Aliya Saperstein: "Gender Beyond Categories: Femininity, Masculinity, and Gender Expression"
Gender categories are not homogeneous; they have inequalities and hierarchies both within and between them. Within any gender identity category, people enact varying levels of femininity and masculinity, from traditional bipolar or “opposite” conceptions of gender, to various forms of androgyny and nonconformity, to feeling little attachment to gender at all. Contemporary gender theory highlights the importance of understanding these dominant, subordinate and mixed positions within gender categories as key to the overall maintenance of gender inequality. However, outside of social psychology, most quantitative research to date has been ill-equipped to operationalize concepts of femininity, masculinity, and gender expression. This talk situates the (re)emergence of such gradational gender measures amid recent efforts to recognize gender diversity and highlights findings from national survey data that substantiate the presence of a more nuanced landscape: expressions of femininity and masculinity do not fall neatly into binary categories, they reveal inequalities that binary gender frameworks leave hidden, and illustrate how expressions of gender diversity are shaped by social context.
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