The Genesis of Gender

Discussions of “human nature” are implicitly essentialist, because they are concerned with defining a shared, underlying essence common to all human beings.

A month before I started my master’s program in gender studies, I did something unconventional, at least for someone starting a master’s program in gender studies. I got married. To a man, no less. At the age of twenty-two. This was so perplexing to my feminist comrades that they nicknamed me “the queer wife”; in the world of feminist academia, I w

“I feel like I’ve been giving my students poison to drink”, I said. For so many years, I’d been careless, careless with their minds and, most disturbingly, their souls.

When de Beauvoir writes that one is not born but becomes a woman, she is driving a wedge between “woman” and “female”, arguing that “woman” is a social and cultural fiction that is layered onto the biological reality of femaleness. She writes this in the 1940s, prefiguring the postmodern turn. It didn’t take long for a movement centered on the idea

The task for women is to create a distinctively feminine understanding of God, one that can facilitate our “becoming” as women. Irigaray doesn’t think that women need to be free from religion; rather, they need to belong to a religion of their own making.

As a Christian, I believe that the proper response to any human person is always love and respect, but this does not exempt our culture’s idea of human personhood from scrutiny. What is needed at this juncture is a hard look at, to borrow Chesterton’s phrase, “the idea of the idea” of gender in our time.

According to Berry, the underlying malady of our culture is the inclination toward fragmentation. We disrupt the unity of creation by splitting spirit from body, culture from nature, sexuality from fertility. “It is not possible to devalue the body and value the soul”, he writes, and I want to adapt that statement, swapping “soul” for “self”.10 It

It is a sad paradox that a movement centered on the rights of women has led us to this curious juncture where the very definition of “woman” is under fierce dispute. How this happened is a strange story, rich in dramatic irony, and ultimately ruinous. The gender paradigm is feminism’s offspring, and it has proven, as we will see, to be an Oedipal o

For Butler, that statement is a foundational premise. Nothing is natural.