Thinking About Gender

I. Introduction

I tend to think in pictures. What I offer in this paper is a pictorial represen-tation of how a feminist re-visioning of the relationships between construetions of “masculine” and “feminine” might function. I have found this picture, or simple model, to be helpful in organizing the ideas of hierarchies, polarities, dualisms, “differences,” and “complementarities” I have encountered in my reading of the works of other feminist scholars and in evaluating various projects that have been proposed as goals for feminist scholarship. The usefulness of a simple model is not that it incorporates all aspects of reality, but that in highlighting selected aspects of the subject of concern it may help us to organize our thinking.

When I refer to “gender” in this paper, 1 refer not simply to biological sex differences between females and males (which would be unusual in feminist literature these days) nor to attributes that might be differentially possessed by actual women and men due to social influences, but to the way in which we use the categories “masculine” and “feminine” as cognitive organizers. These patterns of mapping concepts, which themselves may have little or nothing to do with sex differences, onto the basic physical observation that there are two sexes (for the most part) in this world, may be called “gender schema” following Bern (1981), or gender-based metaphors, following the theory of cognition and language laid out by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Cats, for example, are generally considered in contemporary American culture to be more feminine (in disregard of their actual sex), whereas dogs are considered more masculine; the Pythagoreans connected masculinity to odd numbers and femininity to even numbers.¹ In both these cases, the attribution of gender tells us more about how our own minds work than about any properties inherent in cats and dogs or in numbers.

What I offer here is not an in-depth analysis of any particular aspect of gender, but rather one out of many possible templates for organizing thinking about gender. I offer this alternative because I believe that the dominant conception of gender in the English-speaking world as an oppositional, hierarchical dualism is deeply entrenched in our cognitive faculties and will continue to trip us up at every step unless a replacement can be found. Feminist analysis that works within the oppositional model tends to swing back and forth between the extremes of trying to erase the dualism—what Evelyn Fox Keller refers to as “counting to one”—and emphasizing the dualism, although perhaps in a “feminist” fashion, as in revaluing “the feminine”—what Keller refers to as “counting to two.”² Keller suggests that we need “a different kind of language, reflecting a higher dimensionality in our landscape—neither homogeneous nor divided, spacious enough to enable multiplicity to survive without degenerating into opposition” (Keller 1987, 48). This is what I try to accomplish here—in the most literal sense of “higher dimensionality.” I put my thoughts in the form of a simple picture because I believe that we need an equally appealing, basically simple, easily visualized alternative metaphor if we are to break out of the pattern of thinking in terms of an oppositional dualism. My picture takes the relationships contained in the dominant conception of gender as a bipolar, one-dimensional, hierarchical relationship and expands them into a two-dimensional diagram that is deceptively simple to draw but has radically different implications.

I begin by reviewing the old dualism and discussing various meanings of opposition. Next I present my picture, first explaining how it “works” and then giving examples of how it can be used to clarify analysis of gender-related questions posed within the context of the dominant North American intellectual culture. I then discuss the problems created for this conceptualization by sexism. After situating this work in the larger context of feminist scholarship, I discuss how it might be extended to research on racism and other relationships of hierarchical “difference.”

II. Traditional thinking about gender is dualistic and hierarchical

Let me represent the traditional, dominant conception of gender by the following picture:

Masculine (+)

Feminine (-)

That is, masculinity and femininity are construed of largely as opposites, with masculinity claiming the high status side of the line. Discussions about the metaphorical connection of this duality with numerous other hierarchical dualisms such as science/nature, mind/body, etc. are endemic in feminist scholarship.³ Tables like the following appear with great frequency, illustrating the metaphorical association of particular traits with gender in post-Enlightenment Western, white, thought:

Masculine

Feminine

reason

emotion

tiard

soft

etc.

etc.

The tendency to connect metaphorically behaviors, activities, and attributes with masculinity or femininity extends not only to cultural conceptions of appropriate social roles for women and men, but also far beyond, as in the cat and dog example above.

