Why should we study Sex and Gender in Communication? Public discourse about sex and gender has been limited by multiple institutional constraints. Among institutions that play a role in codifying sex and gender are education, medicine, politics, economics, and religion, to name a few.
Codifications, or legitimized and institutionalized understandings, of sex and gender throughout history have had a profound impact on personal identity, personal expectations, and personal narratives. When our mothers or other authority figures within the institutions where we are raised give us information about our sex and gender, we generally do not question it unless confronted with alternative possibilities. This illustrates how institutional codification, especially if it is reinforced through repetition and cultural narratives, is a rhetorical construction of reality.
What is "normal" about sex and gender is not something that has always been understood or interpreted the same way nor is it the same across all cultures. The history of political, religious, moral, and legal definitional norms about sex and gender illustrates how various narratives have shaped our understanding of these essential categories (Evans, 1993; Foucault, 1978/1990; Laqueur, 1992). These narratives often work together to construct consistent biases across institutions of power, and are reinforced by the perceived lack of gender variance in the way history is told (Foucault, 1978/1990; Laqueur, 1992; Wierling, 1989/1995). Gender did, of course, play a role in many historical political constructs, but the visibility of gender was often hidden.
Public arguments about gender and sexuality raise a variety of concerns. Consider the following quote from a feminist public argument in the early 2000s:
I am a woman, and I often have sex with a man…When I think about all the things I've learned to do to appeal to him and pleasure him, I realized that I, too, would like to be the man in bed. I don't mean, however, that I'd like to be the one with the penis (McCaughey & French, 2002, ¶s 1 & 4).
This quote, from the Spring, 2002 issue of the third wave feminist e-journal Sexing the Political refers, not only to the idea of having power in bed and in sexual relationships, but to the idea that female pleasure (clitoral sex) could be privileged and valued in society, and thus in individual sexual relationships. This concept, that female pleasure needs to be assigned cultural capital, illustrates how women, non-heteronormative or straight males, and non-binary individuals are limited by language, culture, legal, and social perceptions in something as natural as the sex act itself. This has implications far beyond the act of intercourse, as the implied difference between a male actor and female receptacle in the sex act influences multiple public arguments related to rape culture, sexual harassment, definitions of marriage, identity rights, contraception, abortion, and even influences arguments about the glass ceiling and gender pay inequity, and the very definitions of gender and sexuality.
The multitudes of ways that communication and language inform the performance of gender and gender roles cannot be covered in this one module. However, there is one other example of communication processes reinforcing gender roles and stereotypes that can help us to understand the significance of these labels and processes. The history of gender and sexuality in public rhetoric and political communication has always been complex. In many ways, this complexity is centered on a definition of sex as a procreative act.
The study of sex and gender in politics and public argument is complicated. This is partly due to the fact that gender involves the category of woman, and women are technically not a minority group. For this reason, legal protections accorded to "minority" groups have not been evenly applied to women, and similarly to other gender-based groupings. This complication echoes the invisibility of women in history (Weirling, 1985/1999), the invisibility of lesbians in public and legal discussions of homosexuality (Castle, 1993; Ranger & Fedoroff, 2015), and the hystericization of the female body (Evans, 1993; Foucault, 1978/1990) in religious, medicinal, psychological, and public discourse. Some aspects of men's bodies were also hidden through normalization processes. For example, male circumcision is normalized in much of Western society so that an uncircumcised man is viewed as "abnormal".
From its roots, medicine has served to codify and commodify bodies. Hippocrates, and his Hippocratic school of medicine described bodies in what we refer to as a "two sex" model, viewing men and women as separate (though not necessarily equal) species. On the other hand, Aristotle described what we refer to as a "one sex" model, with women as defective or imperfect men. The differences between the sexes were made clear in both sets of rhetoric. Hippocrates described diseases that could only belong to one sex or the other. Among the more famous of these was hysteria, caused by a woman's uterus moving through her body causing imbalances. The power of the system itself to essentialize women's medical needs and place "her" against "him" in medical discourse has always been problematic. By rhetorically constructing a reality that empowers one half of the gender binary over the other, the rights of those not empowered in the rhetoric are easily constrained. The history of hysteria is one clear example of how women's rights and empowerment potential can be minimized by discursive strategies and rhetorical constructs.
