Gender in Communication

Third Edition

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This book honors our mothers:

Maj. Helen Mary Finks Palczewski (1921–1999)

Victoria DeFrancisco Leto (1924–2004)

Adele Eilers Pruin (1929–)

Mary Lu Dick (1956–)

This book also honors Cate’s life partner:

Arnold James Madsen (1958–2017)

Arnie was a good man. In this political moment, during which good men committed to gender/sex justice are sorely needed, our loss of Arnie is particularly painful. Be good. Do good.

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Gender in Communication A Critical Introduction

Third Edition

Catherine Helen Palczewski University of Northern Iowa Victoria Pruin DeFrancisco University of Northern Iowa Danielle Dick McGeough University of Northern Iowa

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Palczewski, Catherine Helen, author. | DeFrancisco, Victoria L. (Victoria Leto), author. | McGeough, Danielle Dick, author.

Title: Gender in communication : a critical introduction / Catherine Helen Palczewski, University of Northern Iowa, Victoria Pruin DeFrancisco, University of Northern Iowa, Danielle Dick McGeough, University of Northern Iowa.

Other titles: Communicating gender diversity

Description: Third Edition. | Thousand Oaks : SAGE Publications, [2018] | Revised edition of the authors’ Gender in communication, [2014] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017034869 | ISBN 9781506358451 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Sex role. | Gender identity. | Communication—Social aspects. | Communication—Sex differences. | Sexism in language.

Classification: LCC HQ1075 .D43 2018 | DDC 305.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034869

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Acquisitions Editor: Terri Accomazzo

Production Editor: Laureen Gleason

Copy Editor: Deanna Noga

Typesetter: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd.

Proofreader: Sarah J. Duffy

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Indexer: Marilyn Augst

Cover Designer: Scott Van Atta

Marketing Manager: Allison Henry

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Brief Contents

1. Preface 2. PART I: Foundations

1. Chapter 1 Developing a Critical Gender/Sex Lens 2. Chapter 2 Theories of Gender/Sex 3. Chapter 3 Gendered/Sexed Voices 4. Chapter 4 Gendered/Sexed Bodies 5. Chapter 5 Gendered/Sexed Language

3. PART II: Institutions 1. Chapter 6 An Introduction to Gender in Social Institutions 2. Chapter 7 Families 3. Chapter 8 Education 4. Chapter 9 Work 5. Chapter 10 Religion 6. Chapter 11 Media 7. Chapter 12 One Last Look Through a Critical Gendered Lens

4. References 5. Index 6. About the Authors

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Detailed Contents

Preface Events Informing the Third Edition

The 2016 Presidential Election The Women’s March on Washington The Silencing of Elizabeth Warren The Scolding of April Ryan and Maxine Waters

Why Studying Gender in Communication Is Important Core Principles Organization of the Book New to This Edition Individual Acknowledgments Social Acknowledgments

PART I: Foundations Chapter 1 Developing a Critical Gender/Sex Lens

Intersectionality Gender and Sex, Gender/Sex Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Sexuality and Romantic Attraction Race and Ethnicity National Identity Socioeconomic Class Intersectionality Conclusion

Communication Systemic Gendered Violence Conclusion

Chapter 2 Theories of Gender/Sex Biological Theories

Chromosomes (Hormones and Genitalia) Brain Development Biological Theories Conclusion

Psychological Theories Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Feminism Social Learning Psychological Theories Conclusion

Critical/Cultural Theories Shared Assumptions Multiracial and Global Feminisms

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Queer Theory Critical/Cultural Theories Conclusion

Applying Gender Theory: Some Useful Criteria Conclusion

Chapter 3 Gendered/Sexed Voices Conversation Work

Politeness Humor Swearing

Identity Work Feminine Conversational Style Masculine Conversational Style Gay and Lesbian Conversational Styles Trans and Gender Non-Conforming Conversational Styles

Relationship Work Children’s Play Ineffective Conflict Management Conversational Aggression

Conclusion Chapter 4 Gendered/Sexed Bodies

Body Politics Gender Performativity Objectification

Disciplining Gendered Bodies Attractiveness Attractive Men Attractive Women Clothing Embodied Space Embodied Movement

Refusing the Command Performance Agency Using Norms Against Each Other Making Norms Visible Overtly Challenging Norms Revaluing the Body

Conclusion Chapter 5 Gendered/Sexed Language

The Power of Language Language Can Be Used to Oppress and Subordinate

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He/Man Language Semantic Derogation Semantic Imbalance Semantic Polarization Marked and Unmarked Terms Trivialization Naming Lack of Vocabulary The Truncated Passive The Falsely Universal We The Deverbing of Woman Language as Violence

Language as Resistance Talking Back Developing a New Language Resignification Strategic Essentialism and Rhetorics of Difference Moving Over

Conclusion PART II: Institutions

Chapter 6 An Introduction to Gender in Social Institutions Prejudice Versus Institutionalized Discrimination Institutional Control Institutionalized Gendered/Sexed Violence Preview

Chapter 7 Families Defining Family and Gender/Sex Roles The Nuclear Family The State of Families Doing and Undoing Motherhood Communicating in Families

Parent-Child Communication Couple Communication

(Un)Doing Family Singles and Childfree People Creative Undoing of Family Engaged Fatherhood Same-Sex Parents Raising Transgender Children

Conclusion

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Chapter 8 Education The Politics of Knowledge

The History of Education: Gendered/Sexed, Raced, and Classed Hidden Curriculum: Sexist, Racist, Classist, and Heterosexist

Gendered Expectations and Interpersonal Communication Classroom Interactions Bullying, Harassment, and Sexual Assault

Emancipatory Education Curricula Laws Globally

Conclusion Chapter 9 Work

Pay Equity and Job Segregation Sex Discrimination in the Workplace Work as Liberation and Locations of Empowerment Conclusion

Chapter 10 Religion Why Study Religion, Gender, and Communication? Religion and Gender/Sex Roles

Gender, Sex, and Religiosity Sex and Institutional Religious Power Complementarians and Egalitarians Muscular Christianity

Religion and Sexuality Religion as Liberation and Locations of Empowerment

African Americans and Religion Veiling Practices Rereading the History of Women Religious

Conclusion Chapter 11 Media

Defining Media and How They Function Media Hegemony or Polysemy Media Polyvalence

The Gaze(s) Ways of Seeing The Gaze An Oppositional Gaze

Who Is Represented in Media News

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Film Television and Scripted Programming Video Games

How People Are Represented Sexualization of Women “Masculinity in Crisis”

Conclusion Chapter 12 One Last Look Through a Critical Gendered Lens

References Index About the Authors

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Preface

As we worked through the revisions for this third edition throughout 2016 and into the summer of 2017, a number of events transpired that threw into relief the importance of gender in communication: the presidential campaign, the Women’s March on Washington, the silencing of Senator Elizabeth Warren, and the scolding of reporter April Ryan and Representative Maxine Waters. All these events have historical antecedents. So first a little more detail on the events.

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Events Informing the Third Edition

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The 2016 Presidential Election

In the summer of 2016, former senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination for the presidency, but she later lost the electoral college vote to businessperson and reality TV figure Donald Trump. No single factor explains the election, but research indicated that sexism likely had something to do with the result (Maxwell & Shields, 2017). Although polls indicated many Trump voters prior to the election voiced concerns about Clinton’s use of personal e-mail, after the election they indicated they were not concerned about Trump’s use of a personal e-mail server, leading one commentator to conclude, “This news proves that Hillary Clinton’s loss was about sexism, not her emails” (Strassner, 2017). Even though Clinton testified for more than 11 hours about Benghazi and turned over all her files and nothing was found, criticism persisted. Why?

An experimental study about backlash against female politicians provided one explanation. Male politicians who were perceived as power-seeking were also perceived to be “more assertive, stronger, and tougher” and have “greater competence” while women politicians who were perceived as power-seeking were seen as uncaring and people responded to them with moral outrage (Okimoto & Brescoll, 2010). General resistance to female candidates has been demonstrated in experiments that found 26% of the population express anger at the idea of a female president (Streb, Burrell, Frederick, & Genovese, 2008).

The findings of these predictive studies were confirmed by research on 2016voters. University of Arkansas researchers found that “modern Sexism did influence the 2016 presidential election for many Americans” (Maxwell & Shields, 2017). Modern sexism, defined as hostility or resentment toward working women, generally was more pervasive among White U.S. citizens and southerners and was not exclusive to men. The conclusion of the study: Of White Independents and Democrats, 11 million men and 6.5 million women “feel enough animosity towards working women and feminists to make them unlikely to vote for one of them— even from their own party” (Maxwell & Shields, 2017).

Regardless of your opinion of the electoral outcome, gender in communication played a role in the election. But it is important to remember that this was not the first, or only, election in which gender and sex played a role. For every contemporary example of women in politics, a long history of struggle precedes it.

Clinton was not the first woman to run for the presidency. In 1872, Victoria Woodhull ran, even before women had the right to vote. In 1884, Belva Ann Lockwood was the first woman to actually appear on ballots. In 1964, Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman to receive nomination votes at a major party’s convention. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, earned delegates at the Democratic National Convention. Patsy Matsu Takemoto Mink and Linda Jenness ran in 1972, Pat Schroeder in 1988, Elizabeth Dole in 2000, and Carol Moseley Braun in 2004. For any contemporary issue related to gender in communication, a long history precedes it. The same is true for this book. Our ability to write this book, and to cite research about gender in communication, is the product of a history of activism, scholarship, and writing by others.

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Many of the arguments for Trump and against Clinton hearkened back to arguments originally used to deny women the right to vote. On at least 12 different occasions, Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, commented on how Trump being “broad-shouldered” qualified him for the presidency. For example, Pence indicated he agreed to run with Trump because “he embodies American strength, and I know that he will provide that kind of broad-shouldered American strength on the global stage as well” (as cited in Chait, 2016). Although Pence denied that the comments had anything to do with masculinity (Griffiths, 2016), the repeated references to shoulders and strength sounded similar to comments from 100 years ago.

One of the main arguments against women voting was that their bodies were too weak to enforce their vote. The New York Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, in a circa 1910 statement presented to both houses of the U.S. Congress, noted: “To extend the suffrage to women would be to introduce into the electorate a vast non-combatant party, incapable of enforcing its own rule” (as cited in Hazard, 1910, p. 88). British-born historian and journalist Goldwin Smith, in his commentary on the question of woman suffrage, explained: “Political power has hitherto been exercised by the male sex . . . because man alone could uphold government and enforce the law” (as cited in “Opinions,” 1912, p. 6). Author Rossiter Johnson worried, “To make any party victorious at the polls by means of blank-cartridge ballots would only present an increased temptation to the numerical minority to assert itself as the military majority. . . . If an election is carried by a preponderance of votes cast by women, who is to enforce the verdict?” (as cited in “Opinions,” 1912, p. 5). Men’s physical strength was foregrounded as central to their political strength. These contemporary comparisons to historical moments did not end with the election.

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The Women’s March on Washington

On January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration and 10 weeks after the election, the Women’s March on Washington occurred, at which over 470,000 people marched. Across the globe, 999 marches occurred with an estimated 5.6 million people participating, the largest single protest event in history (“Feet,” 2017; see also “Sister Marches,” 2017). In describing the mission of the March, organizers noted how “the rhetoric of the past election cycle has insulted, demonized, and threatened many of us—immigrants of all statuses, Muslims and those of diverse religious faiths, people who identify as LGBTQIA [lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, and asexual], Native people, Black and Brown people, people with disabilities, survivors of sexual assault.” The final element of the mission was “HEAR OUR VOICE” (“Mission & Vision,” n.d.). For every contemporary example of a march about gender injustice, a long history of marches precedes it.

This was not the first women’s march on Washington. On March 3, 1913, the eve of President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, the first national woman suffrage procession occurred. Five thousand women participated, including a contingent of Black women from Howard University who had to fight for their inclusion, as an estimated 100,000 people watched. The march was important, but the crowd’s reaction (first verbally and then physically attacking the suffragists) and the police department’s failure to respond together catapulted woman suffrage into national attention. According to the New York Times, “for more than an hour confusion reigned. The police, the women say, did practically nothing, and finally soldiers and marines formed a voluntary escort to clear the way”; a police officer designated to guard the marchers was overheard shouting, “If my wife were where you are I’d break her head” (“5,000 Women,” 1913, p. 5). Suffrage movement organizers described how marchers were “struck in the face by onlookers, spat upon, and overwhelmed by rabid remarks” (Blatch & Lutz, 1940, p. 196). Our ability to write this book is made possible by the work of activists who made clear women’s issues were public issues and fought for women’s voices to be heard.

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The Silencing of Elizabeth Warren

In February 2017, during Senate debate about attorney general nominee Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, Senator Elizabeth Warren read the words of Coretta Scott King criticizing Sessions for suppressing the vote of Black citizens. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell interrupted and prevented Warren from completing the remarks, enforcing a senate rule that prohibits one senator from “impugning” another. Commenting on this moment, Megan Garber (2017), a reporter for The Atlantic, wrote:

There are many ways that American culture tells women to be quiet—many ways they are reminded that they would really be so much more pleasing if they would just smile a little more, or talk a little less, or work a little harder to be pliant and agreeable. Women are, in general, extremely attuned to these messages; we have, after all, heard them all our lives. . . . [W]hen Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell intervened to prevent her from finishing the speech—many women, regardless of their politics or place, felt that silencing, viscerally. And when McConnell, later, remarked of Warren, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” many women, regardless of their politics or place, felt it again. Because, regardless of their politics or place, those women have heard the same thing, or a version of it, many times before. (paras. 1–2)

Instead of recognizing the gender politics at play, other Senators reinforced sex roles. Senator Orrin Hatch agreed that Warren should have been silenced because she was criticizing another senator. Hatch’s reason: Warren needed to “think of his [Sessions’s] wife” (as cited in Crockett, 2017). In response, a meme was born: “Nevertheless, she persisted” adorned T-shirts, hashtags, and profile pages. For every contemporary example of persistence in the face of gendered opposition, a long history of persistence precedes it.

It is important to remember that in 1917 representatives of the National Woman’s Party would be the first group to protest at the White House directly. Even when the United States entered World War I, the Silent Sentinels kept up the protests in front of the White House only to face arrest, violent crowds, and police violence after arrest. Nevertheless, they persisted.

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The Scolding of April Ryan and Maxine Waters

At a March 2017 press conference, Press Secretary Sean Spicer thought it was appropriate to tell American Urban Radio Networks’ veteran White House correspondent April Ryan to “stop shaking your head” (as cited in Silva, 2017). The same day, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly answered criticisms of Trump made by Representative Maxine Waters by snidely commenting: “I didn’t hear a word she said. I was looking at the James Brown wig” (as cited in Taylor, 2017).

These events motivated educator and activist Brittany Packnett to create the hashtag #BlackWomenAtWork, under which Black women noted the range of ways their nonverbal communication and bodies were disciplined in the workplace, for example, by being told their hair was unprofessional or not being recognized as being the owner or manager. Packnett explained:

This idea that a black woman’s presence is to be policed or politicized in the workplace is what we’re talking about. The idea that Sean Spicer can tell April Ryan what to do with her face, irrespective of her years in journalism, the idea that Maxine Waters’ voice is less important than her hair, is what black women are experiencing every single day. (as cited in Taylor, 2017)

For every contemporary example of Black women fighting for their rights, a long history of struggle precedes it.

It is important to remember that when the U.S. Congress was debating whether to extend voting rights to women, congressmen argued that the vote should not be extended to women because, while the South had figured out ways to suppress the Black man’s vote, they would not be able to suppress Black women’s vote. Representative Clark (1918) explained that Black women would not be as easily cowed as Black men and would be “fanatical on the subject of voting” and “much more insistent and vicious” in their “demands for social recognition which will never be accorded them” (p. H90).

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Why Studying Gender in Communication Is Important

The examples of Clinton, Warren, Ryan, Waters, and the March illustrate four points.

First, gender matters. To be able to understand and explain current events and analyze communication, you need to be able to name and articulate the way in which gender operates in communication. Trump was performing a particular type of masculinity just as much as Clinton and Warren were disciplined for not performing femininity appropriately. Additionally, people’s perceptions of the candidates were refracted through expectations tied to the candidate’s sex. More than actual differences in communication patterns, perceptions and expectations of other people’s behaviors are gendered. In Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs, psychologist Rosalind Barnett and journalist Caryl Rivers (2004) critiqued social myths of gender differences. They argued that the belief in gender differences has created a self-fulfilling prophecy in which people’s stereotypes actually create the differences.

Second, race matters. One is never just a gender, and the communication challenges Black women, Latinas, Asian woman, and Native American women face are distinct from those that White women face. The challenges Black men, and other people of color, face are distinct from those that White men and women face.

Third, masculinity matters. Gender is as much about masculinity as it is about femininity. And being held to a gender binary, masculine or feminine, limits all people.

Fourth, protest matters. People using their voices to advocate for issues about which they are passionate makes a difference. The 2017 Women’s March on Washington was not the first time women marched for rights in the capitol of the United States, Elizabeth Warren was not the first person to persist in the face of being silenced, and the #BlackWomenAtWork hashtag was not the first attempt to make clear the unique challenges Black people face as a result of how their race and sex intersect. Social change regarding gendered expectations and sex roles does not happen overnight; instead, repeated acts of communication—of public protest, of interpersonal interactions, of small-group discussions—are needed to make change.

Because gender is a constantly evolving concept in individuals’ gender identity, in the larger culture’s predominant notions about gender, and in continuing research, absolute claims are not possible and would be irresponsible. Instead, our intent is to better equip readers with tools you can use to examine and make sense of gender in communication. As such, this book is not simply a review of communication research but is rather an attempt to place the research in the context of larger theoretical, social, and political issues that influence, and are influenced by, gender in communication. We have attempted to write this book as an extended conversation in which we interact with research and popular discussions of gender in communication that have most excited our own scholarly imaginations.

We study the variety of ways in which communication of and about gender and sex enables and constrains people’s identities. We believe that people are social actors and create meaning through their symbolic interactions. Thus, our emphasis is not on how gender influences communication but on how communication

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constitutes gender. We believe people are capable of being self-reflexive about communication processes and creative in generating new ways to play with symbols.

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Core Principles

To study how people construct, perform, and change gender and what factors influence these performances, we draw on seven principles:

1. Intersectionality. You cannot study gender or sex in isolation. How a particular sexed body performs gender always intersects with other identity ingredients, including race, ethnicity, social class, age, sexual orientation, physical ability, and more. People are who they are, and act the way they act, not just because of their sex or gender. People are wonderfully complex and form their gendered identities at an intersection of influences from multiple identity ingredients, and the social structures in which people operate are never formed solely along sex lines. Dominance and power also are best understood through an intersectional analysis. Thus, to more accurately study gender, we study gender in the context of other social identities.

2. Interdisciplinarity. We seek to fuse and balance social scientific, humanistic, and critical methods. Thus, we cite quantitative, qualitative, rhetorical, critical, and creative scholarship. As coauthors, we have the benefit of drawing on three fields of communication studies that often operate independent of each other but that are inextricably interlinked: rhetoric, social science, and performance studies. Palczewski, trained as a rhetorical scholar, was a college debate coach for 15 years and studies political controversies and social protest. DeFrancisco, trained as a social scientist, uses qualitative research methods to study how gender and related inequalities and acts of resistance are constructed through interpersonal relationships and individuals’ identities. Dick McGeough, trained in performance studies and qualitative methods, uses creative approaches to explore scholarly questions. Most texts on gender in communication focus on social science studies of gendered interpersonal interactions and, thus, fail to recognize how broader public discourse can influence gender.

Not only do we bridge methodological chasms within our own discipline, but we do so among disciplines. We purposely reviewed each topic from multiple disciplinary and activist perspectives. Throughout the text, we honor the contributions of Black womanist theory, we celebrate the challenges offered by third-wave feminisms, we gratefully include lessons taught by queer and trans theory, we integrate the insights of men’s studies scholars, and we happily navigate the tensions between global and postmodern feminisms. The result is a richer, fuller understanding of the topic that stretches the boundaries of what is commonly considered relevant for a communication text.

We do not present research consistent with our view only. People learn most by stepping outside their academic or personal comfort zones to consider other perspectives. We value engaged and vital disagreement because we believe readers are able to glean more from our presentation of substantiated arguments than they could if we presented the research as if it were all consistent and value free. We express our views of the material, and we hope this encourages you to do the same. Know up front that we believe agreement is neither a necessary nor a preferred requirement for learning from this book, and disagreement is not a sign of disrespect.

3. Gender diversity, not sex differences. We do not subscribe to typical conceptualizations of gender as a form

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of difference. Instead, we problematize the differences view by showing how it engages in essentialism, ignores power, reinforces stereotypes, fails to account for intersectional identities, and is inconsistent with statistical analyses demonstrating that sex does not consistently account for differences in communication. However, our rejection of the differences approach does not mean that we deny differences exist. Instead, we seek to recognize differences within genders as a result of intersectionality. We reject binary ways of thinking. We embrace a gender diversity approach. Research embracing this approach continues to grow, and we make a concerted effort to recognize multiple femininities and multiple masculinities and complex mixtures of them.

4. Gender is performed. Gender is something a person does, not something a person is. Gender is not something located within individuals; it is a social construct that institutions, groups, and individuals maintain (and challenge). Thus, we examine the microlevel (how an individual might perform gender), the mesolevel (how groups within institutions communicate about gender), and the macrolevel (how social understandings of gender are performed on individuals).

5. Masculinity. The study of gender is not exclusively the study of women. However, the study of gender has traditionally been considered a “women’s issue,” hence researchers and textbooks often have focused almost exclusively on women and femininities, underemphasizing men and masculinities. Thanks to the recent growth in men’s studies, we have at our disposal a rich literature base that considers gender and masculinity.

6. Violence. To study gender in lived experiences means to study the darker side of gender: oppression and violence. In this textbook, we do not shy away from this uncomfortable reality. Ours is not a narrative that says, “We are all just different, and isn’t that nice?” To tell the whole story one must go deeper, making visible connections to the realities of gendered violence. This does not mean we are bashing men or that we presume all men have the potential to be violent and all women are victims. Rather, we recognize violence as systemic. That is, who can be violent and who can be a victim and who can be viewed as violent and who can be viewed as a victim are all part of a socially constructed system to maintain differences and inequalities. Gendered violence includes domestic abuse, rape, violence against LGBTQ people, street trafficking, and cyberbullying.

In each chapter, we make visible the connections between presumably innocent gendered practices and a range of specific social injustices connected to the topic. By linking gendered practices to more overt forms of gendered violence, we move beyond superficial generalizations about gender differences and make visible the struggles many people face in their unique contexts.

7. Emancipation. Even as we recognize how gendered norms are linked to gendered violence, we also seek to make visible the emancipatory potential of gendered practice. To focus only on the negative would be to reinforce stereotypes and ignore the ways people challenge gendered norms to create spaces for diverse individual and group choices. Gender identity need not be oppressive and limiting. We offer examples of how diverse groups of people have created strategies to free themselves of stereotypical gender restrictions and other cultural expectations.

We do not shy away from complex and controversial subjects. We reject the sex binary of male and female, instead recognizing the existence of intersex, transgender, and gender non-conforming people. We reject the

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binary-differences approach to studying gender as masculine or feminine, instead finding people to be wonderfully diverse and competent at adjusting their behavior according to situational needs. We reject the false assumption that the norm is to be cisgender (meaning one’s sex and gender are consistent according to social dictates), instead recognizing most people are far more complex. We reject heteronormativity, instead seeing heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and queer sexualities as equally valid sexual orientations.

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Organization of the Book

The book is divided into two parts. “Part I: Foundations” includes five chapters that describe the fundamentals of studying gender in communication: definitions and explanations of key terms, theoretical approaches, gender in conversation, gendered bodies, and language. These chapters provide a foundational vocabulary that enables you to study gender in communication with more subtlety and nuance. “Part II: Institutions” includes an introductory chapter to explain a focus on social institutions, followed by five chapters on the institutions that make evident the intersections of gender and communication: family, education, work, religion, and media. Each chapter examines how individuals experience and enact gender within the institution and how institutional structures and predominant ideology influence the experience and performance of gender. The concluding chapter highlights links among the preceding chapters and presents visions for future study.

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New to This Edition

The third edition of this textbook is revised and updated to make it accessible to undergraduate students while still challenging them. Graduate students will still find it a strong critical introduction to the study of gender in communication. The chapters on voices, work, education, and family have been completely rewritten to reflect major shifts in the state of knowledge. New sections on debates over bathroom bills, intensive mothering, humor, swearing, and Title IX have been added. The sections on trans and gender non- conforming people have been expanded and updated to reflect changes in language. All other chapters have been updated with new examples, new concepts, and new research. Over 500 new sources have been integrated. In an effort to be more inclusive, we have replaced the pronouns his or her with they in most cases even if the reference is singular.

We hope our third edition challenges the way in which readers think about gender and sex, as well as how gender and sex intersect with race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and nationality. Instead of providing simplistic answers, we hope we provide guidance on how to ask good questions. We also hope this book will inspire researchers to contribute to the study of gender in communication, further stretching the boundaries of culturally gendered perceptions.

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Individual Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without the assistance of our colleagues. People too numerous to list have helped us as we wrote this book, but a few deserve special note for the extra time they spent sharing resources, reading chapters, and providing invaluable research assistance. The chapters would not have been as grounded in current scholarship, and the examples would not have been as rich, had it not been for the excellent contributions of graduate research assistants and students over the years: Derk Babbitt, Ruth Beerman, C. A. Brimmer, Kiranjeet Dhillon, Danelle Frisbie, Tristin Johnson, Ashley Jones, Christian Kremer-Terry, Jessany Maldondo, Megan Mapes, Emily Paskewitz, and Eric Short. Colleagues, students, friends, and staff served as resources, offering ideas, examples, and other support: Rob Asen, Judith Baxter, Harry Brod, Dan Brouwer, Patrice Buzznell, April Chatham-Carpenter, Jeanne Cook, Melissa Dobosh, Valeria Fabj, Jennifer Farrell, Patricia Fazio, John Fritch, Susan Hill, Kelsey Harr-Lagin, Stephanie Logan, Karen Mitchell, Amymarie Moser, Harrison Postler, Jennifer Potter, Alimatul Qibtiyah, Martha Reineke, Kyle Rudick, Colice Sanders, Montana Smith, Mary Beth Stalp, Leah White, and Nikki Zumbach Harken. We thank the UNI library staff, especially Christopher Neuhaus and Rosemary Meany. We recognize that no book is created in isolation. We thank Julia Wood (Gendered Lives), Diana Ivy and Phil Backlund (GenderSpeak), and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (Man Cannot Speak for Her) for helping pave the way in gender/sex in communication textbooks. We thank our life partners, Arnie Madsen, David Pruin, and Ryan McGeough, for honoring our work.

We thank the Sage staff. Our Sage editor, Matthew Byrnie, advocated for this third edition. We also want to thank the skilled Sage professionals who worked with us through the final stages of the publication process: Terri Accomazzo (acquisitions editor), Erik Helton (editorial assistant), Laureen Gleason (production editor), and Deanna Noga (copy editor). Support for the development of this book was provided in part by the University of Northern Iowa’s Graduate College, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, the Department of Communication Studies, and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

Sage Publications gratefully acknowledges the following reviewers: Cynthia Berryman-Fink, University of Cincinnati; Derek T. Buescher, University of Puget Sound; Sandra L. Faulkner, Syracuse University; Lisa A. Flores, University of Colorado Boulder; Jeffrey Dale Hobbs, University of Texas at Tyler; Charlotte Kroløkke, University of Southern Denmark; D. K. London, Merrimack College; Linda Manning, Christopher Newport University; M. Chad McBride, Creighton University; Elizabeth Natalle, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Narissra Punyanunt-Carter, Texas Tech University; Leah Stewart, Rutgers University; and Lynn H. Turner, Marquette University.