The strength of gender dualisms in organizing our thinking may be tied to the direct appeal of simple orientational metaphors. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, a linguist-philosopher duo who have written about the profoundly metaphorical structure and experiential base of language and cognition, identify many concepts in the English language that have been metaphorically linked to the physical experience of the orientations up-down, in-out, and center-periphery (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). These include metaphors of “control is up; subjection is down,”“rational is up; emotional is down,”“good is up; bad is down,” and “high status is up; low status is down.” One can, of course, add metaphors for gender, with masculinity obviously associated cog-nitively and culturally with the up-in-center-control-rational-good-high-sta-tus pole.⁴

III. Difference is not a binary relationship

In contrast to traditional dualistic conceptions, I suggest that opposition is itself only unidimensional in its basis of physical orientation, and not in the realms to which the dualism has been metaphorically applied. For example, “down” is clearly the opposite, negation, or reverse of “up,” but “emotional” is not unambiguously an antonym for “rational.” One might consider “irrational” to be a better antonym. If we think one-dimensionally and assert that each concept can have only one opposite, then the only way out of this dilemma is to collapse the rational-emotional and rational-irrational comparisons by equating emotion with irrationality (and rationality with lack of emotion). But we do not need to be limited to thinking one-dimensionally. “Irrational” is the opposite of “rational” in that it signifies a lack of the latter; “emotional” might be construed as the opposite of “rational” in the sense of complementarity, i.e., that there is some value to achieving a balance including both capacities. My Webster's dictionary (New Collegiate, 1974) allows “complementary” as one definition of “opposite.” Dare we use it ourselves in our thinking about gender?

I would like to suggest that we think about “opposition” as encompassing relationships of lack and of complementarity. I will use the word “difference” to include both these aspects of opposition plus a third concept that I will call “perversion.” A concept is a perversion of another if it is similar (not opposite) but different due to distortion, corruption, or degradation. For example, emotionalism, which is the tendency to make judgments on purely emotional terms (and hence irrationally), is a perverse use of emotional capacity, just as rationalism, in which all emotion is suppressed, is a perverse use of rationality.

The three different concepts of difference—lack, perversion, and complementarity—can be illustrated with reference to conceptions of masculinity and femininity relating back to Aristotle's biology of sexual difference. In thinking about gender in terms of lack, masculinity is defined by certain attributes, and femininity by their absence. For example, from Aristotle: “The woman is as it were an impotent male, for it is through a certain incapacity that the female is female.”5 Women, according to Aristotle, have less “heat” than men and, accordingly, less soul. This corresponds to a metaphor of “more is up; less is down.” A second form of difference is for the negative end to be a perversion of the positive end. Again, from Aristotle: “Whatever does not resemble its parents is already in a way a monster, for in these cases nature has … deviated from the generic type. The first beginning of this deviation is when a female is produced.”⁶ The female, though having something in common with the male in origin, is considered to be “deviated,” deformed, or distorted. This corresponds to a metaphor of “health is up; sickness is down” or “virtue is up; depravity is down.” A third way is for opposites to be conceived of as complements. In the hierarchical dualism, the complementary is always asymmetric: socially constructed femininity or biological femaleness is seen as something of a necessary evil. Aristotle, again: “While the body is from the female, it is the soul that is from the male, for the soul is the reality [substance] of a particular body.”⁷ Both are apparently necessary for procreation, though male-ness has the role deemed more important. On a metaphorical level, while “up” is quite literally the reverse of “down,” the two belong to the same dimension; without experience of one we can have no conception of the other. Complementarity is, as mentioned, part of the dictionary definition of “opposition.”

Feminists would obviously not want simply to reaffirm Aristotle's explanation of the differences between men and women. But continuing to talk about gender in terms of a unidimensional dualism—treating all the relationships discussed above as though they could be represented in a single masculine/feminine dualism—limits our thought more than perhaps we are aware.