According to Foucault, the hysterization of women's bodies was a process of scrutinizing and assigning the worth of women to their bodies, and particularly their roles in relation to procreative ability, childbirth, family, and children. This process was constructed through public rhetorics and institutionalized through moralistic value assignments, tied both to church and legislation, and later medical knowledge. Foucault's argument addressed that hysterization had its roots in classical and medieval public moral argument, though he focused on the developments within hysteria during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Evans, 1993; Foucault, 1978/1990).
The history of 'female hysteria' had a profound impact on gender roles. The role of hysteria as a disease or psychological problem, however, was also influenced by other understandings of gender roles. An example of a medieval Catholic argument from St. Thomas Aquinas (1225? - 1274/2006) gives us some understanding of how women and women's sexuality were viewed within the hegemonic structures of the time. He explains in his Summa Theological that woman is a failed man, or incomplete man and should be subservient to man. Her purpose is about childbearing, he argues, labeling this as God's work.
First, we need to understand that in some centuries it was assumed that women are incapable of obtaining pleasure from the sex act. By the seventeenth century, hysteria was tied in medical studies to procreation that claimed marriage and childbearing were a cure (Jones, 2015; Schleiner, 2009). Semen was thought to have healing properties, and thus parents were urged to marry off their daughters lest they fall prey to the disease. Nuns and widows, often cited as the only women who could own property or make public arguments in this era, were seen as prone to melancholy due to a lack of regular intercourse. Contraceptives were also argued as problematic as they would not allow the healing properties of semen to aid a hysterical woman and could cause a buildup of excess female fluid, either female ejaculation or more commonly menstrual blood, echoing St. Thomas' concern that women are too moist by nature, which was associated as a primary cause of hysteria (Arnaud, 2015; Scull, 2009).
Dismissing women's need for pleasure also reinforced the male ability to find pleasure in the sex act without regard for a woman's needs. This impacted a variety of issues related to sexuality. Consider the role of women in media and porn as objects of desire to be treated as receptacles rather than as partners. Or consider the language associated with rape and rape legislation, especially as it concerns how the victim is often re-victimized. The discussion of the sex act in culture further illustrates how this works: the male organ penetrates the female organ...the man penetrates the woman. There is no similarly easy way to discuss the woman actively participating in sex. And also consider the taboos on the words associated with the sex act; it is much easier to talk about a penis in society than it is to talk about a clitoris or a vagina. So ask yourself, is language really that biased against women's identities? Does it really place such restrictions on our gender roles?
Consider the following quote from Luce Irigaray (1987/1993), a French feminist theorist and linguist known for her critique of male-dominant language.
Each sex has a relation to madness. Every desire has a relation to madness. But it would seem that one desire has been taken as wisdom, moderation, truth, leaving to the other sex the weight of a madness that cannot be acknowledged or accommodated.
How seriously should we take Irigaray's concerns? If we compare what Irigaray is concerned with to the motivations and challenges behind the #MeToo movement, should we be concerned about how patriarchal language norms rhetorically construct our reality?
In her textbook Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender, and Culture, Julia Wood (2013) explains that studying Gender Communication is important to each individual in two primary ways. First, it helps a person understand how communication works in our own relationships where gender is involved. It helps us to understand how to talk to the opposite, or even our own, sex. Second, it helps us to understand our own genders, how we live within our selves, and what we can do if we choose to revise our genders.
When discussing gender communication and gender roles, we need to distinguish some terminology. "Gender" as a term is generally used to discuss social norms and expectations, and the performance of sexual identity, associated with an individual's self. "Sex" refers to biological categories, particularly male and female, determined by internal reproductive organs and external genitalia. While sex generally refers to two categories, gender can refer to a wide variety of categories based on personal preference and choice.
Other terms reflect this distinction. "Sexuality" is a performance of self tied to both the biological category and the performed self. "Sex Roles" refers to the roles we perform in society based on biological sex, and "Gender Roles" are the roles we perform based on choice. "Queer" refers to any adaptation of gender or gender role categories that challenges normal understandings. When we study gender communication we study the role communication plays in shaping our reality, as well as how to communicate effectively between and within gender categories.
Ranger, R. & Fedoroff, P. (2015). Perversions and sexology. The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality. 861–1042.
Schleiner W. (2009). Early modern green sickness and pre-Freudian hysteria. Early Science and Medicine, 14, 5, 661-676.
Scull, A. (2009). Hysteria: The disturbing history. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Wierling, D. (1995). The history of everyday life and gender relations: On historical and historiographical relationships. In A. Lüdtke, (Ed.). The history of everyday life (Trans. W. Templer) (pp. 149-168). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1989).
Wood, J. (2013). Gendered lives: Communication, Gender, and Culture. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