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Social Acknowledgments

Not only is it important to recognize the individual people in our lives who helped make this book possible, but it also is important to recognize the historical and contemporary movements that made our lives as professors, and the ideas presented in this book, possible. Communication scholars Karma Chávez and Cindy Griffin (2014) were right when they pointed out women’s (and gender) studies in communication is “a field of study that emerges from activist efforts and grassroots social movements” (p. 262). We need to acknowledge the contributions of those movements and activists.

This book would not be possible were it not for decades, if not centuries, of social movements and protests that have made clear that gender, sex, and sexuality are public issues and not merely personal expressions. For this reason, we have integrated examples of social movements that have influenced understandings of gender/sex throughout our chapters (e.g., social protest about sexual harassment, fat activism, gender-inclusive bathroom activism, LGBTQ social protests, woman suffrage, equal pay activism, farm worker’s rights). We could write an entire book about protests and movements for sex and gender justice, but this is a not a textbook about social movements.

Instead, we want to make clear how this book, about this topic, written by three people who identify as women, was made possible as a result of social activism by those who came before us—activism that challenged sex-based restrictions on who could be educated, who could speak in public, which topics could be spoken about in public, and what evidence counted in debates over those topics. The historical centering of some communicators (e.g., White educated men), and the marginalization of others (e.g., White women, women and men of color, poor people, and LBGTQ people), informs contemporary practices. An understanding of that history can help you understand contemporary communication practices and research.

We could not write a book about gender in communication were it not for activists who struggled for centuries to create space for women to speak publicly as knowledgeable experts. We recognize the work it took in Western countries for anyone other than a White land-owning man to be given the chance to speak. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (1989), in her germinal two-volume Man Cannot Speak for Her, outlined the history of exclusion that women speakers faced even as “public persuasion has been a conscious part of the Western male’s heritage from ancient Greece to the present” (Vol. I, p. 1). For decades in public address classes, the speeches of great men were studied, from Pericles’s funeral oration to the most recent presidential state of the union. Unfortunately, “women have no parallel rhetorical history” (Vol. I, p. 1). In fact, for much of Western history, women were explicitly prohibited from speaking publicly by social mores and law.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1995), in Beyond the Double Bind, collected some of the religious, cultural, and legal statements prohibiting women’s speech. We reproduce only a few of them here to make clear how communication, when it emanated from bodies coded as female, was disciplined. Public punishment was used against the speaking woman: “In seventeenth-century colonial America, the ducking stool held a place of honor near the courthouse alongside the pillory and the stock. After being bound to the stool, the ‘scold,’ ‘nag,’ ‘brabling (sic),’ or ‘unquiet’ woman was submerged in the nearest body of water, where she could choose

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between silence and drowning” (pp. 80–81). Philosophers, such as Søren Kierkegaard, proclaimed in 1844, “Silence is not only woman’s greatest wisdom, but also her highest beauty” (as cited in Jamieson, 1995, p. 80). Biblical injunctions, repeated through the early 1900s, reinforced these social restrictions: “I am not giving permission for a woman to teach or tell a man what to do. A woman ought not to speak, because Adam was formed first and Eve afterwards, and it was not Adam who was led astray but the woman who was led astray and fell into sin. Nevertheless, she will be saved by childbearing” (1 Timothy 2:12–15). To even conceive of a book about gender in communication, pathbreakers had to create the possibility of people other than White men communicating.

Even as we write about how silence was the right speech of White womanhood, we want to recognize that silence was resisted. Scholar and educator bell hooks (1989) cautioned against reading the history of silence as universal:

Within feminist circles, silence is often seen as the sexist “right speech of womanhood”—the sign of woman’s submission to patriarchal authority. This emphasis on woman’s silence may be an accurate remembering of what has taken place in the households of women from WASP backgrounds in the United States, but in black communities (and diverse ethnic communities), women have not been silent. Their voices can be heard. Certainly for black women, our struggle has not been to emerge from silence into speech but to change the nature and direction of our speech, to make a speech that compels listeners, one that is heard. (p. 6)

hooks’s warning about reading history in too absolute a way also encourages a rereading of the history of women. Just because women have been exhorted to silence, and punished for speaking in public, does not mean they actually have been silent. A book that recognizes that gender is diverse and intersects with ethnicity, class, citizenship, religion, and other identity ingredients would not be possible were it not for the work of people of color who have made clear that gender norms concerning what it means to be a good woman and a good man have long assumed only White women and White men.

In the early 1830s, Maria Miller Stewart, an African American woman, became the first U.S. woman to speak to audiences in the United States that included both women and men (Sells, 1993). In the mid-1830s, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, daughters of a slave-owning family, began writing about abolition and spoke to small groups of women in parlor meetings (Japp, 1993; Vonnegut, 1993). As their renown as abolitionists grew, they began to speak to mixed-sex audiences and expanded their advocacy to include women’s rights. All three faced rebuke and scorn because of their speaking. Yet they paved a pathway for others to follow: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Lucy Parsons, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, to name only a few. Our voices in this book would not have been possible were it not for the voices of those who opened space for people other than White men to speak.

We could not write a book about gender in communication were it not for activists who struggled for centuries to challenge the sexualization of women in public. Sex and sexuality were intertwined with the

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admonitions against women’s public communication. Jamieson (1995) argued that “since silence and motherhood were twinned, a corollary assumption was formed of the alliance: Public speech by a woman is the outward sign of suspect sexuality” (p. 14). Although women’s actual public participation is far more rich and complex than the narrative of men’s and women’s separate spheres would indicate (Eastman, 2009; Matthews, 1992; Piepmeier, 2004; Ryan, 1992), women faced discipline for violating social dictates concerning separate spheres. As strange as it might now sound to contemporary ears, the very term public woman was synonymous with prostitute through the 1800s in the United States. Thus, if a woman ventured outside the private sphere into public spaces, the assumption was that she was sexually available.

Two stories illustrate this. First, in May of 1862, the commander of the Union forces in New Orleans issued the following General Order:

As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans . . . it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall, by word, gesture or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her vocation. (as cited in Ryan, 1992, p. 3)

Second, in December of 1895, New York City police arrested young, White, working-class Lizzie Schauer for engaging in disorderly conduct. Her crime? She was out in public at night and asked for directions from two men. She was what was then considered a “‘public woman,’ or prostitute” (Matthews, 1994, p. 3). We want to make clear the centuries of work that people completed just to carve out a public space where women could communicate and not fear loss of their virtue. As these examples make clear, it is impossible to talk about gender in communication without also talking about sex and sexuality.

We could not write a book about the multiplicity of genders, and the way people are never just a sex, were it not for the activists who made clear the importance of ethnicity. In 1866, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper challenged White woman suffrage activists when they argued against enfranchising Black men before White women, saying “the white women all go for sex, letting race occupy a minor position” (as cited in Bacon, 1989, p. 35). In 1974, the Combahee River Collective Statement made clear,

There have always been Black women activists—some known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon thousands unknown—who have had a shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles unique.

Gender is never only about sex. Feminist scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) wrote, “To define feminism purely in gendered terms assumes that our consciousness of being ‘women’ has nothing to do with race, class, nation, or sexuality, just with gender. But no one ‘becomes a woman’ . . . purely because she is

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female” (p. 55). Arguments against essentialism and for intersectionality are not new, although the language to talk about them might be.

In 1863, poor women made clear that neutral government policies did not affect everyone equally. As the Civil War raged, and the Union forces needed public support for conscription, poor women protested because the draft impacted them more because “the loss of a male wage earner was the most devastating fate to befall the poor wives and mothers of New York, a sure sentence to poverty given the dearth of women’s employment opportunities and the paltriness of their wages” (Ryan, 1992, p. 149). These women, along with men, engaged in riots to protest the forced conscription of working men on whom families depended. In response, the city of New York suspended its draft and only reinstated it after it had set aside $2.5 million to purchase exemptions for the poorest families (Ryan, 1992, p. 150). Studying gender only by thinking about its relationship to sex would offer an incomplete analysis.

We could not write a book about gender in communication were it not for activists who struggled to make clear gender is not biologically determined. Even after achieving some degree of legal recognition of equality, activists had to struggle for social equality. To do that, they had to challenge the idea that men and women were naturally different. The work of activists in women’s movements made clear that many of the differences between men and women were the result of socialization, not an innate characteristic. The work of activists in the Civil Rights Movement, the Red Power Movement, and the United Farmworkers Movement made clear that many of the differences between White people and people of color were the result of socialization and unequal social relations, not an innate characteristic. We honor the work of the Black Women’s Club Movement of the 1890s, the Woman Suffrage Movement whose work spanned from 1848 to 1919, and the feminist and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s through the 1970s.

To be able to write a book that explores gender diversity requires not only that gender not be biologically determined, but also that we could imagine a range of ways to do gender. Trans activist Leslie Feinberg (1998) used the metaphor of poetry to explain the possibilities of gender:

That is why I do not hold the view that gender is simply a social construct—one of two languages that we learn by rote from early age. To me, gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught. When I walk through the anthology of the world, I see individuals express their gender in exquisitely complex and ever-changing ways, despite the law of pentameter. (p. 10)

Although there are prosaic constraints on how each person performs gender, we hope this book allows the poetry of each person’s individual gender artistry to sing.

We could not write a book about gender in communication were it not for activists in the trans and intersex communities who have pushed scholars to think about gender and sex in more complex and nuanced ways. Feinberg (1998) made clear the need to consider gender, and not just sex, when fighting for liberation: “Women’s oppression can’t be effectively fought without incorporating the battle against gender oppression. The two systems of oppression are intricately linked. And the population of women and trans people overlap”

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(p. 17).

We could not write a book about gender in communication were it not for activists who struggled to make clear the importance of sexuality to understanding sex and gender and the reality that families come in many forms. The Mattachine Society (founded in 1950) and the Daughters of Bilitis (founded in 1955) laid the groundwork so that when in 1969 the police again harassed the Stonewall Inn, the patrons there, including drag queens and trans people of color who high kicked their way against the police line, would catalyze a wave of activism (Duberman, 1993; Vaid, 1995). The innovative protest actions of ACTUP in the 1980s continue to guide contemporary protest (Westervelt, 2017) and marriage equality was not realized until the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. The political imagination of lesbian, gay, and queer people offered new ways of world-making and expanded the understanding of gender beyond the masculine/feminine binary.

We could not write a book about gender in communication were it not for activists who struggled to make clear we need new ways to think about able-bodiedness, neuro-typicality, and gender. To write a book that celebrates diversity requires that we think about those who are disabled and able-bodied, about those who are neuro-typical and neuro-atypical. Alison Kafer (2013), in Feminist, Queer, Crip, offered the idea of “crip futurity” as a way to imagine new futures “that might be more just and sustainable. In imagining more accessible futures, I am yearning for an elsewhere—and, perhaps, an ‘elsewhen’—in which disability is understood otherwise: as political, as valuable, as integral” (p. 3). In thinking about the way in which able- bodiedness and contemporary conceptions of femininity intersect, Kafer began to question “the naturalness of femininity” and then to “question the naturalness of disability, challenging essentialist assumptions about ‘the’ disabled body” (p. 14).

We could not write a book about gender in communication were it not for the masculinity studies scholars who made clear gender is never just about women and femininity. Those people who have, across time, challenged the way in which all people were confined by the limits of binary gender restrictions made clear gender in communication is as much about masculinity’s expectations placed on men as it is about femininity’s expectations placed on women.

We could not write a book about gender in communication about and in education were it not for those who worked to make education accessible to people of color and women. Women’s right to receive an education was not freely given, but had to be fought for. After Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695), a Mexican nun, poet, and theological writer, distributed an essay, she was chastised by a bishop. Her response, La Respuesta, defended women’s rights to education, presaging the U.S. women’s demands for educational and social equality by almost a century.

In the United States, after White women were given access to education, African American enslaved people were denied education and even the right to meet, not just in public but also in private. The Virginia Revised Code of 1819 declared

that all meetings or assemblages of slaves, or free negroes or mulattoes mixing and associating with

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such slaves at any meeting-house or houses, &c., in the night; or at any SCHOOL OR SCHOOLS for teaching them READING OR WRITING, either in the day or night, under whatsoever pretext, shall be deemed and considered an UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY; and any justice of a county, &c., wherein such assemblage shall be, either from his own knowledge or the information of others, of such unlawful assemblage, &c., may issue his warrant, directed to any sworn officer or officers, authorizing him or them to enter the house or houses where such unlawful assemblages, &c., may be, for the purpose of apprehending or dispersing such slaves, and to inflict corporal punishment on the offender or offenders, at the discretion of any justice of the peace, not exceeding twenty lashes.

Thus, even before those who were not land-owning White men could participate in movements for abolition of slavery, workers’ rights, equal suffrage regardless of race, or equal suffrage regardless of sex, they had to create conditions whereby their communication would not be met with punishment.

We could not write a book about gender in communication about and in work were it not for a history of women who blazed the way into workplaces and challenged unfair practices. Women mill workers in the early 1800s were, according to historian Glenna Matthews (1992), “pioneers of changing gender roles” because they were the first group of women to live away from home for work (p. 97). They also “went on strike and publicly protested what they deemed to be unjust treatment by their bosses” (p. 98). In 1834, 800 women struck, one of the first all-woman strikes in U.S. history. By 1860, cotton textile manufacturing companies in New England employed more than 60,000 women. Although many originally were native-born, starting in the 1850s most were immigrant women. Women have worked for as long as the United States has existed. The fact that women can work at paid labor can be traced to the pioneering efforts of others who entered the realm of work and made clear paid labor is “women’s work.”

As these vignettes should demonstrate, there was never one single “women’s movement” that flowed along one single path in three waves. Instead, a broad range of social forces ebbed and flowed, reshaping the contours of how we understand sex and gender, and how sex and gender interact with communication. We acknowledge the importance of all these, and other, movements that made it possible for us to do this work.

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Part I Foundations

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Chapter 1 Developing a Critical Gender/Sex Lens

Gender, the behaviors and appearances society dictates a body of a particular sex should perform, structures people’s understanding of themselves and each other. Communication is the process by which this happens. Whether in a person’s communication or in how others interpret and talk about the person, gender is “always lurking” in interactions (Deutsch, 2007, p. 116). Gender is present in an individual’s gender performance and in other messages that create, sustain, or challenge gender expectations. To illustrate this, consider an example from popular culture: the seemingly innocent custom of assigning infants pink or blue based on the baby’s biological sex.

When parents announce the birth of a child, typically what is the first question asked? “Is it a boy or girl?” or “Is the baby healthy?” “Is the baby eating and sleeping well?” “Is the birth mother okay?” What do birth celebration cards look like? Spend some time in the greeting card section of a store, and you will find two main choices: pink or blue, and the pink cards are decorated with flowers and docile girls while the blue cards are decorated with animals or transportation vehicles (planes, trains, automobiles, and ships) and active boys. What mistake tends to cause people the most embarrassment when complimenting new parents on the birth of their child? What happens if you say, upon seeing a baby boy, “Isn’t she pretty” instead of “He is so big”? Or what happens if you say, upon seeing a baby girl, “Wow, what a bruiser” instead of “She is so cute”?

At the moment of birth (before, if sex identification happens in vitro), people differentiate children on the basis of sex and begin to impose gendered expectations on them with clothing, activities, and interactions (Zosuls, Miller, Ruble, Martin, & Fabes, 2011).

In case you think pink and blue color designations have been practiced forever or exist across cultures, consider this:

Color segregation on the basis of sex is primarily a U.S. and Western European custom, although Western commercialization spread it globally. Sex-based color assignments did not appear until the early 1900s. When first assigned, the generally accepted rule was pink for the boy and blue for the girl. Pink was thought to be a more decisive and stronger color while blue was seen as delicate and dainty (Ladies Home Journal, June 1918, as cited in Frassanito & Pettorini, 2008). The colors assigned to babies did not switch until the 1950s. No one seems to know why. Advice books and magazines targeted at White, upper-class people in the United States stipulated pink was for girls and blue was for boys. Although sex-segregated colors lessened in the 1970s, by the 1980s their dominance returned, as is evidenced by the fuchsia pink and cobalt blue aisles of toys at major retailers (McCormick, 2011; Paoletti, 2012).

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The color-coding of children inspired artist JeongMee Yoon’s “The Pink and Blue Project.” Noting the international sex-targeted marketing, Yoon photographed children in the United States and South Korea. The results were visually astounding. Rooms awash in blue for boys and pink for girls (visit “The Blue Project” Jake and His Blue Things, 2006 and “The Pink Project” Dayeun and Her Pink Things, 2007 at http://www.jeongmeeyoon.com/aw_pinkblue.htm).

If you look at babies dressed in blue or pink, you may see an unremarkable cultural practice. But if you look at the practice through a critical gendered lens, you might begin to ask some questions: Why do we need to assign sex to infants? What does it mean that pink is seen as passive and blue is seen as strong? Why does it seem that a cultural choice is made to appear as a biological necessity?

Obviously, the colors are not biologically caused or universally gendered the same way. The color designations result from the communication practices of specific time periods in commercialized cultures and a particular set of political beliefs about differences between women and men. Further, the color designations indicate how people are conditioned to differentiate between sexes and genders. Although babies may now wear green, yellow, and purple, few parents are daring enough to dress a boy baby in pink or a girl baby in blue. The symbols people use to describe the sexes (pink or blue, pretty or strong), and the way they interact with others on the basis of their sex, matter.

This example reveals that gender is communicated in a variety of forms, even those as mundane as greeting cards. Communication scholar Bren Murphy (1994) made this clear in an analysis of holiday cards targeted at children, noting cards are “part of a social discourse that constructs everyday gender patterns and perceptions” (p. 29). A variety of cultural texts “construct our understandings of gender and gendered relationships” (Keith, 2009, p. iv). Thus, to study gender in communication, you need to study not only how gendered bodies communicate, but also how gender is constructed through communication in cultural texts.

Figure 1.1 Screenshot From Lloyd in Space (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvIpiGLAK9k)

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Source: Lloyd in Space. Disney.

Tellingly, many people do not know how to talk to or about a person without first categorizing that person as female or male. This very conundrum was the focus of one episode of the Disney Channel’s animated series Lloyd in Space, about the adventures of a group of teenage aliens (see Figure 1.1).

In the ninth episode of season three, “Neither Boy Nor Girl,” the main characters argue over the relative merits of two bands, the girls advocating for Aurora and the boys for Total Cosmic Annihilation. They decide the tie-breaking vote belongs to the new kid: Zoit. After Zoit’s answer praising both bands, the boys and the girls each claim Zoit was their sex. Given this is a world populated by aliens, you might assume the human sex binary no longer applied, but it did. As this screen shot illustrates, even alien bodies can be marked in ways that sex and gender them. Body size and shape, hair length, clothing, lip coloration and plumpness, eyelashes, and posture mark some of the bodies as boy and others as girl, except for Zoit. Zoit is purple, does not wear clothes, and has expressive eyes. Visually, no explicit clues are provided about sex.

Demonstrating the obsession with categorizing people by sex, the remainder of the episode is spent trying to box Zoit into one sex. The characters try observing Zoit’s preference in notebook design (Zoit likes monsters and rainbows), whether Zoit rides a “boy bike” or “girl bike” (Zoit rides a unicycle), and which restroom Zoit uses after imbibing an extra-large 640 fluid ounce drink (Zoit claims to be absorbent). Like many, the characters conflate sex and gender, assuming that by observing things Zoit says and does, they can figure out Zoit’s biological designation.

Eventually, the boys and girls decided to ask Zoit: “OK, we gotta know. What the heck are you, a boy or a girl?” Zoit explained that their species is neither boy nor girl until their 13th birthday, when they are free to choose either. On Zoit’s 13th birthday, Zoit decided but kept it to themselves, again sending the friends into

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a flurry of questions, concluding with: “So we’ll never find out if you’re a boy or a girl?” To this, Zoit replied: “You’ll find out some day when I get a crush on one of you.” Here, another conflation occurred: between sex and sexual orientation.

To say that most gender and sex differences are socially constructed rather than biological does not mean that no differences exist or that perceived differences do not matter. Our argument throughout this textbook is that a range of differences exists. We celebrate human beings’ wonderful diversity. To limit one’s understanding of diverse human communication to only two choices, feminine or masculine, reinforces stereotypes. Still, that is often how people think about gender in communication—as a description of the differences between how women and men communicate. If you start from the assumption that women and men communicate differently, then you tend to see only differences between them rather than the more common similarities (Dindia, 2006).

More than actual differences in communication patterns, cultural and individual perceptions of women’s and men’s behaviors are gendered. People see baby girls and baby boys as different because people code them that way; girls are pink, sweet, and pretty, and boys are blue, agile, and burly. This leads people to interact differently with babies, coddling ones they think are girls and playing more roughly with ones they think are boys (Frisch, 1977; Rubinstein, 2001). Emphasizing sex differences reinforces separate expectations about how women and men should behave. In doing so, it restricts what is considered acceptable behavior for all people, and it puts rigid limitations on children’s potential.

In The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children, journalist Caryl Rivers and psychologist Rosalind Barnett (2011) argued that gendered social myths are growing out of control, supported by popular media and consumer demand. As a result, a new biological determinism is emerging supported by questionable data that human beings are born with “brains in pink and blue” (p. 10). This social myth creates a self-fulfilling prophecy to which parents and teachers contribute by maintaining assumptions of sex-based gender differences. Instead, “human beings have multiple intelligences that defy simple gender pigeonholes. Unfortunately, the real (and complex) story line is generally missing from the popular media. It is buried in scholarly peer-reviewed journals and articles that seldom see the light of day” (p. 2). We exhume some of the complexity in this textbook.

Although the predominant culture continues to assume that women and men are different, and therefore communicate in different ways, actual research does not support this (e.g., Anderson & Leaper, 1998; Burleson & Kunkel, 2006; Edwards & Hamilton, 2004; Holmstrom, 2009). Researchers have found that gendered behavior variances among women and among men are actually greater than those between women and men (Burleson & Kunkel, 2006; Dindia, 2006; Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2014; Hyde, 2005, 2007; Mare & Waldron, 2006; Ye & Palomares, 2013). Many other factors affect behavior, such as social roles, ethnicity, individual differences, and purpose of the interaction (Aries, 2006; Deutsch, 2007; Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2014). The focus exclusively on sex differences is too simplistic. Consider the following question: Do all women around the world and across ethnic groups and generations communicate the same way? Do all men?

People believe in universal sex and gender differences for a variety of reasons. For starters, sex is a primary way

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in which people categorize themselves and others, and people have a great deal invested in maintaining these categories. Because society expects everyone to be heterosexual unless proven otherwise, early on, girls and boys are encouraged to see each other as the “opposite” sex and to vie for the other’s attention. Heterosexual dating is a primary means to popularity for many in U.S. middle and high schools. And heterosexual weddings are the ultimate heterosexual social ritual (Ingraham, 2008), so much so that some states amended their constitutions to bar marriage among gays and lesbians. It took the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges to make clear that the Constitution requires states to recognize marriage between same- sex individuals.

The continued cultural insistence on differences despite a massive amount of research that disconfirms this view is political. Subscribing to a differences perspective maintains the status quo, and in that status quo particular groups are privileged (heterosexuals, men, Whites) while others are marginalized and subordinated (homosexuals, women, people of color). This is not to blame individual White men or individual heterosexuals for power differentials but to recognize all people are complicit in the process when they fail to question it. Linguist Mary Crawford (1995) explained that if communication problems were due solely to gender differences and not to group power or status, women and men could borrow each other’s communication styles with similar effectiveness. Instead, the same communication styles do not perform equally well for all people. What style works depends on the situation, the social status of the speaker, and the power relations between the speaker and listener.

Another reason why the culture continues to embrace (empirically disproved) gender and sex differences is that it sells. If you are not convinced, check out how retail sellers target specific sexes in toy aisles, cosmetics, wedding planning, sports, music, and gaming. Yoon’s (n.d.) “The Pink and Blue Projects” provides visual evidence of “the influence of pervasive commercial advertisements aimed at little girls and their parents.”

In this book, we summarize research on gender in communication and equip you with critical analytical tools to develop your own informed opinions about that research, society’s gender expectations, and prevailing cultural views. To accomplish this, it is necessary to understand how predominant cultural views about gender and sex create a gendered lens through which people view reality. This lens can become so embedded that people do not realize how it limits their perceptions of reality. We hope to help you construct a more critical gendered lens by providing analytic tools with which you can examine common assumptions about gender, sex, and communication.

A precise vocabulary is needed to develop a critical gendered lens; intersectionality, communication, and systemic violence are the central components of that vocabulary. Together these concepts provide a more complete understanding of gendered cultural identity and how one does gendered identity work through communication.

Generally speaking, the term identity refers to how people see themselves, and how others see them, as individuals and as members of groups. Identity includes concepts such as personality; the multiple group identities one holds—for example, gender, sex, ethnicity, class, sexuality, nationality; and contextual role identities—for example, friend, lover, student, supervisor, community member. A person’s identity has

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multiple interacting, and sometimes contradicting, facets (Kroløkke & Sørensen, 2006; Tracy, 2002). For example, the social expectations of a person who identifies as a man may seem to contradict with the role that person plays as a teacher or day care provider.

Although people may prefer to box others into set categories, identity is not fixed and unchanging. Rather it is constantly negotiated through intrapersonal communication with oneself, interpersonal communication with others, and public communication circulating in mass media and popular culture. This does not mean that people can change their identities on a whim. Although identity is in constant flux, it is perceived as stable. As such, individuals and groups have some control over their identity construction, but much of the predominant cultural assumptions extend beyond one’s awareness or control (Butler, 2004; Tracy, 2002).

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Intersectionality

Gender and sex are woven into a person’s identity and are axes along which social power is organized. But writing a book that focuses only on gender in communication would be reductive. It is impossible to separate gender/sex from other facets of identity or other social categories along which power is organized. Communication scholar Bernadette Marie Calafell (2014) explained: “Like many women of color before me, I have never been able to be just a woman. . . . My womanhood is messy” (p. 267).

Ethnicity, class, sex, sexual orientation, citizenship status, religion, and gender all intersect to form a person’s identity and to inform social relations. Before you can understand gender in communication, you first need to understand that how a person’s gender identity is performed is not separable from the person’s ethnicity, class, sex, sexual orientation, citizenship status, and religion. Additionally, to study how gender is an arena in which power is exercised, you need to understand how gender intersects with other axes along which social power is exercised.

Intersectionality is a theory of identity and of oppression. Women’s and gender studies professor Vivian M. May (2015) explained that intersectionality “approaches lived identities as interlaced and systems of oppression as enmeshed and mutually reinforcing” (p. 3). Thus, intersectionality enables analysis of communication both at the “micropolitical level of everyday life and at the macropolitical level of social structures, material practices, and cultural norms” (p. 5). An intersectional approach should inform how people understand interpersonal communication, organizational cultures, pay inequity, and mass-mediated messages.

Legal scholar and critical race feminist Adrien Wing (1997) explained the theory of intersectionality as the idea that identity is “multiplicative” rather than additive (p. 30). Instead of understanding identity as the addition of one independent element to another and another, like in a pop-bead necklace, identity makes more sense if you think of each element as inextricably linked with the others. An intersectional approach makes clear that all facets of identity are integral, interlocking parts of a whole.

