Shifting Paradigms and Challenging Categories

Author(s): Judith Lorber

Source: Social Problems , Vol. 53, No. 4 (November 2006), pp. 448-453
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of Social
Problems
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 Shifting Paradigms and Challenging
Categories
JUDITH LORBER, Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, Cuny

Twenty-one years ago, Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne (1985) argued that feminists had
not been able to produce a transformation of existing conceptual frameworks in sociology,
but rather had been contained by conventional categorization that just added gender as
another variable. Feminist work was co-opted by theoretical frameworks that relegated
women to family studies.
In looking back over the last twenty years, I want to start with the paradigm shift in fem-
inist social sciences and then discuss what has and has not entered mainstream sociology.
The paradigm shift in feminist social science starts with the concept of gender as an orga-
nizing principle of the overall social order in modern societies and all social institutions,
including the economy, politics, religion, the military, education, and medicine, not just the
family. In this conceptualization, gender is not just part of personality structures and identity,
but is a formal, bureaucratic status, as well as a status in multidimensional stratification sys-
tems, political economies, and hierarchies of power.
The second aspect of this paradigm shift is that gender and sexuality are socially con-
structed. This principle provides the content of gender as an organizational process, a frame-
work for face-to-face interaction, and the behavioral aspects of personal identity.
The third focus is the analysis of the power and social control imbricated in the social
construction of gender and sexuality, which lays bare the hegemony of dominant men, their
version of masculinity, and heterosexuality.
Fourth, feminist social science has devised research designs and methodologies that have
allowed the standpoints of oppressed and repressed women throughout the world to come to
the forefront, and which reflect increasingly sophisticated intersectional analyses of class,
racial ethnicity, religion, and sexuality.
To what extent have these theoretical and methodological principles, developed in femi-
nist social science over the past 35 years, influenced mainstream sociology? Let me work
backward, starting with standpoint theory and methods.
The social problems research I was introduced to as a graduate student in the 1960s was
the Chicago school of “nuts, sluts, and perverts.” So, if women were considered deviants from
the normal, it was easy to add their standpoints and perspectives to the rest of the oppressed
and repressed.
On the hegemony of dominant men, as an adaptation of Gramsci’s (1971) idea of domi-
nant elites and Marxist class consciousness, it was easy to view women as a subordinated class
in the domestic division of labor. The extensive work on family structure and roles, once
thought to be functional for the social order, could, with a class analysis, be incorporated into
conflict theory, but in sociology, the analysis stayed on a micro level. The exploitation of
wives and mothers and their co-optation through an ideology that domestic work was prima-
rily a labor of love was seen as taking place within the family, but not in the larger society.

Direct correspondence to: Judith Lorber, 319 East 24th Street, Apt. 27E, New York, NY 10010. E-mail: [email protected].

Social Problems, Vol. 53, Issue 4, pp. 448–453, ISSN 0037-7791, electronic ISSN 1533-8533.
© 2006 by Society for the Study of Social Problems, Inc. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photo-
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 Shifting Paradigms and Challenging Categories 449

Marxist feminists expanded their analysis to show that the exploitation of housewives
was an integral part of the capitalist economy, through their maintenance of the home, con-
sumption of goods and services for the family, emotional support of the worker-husband or
boss-husband, and social reproduction of the next generation of men workers and bosses and
women who would take their place as wives and mothers. Mainstream sociology did not con-
sider the exploitation of women in the family as a larger social issue until the intertwined
structure of home and workplace was disrupted by the current generation of married women
with children who have stayed in the workplace.
The social construction of gender and sexuality has been less easily incorporated into
mainstream sociological thinking. Here, biology, procreation, and the idea of immutable sex
differences are constantly invoked as explanations for behavior, especially around parenting.
They run head-on into the feminist idea that social expectations, norms, values, and control
can explain 99 percent of how we behave as girls, boys, women, men, and as sexual actors.
The influences of social class, racial ethnicity, religion, place of residence, culture, and so
on, on behavior, attitudes, and emotions are easily granted in mainstream sociology. But
when these influences are intersected with gender and sexuality, the prime directives become
hormones, genes, and prenatal brain organization. No matter how often and how extensively
feminist sociologists show how biology and biological data are socially constructed as well, we
are not given the credence in sociology that any study of rats, brain slices, surging hormones,
or genetic manipulation gets (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Van den Wijngaard 1997).
Finally, because the concept of gendered behavior, attitudes, emotions, and thinking
constantly gets undermined by the invocation of biology, it has been very difficult, if not
impossible, to get mainstream sociology to use the concept of gender as a building block and
organizational principle of social orders and social institutions, let alone gender as a social
institution itself. Everyone knows now that women and men of the corporation are treated
differently, but the implication is that this occurs because women and men are biologically dif-
ferent, not because the corporation is organized around the production and maintenance of
gender differences in order to have a subordinate group of workers who can be paid less and
do the dirty work. Mainstream sociologists have no problem understanding the social con-
struction of class and racial ethnic differences to the same end, but as cleaning women, secre-
taries, middle management, or CEO‘s, women are seen as biological, not social products. If
that is so, then the men at the top, middle, and bottom of the work hierarchy must also be
distributed on the basis of their biological abilities, not on the basis of their socially constructed
attributes. The puzzle is why the social derivation of behavior is accepted for racial ethnic
groups and social class, but not for gender.
Thus, the enormous body of theory and research feminist sociologists have produced is
used at the gender-as-variable level or as adding women to the sampling mix, just as it was
twenty years ago. For the most part still unused are the idea of gender as a social institution,
the concept of gender as a structural and organizing principle, and the processes of the social
construction of gender and sexuality in the maintenance of men’s dominance (cf. Andersen
2005). So what should we do now?
Paradoxically, I suggest taking a leap beyond the binaries of men versus women and het-
erosexuals versus homosexuals and making the feminist revolution in sociology by challeng-
ing the conventional categories in research design and research questions. (For a longer
critique see Lorber 2005.)
Feminist research now looks at men and women of many different social groups, not just
women. It is sensitive to multicultural perspectives and tries not to impose Western compari-
sons in data analysis (Mohanty 2003). It is exploring the intricate and reciprocal interplay of
gender, sex, and sexuality (Cealey Harrison 2006; Ingraham 2006).
By recognizing the multiplicity of genders, sexes, and sexualities, feminist research is
able to go beyond the conventional binaries. The problem they have begun to solve is how to
generate categories for comparison, even while critically deconstructing them.