So why does it matter that opposition is not itself unidimensional? It matters because a richer understanding of multidimensional “difference” can free us from the straitjacket of hierarchical, unidimensional thinking about gender.

IV. The gender/value compass presents an alternative

My picture retains gender as a cognitive patterning system; it retains hierarchy in matters of value judgment; it retains opposition. I would argue that these are fundamental categories of thought that must be transformed rather than repressed.⁸ What this conception of gender gains over the unidimensional dualism is a radical break of gender categories from value categories, and an explicit exposition of the various meanings of difference. The diagram may seem deceptively simple: it just separates the masculine-positive and feminine-negative ends of the dominant conception into two separate dimensions: feminine/masculine and positive/negative. I hope that this simplicity will make it immediately useful as a cognitive organizer. The apparent simplicity is deceptive because the jump from one to two dimensions doubles the number of categories involved—increases them from two to four—while tripling the types of relationships that can be represented: from that of poles on one dimension to relationships that are horizontal (which will represent complementarity), vertical (which will represent perversion), and diagonal (which will represent lack). This complexity makes the picture richer than it may first appear.

I will present the mechanics of the diagram first and then illustrate with examples how it may clarify thinking. Imagine a situation or question that asks for a judgment about human behavior and that has often been answered in gender-oriented ways. Draw the diagram in two dimensions:

This shape of this diagram should have immediate cognitive “availability” for readers familiar with four-quadrant graphs or two-by-two matrices, without need for further metaphorical elaboration. For those readers who find this diagram unfriendly, I suggest thinking about it as analogous to a directional compass, with poles corresponding to north, south, east, and west.⁹ This interpretation suggests further metaphorical insights. As a compass, its service is to guide and direct—in this case to guide our thinking. It also “encompasses” a larger space than the old dualistic metaphor, which could be represented by the masculine-positive and feminine-negative diagonal. The compass metaphor also highlights the human-defined, culturally variable meaning of gender: objectivity is no more inherently “masculine” than Europe is inherently “Western,” though we often speak of it as such. Speaking from an American perspective, it would be more logical, in fact, to say that Europe is “Eastern.” Directionality, like gender, depends on the standpoint of the perceiver.¹⁰

The four quadrants marked off by the axes are related in the following ways. “Good” or positive attributes are entered in the top of the diagram. This obviously involves value judgments. Since this picture is proposed primarily as a template for organizing thinking, it is not absolutely necessary that my “good” and your “good” be the same thing, although the examples to follow unabashedly impose my own judgments. The attributes are marked as masculine or feminine depending on one's judgment of the cultural perceptions regarding the question under study, which again could vary from person to person as well as from culture to culture. Think of one such concept and put it in the appropriate “+” quadrant. Opposition in the sense of lack is accommodated by putting the term representing the lack of a positive attribute in the negative category under the opposite gender (the diagonal relation). The decision about what attribute reflects “lack” is usually a logical rather than a value-laden or cultural distinction. A negative word representing a perversion or distortion of a positive attribute is entered directly below the positive term (the vertical relation, expressing an explicit value judgment). The M+ and F+ terms should be complementary in the sense that one believes that a healthy, balanced behavior involves both traits or activities (the horizontal relationship of positive attributes), while the M- and F-terms may exhibit something of a perverse complementarity in that each represents the degenerate form of the corresponding positive trait when its own positive complement is absent (the horizontal relationship of negative attributes). Note that while the relationships of lack and perversion are inherently asymmetric (if we drew arrows in the diagram they would point from the top down), this is not true of the relationship of complementarity (which could be illustrated by double-ended arrows).

V. The gender/value compass in use

As an example of a use of the gender/value compass, take the soft/hard distinction given in the simple dualistic chart. Reflection on the various meanings of softness and hardness might result in the following picture, where the question at hand might be the sort of mind-set one needs in addressing a problem:

The positive complementarity is that of “durability.” In addressing a problem, one needs to have the strength to endure at the same time as one needs the flexibility to try new solutions. Weakness is the absence of strength, and rigidity is the absence of flexibility. Weakness is the negative aspect of softness, whereas rigidity is the negative aspect of hardness. The negative complementarity defines “brittleness.”