African American women were the first to make this point clear. Activists in the late 1800s and early 1900s, such as Sojourner Truth, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, all noted how sex and race intersected in a way that made Black women’s social location and struggles unique. Recognizing the contribution of their foremothers, a group of Black feminists wrote the Combahee River Collective Statement in 1974 in which they outlined how “the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” In the Statement, they explained:

We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.

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Author Audre Lorde (1984) offered a description of how an intersectional approach is necessary to fully understand and accept your own identity:

As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present that as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition. Only then can I bring myself and my energies as a whole to the service of those struggles which I embrace as a part of my living. (p. 120)

Lorde’s metaphor ingredients is useful when explaining intersectionality. For example, a cake is an object with ingredients such as flour, eggs, oil, sugar, and milk that can exist separately from each other but, once combined, each element influences the others. Even though the cake contains all the ingredients, none are recognizable in their separate forms. A cake is not just flour and eggs and sugar and oil and milk. A cake is a cake only when the ingredients are so fused together that they cannot be separated again. Like a cake, human identity is the result of a fascinating alchemic process in which ingredients are fused in such a way that each is influenced by the others, to the point where you cannot extricate the flour from the cake once it is baked. The flour is not simply flour (and gender is not simply gender) once fused with other ingredients.

Because identity ingredients interact, you cannot understand how a person does gender unless you also consider how that person’s gender, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, national identity, and socioeconomic class interact to demand a particular gender performance. Researchers who take only gender into account do not recognize that identity actually occurs as a complex, synergistic, infused whole that becomes something completely different when parts are ignored, forgotten, and unnamed (Collins, 1998).

Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), a lawyer and legal scholar, was the first to use the word intersectionality to describe how the oppression faced by Black women was distinct from oppression solely from race or sex. Crenshaw analyzed how employment nondiscrimination law that used the discrete categories of sex and race (as well as color, religion, and national origin) failed to protect Black women who face forms of discrimination that emanate from the intersection of race and sex. Crenshaw’s insights allowed scholars to articulate how “major axes of social divisions in a given society at a given time, for example, race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and age operate not as discrete and mutually exclusive entities, but build on each other and work together” (Collins & Bilge, 2016, p. 4). The interactions matter.

Intersectionality as a theory of identity is helpful because it prevents reducing complex identities down to a single ingredient, and then attributing to the ingredient causal power to explain why a person acts in a particular way. Intersectionality as a theory of power is helpful because it shifts attention away from “preoccupations with intentional prejudice and toward perspectives grounded in analysis of systemic dynamics

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and institutional power” (Chun, Lipsitz, & Shin, 2013, p. 922). With this overarching understanding of intersectionality, we now turn to a consideration of the ingredients.

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Gender and Sex, Gender/Sex

If you have ever filled out a survey, you likely have been asked about your gender and then given the options of male or female. In this example, the words sex and gender are used interchangeably, even though they refer to two analytically distinct things. Sex refers to biological designations (e.g., female, male, intersex, trans), while gender refers to the social expectations attached to how particular bodies should act and appear and, thus, is socially constructed. It is important to understand the distinction between the two terms while, at the same time, recognizing their inextricable interconnection.

Before the 1970s, most people assumed people’s sex determined their behavior; no concept of gender as distinct from sex existed. In the late 1970s, researchers began using the term gender as distinct from sex to identify personal attributes of women and men (Unger, 1979). Gender referred to one’s identity and self- presentation—that is, the degree to which a person associated themselves with what society had prescribed as appropriate behavior given their sex. You can probably brainstorm expected sex-specific stereotypical gender attributes. Feminine attributes are to be emotional, a caretaker, sensitive, compassionate, revealingly dressed; masculine attributes are to be rational, independent, tough, aggressive, comfortably dressed (Coates, 2004; Eagly & Koenig, 2006; Eliot, 2009b; Lorber & Moore, 2007). When researchers embraced the concept of gender, sex and gender were seen as distinct; one’s sex did not determine one’s gender, but social structures linked particular gender presentations with particular sexed bodies.

Figure 1.2 Gender Continuum

These early understandings of gender placed variances in human identity on a continuum rather than casting them as two binary or opposite categories where one is either male/masculine or female/feminine. The continuum helped make visible that instead of two independent categories, degrees of gender are possible (see Figure 1.2).

One could be more masculine (and less feminine) or more feminine (and less masculine). Because researchers saw gender as socially prescribed rather than biologically caused, they assumed that people identify to varying degrees with masculinity and femininity rather than just one or the other. This was heralded as an important breakthrough. No longer were authors saying all men acted one way and all women another, based solely on their biological sex. However, the continuum still set up masculine and feminine as opposites and as trading off with each other; as you were more of one, you were less of the other.

Further developing this idea, psychologist Sandra Bem (1974) coined the term androgyny by combining two Greek words: andros meaning “male” and gyne meaning “female.” Bem developed a questionnaire called the Sex-Role Inventory (SRI) to identify a person’s gender orientation on a continuum from highly feminine to highly masculine, androgynous (high in both), or undifferentiated (low in both masculine and feminine traits).

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Androgynous persons are believed to have more behavioral flexibility. Instead of seeing masculinity and femininity as a zero-sum tradeoff on a continuum, Bem believed one could exhibit characteristics of both (see Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3 Gender Diversity

Now, people talk not just about one form of femininity and one form of masculinity, but about femininities and masculinities. Many ways to be feminine and masculine exist, and many ways express gender that are neither masculine nor feminine.

W. Kamau Bell, comic and host of United Shades of America, reflected on their early career in comedy:

Black comedy clubs . . . felt like public school but grown up. It’s like, these are the same kids when I was a kid where I felt like I was being made fun of because I wasn’t listening to the right music or I wasn’t being a black man in the right way. (as cited in Gross, 2017)

Although focusing on gender instead of sex was meant to be a step away from overgeneralizing people’s identities based on their sex, masculinity and femininity are still stereotypes, prescribing how women and men are supposed to behave (Crawford & Fox, 2007). Because of this criticism, researchers have dropped the terms masculine and feminine, relying instead on measures of dominance, nurturance, orientation toward self versus others, and so forth, but the stereotypical inferences are still present. There is no ideal social science means to study gender identity that avoids reinforcing the very characteristics it is trying to study.

If you use the term gender when you mean sex, you are not alone. Researchers and popular media often do not use the concept of gender correctly or consistently (Muehlenhard & Peterson, 2011). If you read published research, many claim to have found gender differences or similarities, when in actuality they never asked for or assessed the participants’ gendered self-identities. They merely asked participants to label themselves as biologically female or male and then assumed that by studying females they could determine what was feminine and that by studying males they could determine what was masculine. Most people unintentionally

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conflate sex and gender.

However, some intentionally rethink the relationship between sex and gender, claiming sex, too, is socially constructed. Gender theorist Judith Butler (1990a) posited that “perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all” (pp. 9–10). Butler’s argument is that the only way a person can come to understand anything, even biology, is through language and cultural experience. The understanding of the body and its relationship to identity is always mediated by the words and symbols people use to talk about the body. In the words of Butler (1993), “There is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body” (p. 10). Thus, sex is as much a social construction as gender, and bodies have no meaning separate from the meaning language gives them. The argument that people’s biological sex is influenced by communication is not to deny the existence of a material body “but to insist that our apprehension of it, our understanding of it, is necessarily mediated by the contexts in which we speak” (Price & Shildrick, 1999, p. 7; italics in original).

When the predominant culture names the sex of a body female or male (and nothing else), the culture engages in an act of communication that has “normative force” because it recognizes some parts of a person but not all (Butler, 1993, p. 11). Even as the body is referenced, a particular formation occurs—a formation of the body as either female or male. Butler identified the binary linguistic framing of bodies as an act of power because it refuses to recognize the existence of those who do not fit into the male/female binary. The reality, however, is that many bodies do not fit the binary of female or male.

As early as 1993, developmental geneticist Anne Fausto-Sterling argued that people should recognize at least five sexes, with an infinite range in between: “Biologically speaking, there are many gradations running from female to male; and depending on how one calls the shots, one can argue that along that spectrum lie at least five sexes [female, ferm, herm, merm, male]—and perhaps even more” (p. 21). If language names only two sexes, then only two will be seen and any body that does not fit into the two sexes will be forced to fit, or be considered an “it”—not human. The power of language to construct social reality is illustrated by what has been done to those bodies.

Intersex “is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male” (Intersex Society of North America, 2008). Lest you think this is an extraordinarily rare medical phenomenon, from 1,000 to 15,000 intersex babies are born a year in the United States (Greenberg, 2012, p. 7). In a study that reviewed medical literature from 1955 to 2000, the authors concluded that intersex babies may account for as many as 2% of live births (Blackless et al., 2000).

An infant born who did not fit into the male/female binary used to be considered a “medical emergency” (Fausto-Sterling, 2000, p. 45) and, until new policies were proposed in 2005, in European countries, parents were told to decide within the child’s first day of life if the baby will be male or female (Pasterski, Prentice, & Hughes, 2010). The rate of infant genital surgery is still high, and a tendency persists to surgically alter infants’ genitals to female because the vagina is supposedly easier to construct surgically. Butler (2004) pointed

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out that this practice shows how narrowly defined “normal” is in society, and the failure to recognize that intersex persons are part of the human continuum prevents them from being treated humanely.

Despite the biological reality of more than two sexes, the way U.S. society talks about and legislates sex constantly reinforces the idea that there are only two sexes (and that one’s sex determines one’s gender). Law professor Julie Greenberg (1999) explained how “despite medical and anthropological studies to the contrary, the law presumes a binary sex and gender model. The law ignores the millions of people who are intersexed” (p. 275). The language of law has structured the reality of sex and gender in such a way that the grand diversity of human existence is stifled.

In addition to the recognition that sex is as socially constructed as gender, scholars recognize that social constructions (like gender) can be as difficult to change as things people consider biological. Butler (2004) argued that gender is often as immutable as sex, given how social institutions and language constantly reiterate and reinscribe it. One of the primary ways sex and gender discipline bodies is through the enshrinement of binary views (meaning you have either one choice or another) of one’s sex, gender, and sexuality. A person who did not fit in the sex/gender binary (wherein you are either a man or a woman and men are masculine and women are feminine) was unintelligible; people lacked the language to name and understand them. This is why new terms have entered into vocabulary, such as genderqueer, a term used to “defy all categories of culturally defined gender”; it is “gender free” or “gender neutral,” claiming an identity “outside gender” (Ehrensaft, 2011, p. 531). New terms enable people to think outside the binary. English professor Jordynn Jack (2012) offered copia, the classical rhetorical concept of inventing as many terms as possible for a concept, as an alternative to the binary and the continuum. Included in Jack’s copia: “genderqueer, transgende[r], femme, butch, boi, neutrois, androgyne, bi- or tri-gender, third gender, and even geek” (p. 3).

We see gender and sex as something you do, not something you are, and gender is done by you, between individuals, and by institutions. Gender scholar A. Finn Enke (2012) explained that “there is no natural process by which anyone becomes woman, and . . . everyone’s gender is made: Gender, and also sex, are made through complex social and technical manipulations that naturalize some while” making others seem unnatural (p. 1). Linguist Lal Zimman (2012) complicated the term gender even further based on research with transgender men, suggesting distinctions between gender assignment at birth, gender role socialization, the gender identity one claims at any given time, gender presentation, and the variety of ways an individual may perform their gender in a given context “rather than treating gender as a simple binary or even a singular continuum” (p. 161).

If sex and gender are something you do rather than something you are or have, they can be done in a wide variety of ways. If, in your doing, you are performing social scripts, then gender and sex are never just individual quirks, but instead are social institutions. To be able to see how gender and sex are done by and to people, you first need to recognize neither is natural or biologically determined. Gender and sex are not things that belong to an individual. Rather, gender and sex are done by people interacting in accordance with institutional and cultural demands. Gender and sex are social institutions that individuals express. People experience their gender and sex together, and sex and gender are both socially constructed, and hence

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changeable, while at the same time being difficult to change.

We use the term gender/sex in this textbook to emphasize the interrelation between the concepts of gender and sex. When we discuss gender in communication, we always discuss sex in communication because communication that is about gender, that is influenced by gender, and that differentiates gender also always is about sex, is influenced by sex, and differentiates sex.

To summarize, researchers in the field of communication studies began by focusing on sex, visualizing it as a binary. They progressed to using the term gender as two culturally imposed opposite identities located on one continuum. This approach was nuanced to recognize gender as not necessarily a zero-sum game; androgynous people could have characteristics of both masculinity and femininity. This allowed the recognition of more variances of behavior and identity (Slesaransky-Poe & García, 2009). However, even as scholars studied gender, they sometimes conflated it with sex. As scholars began to theorize gender as cultural, they also began to theorize sex as cultural. Thus, the distinctions between sex and gender were intentionally complicated. Now researchers are moving toward a much more diverse, realistic portrayal of gender/sex.

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Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming

Transgender or trans is “used to describe individuals whose gender expression and behavior do not match the usual expectations associated with the male-female binary system” (Gherovici, 2010, p. xiii). Susan Stryker (2008), in Transgender History, noted how the term only came into “widespread use” in the last 20 years and is “still under construction,” but refers to

people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, people who cross over (trans-) the boundaries constructed by their culture to define and contain that gender. Some people move away from their birth-assigned gender because they feel strongly that they properly belong to another gender in which it would be better for them to live; others want to strike out toward some new location, some space not yet clearly defined or concretely occupied; still others simply feel the need to get away from the conventional expectations bound up with the gender that was initially put upon them. In any case, it is the movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place—rather than any particular destination or mode of transition—that best characterizes the concept of “transgender.” (p. 1)

Trans and gender non-conforming people include those who identify as trans men (people assigned female at birth, AFAB, who identify as men); identify as trans women (people assigned male at birth, AMAB, who identify as women); reject the gender/sex binary or see themselves as nonbinary; choose to take hormones or not; or have surgical sexual organ changes or not. Thus, trans refers to “a constellation of practices and identities variably implicated in sexual and gender normativities” (West, 2014, p. 10).

The concept of normativity is helpful because it makes clear that some things are treated as the norm, or as normal, when they are statistically or diagnostically neither. Often that which is labeled normal is not really the most common; instead, it is normative, meaning it is the standard by which people are judged. Communication scholar Gus Yep (2003) defined normativity as the “process of constructing, establishing, producing, and reproducing a taken-for-granted and all-encompassing standard used to measure goodness, desirability, morality, rationality, superiority, and a host of other dominant cultural values” (p. 18). Normativities tied to the sex/gender binary result in those who do not fit the binary being labeled as bad, undesirable, immoral, irrational, and inferior. So the sex binary has been normalized, made to appear right, even though it is not the only way to organize understandings of sex.

The cultural disciplining of transgender persons is an example of the way the sex/gender binary constructs sex and gender. Until 2012, the standard diagnostic manual used by U.S. mental health practitioners identified persons who desire to be “another sex” or participate in the pastimes of the “other sex” as having a disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 2000, pp. 576–577). Gender identity disorder was the label given to this “dysfunction.” It was also used for individuals with homosexual or bisexual tendencies, and some practitioners attempted to alter the individuals’ gender identities. However, psychotherapy rarely changes gender identity (Gherovici, 2010; Reiss, 2009; Unger & Crawford, 1992). Intersex and transgender activists raised the

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question of how medical professionals can ascertain a person’s “real” gender/sex identity. They argued that gender should be a matter of personal choice (Schilt, 2011). As a result of this activism, the American Psychiatric Association decided in 2012 to change its diagnostic manual so that it no longer referred to gender identity disorder but instead to gender dysphoria (Lennard, 2012). In the most recent revision, DSM-5, gender dysphoria is diagnosed when there is incongruence between a person’s assigned sex and their gendered behaviors, and it causes significant distress (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

To provide a language that lets people think outside the binary, activists have introduced new terms, like genderqueer, genderfluid, and trans, into the public vocabulary. The New York Times added the sex/gender- neutral Mx. as an alternative to Mr. and Ms. (Curkin, 2015). To provide a term parallel to trans, cis, short for cisgender or cissexual, was introduced in 1994 and popularized in the first decade of the 2000s (Enke, 2012, pp. 60–61). Cis refers to those whose gender self-identity and gender expression match the sex they were assigned at birth. However, even those who introduced this term still worry that it reinforces the very binary that trans folk challenge (Enke, 2012).

Transgender studies scholars note the importance of language and communication to trans people. Susan Stryker (2015) explained:

Transsexuals such as myself were then still subordinated to a hegemonic inter-locking of cissexist feminist censure and homosexual superiority, psycho-medical pathologization, legal proscription, mass media stereotyping, and public ridicule. The only option other than reactively saying “no we’re not” to every negative assertion about us was to change the conversation, to inaugurate a new language game. (p. 227)

To make trans people intelligible, to make them recognizable, new language was required.

Existing language also has been stretched because old terms have seen their meanings shift. For example, in 2015 the Washington Post changed its style guide to allow the singular third person pronoun they (which typically was used when referring to more than one person) and in 2016 the American Dialect Society named the singular they as its word of the year (Guo, 2016). Why? It is an alternative to he or she, terms that unnecessarily tend to sex/gender people.

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Sexuality and Romantic Attraction

Sexual orientation describes the gender/sex of the people to whom you are physically attracted. Heterosexual refers to people who are sexually attracted to a person of the other sex. Homosexual refers to people who are sexually attracted to others who share their sex. Bisexual refers to people who are sexually attracted to both sexes. You might notice that these sexual orientations depend on a sex binary (same or other); if there are five sexes, which is the “other” sex? Again, the sex/gender binary limits human understanding, in this case, an understanding of sexuality.

New language has emerged, such as pansexual, which refers to those who are capable of being attracted to a person of any sex/gender. Celebrity Miley Cyrus declared they were pansexual, explaining, “I don’t relate to being boy or girl, and I don’t have to have my partner relate to boy or girl” (as cited in Petrusich, 2015).

Sexual orientation is about physical attraction while romantic orientation is about emotional attraction. Recognizing this distinction makes it possible to recognize those who are asexual and aromantic. Asexual (Ace) refers to those who are not sexually attracted to others; approximately 1% of the U.S. population identifies this way (Emens, 2014). Aromantic (Aro) refers to people who are not romantically attracted to others, meaning there is no desire to form an emotional relationship (Bogaert, 2015).

The way culture communicates about sexual orientation constructs and maintains the sex/gender binary and maintains heterosexuality as the norm (Rich, 1980). Heteronormativity describes how social institutions and policies reinforce the presumption that people are heterosexual and that gender and sex are natural binaries (Kitzinger, 2005). Persons who are discriminated against due to their sexual orientation are subordinated because they are perceived as sexual deviants. Sociologist Gayle Rubin (1984) stated, “The system of sexual oppression cuts across other modes of social inequality,” such as racial, class, ethnic, or gendered inequality, “sorting out individuals and groups according to its own intrinsic dynamics. It is not reducible” (p. 293). Conversely, discussions of gender and sex are intricately tied to sexual orientation and sexuality. They are not separable. In the study of gender/sex, people must recognize the role of heteronormativity, sexual identity, and romantic identity.

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Race and Ethnicity

We want to be clear from the outset: Race is a social construction. Biologically, there is only one race: the human race. However, humans have long used race as a social construct to divide people from one another, to place them in categories and claim one category is better than another. Scientists have known for some time that race is not an accurate means by which to categorize human beings in terms of ancestry or genetics (Blakey, 1999; Long & Kittles, 2003; “Race,” 2011).

Society holds on to this false assumption that race is a meaningful category because believing in such differences is easy and it benefits those in power. We use the term race to recognize that many people self- identify with a particular ethnic identity and take great pride in it. However, to be clear, when we use the term race, we mean the social construction understood as race; we do not mean race as some biological designation.

Race, like gender/sex, has a socially constructed meaning that has real consequences. Sociologist Estelle Disch (2009) explained why and how we use the term in this book:

The term race is itself so problematic that many scholars regularly put the word in quotation marks to remind readers that it is a social construction rather than a valid biological category. Genetically, there is currently no such thing as “race” and the category makes little or no sense from a scientific standpoint. What is essential, of course, is the meaning that people in various cultural contexts attribute to differences in skin color or other physical characteristics. (p. 22)

To illustrate, consider that Germans, Irish, Italians, and Russians are now considered White in the United States, but after the great migration of the early 1900s up to the 1960s, they were considered “colored or other” (Foner & Fredrickson, 2005).

Ethnicity, too, is a contested term; identifying one’s ethnic origins is not as clear as researchers once thought, given the increasingly transnational world and how cultural labels are subject to change. Ethnicity is a term commonly used to refer to a group of people who share a cultural history, even though they may no longer live in the same geographic area (Zack, 1998).

One way to more clearly see the power of arbitrary social constructions of groups is to consider White identity. Whiteness is a socially constructed racial and ethnic category even if society typically does not recognize it as such. The central position of Whiteness in predominant U.S. culture allows it to be normalized to the extent that it almost disappears; it is deraced and nonethnic. Many who identify as White do not even recognize it is a category. They can readily list characteristics of other peoples, such as the expectation that Asians should be smart and that African Americans should be good at sports, but they have difficulty naming a quality that applies to Whites (Nakayama & Krizek, 1999). When race is conceptualized as natural rather than as culturally created, the power of this category is hidden (Kivel, 2002).

It is important to recognize Whiteness in the study of gender because, if one does not, race remains a concern

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only for those considered non-White, and gender, when studied alone, remains implicitly an identity belonging solely to Whites. What is important to remember is that, like gender/sex, when society constructs arbitrary racial and ethnic categories, these categories are rarely different and equal. Rather, race and ethnicity are tools of social oppression.

Throughout this book, we capitalize Black and White to clarify that we are referring to socially constructed racial categories and the politics of skin color rather than to hues on the color wheel. We hope to move beyond thinking just about differences, whether gender or ethnic differences, and instead induce thinking about power. As Patricia Hill Collins (1995) explained: “Difference is less a problem for me than racism, class exploitation, and gender oppression. Conceptualizing these systems of oppression as difference obfuscates the power relations and material inequalities that constitute oppression” (p. 494). Thus, when it comes to thinking about the category called race, our question is not “How are the races different?” but instead “Who benefits from the belief in difference?”

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National Identity

National identity refers to a person’s immigration status, citizenship, and country allegiance. Interdisciplinary feminist scholars and global human rights activists were the first to explore how national cultural identities are gendered/sexed and how citizens tend to experience their national rights differently based on gender/sex (Enloe, 1989; Moghadam, 1994; Yuval-Davis, 1997, 2003). International studies scholar Tamar Mayer (2000) posited that “control over access to the benefits of belonging to the nation is virtually always gendered” and that “the ability to define the nation lies mainly with men” (p. 2). The feeling of belonging to a nation and the privileges and oppressions contained therein are gendered/sexed in unique ways according to cultural norms, histories of religion, ethnic and class conflicts, economics, and much more.

Gender/sex issues around the world are extremely relevant to any study of gender in communication. Placing the study of gender in the context of national identity prevents assuming universal differences between women and men or, worse yet, assuming that research primarily conducted in the United States represents gendered lives around the world. Gender and ethnic studies scholar Nira Yuval-Davis (1999) explained, “Essentialist notions of difference . . . are very different from the notions of difference promoted by those of us who believe in the importance of incorporating notions of difference into democracy. In the first case notions of difference replace notions of equality—in the second case they encompass it” (p. 131). Recognizing national identities is an important part of a gender diversity approach to the study of gender/sex in communication.

When national identity is included in the study of gender/sex, the focus has usually been on citizens of economically disadvantaged countries. The influence of the United States as a nation has not been a primary focus in gender/sex in communication research. Instead, most of the research has focused on the one-to-one relationship level, as if it existed independently of national identity. Yet U.S. national identity and its economic power have had a profound influence on carving out gender identities worldwide. Gender/sex and national identity are related, not just for persons in economically disadvantaged countries, or in countries with more visible internal violence, but for U.S. citizens as well (Mayer, 2000; Mohanty, 2003).

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Socioeconomic Class

In the United States, socioeconomic class refers to the social position people enjoy as a result of their income, education, occupation, and place of residence. The class to which a person belongs influences the expectations of how gender should be performed. When children are told to “act like a lady” or “act like a gentleman,” the underlying message is usually about class. They are being told to act like a particular type of gender/sex, one that knows the upper-class gentile norms of politeness and identity performance. The message goes even further when children of color receive this message. They are being told to act like White upper-class people do. This command carries class-prescribed expectations of gendered/sexed behaviors that White upper-class people have controlled.

The field of communication studies has been slow to examine the ways in which class may affect communication in the United States. Yet it is clear class often determines how much leeway one is allowed in gender performance. For example, historian Glenna R. Matthews (1992) explained how working-class women were able to enter the public realm as labor activists more easily than upper-class women prior to the 1930s because they were already present in the economic sphere. Economic necessity required them to work and, hence, to violate the social demands of the time requiring that wealthy White women remain domestic. Being politically active presented no unique violation of gender/sex expectations for the working-class women. As a result, the history of labor activism is full of women leaders: Mary Harris “Mother” Jones (Tonn, 1996), Emma Goldman (Kowal, 1996; Solomon, 1987), Voltairine de Cleyre (Palczewski, 1995), and Lucy Parsons (Horwitz, 1998).

Class affects how gender is performed and how gender/sex is perceived. Men of lower classes face the stereotype that they are less intelligent, immoral, and prone to criminality. Women of lower classes are stereotyped as sexually promiscuous, easily duped, and dependent on state assistance. This discrimination and related stereotypes help maintain oppression (Ehrenreich, 1990), which can be multiplied by oppressions due to racism and sexism.

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Intersectionality Conclusion

An intersectional approach has many implications for the study of gender. First, intersectionality prevents scholars from falling into a specific type of generalization called essentialism. Essentialism is the presumption that all members of a group are alike because they have one quality in common. If researchers study only the fragment of a person called gender or sex, they reduce a person’s complex identity to one dimension. Sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and class also must be considered.

Second, intersectionality recognizes assumptions about gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, and class influence the way individuals view the world and the social realities and inequalities they produce (Jordan- Zachery, 2007). Thus, the study of gender in communication is not about quirks of personality but is about the way broad social patterns privilege some people and disadvantage others. Intersectionality makes clear how oppressions of groups interrelate. Just as any analysis of gender in communication is incomplete without taking one’s intersectional identity into account, so, too, is any analysis of the cultural tools used in power and privilege (Davis, 2008). Educator-consultant Heather Hackman (2012) explained that one cannot accomplish social justice by addressing one form of oppression in isolation. Oppressions are not independent. A part of the power of oppressions is the ways they intersect, supporting each other.

Third, intersectionality recognizes that all people are labeled with and internalize multiple group identities: “It is not just the marginalized who have a gender, race, and so on” (Harding, 1995, p. 121). Whiteness is part of identity, as is heterosexuality and being a man. People do not always recognize these ingredients because they are considered the norm. So even as intersectionality enables the understanding of complex forms of subordination, it also makes visible how dominant groups have an ethnicity, sex, gender, and class.

