Gender Construction within Cultural Discourses

Keywords:  Language, Message, Discourse, gendered subjectivity, Performative Act.

Cultural discourse (language/discourse/message) is another space of gender construction.

Contradictions in personality of individuals lead one to the concept of identity. Gender identity is fragmented and unstable, because several discourses pass through an individual life.  This underlines the space of gender construction that encompasses cultural values and ideologies. Within this space, gender is constructed by symbolic practices that would last beyond individual lives: epic masculinities in mythologies or the perverse masculinities of Kant Dracula and the Marquis de Sade.

Language

Knowledge and language are developed by power and this applies to the meanings of words that are associated with gender. What children learn from adults and how they learn it as well as conventional knowledge and language taught in schools and universities contain power. The power of an institution, a group or an individual makes some theories, subjects or words stronger by using different methods. Individuals who use these theories or words and encourage their use participate in this power as well.

Power operates through the construction of particular discourses and humans are created as subjects through the power of discourse. For instance, classification results, as usual, in a process of elimination, establishing the norm by outlining what the norm is not and what "Other" is. Subsequently, some identities become marginalized and deprived of subject status, which is the same as oppression, changing into repression in our psyches. The bio-politics of classification, standardization, and surveillance discipline work to normalize our bodies. (1)

Gender as a category is permeated with power and achieves its solidity through the process of inscription, where unsteady meanings are “written” on the body. Gender then becomes naturalized through incessant repetition of discursively established actions. Therefore, our gender identities and inner sense of self are consequences of repeated actions within the union of power and discourse.

According to Judith Butler, gender identity is a type of performance given by, and on, our own bodies. This performative act creates or displays what it names, and therefore demonstrates the essential or valuable power of discourse (2). Power of gender discourse contains a guiding quality and an assessment of the political features of the gendered subject. 

An examination of gender parody can show the performative quality of gender. Judith Butler contends that parody is revolutionary because it unsettles the preservation of gender divisions, underlines the arbitrary quality of gender, praises discontinuity, and reveals the political foundations of identities. Parody demonstrates that gender consistency is a lie and that gender does not arise from sex, or sex from gender.

A person in "drag" is a perfect example of the ability of parody to unsettle the misleading  gender consistency. The act of drag exhibits a twofold reversal. Drag can be perceived, concurrently, as a man with the external look of femininity or as a woman locked in a man’s body, or the reverse. Gender parody demonstrates “a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization, and it deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to essentialist accounts of gender identity.”(3)

MESSAGES  

The construction of gendered subjectivity implicates many cultural traditions. (4) Cultural values regarding girls and boys, women and men are produced and sustained through basic messages everywhere, and explicit messages from media. Messages are entrenched in and influence all aspects of production, the workforce, and the market. For instance, messages from past and present influence the designs of clothing. These are made trendy through different media outlets. Numerous factors such as store design and ambiance, display schemes and publicizing generate and shape wants for products.

The marketing and presentation of clothing takes place through lifestyle messages of its “coolness”, perfection, and suitability for a specific sex and group. The clothes send gender messages and become elements of the typecasting of a specific femininity or masculinity. Opinions are formed on what categories of people wear or do not wear the specific types and styles of clothing. Afterwards, consumers either accept or reject the messages communicated by the clothing package, even though life style could impede the ability to choose. These messages are about promises of things such as adequacy, beauty and privilege.

Gender construction is strongly influenced by gender messages. Yet these messages are not merely absorbed. They may be accepted or rejected. (5)

Discourse

“Discourse” makes the social construction of gender happen. The “ideological” sense of the word has changed by post-structural feminist theory to mean the multifaceted interfaces between social practice, language and emotional investment. (6) 

People are categorized on the basis of sex and gender by the use of language. For instance feminine/masculine, wife/husband, princess/ prince. These categories create expectations on how people must be. For instance, the category “girl” affects gender distinctive expectations for what a girl is supposed to be, to do and to look like, etc.

Configurations of desire relate to specific categories and social practices as they develop. For instance, clothing is conceived to differentiate boys from girls. The function of the emotional investments is to guarantee that the social practices are “correct”. Discourses create a feeling of what is correct and normal and may become established, supporting some people to influence and dominate others. Examples would be theories of parenting and Piaget’s and Erikson’s theories of the stages of development. Discourses containing more social or political power rule and may downgrade others. Such political power can result from their institutional locality, such as schools.

While individuals dynamically express their genders, dominant discourses are spread within and through social institutions and structures, form needs and aspirations, making some appearances and manners more feasible than others. (7) People make some of their gendered choices based on the social influence and extent of discourses, the political power of the benefits these discourses indicate and an individual’s claim to them.

Conclusion:

As Mazanoglu and Hollad say, “There is a complex interaction between grounded embodiment, the discourse of sexuality and institutionalized power.” (8) In other words, gender identity is something that is continually bargained while we are involved with our own embodiment, take part in social practices, adopt or reject discursive positions that are entangled in a web of power relations whose characteristics are specific to our own culture and times.

Gendered conducts are inclined to change with the context. Flexibility is included in both the formation and preservation of a gender self-concept. (9) It is not an inactive way of osmosis or a fixed style of being. Needs and wants can be formed by external forces such as prescriptions and the mode of dissemination of dominant discourses within, and through, social institutions and structures. (10)

It is possible to see a day when the diversity of conducts that are useful for exclusive individuals to voice their opinions are valued. Such condition would take place not so much by eliminating particular types of femininity and masculinity, but by accepting more varied types to be experienced and observed, which means reducing the hegemonic disposition of some forms, especially some forms of masculinity.

To be continued.

Notes

1. Foucault, Michel. 1980.  Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon, Harvester, London. 

Ramazanoglu, Caroline (Ed).1993. Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions Between Foucault and Feminism. Routledge: London.

2. Butler, Judith & Seyla Benhabib & Drucilla Cornell & Nancy Fraser   (Eds).1995. Feminist contentions: A philosophical exchange. Routledge: New York. P. 134  

3. Clark, M. 1993.  The Great Divide. Gender in the Primary School. Impact Printing: Brunswick. P.81                                             

4. Butler, Judith.1997.  "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory." in: Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, Sarah Stanbury (Editors). Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Columbia University Press: New York. PP.337-38

5. Clark, Op. cit.

6.  Yelland, Nicola .1998. Gender in Early childhood. Routledge: New York. P.159.

7. Ibid, P.160

8. Ramazanoğlu, Caroline, and Janet Holland. 1993. "Women's Sexuality and Men's Appropriation of Desire." Up against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism. Caroline Ramazanoğlu (Ed). Routledge: New York.  (PP. 239-64.)  P.260

9.Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 1992.  Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men. Basic Books: New York. P.89

10. Yelland, Op cit., P. 7