As a more complex example, I read Catherine Keller's book From a Broken Web as presenting (in a far more literate and complex form than I allow for here) an analysis of gender that fits directly into this bare framework (C. Keller, 1986, Chap 1). In brief, she states that in Western culture individuality has been stressed for men, to the point where it takes on the perverse and extreme form of a mythical ability to live without relatedness or interdependence with others. She calls this the creation of the “separative” self. On the other hand, relatedness is stressed for women, to the point where women are rewarded for trying to let our own identities dissolve in marriage and family. This she calls the “soluble” self. In terms of the gender/value compass,

The positive complementarity represents a conception of humans as differentiated individuals who are also interdependent and connected. “Soluble” is the lack of “individual” and the perversion of “related.”“Separative” is the lack of “related” and the perversion of “individual.” The negative complementarity is the functional complementary of sexist social and psychological roles, where individuality and relation are taken on as distinct sex roles instead of incorporated into each person.¹¹

I have especially been interested in exploding the simple dualisms as they relate to the gendered conception of reason and knowledge in post-Enlightenment Western thought. While the simple dualism links reason and knowledge to masculine-logical-scientific-hard, and irrationality and ignorance to feminine-intuitive-humanistic-soft, broader conceptions of what it means to reason or to know suggest more complex pictures. Some researchers suggest that reason is made up of both logic or “reasoning why” and intuition or “seeing that.”¹² If this is true, then the fundamental questions of what constitutes reason or knowledge are not those of masculinity or femininity, but of positive cognitive skills or the lack thereof. Both elements in the top half of the following picture are necessary for comprehension:

An example of logic without intuition is the student who on an exam writes a rigorous and detailed essay that has nothing to do with the question asked: this is “missing the point.” Intuition, or apprehension of the whole, degenerates into vagueness and contradiction if it is not accompanied by logic. The negative complementarity represents an inability to reason in either mode. Similarly, the “gender and science” debate might be clarified by a conception of knowledge that recognizes a complementarity between the upper items in this picture:

The fear of the illogical or unscientific that has guided the attempts to clearly demarcate the realms of reason and knowledge from illogic and “un-science” has some justification; it is the conflation of illogic with intuition, and of unscientific with humanistic, that has steered the discussion in perverse ways. By concentrating on separating science from “softer” forms of knowledge, a project implied by the simple dualistic model, not only are the strengths of humanistic knowledge ignored, but the danger of scientific knowledge unbalanced by more humanistic concerns is also neglected.

VI. The problem of sexism in construction of a gender/value compass

I have presented the diagram as if sexism does not exist, because I argue that the model is a useful tool for envisioning how we can might think of gender in a nonsexist way. In the present-day situation, however, I have found (and expect to find more) problems of sexism popping up at every turn. It is simply much easier, in constructing these tables, to come up with the M+ and F-content of any concept than to find words for negative masculinity and positive femininity. For example, “virility” is a masculine, positive term, one of whose meanings is “manly vigor.” Its diagonal term, signifying “deprived of virility or vigor” and taking its place in the F-quadrant, is “emasculated.” By simple correspondence, one would like to find a F+ term that in common usage is a positive complement to “virility” and whose diagonal term, as projected by analogy to the M+/F- dyad, would be “effeminated.” Of course, this is not the way the English language is currently set up. A diligent search through an old Webster's dictionary (New Collegiate, 1961) revealed “muliebrity,” defined as “womanliness,” as the feminine “correlative of virility,” but this is hardly a household word and it is not clear that it would have a positive connotation even if it was. “Effeminate” is already in use as a term signifying the possession of feminine traits (presumably negative), not the lack of feminine positive traits. The legacy of sexism makes positive femininity, and the negative effects of the lack of positive femininity, almost invisible.

