GENDER

by Ivan Illich

'The break with the past, which has been described by others as the transition to a capitalist mode of production, I describe here as the transition from the aegis of gender to the regime of sex.' Illich insists that we survey attitudes to male & female in both industrial society & its antecedents in order to recover a lost 'art of living'. 'While under any reign of gender women might be subordinate, under any economic regime they are only second sex...both genders are stripped, &, neutered, the man ends up on top.'Guide to Titled FootnotesAcknowledgementsSexism & Economic GrowthEconomic SexVernacular GenderVernacular CultureGender Domains & Vernacular MilieuGender Through TimeFrom Broken Gender to Economic SexIndex

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Cultural, History, Sociology, Gender

Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Ivan Illich was an Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest and critic of the institutions of contemporary western culture and their effects of the provenance and practice of education, medicine, work, energy use, and economic development.

Reviews

[Matthew Colvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of astonishing insights. Illich distinguishes premodern gendered society from modern genderless society. It is only the latter in which men and women take on “sex roles”, and in which they compete for ungendered goods; it is only in modern industrial genderless society that sexism is possible. Illich also remarks on the blindness of anthropologists who falsely project their modern concerns and concepts into their research, missing even the gendered discourse of the subjects whom they interview.

This book was recommended to me by Alastair Roberts. It is of immense importance for understanding why advocates of women’s ordination think the way they do.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

An attempt (amazingly successful, I think) to critique the entire modern system of human relations without employing concepts that presume such relations. Only a medievalist who feels marooned in the contemporary era would conceive such a project, or have any hope of bringing it off. He works his huge bibliography into the text in the form of super-footnotes, that you read alternately with the text, itself. He says this is a takeoff from the way they did it back in the old days, by which he means the 13th century.
. . . . The book focuses on the peculiarity of scarcity as a central issue/influence in forming the "economy". Asserts that: 1)previous to this society/global civilization, there was no such thing as an "economy". 2) The relations between men and women in this culture are unprecedented in annihilating "gendered" differences in all aspects of life, which existed in all previous societies 3)that sexism and the oppression of women is an unavoidable consequence of the denial of "gendered" difference 4) so many other ideas, all really thought-provoking even if you don't accept them, that I'll stop here. . . . Illich draws on a background in early medieval European history, huge erudition, and privileged access to a broad range of brilliant people's conversation, and a humongous reading background, particularly people around Karl Polanyi, who produced Trade and Market in the Early Empires. In addition to his own knowledge of classical and medieval society, Polanyi's work is a major prop of his thesis. I've thumbed through Polanyi's book, and it does seem to back up Illich.

[David Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting sociological essay - I think I would actually disagree with Goodreads' summary of the book, but it is a sometimes confusing work with a lot of specialized language. The big point of the book, I think, is that the most important (and yet almost always ignored) sociological phenomenon of the last few hundred years and, to a lesser extent, the last millennium, is the destruction of gender. Pre-industrialization societies were strongly gendered societies. Men and women had their own specialized language, rituals, work, conversation topics, and domains of life (and, as the Goodreads' summary implies, the historical survey of some of these differences is interesting reading). Industrialization has destroyed gendered society, we are all now just unisex economic units to be plugged into the system. This fact has harmed both men and women, but especially women who now find themselves plugged into a "sexist" system that men have more easily adjusted to (and women are still expected to do some of their pre-industrial tasks around the home but they no longer have the societal value they once had).

He ends the book saying he doesn't have a strategy to offer as to how to fix this problem, but does imply that shrinking the economy, an intentional and significant roll-back of our consumption, would help, and would also aid in the fight against environmental degradation. (As might be implied there, readers on the economic Left in politics might find certain sections of this book especially appealing, but you cannot put Illich in a left-wing box.)

[Kevin Carson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Illich at his worst, where his thought overlaps with the most toxic forms of trad anti-modernism -- in this case gender complementarianism

[Devin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gender, by Ivan Illich, published in 1982, is a fascinating book which makes a useful contribution to the history of the 'battle of the sexes'. By dividing the concepts of gender and sex, Illich weaves together a truly startling and unsettling view of the history of modern society.

This division at first appears opaque, but Illich argues that the two separate concepts have been deliberately ignored and thus confused by modern historians.

Gender refers to an ancient pattern of organizing society on gender lines. In such a system, men and women have separate work, separate tools, and separate forms of speech. For people in these societies: "To belong means to know what befits our kind of woman, our kind of man. If someone does what we consider the other gender's work, that person must be a stranger. Or a slave, deprived of all dignity. Gender is in every step, in every gesture, not just between the legs."

