Doing Gender and Gender Performativity

Sociological thinking about gender went through a decisive transformation in the 1970s and 1980s. The mid-century framework was sex-role theory, developed largely within Parsonian structural functionalism. On this view, men and women occupied complementary 'instrumental' and 'expressive' roles in the family and workplace, socialized into those roles through childhood. The approach had virtues — it took gender seriously as a social phenomenon — but also serious limits. It treated masculinity and femininity as internalized traits rather than ongoing practices; it assumed heterosexual complementarity; and it struggled to account for gender variation within societies and over time.

Feminist sociology reworked the framework. Ann Oakley's Sex, Gender and Society (1972) distinguished sex (biological) from gender (social). Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) argued that gender identity is reproduced through early-childhood care arrangements in which women do the mothering. Dorothy Smith's The Everyday World as Problematic (1987) grounded feminist sociology in women's standpoints and the 'relations of ruling' that organize everyday life.

Candace West and Don Zimmerman's 1987 article Doing Gender, published in Gender & Society, crystallized a new view. Gender, they argued, is not a fixed attribute one 'has' or a role one 'plays' but an ongoing accomplishment — something people 'do' continuously in interaction. Every time we walk, speak, dress, take up space, choose a pronoun, queue for a restroom, we are doing gender. The doing is not optional; competent members of a society are held accountable for doing gender recognizably. To fail to perform recognizable gender is to risk sanctions ranging from social awkwardness to violence.

West and Zimmerman drew on Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, particularly his study of Agnes, a trans woman Garfinkel worked with in the 1950s. Agnes had to learn, consciously, the practical accomplishments that cisgender women performed unconsciously — how to sit, which gestures were acceptable, how to deflect questions about her past. Her experience illuminated the ongoing, achieved character of gender for everyone. West and Zimmerman extended the point to argue that gender is produced and reproduced in every interaction, in ways that sustain broader structural patterns of inequality.