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450 LORBER

There Are No “Opposites” in Feminist Research

Feminist researchers start with the assumption that the content and dividing lines for
genders, sexes, and sexualities are fluid, intertwined, and crosscut by other major social sta-
tuses; thus, there are no “opposites.” In mainstream sociology, most research designs assume
that each person has one sex, one sexuality, and one gender, which are congruent with each
other and fixed for life. Research variables are therefore “sex,” polarized as “females” and
“males;” “sexuality,” polarized as “homosexuals” and “heterosexuals;” and “gender,” polar-
ized as “women” and “men.” But these vary, and for accurate data we need the variations.
How do we categorize intersexuals, transsexuals, cross-dressers, masculine women, feminine
men, bisexual women and men, and their partners in sexual, emotional, and family relation-
ships? As Verta Taylor and Leila Rupp (2005) pointed out in their recent article on the gender
and sexual dynamics of their study of drag queens, how do lesbian women do research
“when the girls are men?”
We also need to compare women and men across different body types, racial ethnic
groups, social classes, religions, nationalities, residencies, and occupations. In some research,
we need to compare the women and men within these groups. In other research, we need to
compare women and men across groups.
The main question is, who is being compared to whom? Why? What do we want to find out?
The choice of categories is a feminist and political issue because using the conventional
categories without question implies that the “normal” (e.g., heterosexuality, masculinity)
does not have to be explained as the result of processes of socialization and social control, but
is a “natural” phenomenon. Deconstructing sex, sexuality, and gender reveals many possible
categories embedded in social experiences and social practices, as does the deconstruction of
racial ethnic and class categories. Multiple categories disturb the neat polarity of familiar
opposites that assume one dominant and one subordinate group, one normal and one devi-
ant identity, one hegemonic status and one “other.” As Barrie Thorne (1993) comments in
her work on children:
The literature moves in a circle, carting in cultural assumptions about the nature of masculinity
(bonded, hierarchical, competitive, “tough”), then highlighting behavior that fits those parameters
and obscuring the varied styles and range of interactions among boys as a whole (p. 100).

By not starting with boys versus girls, but looking at patterns of behavior—assertive ver-
sus shy, verbal versus physical, social versus intellectual—and their possible social causes and
consequences, we may find that gendered patterns are much less clear and dichotomous.

Categories Must Be Multiple

Multiplying research categories uses several strategies. One strategy is to recognize that
sexual and gender statuses combined with other major statuses produce many identities in
one individual. Another is to acknowledge that individuals belong to many groups. There-
fore, it is extremely important to figure out what you want to know before choosing the vari-
ables and subjects for comparison. Samples have to be heterogenous enough to allow for
multiple categories of comparison.
The common practice of comparing women and men frequently produces data that is so
mixed that it takes another level of analysis to sort out meaningful categories for comparison.
It would be better to start with patterns of behavior derived from data analysis of all subjects
and then see the extent to which they attach to the conventional global categories of sex,
sexuality, and gender, or better yet, to one or more of the components. However, in order to
do this second level of analysis, the sample groups have to be heterogenous in the first place.

