From Doing To Undoing: Gender as We Know It

Abstract

This symposium honors the importance of (West and Zim erman 1987) as a conceptual contribution to social th ught. 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 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, 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 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,