Dear Carlos and Stefanie,

thank you for your posts. Fil previously mentioned sex/gender and a couple of people posted saying, I am a man… or I am a woman…, while others have essentialised masculine and feminine traits to all men/all women. 

Although I am loathe to write long posts, I feel it important to first make a distinction between these terms and then conclude with an anecdote that exemplifies the distinction.

First, I use Foucault’s concept of power as productive and distributed through discursive networks. Foucault did not talk about gender, hence feminist concerns about gendered power relations, as my thesis elaborates (Clerke 2012, pp. 65–66):
a concept of power as a relational and productive force rather than a ‘negative, repressive entity’ (McNay 1992, p. 38) that some people have and others do not. Power is thus conceived as a spatial organisation of various forms of cellular grids or nodal networks (Foucault 1970/1971). Organised as social networks, discourses and bodies ‘circulate’ in space, regulated by discipline, which is an apparatus for the control of populations (Threadgold 1997, p. 24). To unpack this a little, bodies and speech are disciplined by discourse, the structured regularities of which are ‘related to the subject through desire…in the form of the power of knowing, and the will to know’ (p. 26).  For Threadgold, the ‘microphysics of power’ that organise disciplines function by ‘naming and classifying, distributing and positioning, belong[ing] to no individual but locat[ing] everyone’ (p. 26). Disciplines are regulated by textual practices, while the practices of positioning oneself within a discipline produce the self and also the field. Yet, as Threadgold explains, citing Foucault (1970/1971), ‘Discipline is unauthored, anonymous. It is not owned by those it disciplines and it remains a discipline only as long as it can continue to produce – ‘ad infinitum—fresh propositions’’ (p. 23). In other words, disciplines operate to control chance and contain bodies and speech. Yet because they rely on the continual reproduction of discourse, disciplines are also subject to change.

Of central importance to feminist theory, gender is a technology of power that functions as social control. While arguably the most important focus for feminist work, gender also intersects with other analytical categories, such as ‘race’, culture and so forth, to position individuals in various social networks as they engage in different activities throughout their daily lives. Through the specificities and particularities of intersectionality, individuals are positioned in relation to others in ways that enable them to act in certain ways in certain discursive networks and other ways in other discursive networks. 

In relation to sex/gender, I again draw on my thesis to differentiate between sex/gender (p. 24):

To define gender, it is necessary to first distinguish between sex, sex category and gender (West & Fenstermaker 1995, p. 14). Sex is classification as male or female, while sex category is the ongoing application of sex criteria through which people identify as male or female (Kelan 2010, p. 179). Gender is,
…a situated accomplishment of societal members, the local management of conduct in relation to normative conceptions of appropriate attitudes and activities for particular sex categories…gender is not merely an individual attribute but something that is accomplished in interaction with others (West & Fenstermaker 1995, p. 21).

The distinction between sex and gender enables an understanding of gender as accomplished through social interaction, which de-ontologises gender as ‘fixed in biology…[and] disrupts the idea of biology as destiny’ (Clegg 2008, p. 112). From this perspective, gender is a verb that exercises power, rather than a noun that embodies essentialised attributes (Davies 1996). Gendering is both an active process and also the product of social practices, rather than an individual possession, trait or role. Gender relations are power relations that often take binary form, through which women are positioned as negative to the masculine positive. Through talk, ‘binaries are drawn upon to enact and make sense of gender’ (Hughes 2002, p. 51). In other words, people’s stories both evoke and reproduce gender as they attempt to describe and make sense of their social interactions.

Gender not only organises bodies, but bifurcates the world and its social practices into broad domains based on sexual difference (Gatrell & Swan 2008, p. 4). Through ongoing social processes, practices and discourses, gender is brought into being (produced) and maintained (reproduced) in organisations and institutions (p. 4). In other words, ‘social interaction is a means to ‘do’ gender’ (p. 5). As a relational technology of power, gender inhabits, formulates and gives meaning to organisational practices and discourses, which reproduces institutions, interactions and work practices as gendered (Davies 1996, p. 664). Gender however, is neither fixed nor stable, which means institutional practices and discourses can be ‘challenged, dislodged and transformed in the process of their daily reproduction’ (p. 664). 

In other words, sex is biological, sex category is social and gender is a verb that exercises power. When I speak of gendered practices, I mean those that default to the (dominant) masculine subjectivity and in the process elide feminine subjectivities as well as other masculine subjectivities (such as some women, people of colour, less esteemed or highly positioned people, PhD students etc). 

To address Stefanie’s statistics about equity and the inevitable challenges that will follow, I elaborate again from my thesis, which discusses women in design in universities (p. 12):

Questions about gender disparities have been raised by women in design (Lavin 2001, p. 110), yet these questions are often framed in terms of equality, the lack of which it seems, women are expected to resolve. For example, women are to address their under-representation in senior academic positions by putting themselves up for promotion. If women choose promotion however, they often feel they have to set unrealistically high standards to succeed, while men can be mediocre (Morley 2003, p. 9). Such a framing of gender as a ‘woman’s problem’ deflects attention away from how promotional processes in universities actually disadvantage women. These practices, I argue, are organised and maintained through the gendered division of academic work in universities. 

It is not about the numbers. Gendered practices (and discourses) systematically organise sayings and doings along gender lines, which women and men reproduce. 

My anecdote: I heard Stefan Sagmeister speak, at UTS (Sydney) on Tuesday last week, about a return to manmade beauty in design (and architecture). I asked him if he thought beauty was gendered, given all the images he showed, and all the designers and architects of which he spoke in his talk were men. In fact, he showed his studio’s designs of the seven deadly sins that were applied to some glasses (I forget the modernist designer). The one representing lust was a disembodied pair of naked women’s breasts. This raised a number of questions for me (and my colleagues when we discussed it later): whose lust does this represent? And whose lust is elided in this representation? 

The point is, ‘manmade beauty’, as he showed us, was perceived, interpreted, translated and reproduced entirely through the work of certain kinds of men (emanating from what Connell calls the ’Northern metropolis). This is an example of gendering, whereby images, symbols, language and social relations default to the masculine (note, I did not say men or women).

If anyone wishes to read more (or access the references), please check the first chapter of my thesis: 
http://uts.academia.edu/TeenaClerke/PhD-thesis <http://uts.academia.edu/TeenaClerke/PhD-thesis> 

cheers, teena
Connell, R. 2007, Southern theory: the global dynamics of knowledge in social science, Polity, Cambridge.

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