Intersectionality renders a more complex, realistic portrayal of individuals’ gendered/sexed experiences. Sociologist Leslie McCall (2005) termed it the “intracategorical approach to complexity” that “seeks to complicate and use [identity categories] in a more critical way” (p. 1780). Like McCall, we seek to “focus on the process by which [categories of identity] are produced, experienced, reproduced, and resisted in everyday life” (p. 1783). As you explore your own intersectional identity, your list of ingredients can be quite lengthy, including religious or faith affiliation, age, physical and mental abilities, immigration status, marriage status, and region of country. Keep in mind that gender, sex, sexuality, ethnicity, national identity, and socioeconomic class influence your perceptions, but they are not innate, permanent, or universal categories.

Intersectionality of identities and oppressions highlights the way cultural identities and inequalities are embedded in political systems and social structures, not only in people. Philosopher Sandra Harding (1995) explained that sexual and racial inequalities “are not caused by prejudice—by individual bad attitudes and false beliefs.” In fact, Harding believed that focusing on “prejudice as the cause of racial (or gender, class, or sexual) inequality tends to lodge responsibility for racism on already economically disadvantaged whites who might hold these beliefs.” It keeps the focus on individuals rather than on the larger culture in which their attitudes were created. Clearly, prejudice does contribute to racism, sexism, and other forms of inequity, but Harding argued that people should view inequalities as “fundamentally a political relationship” that manifests itself

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through cultural strategies or norms that privilege some groups over others (p. 122).

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Communication

Communication constructs, maintains, and changes gender/sex. It is how group and individual differences and inequalities are created and sustained. Fortunately, because of its dynamic nature, communication also makes social change possible. For these reasons, it is particularly beneficial to focus on communication when examining gender.

We define communication broadly as a meaning-making process, consistent with a social construction perspective (Gergen, 1994). People are not passive receivers of meanings but are actively engaged in the meaning-making process. As the title of this book suggests, one of those meanings being continually constructed through and in communication is gender (Taylor, personal correspondence, January 2003). For us, communication is an action (not a reflex). Given gender is communicated, it, too, is an action or something people do.

If we had to summarize the thesis of this entire book in one sentence, it would be this: Communication creates gender, gender does not create communication. Instead of examining how gender influences communication, we explore how communication constrains, perpetuates, stimulates, ignores, and changes gender (Rakow, 1986). We hope to spotlight the profound role communication plays in the construction of gender/sex identities.

Focusing on communication offers important benefits. First, it reminds you that individual gender identities and cultural assumptions about gender change over time. Second, it clarifies that gender does not simply exist on the individual level. Rather, gender is a cultural system or structure of meaning constructed through interactions that govern access to power and resources (Crawford, 1995). Third, it reveals that individuals play an active role in maintaining and/or changing gender constructions.

A communication approach helps prevent essentializing gender because it treats gender as a verb, not a noun. Gender is a process, not a thing or a universal product. Accordingly, in this book we examine how people “do” (West & Zimmerman, 1987) or “perform” (Butler, 1990a) gender. Gender emerges in the seemingly apolitical, routinized daily behaviors you enact in conscious and nonconscious ways. This, however, does not mean that your performance is without gendered intent or goals. Communication is goal driven. Through repeated stylizations such as gender performance, the communication may become automatic, but it is no less strategic (Brown & Levinson, 1978; Kellerman, 1992). We use the word strategic in its broadest sense to refer to how people use components of communication in an attempt to accomplish their multiple, simultaneous interactional goals.

Our reference to cultural systems and structures highlights the point that communication never happens in a void. It always takes place in multiple contexts, including physical, relational, cultural, and temporal. Cultural systems and values play major roles in constructing meanings. Studying gender as a cultural system or structure makes visible how gender is constructed on at least three communication levels covered in this textbook: individual, interpersonal, and societal (Crawford, 1995).

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At the individual or intrapersonal communication level, a person develops personal gendered identities. At the interpersonal communication level, people influence each other’s gender identities. At the societal level, social institutions contribute to the construction of gender/sex—both by imposing gender expectations and by liberating persons from them. This is why we dedicate the second half of the textbook to an analysis of the ways in which family, education, work, religion, and media contribute to the construction of gender/sex.

Individuals experience these communication levels simultaneously. For example, rape is an attack on the individual, but it happens in an interpersonal context, and the reason for the sexual assault, the meaning it is given, and even the laws that define the attack as a crime are gendered. (Note, for example, that not until 2012 did the FBI definition of rape recognize the possibility that men could be raped.) Rape is a crime of gendered and sexual power and domination. It is not a coincidence that women as a group have historically been the most frequent victims of rape, that men as a group have historically been the most frequent aggressors, and that when individual men are the victims, they are emasculated intrapersonally, interpersonally, and culturally. A phrase from the 1960s U.S. women’s movement makes the three levels of gender in communication clear: “The personal is political.” This maxim explains that what happens to people on a personal level is inherently tied to social norms supported by political social structures, such as norms about masculinity and femininity. In the study of gender/sex, analyses of communication enable close examination of how gender/sex is socially constructed, maintained, and changed.

The most comprehensive way to study gender in communication is to study all three of these levels— individual, interpersonal, and societal. Doing so makes it easier to recognize how the gender/sex norms that influence individual and interpersonal communication also influence the range of rhetorical choices available to people in public contexts. Similarly, the way politicians or popular culture stars communicate in public contexts may influence one’s expectations of how people will interact in daily life.

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Systemic Gendered Violence

You cannot adequately study gender in communication without addressing its dark side: violence, including interpersonal physical and emotional violence as well as structural violence. A full understanding of violence requires an understanding of how it is gendered/sexed (Johnson, 2006). Around the world, violence disproportionately affects women and gender non-conforming people.

Regarding women and girls, a United Nations report, The World’s Women 2015, found:

In all societies, to varying degrees, women and girls are subjected to physical, sexual and psychological abuse that cuts across lines of income, class and culture. . . . In some cases, violence against women can lead to death; about two thirds of the victims of intimate partner/family-related homicide are women, in contrast to all cases of homicide, of which 20 per cent of the victims are women. Whereas other forms of homicide have shown significant declines over time, rates of intimate partner/family-related female homicide have remained relatively stable. (UN Statistics Division, 2015, pp. 139–141)

Women and girls, as a result of living in systems that devalue them, face violence as a result of their sex.

Figure 1.4 UN Statistics on Violence Against Women

Source: UN Statistics Division, 2015. “The World’s Women 2015: Trends and Statistics” by United Nations (CC By-NC 4.0_, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0).

Homosexual people, and people who are gender non-conforming, also are targeted for violence. A 2015 report from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees found:

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In addition to “street” violence and other spontaneous attacks in public settings, those perceived as LGBT remain targets of organized abuse, including by religious extremists, paramilitary groups and extreme nationalists. LGBT and gender non-conforming youth are at risk of family and community violence. Lesbians and transgender women are at particular risk because of gender inequality and power relations within families and wider society. Violence motivated by homophobia and transphobia is often particularly brutal, and in some instances characterized by levels of cruelty exceeding that of other hate crimes. (pp. 7–8)

The reality is that regardless of the sex of the victim, masculine men tend to be the perpetrators of violence. Typically, those targeted for violence tend to be gendered feminine (or at least not masculine). The term systemic gendered violence makes clear that across cultures, gender is a predictor of who is likely to be a perpetrator, and who a victim, of violence.

Gendered/sexed violence is institutionalized. Systems or social structures maintain the notion that being violent is a legitimate part of heterosexual masculinity, whether through war between nations or verbal aggression between individuals. Violence becomes a normalized, accepted behavior for men. Predominant expectations of masculinity tend to enable men to dominate other men, women, children, animals, and their environment. Men’s studies scholar Harry Brod (1987) explained,

Whether learned in gangs, sports, the military, at the hands (often literally) of older males, or in simple acceptance that “boys will be boys” when they fight, attitudes are conveyed to young males ranging from tolerance to approval of violence as an appropriate vehicle for conflict resolution, perhaps even the most manly means of conflict negation. From this perspective, violent men are not deviants or nonconformists; they are overconformists, men who have responded all too fully to a particular aspect of male socialization. (p. 51)

If violence is equated with proving one’s masculinity, it becomes difficult for young men to be nonviolent and maintain their masculinity. Worse yet, society struggles to recognize boys and men as victims of psychological or physical abuse by other men, let alone by women. Men who are victimized are emasculated. Furthermore, when women are violent (e.g., suicide bombers or murdering their spouses or children) society struggles to recognize the acts as violence. They are typically explained as acts of self-defense (Johnson, 2006; Stuart, Moore, Hellmuth, Ransey, & Kahler, 2006), acts of martyrdom, or a form of mental desperation. They are viewed as unusual or unnatural acts for women.

Gendered violence cannot simply be explained by examining an individual person’s violent behaviors. Placing blame only on individual men ignores the social structures that enable and even encourage such behavior. People are taught from an early age to view men’s violence as the natural effect of testosterone. But if the hormone causes aggression, all people with higher levels of testosterone would be violent, and they are not. In actuality, men are socialized to act aggressive to become men. There is a hierarchy of masculinity, and those at the bottom due to factors such as body size, racism, sexual orientation, or classism must work harder to prove

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their masculinity (Kimmel, 2012b).

Countless social practices contribute to a culture that normalizes the violence committed by many men against others. These practices include the seemingly innocent standard that girls and women should be more polite, ladylike, and willing to smile and that they should take sexist remarks, street calls, and whistles as innocent jokes or flattery (Kramarae, 1992). Those who speak up risk criticism or physical retaliation. Such gendered social practices also include the expectation that all men should be aggressive, sexually active, and unemotional or risk abuse of some kind.

We introduce you to the interconnections between gender/sex and violence in this chapter, but this is only the start of the conversation. Throughout the rest of this book, we return to this theme by exploring, for example, domestic violence in family settings, bullying in educational settings, sexual harassment in work settings, and sexualized violence in media.

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Conclusion

This chapter demonstrates why a gender diversity approach is necessary. Gender does not exist in isolation from other identity ingredients, nor does it exist in isolation from social pressures and structures that maintain it. Anthropologist Nancy Henley and communication scholar Cheris Kramarae (1992) explained that “cultural difference does not exist within a political vacuum; rather, the strength of difference, the types of difference, the values applied to different forms, the dominance of certain forms—all are shaped by the context” (p. 40). When two people communicate, there are never just two parties present in the interaction; instead, multiple social groups (ethnicity, class, and gender) are represented, each with varying degrees of privilege and oppression.

Given people’s intersectional identity, it makes sense that there are far more than two gendered styles of communication. And given the intersections of forms of dominance, a study of gender in communication also requires the study of diverse social categories’ relative power. Studying gender diversity in communication calls for an analysis of more than just masculine and feminine styles of communication.

In many ways, this textbook is a “how to” book. It explains how to study gender/sex more than it explains what already has been discovered in gender/sex research (although we do a good bit of that as well). Given that researchers’ understandings and people’s performances of gender/sex continually evolve, it is more important to know how to read, hear, understand, and critique gender in communication than it is to know what has already been discovered. Our goal is not to tell you the way things are, for the state of knowledge changes. Instead, our goal is to teach how to see why things are the way they are. That way, you can consciously choose to embrace that which is liberatory and work against that which denies the full measure of your wonderfully unique, distinct, and idiosyncratic humanity.

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Key Concepts

androgyny 11 aromantic 17 asexual 17 binary 14 cis 16 communication 21 essentialism 20 ethnicity 18 gender 3 genderqueer 14 gender/sex 14 heteronormativity 17 identity 8 intersectionality 8 intersex 13 normativity 15 race 18 sex 10 sexual orientation 17 socioeconomic class 19 trans 15 transgender 15

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Discussion Questions 1. Identify five key ingredients that make up your intersectional identity. Reflect on how they interact with each other, creating your

gender identity. Consider how power relations influence them. 2. What does it mean to “do gender”? In what ways is the study of communication central to the study of gender? 3. In your own life, you do gender. Think of examples where you were rewarded for gendered behavior appropriate to your sex or

punished for gendered behavior that did not fit your sex. How did this affect how you do gender?

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Chapter 2 Theories of Gender/Sex

Although people often think of theory as an abstraction far removed from day-to-day living, theories about gender/sex constantly circulate through public and interpersonal discussions. For example, in April 2011, controversy erupted about an e-mail advertisement showing J. Crew president and creative director Jenna Lyons with her son, whose toenails are painted neon pink. The advertisement about how to be stylish during weekends includes a quotation indicating how happy Jenna is to have a son whose favorite color is pink (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 April 2011 J. Crew E-mail Advertisement

Media reactions appeared on all the major news networks and across the Internet. Responses ranged from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show calling the controversy “Toemageddon” to the following:

“It may be fun and games now, Jenna, but at least put some money aside for psychotherapy for the kid—and maybe a little for others who’ll be affected by your ‘innocent’ pleasure. . . . [A]lmost nothing is now honored as real and true. . . . [T]his includes the truth that . . . it is unwise to encourage little boys to playact like little girls. . . . [E]ncouraging the choosing of gender identity, rather than suggesting our children become comfortable with the ones that they got at birth, can throw our species into real psychological turmoil.”

Dr. Keith Ablow, psychiatrist and Fox News contributor

The J. Crew ad is a “marketing piece that features blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children.”

Erin R. Brown, Culture and Media Institute

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“I can say with 100 percent certainty that a mother painting her children’s toe nails pink does not cause transgenderism or homosexuality.”

Dr. Jack Drescher, psychiatrist (as cited in S. D. James, 2011)

Embedded within these statements are theories about where a person’s gender/sex comes from and whether it is acceptable for a person (even a 5-year-old) to engage in actions that violate the norms of gender socially assigned to the person’s sex. Dr. Ablow’s declaration that psychotherapy will be needed is premised on a theory that children’s early experiences may be suppressed in their unconscious and that this particular experience will cause harm requiring therapy. Ablow also asserted that the natural “truth” about one’s gender identity is “got at birth” and it is harmful for parents to manipulate it through social interactions. In contrast, Dr. Drescher argued that a single gender nonnormative action will not cause a change in gender/sex or sexual orientation. To completely understand the controversy, one has to be aware of the different underlying theories at work that explain formative influences on gender/sex.

In this chapter, we examine theories that explain where gender comes from. Researchers generally identify one of three influences as central: biological, psychological, or cultural. Biological theories define gender as biologically tied to sex, and distinctive hormones, brain structures, and genitalia typify each sex. Psychological theories emphasize the internal psychological processes triggered by early childhood experiences with one’s body and interpersonal interactions with primary caregivers. Critical/cultural theories emphasize the role broad cultural institutions and norms play in the construction and maintenance of gender.

Any research done on gender in communication is premised on some set of theoretical assumptions. Theories guide what questions researchers ask. For example, research that begins with a question about how men and women communicate differently makes sense only if one believes that men and women are biologically different. If you resist the biological approach, then you might instead ask: Do men and women communicate differently? or How do diverse people communicate? In many ways, research that begins with the assumption that differences exist reinforces those very differences by not asking questions about similarities or about whether the differences might be a result of some other variable, such as social power, rather than sex.

In this chapter, we review biological, psychological, and critical/cultural theories of gender/sex. By the end of the chapter, whenever you hear a statement about gender/sex in communication, or read research about it, you should be able to identify the theoretical assumptions supporting that research or statement.

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Biological Theories

Biological theories of gender/sex show up everywhere, including in popular culture. An October 6, 2011, Grey’s Anatomy episode, titled “What Is It About Men,” opened with the male doctors in the show offering the following declarative statements:

There are distinct differences between male and female brains. Female brains have a larger hippocampus, which usually makes them better at retention and memory. Male brains have a bigger parietal cortex, which helps when fending off an attack. Male brains confront challenges differently than female brains. Women are hard-wired to communicate with language, detail, empathy. Men— not so much. It doesn’t mean we are any less capable of emotion. We can talk about our feelings. It is just that most of the time, we’d really rather not. (McKee, 2011)

Research, theories, religious doctrine, and popular literature that describe the gender binary as “hard-wired,” and place an emphasis on “differences between male and female brains,” rely on biological explanations for gender. The researcher attributes primary causation to genetics, and the assumption of two “opposite” sexes leads to an emphasis on two “opposite” genders (Fausto-Sterling, 1992; Tavris, 1992).

Recent scientific research has made clear “human brains cannot be categorized into two distinct classes: male brain/female brain” (Joel et al., 2015). Grey’s Anatomy got it wrong when it referred to “male brains” and “female brains.” Researchers analyzed over 1,400 MRIs and found “extensive overlap between the distributions of females and males for all gray matter, white matter, and connections assessed” (Joel et al., 2015, p. 15468). In particular:

Analyses of internal consistency reveal that brains with features that are consistently at one end of the “maleness-femaleness” continuum are rare. Rather, most brains are comprised of unique “mosaics” of features, some more common in females compared with males, some more common in males compared with females, and some common in both females and males. . . . Our study demonstrates that, although there are sex/gender differences in the brain, human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain. (Joel et al., 2015, p. 15468)

Much previous research only looks at one element of the brain, like those identified by Grey’s Anatomy. Thus, research that focuses on only one element might be interesting, but it alone does not prove sex differences.

Most biological research focuses on two areas of difference: chromosomes (which in turn produce hormones and genitalia) and brain development. As we review this research, you will note that it is far more complex, contradictory, and unsettled than the Grey’s Anatomy characters would have you believe.

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Chromosomes (Hormones and Genitalia)

One determinant of the sex of a fetus is its chromosomes (usually XX for female and XY for male). We say one determinant because some people have sex chromosome combinations of XO, XXX, XXY, or XYY. The existence of intersex persons demonstrates there are more than two sexes. The existence of trans persons demonstrates chromosomes alone are not determinative of sex.

Males’ and females’ chromosomes are more alike than different. Males and females share 22 of 23 of the pairs of chromosomes in humans. Furthermore, a fetus’s sex is undifferentiated through the 6th week of gestation; anatomically and hormonally all fetuses are alike (Carroll, 2005; Strong, DeVault, & Sayad, 1999). The genes present in the chromosomes begin to induce gonadal (or reproductive gland) differences in about the 6th or 7th week, leading to hormonal and anatomical differences among the sexes.

Anatomical differences linked to the X and Y chromosomes have long been used to explain gender/sex identity. Artists, journalists, historians, and religious leaders have heralded the penis as an outward sign of men’s virility and right to assert their strength over others. The virile penis has become an essential characteristic of masculinity. Communication studies scholar Diana Ivy (2011) suggested that the more obvious, external nature of males’ sex organs makes the strength of it more overt than females’ less overt sex organs: “The social interpretations of women’s sexual organs identify them as reactors, receivers, followers, and beneficiaries of men’s decisions” (p. 49).

Male and female genitalia are distinct, but what the penis (and clitoris) means is socially constructed. Power has been linked to the penis because of its visible size in comparison to the clitoris. But that size assessment is open to contest. Pulitzer Prize–winning science author Natalie Angier (1999) noted, “The clitoris is simply a bundle of nerves: 8,000 nerve fibers, to be precise. That’s a higher concentration of nerve fibers than is found anywhere else on the body, including the fingertips, lips, and tongue, and it is twice the number in the penis” (pp. 63–64). So is a woman’s clitoris smaller than a man’s penis? In terms of external exposed tissue, yes. But regarding its function as a pleasure organ, is the clitoris smaller? Not if you measure size by the number of nerve endings. The meaning of sexual organs is socially constructed.

Regarding hormones, testosterone tends to occur in larger proportions in males, and estrogen tends to occur in larger proportions in females. However, both hormones appear in male and female bodies. Biology professor Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000), after reviewing a year of articles in major newspapers, noted that “despite the fact that both hormones seem to pop up in all types of bodies, producing all sorts of different effects, many reporters and researchers continue to consider estrogen the female hormone and testosterone the male hormone” (p. 179). Fausto-Sterling urged people to remember, when thinking about hormones, “social belief systems weave themselves into the daily practice of science in ways that are often invisible to the working scientist” (p. 194). The question is “How do hormones interact with all people’s bodies?” Not “How do hormones determine sex?”

Testosterone appears to be related to aggression and risk taking (Archer, 2006; Hermans, Ramsey, & van

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Honk, 2008; McAndrew, 2009). Although many people think there is a simple relationship wherein testosterone induces violent and aggressive behavior, the reality is much more complicated. Research makes clear that situational factors strongly influence how testosterone affects behavior. In their book Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior, social psychologists James Dabbs and Mary Dabbs (2001) reviewed over two decades of research indicating that in certain circumstances (usually those relating to competition for social dominance), testosterone tends to motivate rebellious, aggressive, delinquent, and violent behavior. Under other conditions (where a person is in a protective position like a firefighter), testosterone tends to motivate altruistic and prosocial heroic behaviors. In other words, the social situation influences testosterone’s effects. There is no simple biological cause but a complex interplay of biology and culture. Quite simply, testosterone does not determine one’s gender or one’s behavior.

Not only may social circumstances influence how testosterone’s influence is expressed, but social circumstances can affect one’s level of testosterone. Scientists had long known that fatherhood tended to reduce testosterone in nonhuman species whose males care for young, and so they hypothesized that would happen in human males, too. In a longitudinal study that followed 624 men in the Philippines, researchers found that when single nonfathers became partnered fathers, they experienced a larger decline in testosterone compared to the modest declines that occurred in nonfathers, and those who spent the most time parenting had the lowest levels (Gettler, McDade, Feranil, & Kuzawa, 2011).

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Brain Development

Research about whether male and female brains differ has been conducted for well over a century. In the 1900s, scientists believed that because females’ brains were smaller, women were intellectually inferior. The fact that this would also mean that smaller males were intellectually inferior to larger males did not seem to register (Boddice, 2011). The debate about brain difference was reignited in 2005 when then Harvard president Lawrence Summers, in a speech about diversifying the science and engineering workforce, offered the explanation that women were underrepresented because of “different availability of aptitude at the high end” (para. 2). Embedded in Summers’s statement is a biological theory of gender/sex differences in development.

In the last decade, investigators have found functional, chemical, and structural variations between male and female brains. Thus, you can see why Summers might have felt comfortable making that statement. However, before we detail this research, we want to offer a few caveats—caveats Summers might have been wise to consider.

First, the existence of structural differences does not mean they are biologically caused. Because of brain plasticity (the fact the brain changes depending on a person’s experiences over a lifetime), little can be inferred from the identification of differences (Vidal, 2011). Psychologist Cordelia Fine (2010) explained that the idea that dominates the popular press of “brain development as a gene-directed process of adding new circuitry” is just plain wrong; the most recent research makes clear how “our brains . . . are changed by our behavior, our thinking, our social world” (pp. 176–177; see also Hyde, 2007). Differences are not caused by sex but are caused by experiences over a lifetime (Maguire et al., 2000).

Second, discussing stereotypical sex differences can actually create them because the people to whom the stereotypes apply may believe them and, as a result, perform according to the stereotype instead of according to their skills. Stereotype threat was defined by the research that initially identified it as “being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s group” (Steele & Aronson, 1995, p. 797). Simply being “awar[e] of stereotypes about their group’s underperformance” in a specific task, like math, nurturing, or navigating, may induce people in that group to perform that task less well even if they have the skills and ability to do it (Smith & Cokley, 2016, p. 145). Although stereotype threat can affect everyone, it “is a phenomenon that primarily affects individuals belonging to stigmatized groups” (Smith & Cokley, 2016, p. 157). Thus, Summers’s mentioning of sex differences in the sciences actually may have helped cause or maintain them.

Stereotype threat is so powerful that the message need not be linked specifically to an upcoming task. Instead, general cultural messages can influence performance. However, the good news is that messages countering the stereotype can mitigate its effects. In a study of performance in an upper-level university math course, one class was given a test under normal circumstances and another group was told that “this mathematics test has not shown any gender differences in performance or mathematics ability” to nullify the stereotype that males perform better than females in math (Good, Aronson, & Harder, 2008). In the first case, women and men

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performed equally well. In the second, women not only performed as well as the men in the class, but their performance “was raised significantly to surpass that of the men in the course” (p. 17). The study concluded, “Even among the most highly qualified and persistent women in college mathematics, stereotype threat suppresses test performance” (p. 17). This demonstrates how powerful communication about gender/sex can be. Messages about who is good at what influence who is good at what.

Stereotype threat can influence people’s communication patterns just as much as it influences their math test performance (McGlone & Pfiester, 2015). One study placed participants in a communication situation that required conflict. When told the simulation was about leadership, women’s communication was “less fluent and used more tentative language” (p. 111); when told the simulation was about relationship maintenance, men’s communication was less fluent and more tentative. In other words, the way we talk about gender/sex communication in this textbook may cause the very effects we are describing. Thus, we want to be very clear: We note the differences in brain structure, but there is no evidence they actually affect performance or communication.

Scientists have examined brain structure to identify sex (and then infer gender) differences. Males’ brains do tend to be larger than females’ by about 100 grams (Ankney, 1992), but brain size is relative to body mass, and males tend to have more body mass than females. Contemporary neuroscience finds that animals need a larger brain in proportion to their body’s mass; thus, larger brains have more to do with larger mass than with superior brain functioning. Normal variation in human brain size is not related to IQ (Heymsfield, Muller, Bosy-Westphal, Thomas, & Shen, 2012).

Some argue that women tend to be better at using both sides of the brain because the corpus callosum, which bridges the two hemispheres, tends to be larger in women. This has been used to explain many women’s tendency toward stronger language skills, the ability to identify others’ emotions more quickly (Begley & Murr, 1995), and the ability to use both hemispheres for listening. However, neurons travel quickly across the two hemispheres regardless of the size of the corpus callosum. Psychologist David G. Myers (2004) cautioned against assuming that people use only one hemisphere for individual tasks. Instead, they almost always use both hemispheres because there is a constant exchange of information. Social psychologist Carol Tavris (1992) explained, “The two hemispheres of the brain do have different specialties, but it is far too simple- minded (so to speak) to assume that human abilities clump up in opposing bunches” (p. 49). The two hemispheres have the ability to compensate for each other and to cooperate. For example, if one hemisphere is damaged, the other hemisphere takes over its tasks. This demonstrates that each side has the neurological ability to perform the other side’s tasks. Even though this plasticity decreases with age, the two hemispheres are interdependent (Myers, 2004).

Researchers have found more consistent links between sex differences and responses to mental disorders, stress, hormones, and memory (Cahill, 2005). These findings have raised awareness that research and medical treatment procedures performed on men cannot be generalized to women or even to all men.

Additionally, the National Academy of Sciences reported that sexual orientation may be influenced by brain differences (Allen & Gorski, 1992). A band of fibers called the anterior commissure, which connects brain

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hemispheres, tends to be larger in gay men than in heterosexual people. Other researchers have found that twins raised apart tend to have the same sexual orientation (Whitam, Diamond, & Martin, 1993), and lesbians are consistently different from heterosexual women in self-reported sexual orientations across cultures (Whitam, Daskalos, Sobolewski, & Padilla, 1998). Yet researchers do not know whether the fiber band’s size is affected by use and whether it can change. In addition, cognitive researcher William Byne (2005) pointed out that quantitative size differences in brain structure alone cannot tell about qualitative differences in sexual orientation.

Although some evidence of biological influences exists, biology alone cannot determine gender identities, and it certainly cannot predict gendered communication. Otherwise, all women and all men in all cultures and all countries across the world would express masculine and feminine gender in identical ways. Biological links to gender are probably more realistically described as influences rather than as sole or direct causes (Reiss, 2000).

