this article argues that understanding gender relations in indigenous contexts requires us to situate the ideological frameworks (epistemological, theoretical and methodological) that limit our interpretation of their actual experiences. In other words, any comprehensive approach and methodology that aims to truly understand these relationships must be grounded in a feminist and decolonial standpoint in order to overcome the inherent binarism of hegemonic western gender that is explicit or implicit in our analysis. According to the author, the dominant system organizes, reinforces, and reproduces models of femininity and masculinity that promote its hegemony (dominance) and thus obscure any possibilities of transformation (non-binary). Furthermore, the author warns against approaching indigenous gender systems as existing in a vacuum and ignoring the influence of western domination (which includes hegemonic masculinity in proximity to white cisheteronormativity).

Together, these two articles made me think of an example of “gender” in the real world that helps us ground the experience of gender in completely different gender economy and thus helps us think of ways in which we can move beyond the binary. While there are many kinds and examples of non-western gender systems around the world, I specifically wanted to draw attention to the muxes of Oaxaca in Mexico to complicate our understanding of gender. The following video, while framed through a particular western lens (it’s from national geographic), nonetheless includes real muxes explaining who they are and what their gender identity means within their Zapotec community. Uncritically, we might compare these people to trans individuals or transwomen (just by “gazing”). However, as they explain, both femininity and masculinity form part of their identity and they position themselves outside the binary as a “third” gender. In the Zapotec language (muxes are from the Zapotec culture), there is no differentiation between men and women. According to the video, the Zapotec language differentiates and is organized as such:

La-ave: people 

La-ame: animals 

La-ani inanimate: things