“Doing Gender”

Abstract

C andace West and Don Zimmerman wrote Doing Gender at a time (the 1980s) when a paradigm shift in feminist social science was occur ring. The long-standing conception of sex roles had suffered fundamental feminist critique for a variety of reasons, none more important than its eclipsing of interrogations of power and inequality (Lopata and Thorne 1978). For those second-wave feminist perspectives that did highlight power and inequality-such as Radical feminism and Marxist feminism serious theoretical problems likewise quickly emerged. Radical feminism was the first feminist perspective to spotlight the significance of masculine power, but it eventually became radically regressive by assuming essential ism. Marxist feminism-popular for its emphasis on both class and inequalities-became enmeshed in analytical debates over how best to conceptualize the intersection between patriarchy and capitalism. And all of these perspectives-sex-role theory, Radical feminism, and Marxist (and socialist) feminism-were criticized for ignoring distinct displays of agency. Individual social action was viewed by each theory as simply the result of one's sex role or the systems of patriarchy and capitalism. Thus, by the mid-1980s feminist social science that theorized about suffered an impasse at both the micro and the macro levels. Doing Gender was a conceptual breakthrough that compellingly responded to this theoretical impasse and influenced feminist theory worldwide. The concept of doing gender was supported and confirmed during 20 years of intense sociological scrutiny and substantial cogent research. Not surprisingly, this concept became, and remains, immensely salient in sociology, studies, and feminist theory. Over the past eight years, my research on doing gender has concen trated primarily on white, working-class, violent and nonviolent teenage