When researchers do not start from the assumption that the sexes differ, and instead sort people based on gender, interesting results emerge. Researchers at the University of Iowa studied the relationship among sex, gender, and social cognition. Given studies found women are more adept than men at social perception and the interpretation of nonverbal social cues, the researchers wondered whether the brain might give some clue about why. They studied 30 men and 30 women matched for age and IQ. The researchers used a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan to measure gray matter volume and surface area of the ventral frontal cortex (VFC). However, instead of just comparing people based on sex (comparing males to females), they sought to compare people based on gender (as determined by the answers to the Personal Attributes Questionnaire, the PAQ, a scale of femininity and masculinity). They found “identification with more feminine traits on the PAQ correlated with greater SG [straight gyrus] gray matter volume and surface area. In addition, higher degrees of femininity correlated with better performance on the IPT [Interpersonal Perception Test]” (Wood, Heitmiller, Andreasen, & Nopoulos, 2008, p. 534).

This begs the question: Why is the SG larger in adult women? The researchers did a second study to look at 37 girl and 37 boy children to see if the size difference was innate (meaning programmed from birth). They found the SG was actually larger in boys, yet the same test of interpersonal awareness showed that skill in this area correlated to a smaller SG (Wood, Murko, & Nopoulos, 2008). In commentary on these studies, neuroscience professor Lise Eliot (2009a) explained,

This finding—that brain structure correlates as well or better with psychological “gender” than with simple biological “sex”—is crucial to keep in mind when considering any comparisons of male and female brains. Yes, men and women are psychologically different and yes, neuroscientists are uncovering many differences in brain anatomy and physiology which seem to explain our behavioral differences. But just because a difference is biological doesn’t mean it is “hard-wired.” Individuals’ gender traits—their preference for masculine or feminine clothes, careers, hobbies and interpersonal styles—are inevitably shaped more by rearing and experience than [by] their biological sex. Likewise, their brains, which are ultimately producing all this masculine or feminine behavior, must be molded—at least to some degree—by the sum of their experiences as a boy or girl. (para. 10)

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The studies by Wood and colleagues are important because theirs are some of the very few studies that do not look solely for sex differences.

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Biological Theories Conclusion

Biological theories should be approached with skepticism. If something is presented as caused by biology, this creates the impression it is unchangeable. Biological determinism—the idea that biology (sex) determines gender differences—means that inequalities are natural and, hence, cannot be changed by social action. Biologist Fausto-Sterling (2000) urged people to never “lose sight of the fact that our debates about the body’s biology are always simultaneously moral, ethical, and political debates about social and political equality and the possibilities for change. Nothing less is at stake” (p. 255).

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Psychological Theories

When you read research, theory, or popular material that assumes gender is an innate part of one’s personality, the authors are likely drawing from the field of psychology. They focus on how one’s identity becomes gendered through early childhood experiences, as when Ablow warned of the “psychological turmoil” caused by a young boy having his toenails painted. Some argue that a child’s gender identity is generally set as early as 1 to 3 years of age (A. Campbell, 1993). Although psychological theories vary, they focus on linking one’s sex to gendered personalities via the influences of close relationships. Later theories also recognize the influences of culture in developing one’s gender.

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Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Feminism

Psychoanalytic theories call attention to how unconscious thoughts and memories influence a person’s identity, actions, and beliefs. Thus, to truly understand why a human being is the way they are, psychoanalysis demands attention to “early bodily and emotional experience in infancy and early childhood” as central elements forming the unconscious ways people do gender (Minsky, 1998, p. 6).

Sigmund Freud originated psychoanalysis as a psychological treatment technique. Central to psychoanalysis was the study of gender and sex identity formation. Freud (1975) theorized that children develop gender identity personalities based on their perceptions of sex differences in biological genitalia. Freud theorized that until age 4, sex difference is irrelevant to the child. At around 3 to 4 years of age, “the sexual life of children usually emerges in a form accessible to observation” when they enter the phallic stage, during which they become aware of their genitals (pp. 42–43). From the phallic stage till puberty (the genital stage), Freud argued children see themselves in terms of having, or not having, a penis. While little boys initially assume everyone has a penis like theirs, Freud argued that little girls recognize their genitals are different and “are overcome by envy for the penis—an envy culminating in the wish . . . to be boys themselves” (p. 61). When boys do notice girls lack a penis, they experience “castration complex” wherein they recognize the possibility that the penis can be removed, and they begin to fear castration as punishment (p. 61). In Freud’s view, for girls to develop normally, they must be heterosexual and associate with their mother to compensate for their failed masculinity. For boys to develop normally, they must ultimately identify with their father. According to Freud’s original theory, boys who do not make a complete break in their dependence on their mothers will not become fully masculine (Brannon, 2011). Thus, successful gender and sexual development in girls and boys is marked by their willingness to identify with the parent of their sex (instead of seeing that parent as competition for the affections of the other parent).

Much of Freud’s work has been criticized for reflecting a heteronormative and masculine bias and a misunderstanding of women’s psyche. A contemporary of Freud, Karen Horney, initiated the criticism. Horney argued that for girls, penis envy did not represent a literal envy for the physical penis but rather represented a symbolic envy for the social power and prestige men and boys experienced. In addition, Horney argued that men experienced “womb envy,” in which men sought social and material accomplishments to compensate for their inability to give birth. Horney (1967) wrote, “From the biological point of view woman has . . . in the capacity for motherhood, a quite indisputable and by no means negligible physiological superiority. This is most clearly reflected in the unconscious of the male psyche in the boy’s intense envy of motherhood” (pp. 60–61).

In addition to the near universal rejection of the theory that all women experience “penis envy” (Tavris, 1992), Freudian psychoanalysis is criticized because it essentializes gender/sex when it dictates only two sex-based paths for successful gender identity development (Bell, 2004). The reality is children respond to gender identity in highly idiosyncratic and individual ways. Further, Freud’s early theory recognized only heterosexual identities and did not consider cross-cultural variations.

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Although many rightly critique Freud’s work, the attention to the unconscious and the role of early experiences in gender identity formation were revolutionary. For feminists, Freud helped make clear that gender was not biologically determined but was influenced and formed by social experiences. One could understand gender from a psychoanalytic perspective by focusing on the way adults impose gender/sex norms on infants and, in the process, structure the human mind. Psychoanalysis generated multiple strands of psychoanalytic feminism (e.g., interpersonal psychoanalytic feminism [Gilligan, 1982], Lacanian theory [Lacan, 1998], and object relations theory).

In object relations theory, feminist psychologist Nancy Chodorow (1978) built on Freud by arguing that the mind (and gender identity) is formed in childhood, not in response to children discovering their genitalia but rather by the relationships children have with others—particularly their primary caregivers, who tended to be women. According to Chodorow, because the mother is a gendered person herself, she interacts with boy and girl children according to her gender, forming distinct relationships. At the same time, each child experiences internal conflict in trying to construct a separate identity from the mother. Because the mother and daughter are overtly similar, the daughter resolves her conflict by identifying with the mother and thus emulates a feminine gender identity. The girl develops intimacy and relationship as a primary part of who she is. According to Chodorow, the mother tends to treat a boy child differently from a girl child. The mother encourages independence in the boy earlier than in the girl and is less intimate in her talk with the boy. The boy child also recognizes that he is not like his mother in basic ways. To resolve his internal conflict, the boy must reject the mother as a part of his independent identity development. The boy develops an orientation toward independence and activity as a primary part of who he is and thus finds relationships potentially smothering.

Object relations and other strands of feminist psychoanalysis agree with Freud that all gender identity, conscious and unconscious, has its origins in early bodily and emotional experiences and the fantasies associated with them (Minsky, 1998). They also suggest gender is influenced by one’s sex identity and vice versa. Persons do not experience these in isolation but rather as related parts of the self (Bell, 2004). However, this does not mean that sex causes gender. Psychoanalytic theorists since Freud have emphasized the role of culture in gender development.

By combining the influences of culture and the unconscious self, theorists are better able to explain why some individuals do not conform to cultural pressures of gender/sex expectations; why gender, sex, and sexuality are more fluid and diverse than cultural stereotypes suggest; and how race, class, and culture create multiple variations of gender, sex, and sexuality (Bell, 2004). Social learning theorists offer examples of this explanatory power.

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Social Learning

Social learning theory posits gender is a learned behavior, learned by observing, analyzing, and modeling others. When gender behavior is modeled consistent with sex identity, it is rewarded; if done incorrectly, it is punished. Particularly with children, this process of modeling, reinforcement, and punishment shapes gender/sex identities. Originally developed by Walter Mischel (1966) and later modified by Albert Bandura (2002; Bandura & Walters, 1963), this theory explains the socialization process whereby children internalize many identity ingredients and norms of behavior, not just gender. When children are positively rewarded for mimicking preferred behaviors, the behaviors attached to prescribed social roles become internalized habits (Addis, Mansfield, & Syzdek, 2010). Young girls tend to be rewarded for being polite, neat, emotionally expressive, and well behaved. Young boys tend to be rewarded for being independent, emotionally controlled, and physically active. Thus, girls tend to develop feminine qualities, and boys tend to develop masculine qualities.

As with object relations theory, in the initial research on social learning theory, the parents’ and/or primary caregivers’ behaviors were considered most influential. However, more recent uses of social learning theory have highlighted three things. First, observational learning occurs not only in relation to immediate family but also through media sources such as video games (Wohn, 2011). Second, social learning is situational; a variety of ways to do gender in different situations are rewarded. Third, relationships with peers also are influential.

Understanding the role media play in social learning is necessary. For example, given most people do not directly observe others’ sexual activity, social learning theory recognizes people can learn from, and model, mediated gender and sexuality performances. This also demonstrates why “increased exposure to media is associated with more sexually permissive behaviors and attitudes” (Petersen & Hyde, 2010, p. 23). Given that sex scenes on television doubled from 1998 to 2003, and that they increased most dramatically in depicting sexually active women, based on social learning theory, researchers predicted that women would report engaging in more sexual behaviors. These predictions proved true (Petersen & Hyde, 2010). Mediated communication practices contribute to the formation of gendered expression related to sexuality.

Recent research on social learning also encourages scholars to recognize that learning is far more situational than previously thought. The same action might be rewarded by one group in one setting but punished by a different group in a different setting. Psychologists Addis, Mansfield, and Syzdek (2010) explained:

Social learning is situated learning; particular actions are followed by particular consequences in specific contexts. Young boys, for example, often learn that expressing soft vulnerable emotions like sadness will be followed by punishment and other forms of ridicule, particularly when this behavior occurs in the context of other dominant males. These same consequences may be less likely to occur among close confidants, or around one’s mother versus one’s father. Over time, what emerge are relatively differentiated or discriminated repertoires of activity that are highly sensitive to context. (p. 80)

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As a result of their research, they argue that researchers and theorists should “embrace the contextual nature of gendered social learning” and “avoid metaphors that locate gender as an internal property of individuals” (p. 83). Again, gender is something one does, not something one has.

Recent research has focused on the role of relationships in identity development. The relational theory approach “starts from the premise that our perceptions of, and subsequently our knowledge about, our selves and our world are inextricably embedded within and influenced by our interpersonal relationships as well as our social and cultural contexts” (Chu, 2014, p. 3). Chu (2014) intensively studied 4- and 5-year–old boys over a 2-year period to explore the ways in which their relationships with each other interact with gendered social expectations. Chu’s conclusion was that characteristics labeled “boy behavior” are not inherent to boys, but are learned behaviors. In commenting about the results, Chu noted:

I am wary of the whole “[just] boys being boys” thing because . . . if you expect boys to be a certain way, you’ll say, oh, it’s boys being boys when they’re rowdy or rambunctious or whatever, but never “boys will be boys” when they’re being sweet or sensitive or smart or insightful. So I am wary of those kinds of stereotypes or gender roles.

Especially because . . . when you take the whole range of human capabilities and qualities, and you say one half is masculine, and one half is feminine, and only boys can be masculine, and only girls can be feminine, then everybody loses, because you’re asking everyone to cut off and deny a part of their humanity. (as quoted in Berlatsky, 2014)

Chu argued that the perception that boys are worse at relationships than girls is likely the result of two factors: (1) because people do not expect boys to have relationships skills, they do not look for them, and (2) boys’ relationship skills may not be apparent especially as they get older because they have been socialized to hide that capacity so they do not appear feminine (Chu, 2014, p. 200). For Chu (2014), “becoming ‘boys’—namely by aligning with prevailing norms of masculinity—is neither automatic nor inevitable” (p. 204).

Social learning theory fares better than the psychoanalytic approaches in its ability to help explain communication influences and because it is much easier to directly observe and test. However, it still tends to dichotomize gender/sex, and it cannot explain why some boys and girls do not conform to social expectations.

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Psychological Theories Conclusion

Psychological approaches suggest that gender identity is not naturally set at birth but instead developed through early childhood interaction. The psychological approaches we reviewed presume that all children are raised in Western, two-parent, heterosexual, nuclear, bourgeois families. Psychologist Janet Hyde (2005) conducted a review of 46 meta-analyses on gender and psychology research. Hyde concluded that there is no foundation for the continued belief in prominent psychological gender differences: “The gender similarities hypothesis holds that males and females are similar on most, but not all, psychological variables. That is, men and women, as well as boys and girls, are more alike than they are different” (p. 581).

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Critical/Cultural Theories

Writing in 1949, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir questioned how the natural and social sciences had depicted womanhood as mysterious when justifying women’s inferiority. Beauvoir argued that these supposedly objective sciences were biased in the presumption of women’s inferiority to men and, in turn, reinforced that bias and justified patriarchy (the institutionalized maintenance of male privilege). Beauvoir recognized biological differences exist, but challenged the social value attached to those differences. To make clear the cultural, and not innate biological or inherent psychological, causes of gender, de Beauvoir (2011) declared,

One is not born, but rather becomes, woman. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates [what] is called feminine. Only the mediation of another can constitute an individual as an Other. (p. 283)

Although social inequality between the sexes had been questioned for decades, if not centuries, de Beauvoir’s book marked a turning point in the critical analysis of the cultural foundations of gender. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy declared, “Beauvoir’s The Second Sex gave us the vocabulary for analyzing the social constructions of femininity and a method for critiquing these constructions” (“Simone de Beauvoir,” 2014, part 6, para. 6). To fully understand where gender/sex comes from, critical attention to cultural constructions of gender/sex is necessary.

The emphasis on gender as something a person does and not something a person is emerged from this perspective. A critical/cultural approach calls for people to understand gender as something that is done—by individuals, groups, and institutions. Gender cannot be understood by examining a single individual’s biology or psychology. Instead, the broader situations in which an individual lives—the social meanings embedded within communication—must be studied. West and Zimmerman (1987), the scholars who wrote the germinal essay “Doing Gender,” explained,

Doing gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine “natures.”

When we view gender as an accomplishment . . . our attention shifts from matters internal to the individual and focuses on interactional and, ultimately, institutional arenas. . . . Rather than as a property of individuals, we conceive of gender as an emergent feature of social situations: both as an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements and as a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions of society. (p. 126)

Thus, studying gender is about more than studying how an individual person acts. Instead, to study gender,

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one needs to analyze how it is culturally and socially constructed. One’s gendered lens should focus on how social interactions and institutions do gender by gendering people and practices (see also West & Zimmerman, 2009). Thus, the idea of doing gender “de-emphasized socialization as the basis for gendered difference between men and women” (Deutsch, 2007, p. 107).

If gender is done, then it can be undone as well. Psychology professor Francine Deutsch (2007) clarified: “If gender is constructed, then it can be deconstructed” (p. 108). Thus, when examining how gender is done, you should also look for places where it is undone, where other ways of doing and undoing arise. Exploring other ways of doing gender requires attention to individual examples of resistance and to institutions because power differentials are always in play (Collins, 1995, p. 493).

A range of critical/cultural approaches to gender/sex exist, including postmodernism, deconstructionism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, queer theory, and cultural studies. We outline some of the common assumptions these approaches share and then focus on two of them to give a better sense of how critical/cultural approaches explain gender/sex.

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Shared Assumptions

1. Social reality is communicatively constructed.

Social reality is reality as understood through the symbols humans use to represent it. Social reality is created as people name objects, actions, and each other. Although a material world from which human beings receive sensory data exists, people do not know how to interact with that world until their sensory data is given meaning through symbolic action.

The centrality of communication to social reality is explained by communication scholar Barry Brummett (1976), who argued “experience is sensation plus meaning” and “reality is meaning” (pp. 28, 29). All symbolic action participates in the creation of meaning. The power of symbols to make meaning explains why communication scholars note a distinction between reality and social reality. Critical/cultural theorists emphasize the power of discourse to shape social reality and study the processes by which this is accomplished.

Communication is more than a means to transmit information. When people communicate, they participate in the construction of social reality. Introduced in Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) book The Social Construction of Reality, social construction theory informs much contemporary communication research (Leeds-Hurwitz, 2009). Although you may know things exist apart from your symbol systems, you cannot know what those things mean, or how you are to react to them, except through the symbol system. In terms of gender/sex, critical/cultural approaches examine gender as a social construction, communicatively constituted, and ask how a particular construction of gender and sex privileges some and disempowers others.

No biological entity exists that humans can access without socially constructing it in some way. Critical/cultural scholars emphasize the role communication plays in forming people’s understandings of the world. Even the seemingly simple terms of female and male illustrate the power of communication to create social reality. As long as these were the only terms available to refer to the human body, bodies were forcibly fit—through sex assignment surgery at birth—into one of those binary categories. Until the language for intersex emerged, bodies could only be one of two things.

Imagine if you had to find a way to present your gender to the world, but you could not use any form of communication. You could not speak, wear clothes (which carry with them symbolic messages), or move. How would others know your gender? For critical/cultural theorists, gender is something one does, not something one is, and gender is something that is socially created, not biologically or individually created.

Given this, English professor Jordynn Jack (2012) pointed out how “the formation of gender identities themselves . . . constitutes a rhetorical process” in which gender “provid[es] a range of available discourses through which individuals make sense of, model, and perform a gendered identity” (p. 2). Thus, critical/cultural scholars tend to focus on the rhetoric of gender and sex.

2. Categories such as sex, gender, sexuality, and race become the focus of criticism.

Because reality is socially constructed, critical/cultural theorists conceive of sex, gender, sexuality, race, and

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other categories not as neutral designations of “the way things are” but as ways people structure what is.

Philosopher Judith Butler (1992) explained how the critical/cultural theory of poststructuralism highlights how “power pervades the very conceptual apparatus” that people use to understand the world and themselves (p. 6).

Critical/cultural theorists note how the categories just listed tend to be mutually exclusive binaries (if you are either male or female, then intersex people do not exist) or create differences where none exist (the single human race has been artificially divided into races). The categories determine whose lives are recognizable and intelligible—which people exist socially. Thus, instead of starting from the assumption that males and females indicate the two sexes that exist, a critical/cultural theorist would question and investigate how those categories were created, who those categories benefit, and how the categories are placed in a hierarchical relation to each other.

3. One cannot study gender/sex unless one also studies power and systems of hierarchy.

Systems of hierarchy refer to the patterns and institutional structures that maintain inequality between groups. Critical/cultural scholars emphasize the broad cultural patterns at play to highlight that gender/sex is not simply located within individuals but is sustained throughout the culture, in its symbol systems, institutions, and rituals. In other words, gender is not something you were born with or learned only from interactions with your parents; socialization is an insufficient explanation for gender. Saying that you learned gender from only your parents begs the question: Where did your parents learn gender? Gender/sex, together with ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and other cultural identities, lives in the ideology, norms, laws, worldviews, traditions, popular culture, and social institutions that sustain a culture. Critical/cultural approaches argue that you cannot understand gender only by studying individuals’ performance of it. Instead, one must study the systems of hierarchy that privilege some sexes over others and some performances of gender over others.

Critical/cultural scholars make clear that the issue is not just whether one person exerts power over another. Instead, one needs to critique systems. Systems of hierarchy, embedded within social, economic, and political institutions, explain the existence of ethnic and gender/sex inequality; biology and personal bias are not the central foundations of inequality. Critical/cultural scholars understand discrimination as a system of hierarchy, “fundamentally a political relationship, a strategy that” as a system, gives social, economic, political, psychological, and social privileges to one group and denies them to another (Harding, 1995, p. 122).

Privileges are unearned freedoms or opportunities. Often, privileges are unconscious and unmarked. They are made to appear natural and normal through cultural hegemony, which makes them easy to deny and more resistant to change. When violence prevention educator Jackson Katz (2003) asked men in his workshops what they do to prepare to walk alone on campus at night, most of them responded with an unknowing stare. When Katz asked women this question, they readily offered several strategies they used to keep safe, such as phoning roommates ahead to tell them they are leaving, carrying their keys pointed out between their fingers as a weapon against would-be attackers, or looking in their cars before they open the doors. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons often try to pass as straight to avoid possible verbal or physical violence. Heterosexuals usually do not have to consider such acts.

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For critical/cultural scholars, gender/sex is never just a simple difference. Instead, to study gender/sex, one must study power. Power is a social phenomenon. People have power in relationship to others. Social power is embedded in the communicative negotiations of gender/sex, race, class, sexual orientation, and other identity ingredients. For each of these social groups, multiple differences are socially created, and differences are rarely constructed equally. Rather, the groups that have more say about the construction are privileged over others.

Power can simply mean “the ability to get things done” (Kramarae & Treichler, 1992, p. 351). It is not an innately evil concept. However, feminist theorists make an important distinction between “power to” and “power over” (Freeman & Bourque, 2001, pp. 10–11). Power to is the ability to get things done that does not infringe on others’ rights and may actually lead to the emancipation of others. Power over refers to coercive misuses of power. If one is in a position of power over others, then one can dominate and coerce others and, in the process, subordinate or oppress them. If one lacks power over, one is more likely to be in a subordinate position. The interesting point is that to respond to any instance of power over, or to get out of a situation in which one is subordinated by those who have power over, one needs power to.

In their book on intersectionality, sociology professors Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge (2016) identified four “distinctive yet interconnected domains of power: interpersonal, disciplinary, cultural, and structural” (p. 7). Interpersonal power can be found in one’s ability to control or dominate others in the negotiation of personal or professional relationships. Thus, it is important to recognize “power relations are about people’s lives, how people relate to one another, and who is advantaged or disadvantaged within social interactions” (p. 7). However, power also is systemic. Disciplinary power can be found in how “informal social rewards and punishments get distributed in everyday interactions” (p. 27). For example, when parents punish boys for showing emotion and reward girls for being agreeable, disciplinary power is at work. Cultural power can be traced in socially accepted ideas and messages transmitted across media. For example, cultural norms of masculinity and femininity, reinforced by media representations, are a form of cultural power as is the privileging of the nuclear family over other family forms. Finally, structural power can be traced through how groups, institutions, and laws are organized (p. 12). For example, the disproportionate incarceration of men of color is an example of how racism is embedded within structures of law.

4. Oppositional critical views are necessary to critique hegemonic norms.

Hegemony designates the systems of hierarchy maintained by the predominant social group’s ideology (Gramsci, Rosenthal, & Rosengarten, 1993). Philosopher Rosemary Hennessy (1995) explained that hegemony is not a form of power that controls through overt violence. Rather, it controls subtly by determining what makes sense: “Hegemony is the process whereby the interests of a ruling group come to dominate by establishing the common sense, that is, those values, beliefs, and knowledges that go without saying” (pp. 145–146). People willingly belong to cultures for the protection and order those cultures provide, even though predominant cultural ideology may control them in some ways. By following society’s norms of behavior, members uphold the culture’s ideology.

When analysts of gender talk about patriarchy, they are not talking about the domination of one man over one woman but are talking about a hierarchical system that exercises hegemonic control wherein men are

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privileged over women, and some men are privileged over men, and in which even some of those who are subordinate in the hierarchy accept it because such an ordering appears to make sense.

Sociologist R. W. Connell introduced the concept of hegemonic masculinity in 1982. Connell noted there is not one single way to perform masculinity; instead, a range of masculinities exists. But not all forms of masculinity are equal; some forms of masculinity are privileged (White, upper-class, wage-earning, heterosexual, athletic) over other forms, and masculinity is privileged over femininity. Although Connell recognized that a plurality of masculinities exists, the focus was on the normative form of masculinity, the type that has been the most honored way to be a man, even if it is not the type that is most prevalent (or the norm). Hegemonic masculinity does not require all men to engage in overt toxic practices, but it does encourage men to remain silent to protect their own masculinity when others commit such practices. In doing so, they become complicit in the violence (Katz, 2003). Thus, hegemonic masculinity constitutes a “pattern of practices . . . that allowed men’s dominance over women to continue” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 832).

To see hegemony at work, one needs to be critical of taken-for-granted cultural norms, to take what media scholar Stuart Hall (1993) identified as an oppositional, or counterhegemonic, reading of cultural texts (pp. 98–102). Instead of “operating inside the dominant code” (p. 102, italics in original), an oppositional reading challenges the social meanings. Thus, one finds critical/cultural scholars critiquing the way blood donation, as “a performative act of civic engagement,” constructs sex, sexuality, and citizenship in a way that disempowers gay men (Bennett, 2008, p. 23); how Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress, three 2007 films that all centered around a White pregnant woman, “reframe unplanned pregnancy as women’s liberation” and present a model of family that serves only the needs of White, economically privileged women (Hoerl & Kelly, 2010, p. 362); and how media stories about Black male athletes accused of domestic violence construct understandings of them as “naturally aggressive due to their sporting background and black rage” and, in the process, reinforce hegemonic White masculinity (Enck-Wanzer, 2009, p. 1).

To see how specific critical/cultural approaches enact these four assumptions, we offer two examples: Multiracial and Global Feminisms and Queer Theory.

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Multiracial and Global Feminisms

Scholars and activists studying gender/sex through the lens of global feminist theory and multiracial feminist theory have crystallized the reasons that gender/sex must be studied from an intersectional critical/cultural perspective. They note how the category of woman often has represented the concerns of White, economically privileged women from Western countries and, as a result, has reinforced hierarchies that emphasize the concerns of the privileged. Thus, they make clear how the category of woman itself is inflected with race, nationality, and class.

Their position is that no singular gendered experience defines women or men, and the norms of one culture should not be imposed on another in an attempt to improve women’s and children’s human rights. Law professor Isabelle Gunning (1997) put the challenge this way: Instead of being “arrogant perceivers” of the world who judge other cultures based on the ethnocentric view of their own culture as the norm, people should strive to be “world travelers” (p. 352). To be world travelers means to be ethnographers, to try to view other cultures from their members’ perspectives rather than one’s own. To be world travelers also means to recognize the interconnections between cultures. This requires not only observing the other culture but also being willing to turn that same critical lens back on one’s own culture, including examining how one’s cultural practices contribute to the oppression of other cultures. These scholars call for an oppositional perspective.

Authors from this perspective emphasize the experiences and voices of multiple gendered/sexed people, particularly racial minorities living in the West and those living in non-Western, nonindustrialized, noncapitalist countries. They argue that White, Western, educated feminists have had the most to say in defining women’s experiences and have falsely assumed that their worldview represents all women, consequently portraying other women as passive, backward, unenlightened, oppressed, undereducated, and needing help (Kapur, 2005). These scholars make clear the role of privilege.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) outlined the failures of White Western feminists’ studies of third-world women and women of color:

To define feminism purely in gendered terms assumes that our consciousness of being “women” has nothing to do with race, class, nation, or sexuality, just with gender. But no one “becomes a woman” (in Simone de Beauvoir’s sense) purely because she is female. Ideologies of womanhood have as much to do with class and race as they have to do with sex. Thus, during the period of American slavery, constructions of white womanhood as chaste, domesticated, and morally pure had everything to do with corresponding constructions of black slave women as promiscuous, available plantation workers. It is the intersections of the various systemic networks of class, race, (hetero)sexuality, and nation, then, that positions us as “women.” (p. 55)

Mohanty (2003) urged everyone to recognize “the application of the notion of women as a homogeneous category to women in the Third World colonizes and appropriates the pluralities of the simultaneous location

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of different groups of women in social class and ethnic frameworks; in doing so it ultimately robs them of their historical and political agency” (p. 39). An intersectional approach to understanding gender/sex is necessary.