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 Shifting Paradigms and Challenging Categories 451

The differentiating variables are likely to break up and recombine the familiar categories
in new ways that go beyond the conventional dichotomies.

The Radical Possibilities of Going beyond the Binaries

There are radical possibilities inherent in rethinking the categories of gender, sexuality,
and physiological sex, especially in moving from binaries to multiplicities. Binaries produce a
margin and a center, insiders and outsiders, normals and others. Introducing even one more
term, such as bisexuality, forces a rethinking of the opposites. As Ki Namaste (1994) says, “A
critical sexual politics, in other words, struggles to move beyond the confines of an inside/
outside model” (p. 230).
Data that undermines the supposed natural dichotomies on which the social orders of
most modern societies are still based challenges political discourses that valorize biological
causes, essential heterosexuality, and traditional gender roles in families and workplaces.
Research using a variety of gendered sexual statuses has already challenged long-accepted
theories. For example, research on lesbian and homosexual parenting, as well as on single-parent
households, calls into question ideas about parenting and gendered personality development
based on hetero-gendered nuclear families.
As Leslie McCall (2005) says about the anti-categorical approach:
The premise of this approach is that nothing fits neatly except as a result of imposing a stable and
homogenizing order on a more unstable and heterogeneous social reality. Moreover, the deconstruc-
tion of master categories is understood as part and parcel of the deconstruction of inequality itself.
That is, since symbolic violence and material inequalities are rooted in relationships that are defined
by race, class, sexuality, and gender, the project of deconstructing the normative assumptions of
these categories contributes to the possibility of positive social change (p. 1777).

The Politics of Social Location

The concept of standpoint, or perspective from one’s social location, continues to be an

important one in feminist research, but it is complicated by the politics of multiple identities
(Walby 2000). A view has to be situated somewhere, and since our social somewheres are
multiple, intersected, and complex, our knowledge is, as Donna Haraway (1988) claims,
partial. She says:
Situated knowledges are about communities not isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger
vision is to be somewhere in particular. The science question in feminism is about objectivity as
positioned rationality. Its images are not the products of escape and transcendence of limits (the
view from above) but the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position
that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and
contradictions—of views from somewhere (p. 600).

Sandra Harding (1998), who did the groundbreaking work on bringing women’s stand-
point into science, now argues for the multicultural aspects of science. Patricia Hill Collins
(1999) argues that Western science itself should be multicultural. She is critical of studies of
Western women in science that ignore their other social characteristics. She says:
If the absence of women is critical in the production of scientific knowledge, then the absence of
racial, ethnic, and social class diversity among women who critique science certainly must have an
impact on the knowledge produced. Whether intentional or not, feminist scholarship on scientific
knowledge seems wedded to the experiences of white, Western, and economically privileged
women (p. 267).

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452 LORBER

What is needed, she says, is intersectional analyses. To quote again:

This approach means choosing a concrete topic that is already the subject of investigation and trying
to find the combined effects of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation, where before only one or
two interpretive categories were used (p. 278).

The View from Somewhere

Feminists have learned that to do any kind of research, the researcher has to (1) bring to
bear a somewhat distanced stance; (2) closely examine the contradictions in data because
they are likely to be crucially informative; and (3) be able to challenge respondents’ voices
with voices from other worlds. Sometimes you have to be able to look at the familiar world as
if you came from another planet. As Dorothy Smith (1990) says, we cannot take the every-
day world for granted but must see it “as problematic, where the everyday world is taken to
be various and differentiated matrices of experience—the place from which the conscious-
ness of the knower begins” (p. 173).
When researchers construct the patterns of social reality from everyday experiences of
subjects, they do it from the standpoint of their own social realities. Even if the researcher
and the subject are the same gender, they are not likely to come from the same social loca-
tion. And even if they did, the social researcher still needs a bifurcated consciousness, which
can bring to bear a somewhat abstracted larger social reality (the social relations of capitalism,
for instance) on the patterns and experience of the everyday world.
A similar approach is critical realism; its premise, in Leslie McCall’s (2005) words, “is that
the real world puts limits on knowledge so that not all interpretations are equally plausible”
(p. 1793).

The New Feminist Sociology

It is clear from the trends of the last ten years that new dimensions of feminist social sci-
ence theory and research have emerged. They appear in the recognition of the multiple social
locations of both the researcher and the researched, the critical perspective embodied in the
choice of categorical comparisons, the use of intersectional analyses, and the resultant situa-
tional, partial knowledge.
I believe that the future strength of sociology lies in similarly using the variety and den-
sity of multiple identities—not just women versus men, blacks versus whites, or homosexuals
versus heterosexuals.
The future of sociology, in my view, could therefore still benefit from the strengths of
feminism—a structural gender analysis of all social phenomenon, the critical perspective of
the outsider within, and the understanding that knowledge is socially constructed, situa-
tional, partial, and complexly intersectional.

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