From Doing to Undoing Gender As We Know It

This symposium honors the importance of “doing gender ” (West andZimmerman 1987) as a conceptual contribution to social thought. I offer a critique not of the original concept but of how it has come to be used or, as I argue, misused. First, the concept has been so integrated into the sociological lexicon that the implicit feminist critique embedded within it sometimes disappears entirely. Second, the feminist use of doing gender has become so diffuse that we have created a tautology: whatever groups of boys and girls, or men and women, do is a kind of gender. I argue that the language of doing gender ought to be used carefully and that as society changes, we begin to document the ways in which we find boys and girls, women and men, “undoing gender. ” Undoing gender is a concept first introduced by Butler (2004) and recently offered with a slightly different twist to Gender & Society readers by Deutsch (2007). I build on Deutsch’s work by showing how doing gender research would be improved by more attention to undoing gender. The full incorporation of doing gender as a core concept in sociology has sometimes stripped the concept of the intended feminist implications. I illustrate this with a quote from a Social Forces article by Wilcox and Nock (2006, 1327). They write, The gender theory of marriage suggests that men and women are considerably invested in “doing gender ” even when they embrace an egalitarian role ide-ology.... The dispositions acquired over the life course are reinforced by a range of ongoing cultural and social pressures—e.g. cultural conventions, gendered inequalities in the labor force, etc.... For these reasons, women and men face strong internal and external pressures to produce gender in their marriages.... Thus, women may be happier in marriages where they are able to successfully produce gender. Likewise, men who are married to more traditional wives may be happier.... The gender model of marriage woul