Sexism is also historically wound up in previous attempts at a more complex understanding of gender. I can identify, with caution, the diagram which originally started me thinking along the lines of the four-quadrant diagram. I found something similar in Aletha C. Huston's 1983 work on sextyping, which in turn drew on studies done in the 1970s by Sandra L. Bern and by Eleanor E. Maccoby and John C. Masters.¹³ The central contribution of these studies was to envision masculinity and femininity as separate dimensions instead of as opposites in the same dimension. The problem with these studies is that the criterion for positive value was identified as “social desirability,” a criterion that functions rather strangely in a sexist society. In a sexist society, maintenance of accustomed patterns of oppression and victimization receive social approval. Bern's original “positive” traits rated by students as especially desirable for women included “childlike,”“gullible,” and “yielding”; the masculine-identified “positive” traits included “aggressive,”“dominant,” and “forceful” (Bern, 1974, 156). The term “androgyny” has lost respect in feminist circles, and I would hesitate to apply it to what I have outlined as the positive complementarity because of inappropriate associations it may call forth.¹⁴ To the extent that “androgyny” is associated with Bern's earlier work and high ratings on both masculine- and feminine-identified “socially desirable” traits, it suggests that combining “yielding” and “dominant” is somehow possible, and a good thing. I would identify both of these as negative terms—perversions of “sensitive to others” and “assertive,” respectively. Unlike Bern's and Maccoby and Masters's work, my diagram is not (at least in its use here) empirically based. Rather, it is theoretical, subjective, and visionary. I suggest that it can be used to investigate what the gender and value associations of concepts might be in a world where sexism is absent.

Conceptual sexism can be characterized as an ability to see only the M+/F-aspects of the full diagram, or as a tendency to reassert a hierarchy on top of it (e.g., “relatedness is good, but individuality is better”). The central task of the feminist project on gender, then, as 1 see it, is the exploration and valuation of the feminine-positive and the exposing of the masculine-negative. This intellectual project is associated both metaphorically and by the situatedness of feminists in particular and varied relationships to other dimensions of difference—racial, class, cultural—which have been similarly distorted by unidimensional thinking.

VII. Relation to other feminist projects

Does this approach reify gender distinctions? Perhaps instead of dealing with gender categories we would be better off training ourselves into working without them. My vision of the feminist project differs sharply from that of feminist intellectuals who would like to remove the categories of gender from our thinking—that is, get rid of sexism by getting rid of difference.¹⁵ The danger of using gender categories, from this point of view, is the very real tendency of categories of femininity and masculinity to become reified, that is, to come to represent a presumed essence of femaleness or maleness instead of a culturally and historically variable technique of cognitive patterning. Sandra Bern, for example, has argued that “human behaviors and personality attributes should cease to have gender, and society should stop projecting gender into situations irrelevant to genitalia” (Bern 1981, 363). While recognizing the dangers of reification, I suspect that creation of such a “gender aschematic” society is an impossibility. I agree with Catherine Keller that “we never grow beyond or above but always with or through our gender identities” (C. Keller 1986, 4). If gender is so deeply embedded in our minds that it can even serve to organize our thinking about cats and dogs and odd and even numbers, I see little hope for rooting it out. I see more hope in trying to break the associations between gender difference and hierarchical opposition and between gender difference and unexamined assumptions of biological determinism. I would locate the positive aspect of the idea of “de-gendering” not at the level of eliminating gender categories as a cognitive patterning device, but, first, as the assertion that gender categories are irrelevant in making judgments about whether something is good or bad, full or lacking, healthy or perverse, and, second, as the recognition that the gender categories of feminine and masculine are only linked to biological categories of female and male through a complex web of increasingly tenuous metaphorical association.

