introduction to gender theory

Gender is not the same thing as sex. I think an episode of News Radio dealt best with this idea through the following question: "Would you rather have gender, or have sex?"

heh heh. . .ahem, but seriously-

SAT-style, if I had to explain how the terms "sex" and "gender" work, I'd say female is to sex as feminine is to gender.
Most of us are raised to understand gender as a natural part of ourselves, a varying degree of masculinity or femininity that we're born with. Either we're normal little boys and girls, or we're sissies, tomboys, princesses or tough guys. But wait, these categories are culturally produced. Hmm. . . the longer you look at it, the more gender itself looks like a culturally produced and enforced system for making meaning out of people. Judith Butler writes a great deal about the idea of performativity; that is the idea that gender is actually the performance of scripts, rituals and gestures that have been copied from copies of copies of copies. . . down through the generations. Who knows if there was ever an original, or what it might possibly have been?

We gender ourselves and gender our bodies, most of the time in accordance to the gender codes of our society. (Dresses and makeup, high-pitched voices and sensitivity are for girls, suits and body hair, contact sports and coarse humor are for boys. Right. Note my sarcasm.)

But can sex be culturally constructed, too? After all, sex is in the body, right? And bodies are there, material, we're born with them. Right. (There's that sarcasm again.) The thing is, our understanding of bodies is based on tons of cultural standards. Babies aren't born with a sex, they're just born a certain shape and size and we go ahead and sex them as soon as we get our hands on them.

Here's what Riki Anne Wilchins has to say in Read My Lips:
We're taught that while gender may come from Culture, sex comes from Nature. All bodies already have sex "in" them. This sex is recognized and expressed by culture as gender through social practices like clothing, hairstyles, and whether one finds pastels simply faaaaabulous. In this narrative, sex is a natural property of bodies, while gender is just what culture makes of them. In Judith Butler's terms, Sex is to Nature (raw) as Gender is to Culture (cooked). The naturalness of sex grounds and legitimizes the cultural practices of gender. But what if this narrative is actually inverted?

The more we look, the less natural sex looks. Everywhere we turn, every aspect of sex seems to be saturated with cultural needs and priorities. . . .

Maybe the formula is reversed. Gender is not what culture creats out of my body's sex; rather, sex is what culture makes when it genders my body. The cultural system of gender looks at my body, creates a narrative of binary difference, and says, "Honest, it was here when I arrived. It's all Mother Nature's doing." The story of a natural sex that justifies gender evaporates, and we see sex standing revealed as an effect of gender, not its cause. (end quote)

I should talk briefly here about "trans." Since I don't identify as transgender and am by no means an expert, I'll quote Sandy Stone from her webpage on transgender:
"Transgender is a term whose exact meaning is still in dispute, and I consider that a very healthy sign. The most widely accepted definition is that transgender includes everything not covered by our culture's narrow terms 'man' and 'woman'. A partial list of persons who might include themselves in such a definition includes transsexuals (pre, post, and no-op); transvestites; crossdressers; persons with ambiguous genitalia; persons who have chosen to perform ambiguous social genders; and persons who have chosen to perform no gender at all." (end quote)

When I apply the terms trans, transsexual or transgender to Ranma (or Tsubasa), it's in accordance with this definition -- when they move outside categories of "man" and "woman". I also use the word "genderqueer" in a few spots, which has a similar meaning but deals with the categories of "masculine" and "feminine".

I latched onto Ranma 1/2 as a text to analyze because of the ways it messes with AND reifies conventional ideas of how gender and sex relate to identity. Ranma is a straight guy who suddenly has to deal with not just a new female body, but both male and female bodies. How does this affect his sense of self? Can he still really be a boy the way he was before? Is there any way in which he's not genderqueer? Is he the only guy that can wear deodorant that's strong enough for a man, yet pH balanced for a woman?

Go to the How is Ranma queer? section and find out!