Global feminists urge a consideration of all hierarchies and how they interact. A sex-only approach misidentifies third-world men as the root cause of third-world women’s oppression, not capitalist colonial systems. This creates a dynamic that English professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) described as “white men saving brown women from brown men” (p. 297). This is not a dynamic confined only to colonial times. Dana Cloud (2004) provided a trenchant analysis of images circulated by Time.com of Afghan people while the U.S. administration was building public support for the 2001 invasion of and war in Afghanistan. Focusing on the women as veiled and oppressed, the images appealed to White men to save Brown women from Brown men and evoked a paternalistic stance toward the women of Afghanistan. Power is at the center of their analysis.

So-called third-world people and the colonization of them can exist in any country, including the United States. Chicana author and activist Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) explored the ways in which living on the U.S.- Mexican border shapes mestiza (mixed-race) women in Borderlands/La Frontera. Throughout this work, Anzaldúa moved between English and Spanish, detailing the process and purpose of communication, constantly reminding the reader of their role as a person positioned on the border between two cultures. As part of the exploration of political and personal borderlands, Anzaldúa, like other Chicana feminists, created a space in which to perform multiple identities (Flores, 1996; Palczewski, 1996).

Rhetorician Raka Shome (1996) explained why the study of communication and imperialism is important. Postcolonialism, as a theoretical orientation, examines the social, gendered, economic, and environmental impacts of colonization and the ways in which colonial ideologies have continued to exist in contemporary institutions in the form of neocolonialism. In the United States, this also means attention to settler colonialism, or how the settling of the lands that became the United States displaced Native peoples. As “a critical perspective that primarily seeks to expose the Eurocentrism and imperialism of Western discourses,” it asks two related questions:

How do Western discursive practices, in their representations of the world and of themselves, legitimize the contemporary global power structures? To what extent do the cultural texts of nations such as the United States and England reinforce the neo-imperial political practices of these nations? (Shome, 1996, p. 41)

Shome explained that a focus on communication is necessary because “discourses have become one of the primary means of imperialism” (p. 42). Although “in the past, imperialism was about controlling the ‘native’ by colonizing her or him territorially, now imperialism is more about subjugating the ‘native’ by colonizing her or him discursively” (p. 42) by forcibly changing gender and national identities and values. The tremendous reach of Western media, the universality of English (a legacy of earlier territorial imperialism), the way in which academics have named and defined the “native” as “other,” and the creation of economic dependency all

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mean that attention to communication patterns is central to understanding how colonialism persists (see also Shome & Hegde, 2002). They note the role of communication to construct social reality.

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Queer Theory

Queer theorists challenge noncritical approaches’ use of binary categories such as gender (feminine/masculine), sex (female/male, woman/man), and sexuality (homosexual/heterosexual); contest heteronormativity; and offer a politics that is not tied to stable identity categories (McDonald, 2015). Queer theorists do not deny that identity categories exist. Instead they argue that the categories should be analyzed because identity is, in the words of Heather Love (2011), “spoiled, partial, never fully achieved, but sticky, familiar, and hard to lose completely” (p. 185).

Queer theory argues that social categories artificially restrict people’s perceptions. Thus, when communication scholars use the word queer, they do so “to denote bodies, identities, and enactments that challenge and/or reimagine normative gender and sexual arrangements” (LeMaster, 2015, p. 170). Queer theorists operate with an oppositional perspective.

As a form of study, queer theory is the “process by which people have made dissident sexuality articulate,” meaning “available to memory, and sustained through collective activity” (Warner, 2002, pp. 17, 203). Queer theory creates a language that names and makes present those who live outside the binaries. Queer theory critiques the categories used to understand gender, sex, and sexuality as part of the very hierarchies that maintain privilege for some groups over others. Queer theorists “contest and deconstruct identity categories by conceptualizing identities as multiple, fluid, unstable, changeable, and constantly evolving” (McDonald, 2015, p. 319). Queer theory is one of the clearest locations where the categories themselves become the subject of study.

Queer theory questions all forms of sex and sexuality categorization because it addresses “the full range of power-ridden normativities of sex” (Berlant & Warner, 1995, p. 345), particularly heteronormativity. Queer theory makes clear the variety of ways in which heterosexuality is composed of practices that have very little to do with sex (Warner, 2002, p. 198). When it comes to thinking about sex, sexuality, and gender, queer theory calls for a “rethinking of both the perverse and the normal” (p. 345). For queer theorists, desire is a focus of study, including the “categorization of desiring subjects” and what allows some desires to “pass as normal, while others are rendered wrong or evil” (Giffney, 2004, p. 74). Queer theorists challenge hegemonic understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality.

By recognizing and examining connections among sexual desire, gender, sex, and sexual orientation, this approach broadens the study of gender/sex in communication in important ways. For example, English professor J. Halberstam (1998) showed that studying women performing masculinity may reveal more about cultural assumptions of masculinity than studying men, for whom society assumes the relationship is normal. Halberstam’s (2005) study of drag kings (women and men who expressly perform masculinity, like Mike Myers in Austin Powers) exposed some of the absurdity of gender norms and how gender functions as “a kind of imitation [or copy] for which there is no original” (Butler, 1991, p. 21, italics in original). Halberstam’s oppositional perspective made hegemonic norms more visible.

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In communication studies, queer theory critiques the heteronormativity of much research in family and interpersonal communication. The family, for example, is not a neutral or natural institution, but “a primary vehicle through which heteronormative ideologies are mobilized” (Chevrette, 2013, p. 173). But emerging research offers an alternative. As Roberta Chevrette (2013) compellingly argued in their Communication Theory essay, “Queering communication, and ‘feminizing’ queer theory, requires scholars to be theoretically diverse, to utilize mixed methods, and to frame research questions with power, language, sexuality, and difference in mind” (p. 185).

Cultural Critic Wesley Morris reflected on the effect of three pop culture icons: Prince, David Bowie, and George Michael, all of whom died in 2016. All three rose to prominence in a time of hyper-masculinity during the 1980s: “Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career as an action hero began. Sylvester Stallone moving from Rocky not just to Rambo, but to things like Cobra and Over the Top. This was a time when Michael Douglas was the sexiest man alive.” In assessing their impact on understandings of masculinity, Morris said the following about the three performers:

Prince: “And so you have this tension between straight culture—and you have, in somebody like Prince, this person who is really queering the difference between these two. He was singing about heterosexual sex while looking anything but conventionally heterosexual.”

George Michael: “I think that by the time the ‘Faith’ video came around—it was his first solo album—he wanted to have a look that separated him from Wham! And this very sort of butch, rockabilly thing that he went for was so different than the other George Michael that it was arresting. That video just completely eroticized him: I mean, the camera is rising up his body as moving around this contraption that’s spinning. It’s great.”

David Bowie: “He made every aspect of what was normal about being human seem foreign. I think that Ziggy Stardust period was probably the most obviously queer period that he performed in. He was interested in this makeup and these platforms and this hair, and it was neither male nor female, and I think that was what was so disconcerting about him. “But also, if you were a kid, it was kind of weirdly exciting, because these ideas of gender and masculinity and femininity are these acquired notions. I think that if you’re ignorant of what they signify, you see this person signifying none of it and it kind of blows your mind.”

(as cited in Shapiro, 2016)

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Critical/Cultural Theories Conclusion

Despite the range of approaches, critical/cultural approaches theorize that one can never understand gender and sex unless one studies broad cultural systems that sustain power differences. Critical/cultural approaches emphasize that reality is constructed through communication and that social reality contains systems of hierarchy and power differentials. Thus, gender differences are never seen just as differences but always as possible patterns that expose relations of power.

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Applying Gender Theory: Some Useful Criteria

In this chapter, we outlined three primary approaches (biological, psychological, critical/cultural) used by researchers, popular media, and laypeople to explain gender in communication. They have different underlying assumptions about how people conceptualize, study, and explain gender/sex. Our goal has been to help you better identify and examine your own and others’ assumptions before our upcoming chapters present more specifics about gender in communication.

After reviewing these approaches to studying gender/sex in communication, we find the multiple theories and research practices useful, depending on the precise question studied. Given that gender is complex and diverse, it makes sense that complex and diverse theories are necessary, and that the influence of biology, psychology, and social hierarchies are likely interrelated. To make clear the way the theories interact, we offer the diagram shown in Figure 2.2.

Figure 2.2 Theory Chart

The three approaches differ in the expansiveness of their assumed cause of gender, with the critical/cultural approach being the most encompassing.

We now offer some fundamental criteria for, and questions to empower, you to do your own critical thinking about gender/sex in research and popular culture.

Criterion 1: Is an intersectional approach being used?

An intersectional approach is needed to avoid stereotypes and to more accurately reflect the diversity that exists in gender/sex identities. Because many other identity ingredients intersect with gender, gender diversity makes more sense than gender differences tracked along a single axis. There is not just one femininity or one masculinity. Given the multitude of variables that influence who persons are, it makes sense that there would never be just two gendered types of communication. Like Jordynn Jack (2012), we embrace moving beyond binary gender differences and toward gender copia.

Communication studies professor Celeste M. Condit (1998) outlined the benefits of a gender diversity

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perspective. First, “the gender diversity perspective advocates respect and care for persons of all genders and gender types (as long as those types do not directly harm others or infringe on the human rights of others)” (p. 177). It is inclusive. Second, it reorients research in an invigorating way: “Instead of trying to describe how men and women speak differently, we can begin to explore the range of gendered options available to people” (p. 183). It diverts attention from the study of how women’s gender limits communication and directs it to the study of how a range of people have used diverse gender styles to speak passionately, ethically, and effectively to their audiences. A gender diversity approach provides a more realistic, more interesting, and wider scope for analyzing gender/sex in communication.

How will you know if an approach is intersectional? Here are some questions you can ask:

Does the source study sex or gender or both? Research that identifies only the sex of each person in the study, and then draws conclusions about gender, may be unintentionally conflating these concepts. Does the gender/sex analysis include other possible interdependent influences on one’s behavior, and on how others perceive that behavior, such as how one’s gender intersects with ethnicity, age/generation, social class, physical or mental ability, and nationality? Does the analysis consider gender/sex differences and similarities? Does the source offer nuanced conclusions? For example, claiming gender/sex differences exist does not tell how much difference was found. In a study of sex and self-disclosure, Dindia and Allen (1992) claimed statistically significant differences, but in looking closer they admit only about 1% of the differences in self-disclosure could be attributed to sex differences (Dindia, 2006). Does the source account for power differences? Intersectionality is not about identity alone; it also explains power. Does the source account for how the same act of communication might be interpreted differently depending on how the body communicating is perceived and where the person is placed in social hierarchies of power? For example, anger when expressed by a White male body might be perceived as righteous indignation and passionate defense of an idea, while anger expressed by a Black male body is perceived as incipient violence and anger expressed by a Black woman is perceived as mental imbalance (Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003). Keep in mind that descriptions of behavior alone tell little about why the behaviors exist or what the social consequences might be. Others might interpret the same behaviors very differently depending on the sex, ethnicity, age, and so on of the person doing them.

To examine how people communicate, one needs to look beyond gender/sex. Communication differences and similarities between people are rarely, if ever, determined solely by the sex of the speaker.

Criterion 2: Is the focus on communication?

We suggest placing communication at the center of analysis. Communication creates, maintains, and alters identities and relationships. Communication creates gender/sex; gender/sex is not a static identity that produces communication. Gender/sex is a communicative process, not a fixed attribute.

This does not mean things like economics, politics, psychology, or biology are irrelevant to gender/sex.

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Indeed, we have demonstrated the value of combining information from diverse fields. We emphasize communication because it is important to recognize people have degrees of agency in creating and communicating their gendered/sexed identities, and people are compelled to follow social norms through communication in relational, institutional, or cultural interactions.

Here are some questions you can ask:

Are claims about gender based on specific observations of communication, mere generalizations, or anecdotal experiences? Many popular publications and media products are based on cultural assumptions, not careful analysis of particular data collected. Are the communication process and the possible patterns it creates the focus? People create meaning by practicing recognizable patterns of interaction (such as norms of taking turns to speak) or unique interpersonal patterns (such as both parties using a particular emoticon in text messages). These patterns create meanings. Claims based on an isolated example may only serve to maintain stereotypes.

Criterion 3: Does the source recognize unique context-dependent influences on behaviors?

Surprisingly, most of the research on gender in communication has not traditionally taken into account unique situational influences (Dindia & Canary, 2006; Eckert & McConnell-Ginnet, 1992, 2011). This is problematic because any act of communication can have multiple meanings and serve a variety of functions (Tannen, 1994). Without context, researchers fall back on stereotypical cisgender norms to simply label behaviors as masculine or feminine. Communication context includes the physical, social (West & Turner, 2014), cultural (Campbell, Martin, & Fabos, 2015), and psychological elements of a given interaction (Palomares, 2012).

Here are some questions you can ask:

How might the physical context influence behavior? Consider the immediate setting, time, place, and so on. How might the social context influence behavior? This refers to the type of relationship such as interpersonal, small group, organizational, public speaking, or social media. How might larger cultural influences, such as social norms, values, languages, inequalities, and violence, influence communication? How do the participants view their own interactions? What is going on for a person in the moment can be very telling. People can play active roles in creating, maintaining, and/or challenging their gendered identities. The lesson here is that you should not assume a person always talks the same way regardless of context.

Criterion 4: Are there possible power implications?

Power can take many forms, and it exists on many levels. The pervasiveness of power is a part of the reason it is difficult to recognize and so influential.

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Here are some questions you can ask:

What roles do the participants play and is power embedded in these roles (e.g., parent/child, boss/worker, friends)? Are there signs of some people trying to control others or trying to resist control? Do the participants seem free to be themselves? Can you identify ways in which power might be embedded in the context (e.g., cultural expectations, standard organization policies or procedures)?

We note power separately to mark its importance. When studying groups defined by their gender, ethnicity, class, and so on, identity distinctions are rarely different and equal. The nature of the distinctions, the values assigned, and the power attributed to those distinctions are culturally determined and decidedly unequal most of the time.

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Conclusion

A more productive way to study the topic of gender in communication is to use a broader lens of analysis that recognizes that theory and knowledge construction are rhetorical and political acts, as are people’s efforts to interpret, embrace, and reject them. This does not mean that there is no objective reality but rather that reality means nothing until people give that reality meaning as they play active roles in its construction and deconstruction. People’s perceptions are their reality. This is no less true for researchers. Understanding the link between expectations and reality brings with it an awesome ethical responsibility to attend to how one communicates and how one studies gender in communication. It also represents an exciting adventure through which we travel in the remainder of this book.

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Key Concepts

biological determinism 37 biological theories 30 critical/cultural theories 30 domains of power 45 gender diversity perspective 52 hegemonic masculinity 46 hegemony 45 patriarchy 46 postcolonialism 48 privileges 44 psychoanalytic theories 37 psychological theories 30 queer theory 49 relational theory 40 social learning 39 social reality 42 stereotype threat 34

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Discussion Questions 1. What expectations do you have for appropriate gender-related behaviors? Where do you think these expectations come from?

What are your underlying theories about gender given what you have identified as the sources of gender? 2. How do biological theories explain the formation of gender and its role in communication? Identify examples from popular culture

that embrace this theory. 3. How do psychological theories explain the formation of gender and its role in communication? Identify examples from popular

culture that embrace this theory. 4. How do critical/cultural theories explain the formation of gender and its role in communication? Identify examples from popular

culture that embrace this theory.

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Chapter 3 Gendered/Sexed Voices

Time magazine and Huffington Post wrote about it. Kim Kardashian and This American Life host Ira Glass do it. Linguists and speech pathologists study it. What is it? Also known as “creaky voice” or glottal fry, vocal fry occurs when speakers lower their vocal pitch at the end of sentences to the lowest register they are capable of producing. This creates irregular vibrations of the vocal cords resulting in a creaky, gravelly sound. If you are still unsure of what it sounds like, for an example visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6r7LhcHHAc (or search “Faith Salie on speaking with vocal fry” on YouTube).

Although women receive the most negative attention for the use of vocal fry (Anderson, Klofstad, Mayew, & Venkatachalam, 2014; Blum, 2016), linguist Penelope Eckert found men are its most frequent users: “So the disparity in people’s noticing is very clear to me. People are busy policing young women’s language, and nobody is policing older or younger men’s language” (as cited in NPR, 2015). People perceive sex/gender differences in voice that simply do not exist.

Voice researcher Cate Madill (2015) explained that everyone uses some vocal fry, usually when stressed or tired, and it is actually a normally occurring feature in many tonal languages such as Vietnamese, Wu Chinese, and Burmese. Madill reported that lower voices are perceived almost universally as more authoritative or higher status. Thus, vocal fry is fine if you are a man, an older woman, or a person with a position of higher status, meaning “all this commentary about vocal fry is not actually about the voice, but about power and status, and who is allowed to have it.” Differences in perception also depend on who is hearing the voice. The listener’s age (Anderson et al., 2014), sex, and region (Yuasa, 2008) affected their judgment of vocal fry.

Vocal fry illustrates a number of points about gendered/sexed voices. People often perceive gendered difference in voices that are not actually there. Power rather than sex explains perceived difference in communication styles. And no universal gender assessment of voice makes sense because gendered talk varies according to the topic being discussed, speaker status, how salient gender is in the interaction, and other people present (Ye & Palomares, 2013). When you take into account a speaker’s intersectional identities and how a context calls for unique norms of behavior (such as legal court testimony or a chat with a friend), what were presumed to be gender/sex differences in behavior are often better explained by other influences (Dindia & Canary, 2006; Hinde, 2005; Schleff, 2008).

This chapter helps you think about how you do gender, and how others do gender to you, in your daily conversations. Mundane interactions—conversations—are the most pervasive micro-process during which people perform gender. Conversation is the process of two or more parties working interactively to create meanings through the exchange of verbal and nonverbal cues within a given context. Conversations include content (i.e., verbal and nonverbal vocalizations) and structure (e.g., social expectations for turns at talk that build and end conversations).

Conversations require work. The concept of conversation work makes clear that some degree of intent, effort, and cooperation is required in the seemingly easy turn-taking process of talking to others (Brown & Levinson,

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1987; Tracy & Robles, 2013). For example, when Sam says, “Thanks for going to the movie with me. I really liked it,” Casey will likely feel compelled to build on that comment in some way. Casey might say, “Sure, I wasn’t doing anything,” or “I liked it, too.” Each speaker has taken a conversational turn and, if they continue to respond to each other, they will build a conversation. The topic may change, their roles in carrying the conversation may shift, but they each work to keep the conversation going.

People do gender through conversation. Thus, we first examine how conversational work itself can have gendered expectations by focusing on three linguistic forms people use in everyday talk: politeness norms, humor, and swearing. They are by no means the only components of conversation used to do gender, but they offer compelling examples of how conversational work is often done to construct and deconstruct gender.

Next, we examine how people do gendered identity work through conversation as they present who they are and negotiate that identity with their conversational partners (Brown & Levinson, 1987; De Fina, Schiffrin, & Bamberg, 2006; Tracy & Robles, 2013). Individuals do not have exclusive control over constructing their identities. Identities also are constructed when people respond to each other in conversation. Social psychologists call this altercasting, a concept that “highlights how the way we talk to and act toward others (alters) puts them in roles (casts them)” (Tracy & Robles, 2013, p. 28). Conversational partners may reinforce your identity, restrict it, contest it, and/or embellish it. Altercasting plays a central role in maintaining stereotypical gender role expectations. Altercasting does not mean people have to accept the roles in which they are cast, but the potential for negative judgments exists should they violate expected roles. To illustrate gendered identity work, we examine stereotypical masculine and feminine identity markers in conversation, as well as more recent research on trans and LGBQ identity markers.

Finally, we examine how conversations are central to relationship work. Relationships take continuous effort by all parties involved. Conversations enable people to create, sustain, negotiate, and/or end their interpersonal connections with others (Baxter, 2011). Interpersonal communication scholar Steve Duck (2002) explained that by the time two parties exchange their second utterance, they have a shared history and that history will influence what comes next in their interactions. Cultural norms informed by age, gender, ethnicity, and power influence how relationships are negotiated. To demonstrate this, we examine children’s play, ineffective conflict management in adult romantic relationship, and verbal aggression and abuse in relationships.

Conversation work, identity work, and relationship work occur simultaneously. Together they reveal the realistic, context-specific ways in which intersectional gender identities are constructed in unique social contexts. This chapter demonstrates that

popularly presumed gender/sex differences in talk are not innate but socially constructed, stereotypic expectations can lead to gendered perceptions and judgments of behaviors, people have more agency and diversity in actual talk than simple binary stereotypes suggest, and behaviors are often more about power and other intersecting identities than gender/sex alone.

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Conversation Work

People do conversation work when they follow (or violate) socially recognized patterns and rules, including rules about politeness, what is considered funny and who gets to be funny, and who gets to swear and when. Women, children, and upper-class men have typically been expected to follow politeness rules more carefully. In fact, polite behaviors and feminine behaviors are seen as synonymous (Mills, 2003). In contrast, humor and swearing have traditionally been seen as more crude, reserved for men performing hegemonic masculinity (Coates, 2013).

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Politeness

Feminist linguist Sara Mills (2003) noted, “Linguistic politeness lies implicitly at the heart of a great deal of gender and language research” (p. 1; see also Baxter, 2011; Brown & Levinson, 1978). Politeness is commonly and historically thought of as having good manners, saying “please” and “thank you,” and apologizing to avoid offending others. It has traditionally been relegated to (White) women’s domain. It is associated with stereotypical feminine conversation qualities tied to women’s traditional responsibilities as caregiver and nurturer, including keeping harmony; showing interest in others; listening; and being supportive with verbalized expressions “oh,” “aha,” and “mmm.” Politeness has also been associated with the manners of sophistication needed to fit into upper- or middle-class society (Eelen, 2014). Politeness can be used to regulate gender, social class, and race, but the cues of politeness may vary by culture.

Identifying and interpreting politeness behaviors is complex because interpretations must account for context. Everyone is capable of using a range of politeness skills to negotiate social situations; your gender/sex does not determine your level of politeness. Thus, one cannot assume politeness or any other conversational component is innately, consistently, or universally gendered/sexed, even though traditionally some women have been held to higher expectations of politeness than some men (e.g., Coates, 2013; Mills, 2003). Furthermore, politeness is too narrowly defined, limited to upper-class expectations, and its performance is not always genuine. More research is needed on gendered links to politeness behaviors.

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Humor

In a 2007 issue of Vanity Fair magazine, columnist Christopher Hitchens asked: “Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women?” Answering his own question, Hitchens explained that men use humor to attract women and “loosen” them up, whereas “women have no corresponding need to appeal to men this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift.” Hitchens’s question and response is sexist and heterosexist (and not very funny). But he is not the first to make such a declaration: “The idea of the humorless female has been embedded in Western culture for at least the past century” (Crawford, 1995, p. 135).

A traditional assumption has been that humor is a part of the culture of masculinity. Various explanations exist for why humor is perceived as a masculine trait: Humor is associated with public figures and White men have traditionally dominated public life; and humor is often vulgar or rough, traits associated with masculinity and working-class identities (Coates, 2014). Conversely, it is simply not considered ladylike to be funny (Kotthoff, 2006).

Expressed verbally and/or nonverbally, humor is a quality that usually leads to positive feelings expressed by laughter or a smile from the observer. Although most everyone uses humor, the concept of humor is gendered, raced, classed, and culturally defined. Humor is about power and can be effective in getting another person to comply, conform, or submit.

Helga Kotthoff (2006) identified four dimensions of humor as especially gender-, power-, and relationship- sensitive. First, status: People of higher status seem to be at more liberty to use humor, sometimes teasing persons of lower status. Status humor can reinforce and/or reduce hierarchies, as when a boss shows their more human side by making fun of themselves. Second, aggressiveness: defined as teasing, mocking, parody or ridicule. Boys have been found to display more aggressive humor than girls, and ritualized humorous attacks on each other have been more common among boys’ and men’s groups. Third, body politics/sexuality: Across cultures people used humor to talk about taboo topics, such as sex. A wide range of body politics/sexuality humor exists, from shared sexual banter to sexual harassment, and from innuendo to overt graphic claims. Whether or not these behaviors are received as humorous depends on the gender/sex of the participants, age, nature of their relationship, and context. Fourth, social alignment: This is the giving and receiving of social support, cooperative conversational style, and teasing among close friends. Some women have been found to prefer the use of collaborative humor to create intimacy and solidarity (Coates, 2014). Some men have been found to use humor as social support in nonromantic relationships, in the form of teasing, friendly competition, playful punches, or backslaps (Swain, 1989; Wood & Fixmer-Oraiz, 2017).

Although there is evidence of stereotypical gendered roles and styles in humor, Rod Martin (2014) found more similarities than differences between men and women “in self-reported tendencies to perceive, enjoy, and create humor in daily life” (p. 144). The rigid gendered expectations around humor seem to be lessening, enabling all to more fully explore the productive uses of humor.

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Women’s use of humor, especially for political ends, has a robust history. From Anna Howard Shaw and Sojourner Truth to Ann Richards and Flo Kennedy, humor has played an integral role in women’s political activism. For example, journalist Marie Shear offered this simple definition of feminism in 1986: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” The phrase became enormously popular and appeared on T- shirts, posters, and mugs, providing a way to poke fun at those who unnecessarily fear feminism.

We identify four common functions of feminist humor. First, it creates a space for marginalized voices. Humor suspends predominant social arrangements so that roles may be tried on and voices may be exorcised and exercised. Second, as space is opened, challenges to taboo emerge. In feminist humor, women are allowed to recognize their bodies and not be ashamed. They are allowed to be simultaneously intellectual and sexual, even aggressively sexual, as seen in Eve Ensler’s (1998) award-winning play Vagina Monologues and its more gender-inclusive versions today (Brighe, 2016). Third, feminist humor challenges stereotypes (Kaufman & Blakeley, 1994). Comedian Ellen DeGeneres models this approach by playing the role of the innocent nice White butch girl next door while she challenges assumptions about comedy as men’s domain and marriage as heterosexuals’ domain (Mizejewski, 2014). Fourth, by breaking taboos and challenging stereotypes, funny feminists are politically subversive (Barreca, 1991). Humor challenges power relations, standards of who may speak, and who may speak about what. It is powerful as a subversive tool because, unlike traditionally rational attacks on systemic uses and abuses of power, humor works on a nonrational level as well.

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Swearing

Former U.S. secretary of state Madeline Albright noted she nearly gave then Joint Chiefs’ chair Colin Powell an aneurysm with her bad language. In one instance, as she watched a video of Cuban pilots celebrating the downing of two civilian U.S. planes, Albright responded, “That’s not cojones, that’s cowardice” (cited in Mills, 2003, p. 193). Even in this highly emotional moment and with her power as a world leader, she was expected to speak lady-like and refrain from directly expressing anger. Swearing does not serve all users equally to express emotion.

Perhaps more than any other conversational tool, swearing has a history of being considered men’s talk. In fact, several states once had laws regulating swearing. A Michigan law required, “Any person who shall use any indecent, immoral, obscene, vulgar or insulting language in the presence or hearing of any woman or child shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.” The law suggested that swearing was reserved for the company of men. It took until 2015 to repeal this archaic and unconstitutional law (Feldscher, 2015).

