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Doing Gender Author(s): Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman Source: Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Tun., 1987), pp. 125-151 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: http: ww.jstor.org/stable/189945 stororg/stable/189945

 

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CANDACE WEST University of California, Santa Cruz

 

DON H. ZIMMERMAN University of California, Santa Barbara

 

The purpose of this article is to advance a new understanding of gender a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction. To do so entails a critical assessment of existing perspectives on sex and gender and the introduction of important distinctions among sex, sex category, and gender. We argue that recognition of the analytical independence of these concepts is essential for understanding the interactional work involved in being a Rendered person in society. The thrust of our remarks is toward theoretical reconceptualization, but we consider fruitful directions for empirical research that are indicated by our formulation.

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In the beginning, there was sex and there was gender. Those of us who taught courses in the area in the late 1960s and early 1970s were careful to distinguish one from the other. Sex, we told students, was what was ascribed by biology: anatomy, hormones, and physiology. Gender, we said, was an achieved status: that which is constructed through psychological, cultural, and social means. To introduce the difference between the two, we drew on singular case studies of hermaphrodites (Money 1968, 1974; Money and Ehrhardt 1972) and anthropological investigations of ”strange and exotic tribes” (Mead 1963, 1968). Inevitably (and understandably), in the ensuing weeks of each term, our students became confused. Sex hardly seemed a ”given” in

 

AUTHORS’ NOTE This article is based in part on a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, September 1977. For their helpful suggestions and encouragement, we thank Lynda Ames, Bettina Apt hehn. Steven Clayman, Judith Gerson, the late Erving Coffman, Marilyn Lester, Judith Lorber, Robin Lloyd, Wayne Mellinger, Beth E. Schneider, Barrie Thorne, Thomas P. Wilson, and most especially, Sarah Fenstermaker Berk.

 

GENDER k SOCIETY. Vol. I No. 2, June 1987 125.151 • 1987 Sociologists for Women in Society

 

125 126 GENDER & SOCIETY / June 1987

 

the context of research that illustrated the sometimes ambiguous and often conflicting criteria for its ascription. And gender seemed much less an ”achievement” in the context of the anthropological, psychological, and social imperatives we studied—the division of labor, the formation of gender identities, and the social subordination of women by men. Moreover, the received doctrine of gender socialization theories conveyed the strong message that while gender may be ”achieved,” by about age five it was certainly fixed, unvarying, and static—much like sex.

 

Since about 1975, the confusion has intensified and spread far beyond our individual classrooms. For one thing, we learned that the relationship between biological and cultural processes was far more complex—and reflexive—than we previously had supposed (Rossi 1984, especially pp. 10-19). For another, we discovered that certain structural arrangements, for example, between work and family, actually produce or enable some capacities, such as to mother, that we formerly associated with biology (Chodorow 1978 versus Firestone 1970). In the midst of all this, the notion of gender as a recurring achievement somehow fell by the wayside. Our purpose in this article is to propose an ethnomethodological lv informed, and therefore distinctively sociological, understanding of gender as a routine, methodical, and recurring accomplishment. We contend that the ”doing” of gender is undertaken by women and men whose competence as members of society is hostage to its production. Doing gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine ”natures.”