Does my approach give too much advantage to masculine concerns ? Perhaps we should forget about the left side of the diagram and try instead for a “gynocentric” society based on “women's values.”¹⁶ The danger of my view, which might be called more “human-centered” or inclusive, is that without adequate reconstruction of what it means to be “feminine” old sexist assumptions about passivity and submission might continue to define the feminine side of the picture. (Some critics from this camp might add that the whole idea of diagraming gender is “too analytical”—i.e., too masculine.) The dangers I see in the gynocentric approach are a possible lack of distinction between feminine-positive and feminine-negative attributes, a disabling repression of masculine-positive attributes, and a reification of the “women are feminine; men are masculine” dichotomy. What I see as a positive aspect of the gynocent-ric view is its serious attempt to find, name, and revalue the feminine-positive attributes about which, at this point, we can barely speak.

I am not, of course, the first scholar to recommend a possible way out of the minimalist/maximalist dilemma. The other approach of which I am most aware is that of feminists who use the approach of deconstruction, associated with the work of Jacques Derrida (Scott 1988; Poovey 1988; Alcoff 1988; Nicholson 1990). I believe the goals of the two projects are the same: if I understand the deconstructionist vocabulary correctly, Mary Poovey's project of finding a way to “dismantle binary logic and deconstruct identity” is what I would express in my own chosen vocabulary as finding a way to explode simple dualisms and move beyond unidimensionality. The philosophical bases are, however, quite different. By drawing on Lakoff and Johnson's idea of cognition as based in metaphors, one avoids having to adapt to the baggage of radical relativism that some feminists have argued comes along with certain strains of deconstructionist philosophy.¹⁷ The identification of the basis of metaphor as experience, and especially physical experience, also puts human physical bodies explicitly at the heart of the analysis.¹⁸ The extent to which “the body” figures into deconstructionist thought is in dispute.¹⁹ The most significant distinction between my approach and the deconstructionist one, however, comes in the pragmatic questions of what one is supposed to use as a substitute for binary opposition. The deconstructionist answer is “endless deferral or play” (Poovey 1988, 52) or the “constant vigilant suspicion of all determinate readings of culture and a partner aesthetic of ceaseless textual play” (Bordo 1990, 142). In contrast, my answer is more simply, and provisionally, “use a more complex metaphor.” My approach is thus both more pessimistic, and more optimistic, about human cognitive abilities. The deconstructionist literature seems to assume that all its readers have the time and inclination to become versed in its vocabulary and rules through extensive scholarly study of contemporary literary criticism; either that, or it assumes that theorizing best be left with the literary elite. I doubt the practicality of the first option and deplore the parochialism of the second. On the other hand, while deconstructionist thought recognizes that undimensional binary oppositions are basic conceptual building blocks, it does not recognize that we all learn, easily and at a young age, to handle more than one dimension at a time. In any movement through space, we have to deal simultaneously with up/down, left/right, and forward/back: even though we might in some contexts draw on metaphorically constructed links between up-right-forward(-good) and down-left-back(-bad), we certainly do not choose to make use of these particular metaphors all the time; if we did we would never be able to order our movements. Moving spatially, we can deal with the fact that “up” and “left” are related but that the relation is not oppositional. I believe we can train ourselves to perceive the same sort of more complex relation between “good” and “female.”

VIII. Relation to other forms of difference

I came to writing this paper by thinking about gender in the contemporary, white, intellectual, culture in which I am located, and coming up with a diagram to use as a tool. Now created, can the tool be used for other purposes? As I have already mentioned, the content of the gender/value compass will change as gender is analyzed in different contexts. For example, the metaphorical association of femininity with “soft” (which I used above) applies much more to white women of the middle or upper classes than to black or other women of color or to women who do manual labor. In a different context, the content would be different. I hesitate to assert just what the content would be in other contexts or to extend the framework to analysis of race or class or other forms of difference myself, because I suspect the process of putting content to the diagram is both as important as the final content itself and strongly tied to experience. The purpose of the diagram is to increase clarity of thinking and thus empower people at the bottom of the old hierarchies—to create a cognitive space for finding value in the previously devalued and for creating new definitions of identity and knowledge.²⁰