Swearing uses expletives or offensive language to express strong emotion, whether anger at specific others or simply general frustration. As potent language, it can sometimes achieve impressive effects (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 2013). Today, many adults and children swear, regardless of gender/sex, social class, or ethnicity. And yet swearing is still perceived as more acceptable for men given “swearing has historically been used by men in the company of other men as a sign of their toughness, manhood” and for group bonding (Coates, 2003, p. 46). Ample evidence proves that taboo language has been a defining part of all-male subcultures, including the military, fraternities, and sports, “as well as in male peer groups on the street as a way of constructing solidarity” (Coates, 2013, p. 153).

Swearing serves multiple functions. First, it can provide emotional release. Second, people use swearing to perform identity that is gendered, classed, generational, and sometimes raced. Third, people use swearing to create conversations and unique relationships. Fourth, swearing can assert and/or resist power. A speaker can accomplish many of these functions in the same utterance (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 2013).

Robin Lakoff (1975) long ago claimed swearing was a privilege reserved for men to exert power and express emotion while women were expected to speak indirectly and politely. Lakoff’s work has since been challenged by evidence that many women use profanity and many men do not (e.g., Charteris-Black & Seale, 2009; Mendoza-Denton, 2008) and that swearing’s effectiveness depends on a person’s relative power and the social context.

Research on swearing and illness makes clear the relationship between swearing and gender/sex is complicated, as rules surrounding masculinity and femininity limit possible forms of expression. In interviews with British male cancer patients, researchers found a younger, higher socioeconomic class of men commonly used the word fucking to discuss their illness (Charteris-Black & Seale, 2009). The researchers suggested the relationship between swearing and masculinity may not simply be about the right to use profanity, but about their frustration that hyper-masculine expectations did not allow them to express their fear or grief in other

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ways (such as crying). In contrast, in a study of women dealing with illness, some swore as a form of emotional release, but the expression often came at the cost of losing the emotional support of others. People did not want to hear them swear. The researchers pointed out that swearing for women in their 50s might have been perceived by others as taboo, which reinforced the notion that swearing has age and gender connotations (Robbins et al., 2011).

Who is allowed to swear where and when are forms of social control and reveal the potential power of swearing. Some of what can make swearing powerful are (1) the nonverbal way in which it is said, (2) the words used, (3) its link to masculinity and aggression, (4) swearing as a form of violence, and (5) swearing to empower a speaker or group.

First, a part of the power of profanity is that when expressed in anger, the speaker usually increases their volume and vocal inflection, and adds facial and bodily gestures for emphasis. When expressed this way, particularly in cultures where relative inexpressiveness is the norm, swearing can be a strategy to demand compliance to a request by attempting to frighten or intimidate others.

Second, not all swear words are equally powerful. Kristy Beers Fἂgersten (2012) found students and nonstudents used a wide range of swear words, but eight were most common: ass, bitch, cunt, damn, dick, fuck, hell, shit, and possible inflections and derivations such as asshole or motherfucker. Of these, “the single most important contributor to the swearing paradox is the word ‘fuck.’ It is consistently cited among the most frequently used swear words and consistently rates among the most offensive” (p. 108). Other swear words have misogynist connotations, as in bitch (referring to a female dog), son of a bitch, and motherfucker. It is difficult to think of strongly offensive words that are not homophobic or misogynistic.

Third, swearing has been relegated to the realm of aggressive masculinity. Fἂgersten (2012) found African American and White men tended to disapprove of women swearing, particularly using the more offensive word fuck. This meant the more powerful swear words were reserved for men’s use. However, Fἂgersten found fewer gender differences than previous research in the actual use of swearing.

Fourth, swearing is powerful because it can be a form of aggression and violence. The seemingly habitual, less overt forms of violence create a context in which physical forms become normative in a culture (Kissling, 1991; Kramarae, 1992). Swearing can be used to convey aggression and commit verbal abuse.

Fifth, some women and men use swearing to seek empowerment (unfortunately, sometimes at the expense of others). This is visible when some young adolescents and teens attempt to assert their independence by swearing. In a study of Irish college students who identified themselves as drinking friends, the researcher did not find gender/sex differences in swearing and concluded the women used profanity not to try to talk like men, but because it was a fun part of the pub culture. They enjoyed the shock value swearing sometimes had on others, and they wanted to model other women they admired who did not follow the predominant norm that women should not swear (Stapleton, 2003).

In sum, politeness, humor, and swearing offer three examples of the ways in which conversational work has been gendered/sexed in binary, stereotypical ways and how individuals and groups attempt to strategically use

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these tools to accomplish their conversational goals.

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Identity Work

People use conversation to assert individual, interpersonal, and group identities. This can be accomplished in overt ways such as introducing yourself as Ms., Mrs., Mx., Mr., Senorita, Professor, Doctor, or by your name. But identity is more commonly accomplished in the myriad, subtle ways you speak—your conversational style.

For example, communication scholar Karla Scott (2013) studied how young Black professional women used conversation to perform competence while faced with the double, intersecting oppressions of race and gender/sex in predominantly White work environments. The 33 participants’ reflections revealed that the “‘preferred outcome’ of their communication strategies is to construct an alternate identity of a Black woman and redefine Black womanhood” (p. 318). They were well aware of the stereotypes of Black women’s conversational style as “overbearing, too outspoken, strong, angry” (p. 319). One of the participants, Cathy, described:

When I step into a setting where . . . I’m the only Black, I’m feeling like all eyes are upon me, for my entire race, especially Black women. My tone changes, the way I speak, I speak properly, following the rules of language arts [laughter from other women]—not that I don’t do it anyway, but I’m more alert, making sure that I don’t stumble over certain words. (p. 319)

The research concluded, “These young Black women perceive themselves as having some measure of control in dispelling myths about Black women through the use of specific communicative strategies that are immediately available and well developed from a field of experience” (p. 325). They perform identity work through their conversational style.

Conversational style refers to a person’s tendency to communicate verbally and nonverbally in a particular way, such as being assertive, indirect, argumentative, collaborative, polite, or animated (Norton, 1983). Your style is created through your rate of speech, vocal inflection, vocal pitch, pronunciation of words, volume, amount of talk and silence, how you tend to take turns in conversation, and even topic preferences. Put simply, “style is a combination of what we do and how we do it” (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 2013, p. 248). As the above example illustrates, it can also include tone, grammar, and enunciation.

The presumption of opposing feminine and masculine conversational styles has dominated popular culture and media across many cultures for some time, even though actual research does not support such claims (e.g., Canary & Hause, 1993; Dindia & Canary, 2006; Goldsmith, & Fulfs, 1999; Hyde, 2005; Leaper & Robnett, 2011). Holding on to these stereotypes discredits the behavioral flexibility of all genders/sexes and fails to recognize what the research actually shows. Unique contexts and intersectional identities such as race, ethnicity, social class, national origin, and language have far more influence on conversational styles than gender differences (e.g., Carbaugh, 2002; Hall, 2009; Kikoski & Kikoski, 1999; Kochman, 1990; Ye & Palomares, 2013). We describe feminine and masculine conversational styles, gay and lesbian conversational styles, and trans and gender non-conforming conversational styles here. One caveat: We know that by

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describing them, we risk reifying their normative power. However, it is helpful to understand the norm against which most gendered performances tend to be judged. Research has shown perceived gender/sex differences in conversational style far exceed any performed ones (Kirtley & Weaver, 1999).

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Feminine Conversational Style

The primary characteristic attributed to feminine style is rapport talk: talk that focuses on building relationships, connecting collaboratively with another person, and showing empathy. Speakers using this style are said to view talk as the primary means of negotiating and maintaining relationships. To build rapport, speakers use verbal and nonverbal cues that convey support to the other person (offering affirmations or questions that convey interest) and seek cooperation rather than competition (Coates, 1997; Johnson, 1996; Tannen, 1990; Wood & Fixmer-Oraiz, 2017).

A second characteristic attributed to feminine style is indirect communication, which includes hedges (“I am sort of thinking . . .” rather than “I think what we should do is . . .”); qualifiers (“Well, I may be wrong, but . . .”); tag questions (“I think we should do this, don’t you?”); and indirect requests (“There is a hole in my glove” rather than asking “Could you buy me some new gloves?”). Indirectness softens the claims or requests being made and is perceived as more polite (Mills, 2003). In what was considered a groundbreaking article, feminist linguist Robin Lakoff (1975) argued women strategically learn to use indirectness to better accomplish their goals as relatively powerless speakers in a patriarchal culture.

Third, feminine talk is said to be more collaborative than masculine talk (Aries, 2006; Coates, 1996; Holmes, 1997). One person’s story becomes the group’s story or an invitation for others in the group to share their stories (Coates, 1997). The goal is to catch up on each other’s lives by sharing intimate details (Holmes, 1997). As such, simultaneous talk is seen more as collaboration and enthusiasm, not as interruption, making the organization of the story less linear.

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Masculine Conversational Style

The primary characteristic attributed to masculine style is report talk: talk that focuses on instrumentality or task orientation, asserting oneself, and competitiveness. Those who use a masculine style are said to use talk as a tool to accomplish a goal. The goal can be to complete a task, solve a problem, exert control, assert oneself, or gain independence and status (Cameron, 1997; Coates, 1997; Wood & Fixmer-Oraiz, 2017). Masculine style avoids personal disclosure and vulnerability, which is typically associated with feminine style. The focus on using talk to accomplish tasks also indicates masculine speakers will talk less than feminine speakers; talk is a means to an end, not an end in itself as when using talk to do relational work.

Second, masculine talk is described as direct and assertive (Mulac, 2006; Wood & Fixmer-Oraiz, 2017). Direct communication straightforwardly states what a person wants, thinks, or feels. Being direct and assertive fits well with a speaker who is task-oriented rather than relationship-oriented and with one who uses communication to establish and maintain control or status.

Third, masculine talk such as storytelling is characterized as being largely about status. Men studied tend to prefer to tell stories in ways that helped enhance their status and masculinity (Coates, 1997; Holmes, 1997). In an extensive study, linguist Jennifer Coates (2003) identified five prominent features in young British men’s stories: (1) the stories were about stereotypical masculine topics such as cars, sports, drinking, and technology, and these topics helped detour the conversation away from personal self-disclosure and vulnerability; (2) the stories were told as a series of monologues, not interactively; (3) the organization of stories was chronological or linear; (4) the men used profanity heavily; and (5) the men’s stories stressed achievement or bragging rights. The men engaged in competitive storytelling, seeing who could tell the bigger “fish story.” Storytelling became a competitive sport in a way Coates did not observe in the women’s conversations.

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Gay and Lesbian Conversational Styles

Although sexual orientation and gender are different identity ingredients, Western cultures conflate them. Traditionally, the worst name a boy or man can be called is woman, fag, or femme. The stereotypic expectation that gay speech is highly feminine is a constant source of ridicule, rebuke, and prejudice, even though studies demonstrate observers cannot distinguish gay from straight speakers (Smyth, Jacobs, & Rogers, 2003). Just as heterosexuals might emphasize masculine or feminine speech styles to convey their identities, some gay men choose a flamboyant feminine style when performing drag, to celebrate gay pride, or to protest for gay rights. In using this style, Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet (2013) argued gays are not “doing female,” but “they are extracting expressiveness from the gender binary” (p. 270).

In contrast, lesbian speech style receives little ridicule or attention. Researchers have not been able to identify common features in lesbian speech. This may be because society tends to tolerate a wider range of speaking styles from women than men. Women’s adoption of masculine style is more tolerated than men’s adoption of feminine style. Patriarchal culture mandates closer compliance with hegemonic masculinity for those fighting for the top of a social hierarchy. Also, lesbians are subject to the double oppression of being a woman and being homosexual, so they may simply have less safety to experiment with expression (Cameron, 2011).

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Trans and Gender Non-Conforming Conversational Styles

The claim that the voice is integral to constructing gender identities is clearly illustrated in the voice of a person transitioning genders. If a transwoman has a body that reads woman to others but speaks with a deeper voice, her voice may belie her body, and others may reject her identity as a woman. This seems to be the case, even though the majority of people have a conversational style that is not extremely masculine or feminine. For those who are gender non-conforming, “there is great variation in the extent to which voice and communication changes are undertaken or desired” (Davies, Papp, & Antoni, 2015, p. 120).

Scholars have not completed a great deal of research on transgender voices (Davies et al., 2015), but the work that does exist made a few things clear. Many (not all) transitioning individuals feel vocal change is essential for their new identities. Vocal change is attainable with practice; no surgery is needed. Vocal change involves more than simply raising or lowering pitches. People use a combination of speaking patterns to sound more feminine or masculine. There is no single ideal pitch level that sounds feminine or masculine; rather a range of pitches exists.

The instructions given to sound more masculine or feminine reveal much about cultural stereotypes of binary gendered voice expectations. People who are transitioning often use these stereotypes strategically to attain their desired vocal gendered identities. Together, these findings reveal not only that trans individuals are able to successfully adjust their voices, but that everyone, cis and trans, adapts their voices over time to convey preferred gendered voices.

YouTube Voice Training for Trans Women

Caroland, a trans woman, provided videos in fluent Spanish and English. Her three disclaimers are found in other tutorials as well:

1. You don’t have to alter your voice at all to be a woman. 2. There is no set pitch that you have to reach to have the woman’s [or man’s] voice you want. 3. There are many ways to achieve the voice you want.

—Caroland (2014) Volume 1, with more than 27,000 hits.

To conclude, “speakers who cross the gender divide in this way [vocally] can help us better understand the relationship between gender and the voice as it functions for all speakers” (Zimman, 2012, p. 49). People literally speak themselves and others into a gender identity. Although much of gender is done in subtle, habitual ways, all doing of gender is strategic and has potential social consequences. The question remains: How do these gendered conversational style expectations affect relationships?

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Relationship Work

Relationships do not just happen. Like communication, relationship work is an ongoing, ever-changing process. Like conversation work and identity work, relationship work requires some degree of cooperation from all parties involved. The work is complex because the individuals involved are simultaneously negotiating their individual and relationship identities (Baxter, 2011). Gender/sex is not a primary component of all relationships, but because gender/sex is a component of how people categorize themselves and others, it makes sense that it commonly plays a role in relationship development and maintenance. The following are examples of how gendered identities and gendered interpersonal (one-to-one) or small-group relationships are negotiated through conversation.

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Children’s Play

Gender/sex, along with intersecting identities such as social class and ethnicity, is central to children’s and teen’s relationships due to hegemonic influences (Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2014). Children often help create each other’s identities through relationship play: imitating adults’ speech, creating unique greetings for each other, singing, telling stories, and creating verbal competitions or other power plays. Such play allows children to try on and explore social roles, such as gender/sex. Children’s play is not merely a form of passive socialization where binary gendered identities are imposed on them. Instead, play is a means by which children push back, explore multiple identities, have fun, insult, and negotiate relationships (Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2014).

In relationships, peers monitor each other’s behaviors through communicative strategies such as bullying or gossip to sanction those who do not conform to identity and relationship expectations (Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2014). In a study of working-class boys in Sweden, the researcher observed a pattern of gossiping in front of the targeted boy as a way for the speaker to solicit support and solidarity from other boys (Evaldsson, 2002). This research countered the stereotype that only girls gossip and demonstrated how the boys taunted each other about perceived failures to perform masculine expectations. For example, boys were much more likely to be teased when they expressed anxiety about not being included, cried, wet their pants, or told on others. Similarly, in a study of preschool middle-class Turkish girls, researchers observed sanctioning of other girls for failure to comply with feminine, collaborative play expectations (Kyratzis & Tarim, 2010).

Unfortunately, much of the research on gender in children’s interactions is older and focuses on White children, but in a more recent review of studies looking at children’s talk in diverse ethnographic settings, Goodwin and Kyratzis (2014) found communication behaviors and relationships differed more by age and class than by gender/sex. Older children used more complex communication strategies (e.g., teasing and storytelling), and younger children used less variety (e.g., song or pretend games). In working-class contexts or other social contexts that required one to be tough due to minority group membership or difficult economic situations, girls and boys used more argumentativeness. Although earlier gender research suggested girls’ play focused on creating symmetrical relationships (Tannen, 1990), a multitude of studies showed working-class and middle-class girls built asymmetrical relationships of exclusion, such as by indicating who can and cannot be the leader of a game or by comparing each other in terms of material possessions (Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2014).

Children’s play often occurs in sex-segregated groups. Researchers have observed tendencies toward single-sex play in studies of preschool children from Australia, Italy, Japan, Norway, the Peruvian Aymara, the United States, and Wales. You can probably speculate some of the causes of such segregation: binary gender socialization, fear of perceived differences, gendered toys, anxieties toward the other sex tied to cultural expectations of romance and sexual activities, and gender identity competitions. Some sociolinguistic researchers argued segregation encourages children to develop limited binary masculine or feminine conversation styles because the rules of interaction differ. Boys’ stereotypical play teaches competition and assertion; girl stereotypical play teaches relationship nurturance and collaboration (Maltz & Borker, 1982;

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Tannen, 1990; Wood & Fixmer-Oraiz, 2017). Although many girls learn the rules and play so-called boys games such as soccer and wrestling, many boys consider playing so-called girls’ games taboo, not because they do not know the rules but because they are afraid of retribution or are attempting to distance themselves from anything considered girly (Eliot, 2009b).

Regardless of the gender/sex make-up of friendships, children know how to do relationship work. The giving and receiving of social support—providing emotional support and showing care and concern—is a central element of relationship work. Social support fulfills an innate human need for the help of others, and people use multiple strategies to assist each other (Burleson & MacGeorge, 2002). Having social support is linked to personal well-being and relationship well-being (Goldsmith, 2004). Recent research showed girls and boys in stressful situations provided necessary social support to each other by listening and sympathizing, but with a gender/sex twist. The girls talked about the problem longer and the boys used more humor with age, but the boys and girls all felt closer to their friend after their talk (Rose, Smith, Glick, & Schwartz-Mette, 2016).

Research on children’s conversations demonstrates how children play active roles in simultaneously constructing individual and relationship identities even as diverse gendered approaches are used.

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Ineffective Conflict Management

Conflicts in long-term relationships are inevitable, and the more interdependent two people are the more likely they are to have conflicts over shared resources, values, needs, and so on (Kelley et al., 1983; Wilmot, 1995). Thus, experts suggest one’s communication goal should not necessarily be to end conflicts, but to learn to manage them effectively through conversational work (Guerrero, Andersen, & Afifi, 2018).

Most interpersonal conflict research is on married heterosexual couples. A particularly ineffective communication pattern of heterosexual marital conflict is the demand/withdrawal conflict pattern. The partner who most wants a change demands (through requests, complaints, criticisms, coercion, or other forms of pressure), and the one who does not want that change withdraws (by changing the topic, avoiding eye contact, leaving the room, or just never doing as asked), resulting in a failure to resolve the conflict (Papp, Kouros, & Cummings, 2009). One behavior triggers the other, and soon the conflict escalates. For example, if Jo wants Bernie to stop playing the video game to talk, and Bernie does not want to, Bernie withdraws from Jo, and Jo makes more demands. This is an example of how conversational and relationship patterns of interaction are the work of both parties, even if the result is not positive.

Researchers repeatedly have found wives tend to demand (e.g., for closeness) and husbands tend to withdraw (e.g., Christensen, Eldridge, Catta-Preta, Lim, & Santagata, 2006; Gottman, 1994; Walker, 1999). Researchers link these findings to traditional gender roles. The woman demands because feminine relationship-orientation is toward talk and connection, and the man withdraws because he is socialized to value unilateral problem solving. Men are expected to be able to fix problems alone, and if a problem cannot be repaired, they may not see value in discussion (Tannen, 1990).

This explanation contains several flaws. First, the person who raises the topic tends to be the demander regardless of gender/sex in heterosexual and same-sex couples, and the one who withdraws may be exercising the power of the least-interested rather than, for example, because they cannot fix the problem (Baucom, Snyder, & Gordon, 2009; Holley, Sturm & Levinson, 2010). Researchers have found, regardless of the topic, individuals are more demanding for their own issues and withdraw more when it is their partner’s issues (Papp et al., 2009). Second, the demand/withdrawal pattern is not likely to become an endless cycle if the two parties use more effective communication such as cooperation. Competitiveness and indirect fighting lead couples to get stuck in demand/withdrawal patterns (Heavey, Christensen, & Malamuth, 1995). Third, power can reside with the demander or the withdrawer, depending on the relationship. Parents and children display this pattern as well, with parents demanding more than children, regardless of the gender/sex of the parent. In this context, the one who has the most power is demanding (Caughlin & Ramey, 2005). Thus, the tendency to demand or withdraw during conflict is not consistently or innately tied to a person’s gender/sex.

However, gender/sex can explain why heterosexual couples in distressed relationships over time seem to lock into stereotypical gender roles of wife demanding/husband withdrawing (Eldridge, Sevier, Jones, Atkins, & Christensen, 2007). People tend to adhere to rigid binary gender roles when there is stress in the relationship and, once adopted, these roles are difficult to change. Regardless of gender/sex, sexual orientation or

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relationship type, and which partner plays which role, falling into a pattern of demand/withdrawal can lead to negative emotions, lower levels of conflict resolution, spousal depression, break-ups, and what is known as common reciprocal domestic violence (Papp et al., 2009). To break the cycle, the partner who wants a change needs to step back, be patient, and avoid becoming aggressive or violent. The person who does not want the change needs to listen and try to understand the other’s position. Thankfully these are skills people can learn, regardless of gender/sex.

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Conversational Aggression

We cannot end this chapter without acknowledging that conversation can do harm to individuals and relationships, whether intentional or not. Some of that harm can result in physical and sexual violence. We use the phrase conversational aggression to recognize the multiple forms of verbal aggression people may use to inflict pain on another (Aloia & Solomon, 2017; Spitzberg, 2011). Verbal aggression refers to communication in which a person “uses language to attack the self-concept of a message recipient” (Aloia & Solomon, 2017, p. 1). Verbal aggression can include verbal attacks, blaming, and name-calling, but it does not include physical contact. Communication scholar Brian Spitzberg (2011) indicated verbal aggression does not require the receiver to perceive the behavior as hurtful nor does it require intentionality from the sender.

From a legal perspective, domestic or intimate partner violence is more severe than verbal aggression and includes a degree of intentionality. Intimate partner violence, also known as domestic violence, is harm to someone “in an ongoing interdependent or close relationship with the perpetrator” (Spitzberg, 2011, p. 328). It includes physical, psychological, and/or sexual abuse. Violence then is a subset of aggression. Violence almost always includes some form of aggression, but aggression does not always include violence.

Communication scholar Julia Wood (2006) observed, “An increasing number of researchers assert that intimate partner violence is a heavily gendered phenomenon . . . given the greater number of male perpetrators of intimate partner violence and the greater severity of their violence” (p. 402). Intimate partner violence is the most common form of violence against women in the United States; 28% to 50% of women experience physical, mental, emotional, and/or verbal abuse from an intimate partner (Catalano, 2012). About four in five reported victims of intimate-partner violence are female. Males are less likely to report or file charges (Catalano, 2012); some suggest it is because men have a harder time realizing and then admitting they are victims of domestic violence (Oliffe et al., 2014; Stiles-Shields & Carroll, 2015). The pervasiveness of violence in intimate relationships indicates it is a common part of the predominant culture. Violence likely exists in all forms of intimate relationships: queer, gay, lesbian, and heterosexual romantic partners, as well as siblings, parents, grandparents, and friends. Here, we focus on couple violence as tied to gender/sex.

People tend to assume all domestic violence is basically the same. Feminist scholars Joan Kelly and Michael Johnson (2008) were among the first to challenge this idea. They identified three types of domestic couple violence: coercive controlling violence, violent resistance, and situational couple violence.

Most early research focused on intense wife battering from husbands, which Kelly and Johnson called coercive controlling violence or intimate terrorism. Johnson (2006) suggested this type of violence is fed by traditional gender expectations that men should be the head of the household. This leads some men who feel they are not meeting this expectation to perform their masculinity through dominance and control. It has been tied to the demand/withdrawal conflict pattern (Olson, 2002). Coercive controlling violence generally combines physical abuse with verbal and emotional abuse, destroying the partner’s self-esteem with repeated messages such as “No one else would have you,” “You are worthless,” “You are ugly,” “What would you do without me?”—all comments that might boost the speaker’s self-esteem by derogating the partner. Among heterosexual couples,

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the primary perpetrators are men, and misogyny and traditional gender roles are contributing factors (Johnson, 2011).

Johnson (2006) argued the cultural rhetoric of romance plays a powerful role in coercive controlling violence. Communication scholar Julia Wood (2001) discovered this link between abuse and romantic myths. Wood interviewed women from abusive relationships and found they were strongly invested in predominant heterosexual gender expectations and fairy-tale notions of romance. Many spoke of failing in their responsibilities as women to care for their partners, or they insisted the abuse was out of character for the Prince Charming who had originally swept them off their feet. They would not leave the relationships because they felt they needed men to feel complete. Wood (2001) and several masculinity studies scholars (Kimmel, 2012b; Messner, 2016) suggested men who batter their partners (gay or straight) are overly complying with cultural expectations of masculinity, even as they may profess to feel it is their responsibility as men to protect the ones they love.

Gay and lesbian couples report this type of domestic violence at similar or higher rates than heterosexual couples. This demonstrates the link between violence and gender is complex and that there are always other contributing influences, such as the social stress of being a sexual minority (Stiles-Shields & Carroll, 2015). For example, one qualitative study of gay men who had been victims of such violence revealed that some of the violence was about them engaging in masculinity competitions with their partners. Given gender is not the same as sexual orientation, it makes sense that gay men may experience hegemonic masculinity just as heterosexual men do, and violence may be a response when one’s masculinity feels threatened (Oliffe et al., 2014). Similarly, there are lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, and trans women who identify as highly masculine and may be more inclined toward violence (Baker, Buick, Kim, Moniz, & Nava, 2013). Some research suggested lesbian couples experience slightly less violence as compared to gay couples (e.g., Bartholomew, Regan, White, & Oram, 2008), but more research is needed.

What we do know is coercive controlling violence should not be understood as an aberration in an otherwise well-functioning relationship. Instead, it ought to be seen as a possible outcome of the cultural gendered/sexed pressures brought to bear on couples. Coercive controlling violence is not the result of inherent sex differences but of socialization practices that tend to socialize some people who identify strongly with a form of aggressive masculinity to see violence as a solution to problems.

A second type of domestic violence is violent resistance in which a person tries to protect themself by resisting the other’s abuse. This type of domestic violence is not reported as often, but the resistance situation that receives the most media attention is women who murder their partners. In a study of women on trial for, or convicted of, attacking their intimate partner, the women reported frequent violent attacks from their partner, and most murders were not preplanned but took place during an attack from their partner (Ferraro, 2006). There is not enough research, however, to make any gender/sex claims regarding this type of violence (Spitzberg, 2011).

The third type of domestic violence is the most common form of aggression: situational couple violence. This type of violence is perpetrated by both partners in heterosexual or same-sex relationships, married or

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cohabitating. It is not typically tied to relationship-wide patterns of control and coercion. Either partner is likely to initiate the violence in specific situations; it does not seem influenced by gender expectations. Causes are more unique, such as observing one’s partner flirting with another person or stress due to finances or concerns about children. The violence typically happens with less frequency and partners are not afraid of each other as in coercive controlling violence. In teen and young adult research, the women tended to initiate the violence against their partner more frequently than the men (Kelly & Johnson, 2008).

