Theresa Runstedtler, on what happens when one sector of society declares the “end of gender” and the “end of men,” while another works to reinstate patriarchy and rollback women’s rights.
This piece is part of a special series on the End of Gender. This series includes bloggers from Role/Reboot, Good Men Project, The Huffington Post, Salon, HyperVocal, Ms. Magazine, YourTango, Psycholog
Declaring the “end of gender” is kind of like Francis Fukuyama’s announcement of the “end of history” at the end of the cold war in 1989 – entirely premature and potentially playing into a reactionary political agenda with unintended consequences.
While pondering the impending “end of gender” is a kind of triumphalism that may seem appealing to white and/or middle-class people of the global North, it remains a discourse of privilege. It is not applicable for most of the world’s population, especially to women struggling to survive in the global South, many of whom face interconnected forms of economic, physical, and sexual exploitation on a daily basis. Poor and working-class women in the global North are not much better off. They also remain vulnerable to abuses of all kinds, in ways that are unique to women. This is not because poor people are somehow less enlightened about the fluid and performative nature of “gender.” It has much more to do with the fact that race and class inequalities and the expansion of neoliberal development continue to have a particularly pernicious effect on less privileged women’s quality of life.
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Still, the idea that we are somehow both post-racial and post-gender has not only become a popular cocktail party conversation topic for us older folks but also a given for the younger college set. I recall overhearing a young female student muttering, “I hate gender,” as she passed by the table for the Global Gender Studies Department at a SUNY Buffalo freshman orientation event. Students in an American Studies classroom at Yale University were hesitant to raise their hands when the professor asked if they considered themselves to be feminists. And yet, when he asked if they supported a woman’s right to vote, the right to equal education, the right to pay equity, the right to confront her rapist or abuser in court, the right to have an abortion and access to quality sexual health services (just a sampling of the many things fought for by feminists), most raised their hands.
So, what does it mean that in one sector of society we are debating whether men are finished, while access to abortion is becoming tighter in states across the nation? While abstinence-only education fails to empower our young women about their options? While there is a conservative movement afoot to reinstate patriarchal values? While women of color remain particularly vulnerable to sexual assault and physical abuse? While many women must sell and traffic their bodies in order to make ends meet? While rape is used as a strategy of war and genocide? While sexual abuses are part and parcel of interrogation techniques in the global war on terror? And the list could go on. . .
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Men don’t have to stop being men, but we all need to rethink what it means to be a man. This should be much more than just a conversation about whether real men can be metrosexual, wear pink, drink light beer, or hold the door open for a woman.
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Men don’t have to stop being men per se, but we all need to rethink what it means to be a man. This should be much more than just a conversation about whether real men can be metrosexual, wear pink, drink light beer, or hold the door open for a woman. It should be much more than just a conversation about the performance of gender identity. Rather, we need to think about how to continue dismantling the institutions and ideologies of patriarchy/heterosexism, and the hierarchies they uphold.
Ironically, the Ivory Tower (where a lot of the research on gender as performance came out in the 1990s) remains male dominated, with vast disparities of pay and job security between men and women. At around the same time academics had a similar discussion about the social construction of race but it seemed to lead nowhere politically. It certainly hasn’t changed the whitewashed character of the professoriate. Don’t get me wrong, these were important and much-needed theoretical breakthroughs. However, simply recognizing that gender and race are not rigid, biological categories has failed to end discrimination and inequality based on gender, race, and sexuality.
Embracing the idea that gender is a fluid rather than fixed concept can definitely help us as we turn towards figuring out how to envision and create a more equitable and democratic society – but it is only just the beginning.
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photo by Old Sarge / Flickr
Ah, Michael ! Somehow, you came up with the answer, but you just cannot or will not accept it. VICTIMIZATION !! You said it yourself…poor young white men are victims !! By your logic..YES..they are victims of their own malaise and failure to grasp ALL that the world can offer. BUT, it must come from within..the desire to honor education until the day that you die. Critical self analysis of one’s own value and interest(s) ..desire to reach out and get what is most sought after in a career, community and as a global citizen.. Don’t believe me…read the biographical… Read more »
“By your logic..YES..they are victims of their own malaise and failure to grasp ALL that the world can offer. BUT, it must come from within..the desire to honor education until the day that you die. ”
So you are essentially saying that men DO create the entire culture, and that they are inherently flawed.
Well… axiomatically, men do NOT create the entire culture. If you wish to believe that men are inherently flawed with the total lack of desire to do anything better for themselves…. wow. I suppose you really hate yourself.