As a tool for thinking, the diagram may be useful wherever an existing hierarchy seems to leave one with only the choices of assimilation (the “counting to one” mentioned in the introduction) or of separatism (the “counting to two” of the introduction). While I have concentrated on the positive complementarities possible in looking at gender, consider the following by bell hooks, in which she talks about experience of race, region, and class:

What is good in each way of being? What should be kept from the one identity and what should be added from the other? On the other hand, what parts of each identity have been perverted by relations of oppression? What should one discard from the one identity or be suspicious of in the other? Perhaps the notion of value as a separate dimension from race, class, ethnicity, or sexual preference, as well as from gender, can, along with the concepts of “complementarity,”“lack,” and “perversion,” aid in clarifying these choices.

Seen in this more abstract context, my diagram is obviously de-centering in a postmodernist sense (using the word in its general, “after-modernism” meaning). “Essentialism” gives way to recognition of agency in the formation of identity, and all forms of privilege (including those enjoyed by feminists) may be called on the carpet and required to prove their worth or be unmasked. But, in contrast to a strain in the deconstructionist variant of postmodernism, the recognition of multiple and (somewhat) fluid identities does not necessarily imply that group identities are meaningless. To push my diagram one last step, consider one uneasy dualism that appears in some discussions of feminist theory: deconstructionist “difference” versus political solidarity. The positive aspects of deconstructionist writing are sometimes described as the investigation of new ways of “self-creation” and the critique of “universalism” or “essentialism” which this recognition of individual agency implies (Fraser and Nicholson 1990; hooks 1990; Rorty 1989). On the other hand, feminists (and others) have raised the fear that the emphasis on difference may degenerate into a thoroughgoing individualism and political conservatism (Bordo 1990; Hartsock 1990; Fraser and Nicholson 1990; Poovey 1988). A very simple diagram may help to shed light on the relationships among universalism, solidarity, individualism, and relativism by examining the different ways one might compare oneself to another human being:

Starting at the bottom right, do we see others as the same, completely lacking in characteristics that would distinguish them from ourselves? This is false universalism and perhaps the failing of a too-enthusiastic push for “sisterhood” in some episodes of feminism. Do we view others as disjunctive, that is, completely lacking in similarity? This overemphasis on differences leads to radical relativism and is a failing of a too-extreme form of postmodernist thought. But can we see others as similar? This is a basis for solidarity. And can we see others as distinct? This is a basis for respecting differences.

IX. Conclusion

I offer my diagram of gender and value as a provisional tool. The structure offers one possible way to organize one's thoughts in the effort to “count past two.” I do not present it as a finished product or as a structure that presumes to incorporate all possible aspects of gender and “difference.” I see its main function as a sort of safety net that prevents one who is primed to thinking in binary oppositions from lapsing back into simple dualistic thinking. I hope that the gender/value compass is both simple enough to be readily understood and remembered and just rich enough to provide a small beginning toward a deeper understanding of gender. If it helps in a particular context, then use it; if it does not, then discard it. In terms of the content of the examples I have used to illustrate the diagrams, it would be a severe misinterpretation of my intent to take these as representing any unchangeable “essences” of femininity or masculinity. In fact, I would expect substantial disagreement over exactly what belongs in each quadrant when one looks at concepts from different historical, cultural, or personal perspectives. It is the underlying structure that is important. The structure allows simultaneous conceptualization of gender, value judgment, and difference without conflation of gender with hierarchy and antagonism.

Notes

This paper originated as an attempt to define “gender” within a paper on “Gender, Metaphor, and the Definition of Economics.” It was formerly entitled “A Picture of Gender.” I am indebted to the following people and groups for comments: Evelyn Fox Keller, Judith Newton, Stephanie Shields, Evelyn Silvia, an anonymous referee of this journal, and the Faculty Women's Research Support Group at the University of California, Davis.