Not all domestic partner violence is the same. These distinctions are important because they prevent readers from overgeneralizing claims such as “only men abuse” or “women are violent only when abused.” Men do tend to inflict more serious physical injuries when they are violent and participate in all the listed forms of domestic violence more than women. Violence is inflicted on women and other men (Kelly & Johnson, 2008).

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Conclusion

Conversation is a primary means by which people and groups continually negotiate identities and relationships. Contrary to popular assumptions, any presumed gender differences in conversational style cannot be aligned with a person’s sex. Stereotypical cultural expectations and perceptions of gender/sex behavior do have the potential to strongly influence how people do gender and construct group identities and inequalities through talk. But people also make choices of behaviors according to their goals in unique situations.

Because the construction and perceiving of gender are cultural, they are also potentially political. Understanding the power embedded in conversation helps answer the question of why differences rather than similarities are culturally emphasized. After reviewing a large volume of research on gender in communication, researcher Kathryn Dindia (2006) noted that with all the pressure for people to conform to different gender/sex expectations in communication styles, it is amazing how similar the sexes are in their communication. The similarities between women and men, and the variances among women and among men, offer evidence that differences are not innate or universal. Yet people still impose expectations on others based on perceived universal differences, so communication problems may emerge not from actual style differences in how people do talk but in different expectations of how people supposedly talk.

Individuals and groups must continually negotiate gender/sex tensions to assert their identities and specific communication goals in diverse cultural contexts. The selective use of feminine and masculine styles in politics, management, and cultures should help make clear that patterns of communication often emerge as a particular way to respond to a particular situation. However, as situations, people, and cultures change so, too, does the utility of the styles and their labels.

Thus, rather than asking whether a person’s speech is feminine or masculine, we advise people to ask: What wide variety of ways of speaking allows each person to communicate more clearly, effectively, ethically, and humanely? Rather than asking how women and men communicate differently, researchers should explore how the range of gender options might be a resource for everyone, whether in interpersonal, group, or public settings.

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Key Concepts

altercasting 58 conversation 58 conversation work 58 conversational aggression 70 conversational style 64 demand/withdrawal conflict pattern 69 direct communication 65 humor 60 identity work 58 indirect communication 65 intimate partner violence 70 politeness 59 rapport talk 64 relationship work 58 report talk 65 social support 68 swearing 62 vocal fry 57

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Discussion Questions 1. Why is it useful to study conversation? 2. Have you observed the construction of gender through conversations in classrooms? At work? In social groups? In church? In your

family? Describe them. 3. Describe your own conversational style and ask a friend to describe it as well. Look for similarities and differences in your

descriptions. Do either of you include assumptions about gender, ethnicity, or class? If so, which identity ingredients are noted and which are not? Why not? What can you learn from this activity about your gender identity and performance in conversation?

4. How might employing diverse gendered styles become a communication resource for individuals? What are examples of this?

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Chapter 4 Gendered/Sexed Bodies

With the 2017 Australian Open, Serena Williams won 23 Grand Slam single titles, the most for any player in the Open era. Yet Maria Sharapova makes nearly twice as much in commercial endorsements. Why? Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (2015), six-time NBA champion, explained, “Because endorsements don’t always reward the best athlete. They often reward the most presentable according to the Western cultural ideal of beauty.” Despite Williams being arguably the greatest tennis player ever, people criticized Williams’s body in ways “that perpetuate racist notions that black women are hypermasculine and unattractive. Imagine being asked to comment at a news conference before a tournament because the president of the Russian Tennis Federation . . . has described you and your sister as ‘brothers’ who are ‘scary’ to look at” (Rankine, 2015). Author Jenée Desmond-Harris (2016) reviewed the media coverage of Williams and found three themes: stereotypes that attributed Williams’s success to race rather than hard work, sexualization of Williams’s body’s size and shape, and violent animalistic descriptions of William’s strength.

The focus on Williams’s body illustrates a range of points we make in this chapter. The body is political—a site of social contest where consumer markets, predominant cultural norms, and medical practices police the boundaries of appropriate behavior and appearance (Langman, 2008). Bodies are disciplined by norms of attractiveness, size, and appropriate movement. Perceptions of bodies are informed by intersections of sex, gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, age, and ability. Embodied communication is a primary place for the doing of sex/gender.

We prefer the term embodied communication, instead of nonverbal communication, because it calls attention to the body in and as communication, specifically highlighting body politics, the disciplining of the body, and the body as a locus of agency. To explore embodied communication, we focus on three points. First, the body is political; the body is a powerful social tool in which intersectional identities and inequalities are created through performativity and objectification. Second, the body is disciplined through cultural norms about appearance, the use of space, and gendered movement. Third, bodies can be a locus of agency. Bodies not only are acted upon but also can act. We offer multiple examples of how people strategically use their bodies to resist the command performance of prescriptive gendered behaviors.

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Body Politics

Although biology and ethnicity contribute to a wide variety of distinctive sizes and shapes of bodies, social norms constrain bodily forms and expressions and your very relationship to your body. People who identify as women are encouraged to be continually aware of their bodies as they prune, pose, provide sexual gratification, menstruate, give birth, and nurse children. People who identify as men tend to experience their bodies as a double bind: They dare not pay too much attention to their bodies for fear of appearing effeminate (Gill, Henwood, & McLean, 2005), but they must work to present their bodies in a masculine way or risk ridicule from appearing feminine. Gender studies professor Rosalind Gill (2017) noted how, in just a matter of years, men have joined women in what she calls the “body culture”—an obsession with shaping “the body beautiful”:

Look around at the pierced, tattooed, scarred, dyed, muscled bodies in any western urban environment and it seems clear that the look of the body is increasingly central to identity. . . . [W]e are experiencing a phenomenal fetishisation of muscles and muscularity among young men at precisely the moment that fewer than ever of them are working in traditionally male manual jobs that require physical strength. In fact, the man building muscles at the gym . . . is more likely to be working in an office than in heavy industry. Highly developed muscles have become semiotically divorced from the previous connotations of social class and manual labour. (Session 1)

Men, like women, increasingly define themselves through their bodies, and gay men tend to be more aware of this than straight men (Gill, 2017). For some time, men’s bodies were barely (pun intended) noticed by critical researchers, but they are increasingly being used in advertising to sell products. Although men’s poses differ from women’s (Gill, 2017; Jhally, 2009), all tend to represent idealized young adult images of binary masculinity and femininity, and all are increasingly eroticized.

Men’s bodies are the unspoken norm to which women’s bodies often are compared and devalued (Weitz, 2017). Men are to be strong, women weak; men should be tall, women short; men should be substantial, women slender; men should be sexually aggressive, women passive. When men are presented as vulnerable (young, clean-shaven, soft-looking skin, big eyes), viewers notice because the image is playing against the macho gendered norm. The result is not just gendered/sexed bodies but a system that requires particular groups of bodies to dominate over other bodies (Lorber & Martin, 2011).

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Gender Performativity

Doing gender involves a continuous process of identity negotiation through verbal and bodily communication (West & Zimmerman, 1987). In this chapter, we focus on philosopher Judith Butler’s (2004) concept of gender performativity as the stylized repetition of acts. Butler’s work built on doing gender to point out not only that people do gender in interaction, but also that the repeated style of interaction genders people.

Each person learns a script about how to act, move, and communicate gender. If gender is “a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint” (Butler, 2004, p. 1), then it is a command cultural performance. Although some variation occurs, and gradual broadening of constraints is happening, it is always within set limits. Through the repetition of gendered behaviors over time, people continually construct and constrict their gender identities. Butler argued this is how binary genders and compulsory heterosexuality were formed. The repetition is largely guided by social expectations of dominant groups and habit, not free will.

We agree with Butler. People do not get up each morning and consciously decide how they will perform their gender that day. Instead, people internalize predominant cultural norms that gender their bodies. However, we also believe people are goal oriented, and they can play with gender performativity to challenge gender/sex norms.

Drag shows demonstrate that gender is a prescribed set of actions. In the staged performance of drag queens and kings (see Figure 4.1), the performers act in often exaggerated ways to appear as another sex as they sing, dance, model, or act on stage. By doing so, they challenge normative gender performances. The exaggerated performance of femininity opens up the possibility of questioning gender/sex prescriptions. When drag “mimics dominant forms of femininity” it can, at the same time, “produce and ratify alternative drag femininities that revel irony, sarcasm, inversion, and insult” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 130). Mimicking femininity is not the same as praise. At its core, doing drag recognizes the performance of gender.

Some people who are transitioning have commented on the need to over-perform their preferred gender while they seek public approval of their new identity (Zimman, 2012). They may have long identified internally as their desired gender/sex, but when they begin publicly to claim that identity, they may look to stereotypes on how to behave and pass. This is an initial phase in the process of settling into a newly claimed identity rather than a long-term ideal (Caroland, 2014).

Figure 4.1 Drag Queen (Left) and Drag Kings (Right)

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Sources: iStockphoto.com/karens4 and ZUMA Wire Service/Alamy.

Overt gender performance is not reserved for those who practice drag or trans identities. Sociologists Richard Majors and Janet Billson (1992) observed how some young African American men challenged racial stereotypes through the performance of a cool pose. Street pimps originally created the pose that included a specific stance, walk, posture, handshake, and speech pattern, which all suggested a relaxed, confident, and cocky masculinity. The walk was similar to a slow stroll, with parts of the body moving together. By posing, the men presented themselves as a spectacle of self-expression, detachment, and strength. Majors (2001) argued that many learned to use posing as a strategic tool to convey control and toughness when other resources of power and autonomy were not available to them. The pose has become more mainstream for some young African American men facing the intersecting threats of racism and homophobia in predominantly White universities (Harris, Palmer, & Struve, 2011). Their ritualized acts were directed at the dominant culture and other Black men to assert pride and masculine, heterosexual identity. However, others caution the pose may further prevent Black men from full participation by no longer passing in a privileged White masculine culture (Johnson, 2010).

The concept of performativity points out that when people internalize social expectations about gender tied to their body’s sex, it becomes difficult for them to realize gender/sex expectations construct their gendered/sexed identities. Objectification theory explains a more specific way society disciplines the performance of gendered bodies.

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Objectification

Objectification occurs when people are viewed as objects existing solely for the pleasure of the viewer, rather than as agents capable of action. The person being objectified often is reduced to body parts: breasts, genitalia, muscles, curves, buttocks, and hair. The person is no longer human but commodified—turned into a commodity like other inanimate products, free to be bought and fondled (even if only by others’ eyes). Self- objectification occurs when people internalize the objectifier’s view of their body and “participate in their own objectification” by seeking to exert a limited power linked to their ability to attract the gaze of others (Lynch, 2012, p. 3).

People who internalize objectification engage in heightened body surveillance; they critically look at and judge themselves. Objectified people’s perceived physical and sexual attractiveness may become more important to them than their morality, honor, intellect, sense of humor, or kindness. Researchers have linked objectification to low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, disordered eating/eating disorders, muscle dysmorphia (obsession with building muscles), and suicide (Moradi & Huang, 2008; Travis, Meginnis, & Bardari, 2000), particularly for puberty-age children and teens (Grabe, Hyde, & Lindberg, 2007; Grogen, 2017; Tiggermann & Slater, 2013).

Researchers continue to identify women and girls, across ethnicity and race, as particularly vulnerable to objectification (Moradi & Huang, 2008; Ramsey & Hoyt, 2014; Velez, Campos, & Moradi, 2015). Sexual objectification has become a part of feminine gender socialization, as evidenced by some women’s recollection of the first time they were sexually objectified and how that experience became a part of their identity growing up (Valenti, 2016). Sexual objectification does not come only from the gaze of strangers. In a study of heterosexual college women, several reported their boyfriends at times looked at their bodies in sexually objectifying ways, and those women reported feeling more sexual pressure from their partners (Ramsey & Hoyt, 2014).

Sexual objectification happens earlier and is more pervasive than you might think (Levin & Kilbourne, 2009). Beauty pageants, such as Dream Girls U.S.A. and Real Girls U.S.A., start at age 4; others start even younger. The Learning Channel (TLC) broadcast a highly successful reality show called Toddlers and Tiaras that followed young pageant competitors and their parents to competitions (Mirabello, 2009–2013, 2016). Television scholar and filmmaker Christina Hodel (2014) found that although “the negative aspects of child pageants is exaggerated” to “boost viewership with its shock value,” the show did depict the sexualization of the youngsters through distinctive constructions of gender (p. 114). By studying the first five seasons, Hodel found “gender and identity is prescribed” to the girls in the show (p. 126).

Girls do not have to be in a beauty pageant to internalize sexualization. A study of 60 6- to 9-year-old girls in the Midwest found the girls chose a sexualized paper doll as their ideal self (68%) and the doll that would be popular (72%; Starr & Ferguson, 2012). Researcher Christy Starr said, “Although the desire to be popular is not uniquely female, the pressure to be sexy in order to be popular is” (cited in Abbasi, 2012, paras. 6–7). Not all the girls chose the sexualized doll as their ideal self: Girls who took dance classes, had maternal influences

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that did not self-objectify, had been taught to view media critically, and/or were raised with strong religious beliefs were more likely to choose the doll with more clothing as their ideal self.

Figure 4.2 Eden Wood, from Toddlers and Tiaras, promotes her new LOGO docu-series Eden’s World.

Source: Anthony Behar/Sipa Press (Sipa via AP Images).

Increasingly, men and boys are victims of sexual objectification (Davidson, Gervais, Canivez, & Cole, 2013; Moradi & Huang, 2008), but this tends to be less frequent (Harris, 2016) and is less likely to be internalized (Grabe et al., 2007; Grogen, 2017). Indicators of this trend are the growth in a $50 billion cosmetic market for men (Whipp, 2017), greater stigma for men perceived as fat (Monaghan, 2015), and hair transplants for balding heads (Shapiro, 2010). Men and masculinities scholar David Buchbinder (2013) argued a difference in men’s self-objectification is that it is not for women’s pleasure as much as it is to compete with other men.

Men who are members of oppressed groups due to race, ethnicity, and/or sexual orientation are most often the male recipients of objectification (Teunis, 2007; Whitehead, 2002). The objectification marks them as not quite men, or certainly not as normative White fit men. The dominant White culture has a history of objectifying African American men’s bodies, reducing them to being violent, sexual, aggressive, naturally talented, and athletic (Bordo, 1999; hooks, 1992; Jackson & Dangerfield, 2003). African American gay men may become sexual objects of desire by some White gay men because of the stereotype that they are endowed with larger penises, and Asian and Hispanic American men may be labeled exotic objects of sexual pursuit. When “the sexual objectification of men of colour forces them to play specific roles in sexual encounters that are not necessarily of their choosing” (Teunis, 2007, p. 263), gay communities uphold normative White masculine domination (McKeown, Nelson, Anderson, Low, & Elford, 2010).

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Figure 4.3 Paper Dolls Used in Starr and Ferguson Study

Source: Starr & Ferguson (2012).

The embodied performance of gender is far from natural. For more than 50 years, researchers have documented the negative effects of cultural norms that objectify bodies and command particular gendered performances. Bodies are disciplined to perform gender in particular ways.

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Disciplining Gendered Bodies

Communication scholar John Sloop (2004) used the term disciplining gender to make visible the multiple ways in which people and cultures consciously and unconsciously maintain rigid norms of binary, heteronormative, and cisnormative gender performance. Common body practices, or signifiers, are so intertwined with gender expectations that it is difficult to recognize these are socially constructed practices. Sloop explained,

Just as with a child’s clothing and hairstyle, a single set of signifiers (gait, gestures, body movements, rough-and-tumble play, and the stance for urination) are used to illustrate masculinity and femininity in binary fashion regardless of whether gender is posited as a product of socialization or the materiality of the body, that is, its sex. In terms of gender culture, we clearly see . . . the signifiers that are employed in the judgments people make about one another and themselves in their evaluations of gender performance. . . . Heterosexuality is signified, indeed emphasized, as a norm in the performance of gender. (pp. 36, 40)

What follows are three examples of how heteronormativity disciplines the gendered body.

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Attractiveness

People speak of natural beauty, but most human beauty is constructed, perceived, and regulated through a narrow cultural lens of what is defined as gendered attractiveness: normative physical appearance that is seen as pleasing, beautiful, and sexually appealing. The norm of attractiveness that merges beauty and sexuality “moves sexuality into the public realm . . . and thereby [makes it] amenable to inspection, definition, social monitoring, and control” (Travis et al., 2000, p. 239). People’s sexualities are not private; through attractiveness norms, they become public, social property. Gendered attractiveness norms reinforce and privilege White heterosexual gender expectations and help maintain women as objects (Felski, 2006).

Attractiveness norms are maintained and changed through consumer markets. The dominance of Western capitalism and commercialization has imposed a narrow definition of attractiveness worldwide (Bordo, 2003). Consumers, particularly women, spend millions of dollars annually to buy cosmetics, diets, hair products, beauty advice, plastic surgeries, clothing, and accessories. The demand for beauty products continues to increase annually (see Figure 4.4).

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Attractive Men

Feminist sociologists Judith Lorber and Patricia Yancey Moore (2007) described a “hot” man’s body:

In Western contemporary cultures, a sampling of popular images would suggest that the ideal male body is over six feet tall, 180 to 200 pounds, muscular, agile, with straight white teeth, a washboard stomach, six-pack abs, long legs, a full head of hair, a large penis (discretely shown by a bulge), broad shoulders and chest, strong muscular back, clean-shaven, healthy, and slightly tanned if White, or a lightish brown if Back or Hispanic. Asians . . . are rarely seen. (p. 114)

Size matters. Social norms dictate that attractive men are big—but muscular, not flabby. They are tall. Lorber and Martin (2011) noted, “We may say that intelligence and competence count for much more than physical appearance, but only a few presidents of the United States have been shorter than 6 feet tall, and research on corporations has shown that approximately 10% of a man’s earnings can be accounted for by his height” (p. 282). Interpersonally, many women who marry men shorter than they are consciously choose to wear flat shoes on their wedding day to deemphasize their height. Men’s studies scholar R. W. Connell (1995) explained the social significance of expecting men to be bigger than women: “Visions of hegemonic masculinity help to legitimize a patriarchy that guarantees the dominant physical position of men and subordination of women” (p. 77).

Figure 4.4 Revenue in the Cosmetics and Personal Care Market

Source: Statista (2017).

Consider the well-known G.I. Joe action figure (see Figure 4.5), who turned 50 in 2014. In its years on toy shelves, the doll’s size has ballooned, from its 1960s life-size equivalent of 5′10″ tall (unchanged for 40 years) with biceps of 12″ and a chest of 44″ to 2011’s biceps of 27″ and chest of 55″. Given these measurements, “GI Joe would sport larger biceps than any bodybuilder in history” (Pope, Olivardia, Gruber, & Borowiecki,

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1999; see also Olivardia, Pope, Borowiecki, & Cohane, 2004). Barbie celebrates her 60th anniversary in 2019. The size did not change until 2016. If the original Barbie was life-size, it would have a height of 6′9″, with only a 20-inch waist but a 41-inch bust and she would not be able to stand up. The odds of a woman having these proportions are 1 out of 100,000 (“As G.I.,” 1999; BBC, 2009).

When you compare current cultural norms of men’s attractiveness to current cultural norms of women’s attractiveness, an interesting insight emerges: As women are encouraged to become smaller, men are encouraged to become larger. Even as children, size matters. Shorter boys are bullied more (Voss & Mulligan, 2000).

Figure 4.5 G.I. Joe, 1964 (Left), and G.I. Joe, 1992 (Right)

Source: Photograph by Catherine Palczewski. G.I. Joes from the collection of Tom Stewart.

Negative body image is affecting men in increasing numbers (Gill, 2017; Grogen, 2017). One study found the percentage of men dissatisfied with their overall appearance almost tripled in 25 years (to 43%), and the men reported being nearly as unhappy with how they look as women reported (Pope, Phillips, & Olivardia, 2000). Men are concerned about being underweight and lacking body muscularity. Muscle dysmorphia is a preoccupation with muscularity and the misperception of one’s physique as small, often despite distinct muscularity and size (Pope, Gruber, Choi, Olivardia, & Phillips, 1997). This psychological disorder leads to compulsively working out, weight lifting, and rigid low-fat diets. The causes are attributed to increasing social pressures for boys and men to be large, muscular, and athletic: “For many men today, muscles—literally— make the man” (Olivardia, 2000, p. 11).

Some segments of the LGBTQ community have been identified as having greater tendencies toward eating disorders. The National Eating Disorders Association (n.d.) attributed this to multiple stressors, including coming out, threats of violence, and bullying. Some gay men report stressors similar to those heterosexual women report regarding making themselves attractive to men (Olivardia & Pope, 1997). The more a person’s value is reduced to their sexual attractiveness, the more they are likely to engage in self-destructive practices.

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Attractive Women

Cultural ideals of attractiveness are impossible to attain because they keep changing. In the 1910s and 1920s, when women entered the U.S. workforce in larger numbers and gained the right to vote, women’s fashion trends seemed to counter this political progress by becoming more restrictive of movement and more revealing of the body. Sexual appeal became about external appearance, with short flapper-style dresses. Pale complexions, slender legs, narrow hips, and flat breasts were the ideal, causing many women to bind their breasts and shave their legs and armpits. In the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe became a beauty icon. As the first woman to be featured naked in Playboy, Monroe exhibited breasts and hips that became sexy. Her size 12 is considered large by today’s beauty standards. The ideal woman’s body type has become increasingly thinner, both in reality and as a result of photo alteration. According to advertising analyst Jean Kilbourne (2010), only 5% of today’s women fit the preferred body type, which leaves 95% of women wondering what is wrong with their bodies.

The thin, White, blonde Barbie doll physique dressed in tight-fitting, revealing clothing captures predominant expectations of women’s beauty. In a survey of 4,000 people, results echoed this narrow definition (Brumbaugh & Wood, 2009). This beauty ideal is normative, even though it is not the norm. The White upper-class ideal of beauty is impossible for most women, but the ideal particularly disciplines women who have disabilities, darker skin, larger bodies, kinky hair, or limited money (Gerschick & Miller, 2004; Kramer, 2005; Lorber & Martin, 2011; Shapiro, 2010).

Body size, especially for girls and women, tends to affect popularity (Parker-Poke, 2008), employment, and pay (Levine & Schweitzer, 2015). Women who do not comply with social demands regarding beauty regularly experience humiliation, harassment, and discrimination. They are called lazy, mentally ill, unfeminine, and asexual (Lorber & Martin, 2011; Travis et al., 2000). In acknowledgment that Barbie is not the norm and stirred by slumping sales, Mattel redesigned the dolls to look more like the kids who play with them (Abrams, 2016). Barbie is now available in tall, petite, and curvy as well as a variety of ethnicities.

A clear indication that women’s attractiveness is a social construction is apparent when comparing Western ideals to other cultures’ traditional notions of beauty. Azawagh Arabs of Niger defined ideal femininity as extreme fatness (Popenoe, 2004). Latinx and African American cultures traditionally defined larger-sized women as voluptuous and physically and emotionally strong (Patton, 2006). Traditional Asian Hmong culture valued sturdy women who could work hard, making larger waists and hips attractive. But Hmong immigrants in the United States are assimilating to Western notions of thinness (Lynch, 1999).

White skin, round eyes, and thin bodies are now markers of social status around the world. In a study of 3,300 females from 10 countries, aged 15 to 64, 90% said they would like to change at least one thing about their bodies. Most wanted to lose weight, and 67% said they withdrew from life-sustaining activities because of their perceived bodily flaw (Etcoff, Orbach, Scott, & D’Agostino, 2004). Women and girls’ body anxiety has become a global problem (Calogero, Boroughs, & Thompson, 2007). Skin-whitening products, plastic surgeries, and weight reduction are believed to help women’s earning potential and marital prospects in

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countries such as Hong Kong, India, Japan, and South Korea (Glenn, 2008; Li, Min, Belk, Kimura, & Bahl, 2008). The message is clear: The natural body is sick or unacceptable, and altering feminine bodies through products or surgery is the way to fix it. Western beauty ideals have become a tool to colonize women around the world (Hegde, 1995).

Figure 4.6 Barbie’s Redesign

Source: Barbie®.

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Clothing

Beyond protecting you from the elements, clothing constructs personal and group identities. Researchers in textiles and apparel understand clothing as an overt form of gender performance (Lynch & Strauss, 2007). Given Butler’s (1990a) description of gender performance as operating in a scene of constraint, how you clothe yourself is not necessarily freely chosen. Even though you may choose what to wear each day, the closet you choose from likely has a limited range of gendered options. Western clothing designated for girls and women tends to be restrictive, following the contours of the body. Men’s clothing tends to be loose fitting, has practical pockets, and allows movement.

Sociologist Ruth Rubinstein (2001) argued that gendered clothing reinforces heteronormative gender/sex differences in society when it serves to “alert an approaching individual about suitability for sexual intercourse” (p. 103). When you are socialized into wearing binary clothing, you perform your gender/sex and sexual identity through apparel.

Clothing’s maintenance of binary gender and sexuality becomes more obvious at Halloween. In a study observing 828 students’ costumes on a state university campus, researchers found women were three times more likely to dress sexually, and men were three times more likely to dress comically or scarily. They concluded, “Although Halloween is a time when the imagination can run wild and people can engage in extreme forms of self-presentation, the young men and women in this study choose to address gender, as opposed to other aspects of the construction of self” (MacMillan, Lynch, & Bradley, 2011, p. E23).

The continued disciplining of gender attractiveness through dress is apparent in responses to cross-dressing and some trans people. People in the United States tend to be uncomfortable with and ridicule cross-dressers because they do not conform to the norm. Transgender youth are heavily bullied in school (Gattis & McKinnon, 2015), likely in large part because of their clothing. Why does the vision of anyone other than a person assigned female at birth in a skirt make some people uncomfortable? In many places, men wear skirts in the form of kilts, sarongs, caftans, or djellabas. Ridicule is an indication of the disciplining power of clothing to dictate social norms for gender/sex and sexual orientation.

Fashions change and with them gender transformations occur because “fashion allows us to embody our desire, buy our identity, in the most intimate sense and the most linked to the performance of everyday life” (Lynch & Strauss, 2007, p. 120). Women no longer have to cover their ankles as they did prior to the invention of bicycles in the 1890s. Unisex clothing—known for its loose fitting, comfortable style, in neutral black, white, and gray colors, and designed not to call attention to binary gender/sex—has been available in the United States since the 1960s. The T-shirt and jeans popular for casual U.S. dress is an example even though most do not see it as unisex. More clothing companies have begun to advertise (and make money) from “gender fluid” looks (Sharkey, 2016).

Figure 4.7 Jaden Smith in Vogue Korea 01

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Source: Photographed by Peter Ash Lee, Styled by Ye Young Kim/Vogue Korea.

Celebrities seem to be given more flexibility with clothing. Entertainer Jaden Smith has received mixed reviews for wearing dresses (Abeydeera, 2016; Goldstein, 2016). Smith is a self-identified 17-year-old African American heterosexual man. Megan Mapes (2016) suggested his celebrity status, youth, and the unique ways in which he combines masculine (bare-chest and crossed arms) and feminine (flower, head tilt, and skirt) fashion enable him to push back on rigid expectations for African American men’s dress: “His character as the carefree black boy seems like a reaction to the cool but hypermasculine and hypersexualized black man” image (p. 15–16).