Sex and sexism, on the other hand, are concepts that only make sense within a gender-less society. In the old gender system, an individual couldn't be discriminated against on the basis of sex, because the two sexes were not in direct competition. Illich puts it this way: "Sexism is clearly not the continuation of patriarchal power relations in modern societies. Rather, it is a hitherto unthinkable individual degradation of one-half of humanity on a socio-biological grounds. The lower prestige assigned by patriarchal societies (of the Mediterranean or of any other type) must therefore be carefully distinguished from the personal degradation of each individual woman who, under the regime of sex, is forced to compete with men."

This is not splitting hairs, but is a disturbing revelation about the organization of modern industrial life. In gendered societies, men and women are not 'equal', but they are both necessary and valued for the categorically different types of contributions they make. The differences between them are ambiguous and asymmetrical, which discourages domination.

However, in sexed societies men and women are in competition as homogeneous entities that are nevertheless asymmetric on socio-biological grounds. "Exchange drives partners toward an ever clearer fit, (homogeneity and not ambiguity) whose asymmetry therefore tends toward hierarchy and dependence, where exchange structures relationships, a common denominator defines the fit."

Crucially, in the old gender system, men and women were economically dependent on each other. Neither could completely control the other, because both made separate but necessary contributions. But once gender was broken: "The two new functions, that of the breadwinner and that of the dependent, began to divide society at large."

Why has this distinction between gender and gender-less sex been lost? Illich asserts that: "Only when we stop looking at male roles and forms of power as the norm and begin to look at female arrangements and perceive them as equally valid and significant - though perhaps different in form - can we see how male and female roles are intertwined, and begin to understand how human societies operate." To the gender-less/sexist researcher, whose point of view is necessarily sexist, gender is invisible.

Where did the change between gendered and sexist societies begin? Illich traces the shift to the changing ideological worldview of the Catholic Church: "By restricting power, privilege, and ordination to men, Church law was not sexist; it simply reflected its sources. Church law did pioneer sexism by ruling on the consciences of equally immortal souls capable of committing the same sin with different bodies. By equating, in terms of sin, the transgressions of the same law by both men and women, it laid the foundation for sexist codes."

Illich also notes the changed significance of marriage. "What had been principally a ceremony to tie together two families related by complex lines of kinship became the event by which two individuals were joined for life in the new economic unit of the couple, an entity that could be taxed."

There are many implications of the gender to sex transition, which Illich gets into in detail, but that I won't attempt to summarize here.

The main question for me is, what have we lost with the loss of gender? Illich states: "Vernacular culture is a truce between genders, and sometimes a cruel one. (...) In contrast to this truce, the regime of scarcity imposes continued war and ever new kinds of defeat on each woman. While under the reign of gender they are subordinate, under any economic regime they are only the second sex."

For Illich: "'Vernacular' means those things that are homemade, homespun, home-grown - not destined for the marketplace, but that are for home use only."

The loss of gender is primarily the loss of subsistence. Whereas in the past gendered society provided the means of survival, today the marketplace allegedly does the same. "For a generation, development has swallowed those environmental resources that had allowed people to meet most of their needs without recourse to the marketplace, and in the process they have unlearned most of the skills necessary for subsistence."

To me, this indicates that as a society we have lost the ability to be self-regulating, self-provisioning, and self-made. Industrial society is today dependent on international power struggles and international catastrophes. Instead of being exposed to a few local and manageable threats, today the livelihoods of billions of people are exposed to unmanageable risks in systems of unprecedented size and fragility.

While I certainly don't propose a return to patriarchal patterns of gendered living, it is clear that the battle of the sexes is creating a worldwide crisis in living. It would be interesting to see what Illich would make of today's popular culture's destruction of the gender line. From this point of view, any discussion of 'gender' is obsolete and, in the exact confusion of terms this book aims to combat, sexist.

Can the social differences between the sexes be erased? Modern industrial culture states emphatically yes, as the myth of the objective marketplace is built on the myth of equal competition between gender-less individuals, but I believe this is a misleading question which ignores the importance of the physical world. Such a question can only be asked if we assume that the physical differences between biological men and women can be overcome.

The physical reality of biological women giving birth will simply not bend to the dreams of a gender-less world. However, instead of demanding the end of bigotry, I believe it would be much more useful to demand the end of economic dependence. The goal of ending bigotry is not wrong, but it fails to recognize that bigotry is inevitable wherever we must decide how to divide 'scarce' resources on social or biological grounds.