As for this trite bit of garbage: “But as long as you, EMPHASIS YOU, choose to be a victim..your life wont be worth very much and the winds of change will sweep you aside to a life of nothing but struggle.” I AM and HAVE BEEN a victim. I’ve made my life worth a ton–part of the Big Brother program and a PhD student who has done HIV vaccination and Alzheimer’s detection research. So don’t tell me My life won’t be worth very much. Whether it is worth anything to me, I know I have contributed to the lives of… Read more »
Hey Michael and Theresa….. Michael…today 10/06 was a real “ground-hoggy” kind of day. I am 62, a solid male, unafraid to show emotion, especially with my grand daughter. And for her, I have great plans..Ph.d, Environmental Scientist, scuba diver, adventurer and lecturer to our our stupid congress about saving our planet. Anyway, back to today…I met a FEMALE doctor (M.D.) , a FEMALE sanitation truck driver, a FEMALE telephone line technician (on a boom truck) and a FEMALE auto mechanic . And to a person, they talked about their career choices and how hard they studied and educated themselves to… Read more »
“So Michael, your issue about poor white boys does not have much weight.” Can you say in a concise paragraph why you say this? I don’t think your lengthy comment demonstrated why my comments are either not important, or are not true. Poor white males ARE performing worse each year in the US and the UK, so my comments ARE true. Are you saying that it is not important that they are performing worse?
Maybe your objection to my post is that you don’t think poor white males are the victims of the culture they live in (which they obviously did not, themselves, create–and so we should not blame them for the amalgamated CULTURE any more than we blame any single group for it). But I don’t see how that can be, since by your own admission, “Their ingrained STREET upbringing appeals to their current societal level, and they too, are most uninterested in increasing their knowledge base to gain a better career path.”
The fallout of focusing on the harm our culture does to people of color and to women is that poor and working-class young white males are being completely ignored. In the UK and US, poor young white males are performing worse and worse in school every year. While there are a host of new programs to improve the situation of young men of color in foundering communities, young white men in those areas are left to continue the downward trend. Usually what I hear when I point this out is that, “That’s true, but it was not the point of… Read more »
Oh, and by th way, I had no control of over the choice of picture that accompanied this article.
What is so interesting to me about these responses is that I wrote this article as a critique of white middle-class men and women who naively talk about the “end of men” and the “end of gender,” without recognizing that it is largely a discourse of the privileged few. After all, as both my critics have pointed out, the intersecting oppressions of race and gender (and of course class) still matter for the vast majority of people on this earth. I don’t see how writing about the continued need to question and disrupt white male patriarchy and heterosexism has somehow… Read more »
I agree with the tenor of the article, but nonetheless it was filled with references to women’s problems and men’s transgressions and never once the other way round. Feminism really has to let go of that or its not really a gender egalitarian movement.
The above posters have a point, by focusing exclusively on women’s issues feminists often do descriminate against men, and the poor black men mentioned are the worst hit.
Leonard: Black men suffer 8 times the rate of murder over white men. They suffer 13 times the rate of murder over white women. 95% of the time their assailant is another black male. This is the problem with both feminists and black leaders: they don’t want to address the black male on black male oppression that occurs. Just as they don’t want to address the white male on white male oppression that occurs with the elites (male and female but overwhelmingly white) who continually knock blue-collar worker men on their ass with laws like Nafta, free trade, and union… Read more »
WIC is on it’s face discriminatory. It should be replaced with something that also contributes to entire intact poverty-stricken family. The government should not be setting itself as a competition to fathers, but helping poor and minority fathers do a better job. 90% of the men in prison for violence come from fatherless homes. 98% of the men on death row come from fatherless homes. Some relevant numbers. If you age backwards about 16 years (most male criminals are 16 to 28 years of age) only about 25% of homes had no fathers in them nationwide (in black families the… Read more »
Eric: I am not sure why you are juxtaposing the experiences of white woman with black men, as if gender doesn’t matter in the experiences of men and women of color. The demonization of men and women of color are very much wrapped in the constructions of both race and gender. She writes, “Embracing the idea that gender is a fluid rather than fixed concept can definitely help us as we turn towards figuring out how to envision and create a more equitable and democratic society – but it is only just the beginning.” So, the idea that Dr. Runstedtler… Read more »
“We need to rethink what it means to be a man.” How about we all rethink what it means to be a woman? Why do feminists want to dictate what it means to be a man, but consider it sexist if a man were to dictate what it means to be a woman? I have the solution. Let each woman and each man decide for themselves how they want to live, and be told by feminists whether they are a real or good man or not. “Women remain vulnerable to abuses of all kinds. . .” Let’s make… Read more »