Video: What is Gender?
From Our Free Video Program: Cultivating Catholic Feminism
About the Presenter: Abigail Favale is Dean of Humanities at George Fox University, and the author of Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion. Her latest book, The Genesis of Gender, will be published by Ignatius Press in early 2022. In addition to writing and presenting the educational material of this program, Abigail also wrote our program prayer Heroines of the Faith.
This lesson with Dr. Abigail Favale is a part of our free video program Cultivating Catholic Feminism. Sign up for the program at the link below.
Video Transcript
One of the trickier aspects of discussing gender today is settling on a definition. There are multiple, and often conflicting, definitions of gender on offer, and so you find people using the same word to name a radically different concept. Let’s take a brief tour of the more commonly used understandings of gender:
Historically, some have used the word gender to simply denote sex—whether one is male or female. The word “sex” tends to serve as shorthand for sexual intercourse, so “gender” has now commonly taken its place.
In the 1970s, second-wave feminists began using the term “gender” to make a distinction between biological sex and the cultural stereotypes associated with each sex. In this understanding, “gender” and “sex” are decidedly not synonymous. Sex is innate, referring only to biological sex characteristics, whereas gender is socially constructed.
In third-wave feminism, gender becomes even more distanced from bodily sex. For some feminists, like Judith Butler, “gender” is entirely a social construct; our gender is something we continuously and unconsciously perform in response to social scripts about what it means to be a man or a woman. This perspective denies there is anything innate about gender.
More recently, fourth-wave feminists have increasingly defined gender as an inner conviction that one is a man or a woman—a conviction may not align with one’s biological sex. In other words, one’s gender might have nothing to do with sex whatsoever. In fact, fourth-wave feminists talk about sex as being “assigned” at birth—and therefore socially constructed—whereas one’s gender is not a construct, but fixed and innate. This is almost an exact reversal of the second-wave understanding of gender and sex.
There are problems and limitations with each of these definitions. The first tends to be too reductive and simplistic, overlooking the fact that cultural norms can sometimes be misread as stemming from biology. This has been used in the past as an excuse to justify certain forms of oppression, such as denying women access to education on the grounds that women are supposedly less intelligent than men by nature. It is important to recognize that a particular culture’s idea of womanhood is shaped by social practices as well as biology.
Second-wave feminism tries to address this with the sex/gender distinction, but it drives too hard a wedge between the body and gender, downplaying the influence of the body on our identity, and neatly distinguishing between sex and gender in a way that oversimplifies and fragments our sense of self.
This sets feminist theory on a trajectory of increasing fragmentation and disembodiment, to the point where—in third and fourth-wave feminism—gender has been entirely uprooted from the body altogether. A “woman” is anyone who identifies as a woman, even if that person is biologically male. Ironically, this kind of disembodied womanhood tends to be defined and expressed by the very stereotypes that earlier feminists tried to undo. Now, a girl who loves sports and hates dresses is encouraged to question whether she is really girl at all. It is the stereotype that supposedly speaks the truth about her gender, rather than her body.
What, then, is the alternative?
Gender, from a Catholic perspective, concerns the whole person: body, soul, intellect, and will. Gender, then, cannot be totally detached from biological sex, and neither can it be simply reduced to it. My womanhood is rooted in the bodily reality of my femaleness—but I am a soul and a body, and so my gender has a spiritual as well as a physical dimension. I also have free will—I am not a robot, programmed by biology or totally compelled by society; I can exercise my reason and my freedom in living out my gender as a woman. It is important to recognize that there is cultural and historical diversity in how manhood and womanhood are expressed, and some aspects of those expressions are unjust and dehumanizing—but gender cannot be totally reduced to those cultural expressions.
My gender—“woman”—names the multi-dimensional reality of my identity that involves the biological, the social, the psychological, and the spiritual—and this is an integral reality, a unified whole. Only a holistic understanding of gender can avoid the extremes that fragment the human person into disparate parts, and deny the reality of either the body or the soul.
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