Gender Theory in Troubled Times. Rachel Alsop
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and class. Decolonial writers insist that such categories are constituted very differently for colonizers and the colonized (Lugones 2010). Such work became crystallized when Crenshaw (1991) coined the term ‘intersectionality’. What this work has made clear is that any account of gender must pay attention to its inter-articulation with race, class, ability, age, sexuality, religion, nationality and colonial legacy, as well as to the power differentials which are thereby marked.
Another key development has been the increasing availability of both theory and memoir from writers who are sometimes grouped together under the umbrella term ‘trans’ (see chapter 7) (Bettcher and Garry 2009; McBee 2018; Namaste 2000; Stryker and Aizura 2013). This work has made clear how the diverse possibilities for living, which such accounts make evident, are central to gender theory.
The developments in Butler’s later work (2004a, 2004b, 2010) have also been indispensable, most particularly her attention to our embodied vulnerability to others and the material world and the necessity of recognition by communities of others for ensuring a liveable life.
All of this work has informed the account which we offer here.
Gender essentialism
The widespread use of the term ‘gender’ to capture sexed difference has not been associated with any extensive rejection of gender essentialism. Indeed, there has been a resurgence of a very visible gender essentialism in everyday life. This is particularly marked in relation to children. Following the informative scan, prospective parents in the UK and the US now often throw pink- or blue-themed parties to announce the gender of their unborn baby. From birth, clothes and accessories are strongly differentiated in colour and style. Toys are divided into those appropriate for boys and those for girls. Behaviour is anxiously policed for signs of cross-gendering. Oddly, these factors seem to have increased as challenges mount to gendered inequalities both in the workplace and in the public world. It has increased and not decreased in the last decade. Now even Lego comes in differentiated colours and themes. Such moves have also been resisted, with some parents challenging retailers to modify their marketing practices. A curious example is found in discussions of education. Currently, in many places where both have equal access to education, girls outclass boys. This would seem to knock on the head previous arguments that the underachievement of girls was due to differences in their brains and to make clear it was a result of social and cultural factors. But such naturalistic arguments have only re-emerged in a different form. Boys, it is now claimed, have different brains to girls, and the teaching methods currently employed do not chime with them. (For a discussion of claims of differentiated brains, see chapter 1, and for the complexity of the educational data on which these claims are made, see chapters 3 and 5.) Such public reinforcement of supposed gendered differences in children comes (presumably non-accidentally) with a large rise in children claiming that their gender has been misassigned and seeking to change it (Hurst 2018).
The reinforcement of gender essentialism in everyday life runs alongside a sinister reinforcement taking place politically across the globe in which claims of gender essentialism – an insistence on natural or God-given differences between men and women that indicate appropriate social roles – are being harnessed to bolster right-wing populist claims and new nationalisms, often interwoven with influence from the religious right. These claims are linked to attacks particularly on the reproductive rights of women and are threatening to the legitimacy of LGBTQI+ communities. In recent years these movements have launched attacks on gender theory itself (Meret and Siim 2013; Kuhar and Paternotte 2017; von Redecker 2018; Kantola and Lombardo 2019). We turn to these developments below.
Gender essentialism has also returned within the feminist community, particularly but not exclusively in the UK, around the question of the rights of trans women. Interestingly, the debate is concerned primarily with the status of trans women rather than trans men. But some organizations made up of women suggest that WNT (women who are not trans) will suffer if the boundaries are drawn to include TW (trans women) as women (Murray 2017).1 In this book we both draw the boundaries to include trans women and argue that this is an appropriate place to draw them. We refute the suggestion that this damages the interests of women with intersectional identities of other kinds (see discussions in chapters 5 and 7). We also return to these points further below.
The rise of right-wing populism
We, the authors of this text, are white, English-speaking, European, cis gender women (women whose claimed gender corresponds to the gender they were assigned at birth) working as academics in the UK. This locatedness is evident in the work that follows, though we endeavour to engage with voices from other perspectives. It is also evident in our viewing the times in which we are writing as particularly troubled for those seeking to promote gender equality. While resisting a simple progressive narrative of history, we acknowledge at the time of our writing a backlash against gained gender equality in many parts of the world, as well as the ongoing oppression and marginalization of women and sexual minorities in many others. We acknowledge that all times are troubled and troubling. However, we wish to point here to certain features of current concern which underscore our insistence that how we theorize gender is of immediate political importance.
A disturbing truth is that 53 per cent of white women in the United States voted for Donald Trump in the US elections held in 2016, despite widespread indication of his misogyny and his opposition to women’s sexual and reproductive rights (Darweesh and Abdullah 2016; Ratliff et al. 2017; Valentino et al. 2018); 94 per cent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton. The more progressive gender agenda was thus supported in that election by black and Latino women. What this has helped clarify is that the possibilities of both a just anti-racist society and a society which promotes the rights of women and the LGBTQI+ community are interdependent. Gender rights intersect with rights of other marginalized peoples. Thus, being concerned with multiple axes of oppression globally is not an add-on for feminism. It is a condition of its survival. Trump’s opposition to gender and sexual rights and their interconnections with his anti-immigration policies are typical of right-wing populism. ‘The few gender issues that appear on the far-right agenda support traditional family and conservative gender roles, and unashamedly oppose women’s sexual and reproductive rights and LGBT rights. … Gender equality discourse is instrumentalised against immigration … and feminist politics is framed as a dangerous “gender ideology”’ (Kantola and Lombardo 2019: 3–4).
Judith Butler points also to the ways in which the language and politics of gender and sexual equality are manipulated to argue against immigration. In Frames of War she asserts that ‘in recent years the positions associated with sexual progressive politics have been pitted against claims for new immigrant rights and new cultural exchanges in the US and Europe’ (2010: 27). One narrative put forward is this: in the US and Europe there are progressive values that give equal rights to women, allow gay marriage and respect gender fluidity. But other cultures, particularly Muslim cultures, are represented as backward in this respect, and this is used to justify rejection of individuals and even military adventures in predominantly Muslim countries. In this narrative, many of the things for which feminists and LGBTQI+ activists have been fighting are appropriated to ensure that the rights and dignity of migrants and minorities are positioned as somehow in opposition to gender and sexuality rights. Paradoxically, such a position is taken while at the same time the very same gender rights are being undermined.
The interweaving of nationalism and right-wing populism manifest in Trump’s United States is found in many other parts of the world. And the same pattern is repeated: chauvinistic nationalism is accompanied by attacks on gender rights (Alsop and Hockey 2001; Yilmaz 2012; Meret and Siim 2013). ‘It’s a vision