Ultimately, I believe the problem is not social and biological differences between individuals and ‘identities’, but the concept of economic scarcity. In economics, scarcity has a very particular definition. Illich says this about the concept :“Scarcity is historical, as historical as gender or sex. The era of scarcity could come to be only on the assumption that ‘man’ is individual, possessive, and, in the matter of material survival, gender-less - a rapacious neutrum oeconomicum.”

The assumption of possessive, gender-less individuals is not an inevitable truism, as many a modern economist would have us believe.

What does the concept of economic abundance look like? That isn’t a question Illich proposes to answer, but by clearing the air of incorrect notions of the ‘inevitability’ of modern life, he leaves us in a much more complicated and fruitful space. It is important to understand where we have come from, in order to move on. As Illich puts it: "All living is dwelling, the shaping of a dwelling. To dwell means to live in the traces that past living has left."

Interestingly, to 'dwell' on something in modern culture has negative connotations. However, if we are going to make a live-able future, we must find a way to make a living, to dwell, in the world the past created.

[Achmad Soefandi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Buku dengan judul asli gender ini diterbitkan lagi oleh penerbit Pustaka Pelajar dengan judul yang cukup menggoda pembacanya yaitu "Matinya Gender". Buku yang ditulis oleh salah satu tokoh pendidikan kritis yang membahas tentang gender sesuai judulnya. Tidak seperti pada buku buku lain yang membahas mengenai gender seperti buku tulisan Mansour Fakih yang berjudul "Analisis Gender", yang memberi penekakan isi terhadap macam macam pergerakan perempuan, usaha penyetaraan anatara perempuan dengan laki-laki sampai ketimpangan gender dalam masyarakat. Buku Ivan Illich ini lebih menitik beratkan pada masalah mulai pudarnya gender yang sudah terkosntruksi pada masyarakat disebabkan perubahan dalam beberapa bidang pada masyarakat seperti perubahan dalam segi ekonomi masyarakat.

Buku ini memang jika ditilik melawan arus mainstream buku buku yag membahas tentang gender, dalam buku ini justru Ivan Illich selain membahas masalah ketimpangan gender, juga menekankan bagaimana gender tersebut sudah tidak memiliki batasan yang jelas khususnya pada masyarakat yang selalu berubah seiring perkembangan jaman. Maksudnya jika pada masyarakat kita dulu gender tertentu selalu diidentikan dengan jenis kelamin tertentu. Pengertian gender sendiri adalah segala tanggung jawab yang dikonstuksi oleh masyarakat pada jenis kelamin tertentu, misalnya laki -laki gendernya adalah bekerja pada sektor publik, lebih mengutamakan rasio, sosok yang keras, dan segala bentuk maskulinitas yang dilabelkan pada jenis kelamin laki laki. Sedangkan untuk peempuan gendernya adalah lemah lembut, keibuan, bekerja pada ranah domestik, lebih mengutamakan emosi dan segala bentuk feminitas yang dilabelkan masyarakat terhadap perempuan.

Masyarakat memang selalu dinamis dan selalu mengalami perubahan, begitulah kira kira pendapat Hegel yang mempercayai sejarah sebagai penggerak dalam masyarakat, selalu ada dialektika yang menimbulkan perubahan dalam masyarakat. Bentuk perubahan dalam masyarakat tersebut salah satunya juga dalam hal gender ini. Salah satu contoh yang diambil oleh Ivan Illich tentang pergeseran gender ini adalah dalam bidang ekonomi khususnya dalam masyarakat kapitalis seperti saat ini. Menurut Ivan Illich dalam masyarakat kapitalis khususnya dalam negara berkembang batas antara gender antara laki laki dan perempuan sudah mulai tidak jelas bahkan gender tersebut bisa dipertukarkan antara kedua kelamin tersebut. Perubahan tersebut contohnya dialami negara berkembang, banyak perempuan saat ini sudah bekerja pada ranah publik dan banyak juga laki laki yang pada saat ini justru bekerja pada ranah domestik seperti mengurus anak memasak dan sebagainya. Hal ini terjadi dikarenakan pihak pemilik modal lebih senang mempekerjakan kaum perempuan yang dianggap pekerja yang tidak banyak menuntut dan bisa dibayar dengan upah murah. Perempuan yang bekerja di ranah publik dan laki-laki yang bekerja pada ranah domestik merupakan salah satu contoh bahwa gender yang dikonstruk oleh masyrakat tertentu atau Ivan Illich menyebutnya sebagai gender ke-daerahan sudah mulai luntur.

Pergeseran atau perubahan batas gender ini bukan tanpa masalah, karena menurut Ivan Illich yang dirugikan adalah pihak perempuan, karena perempuan perempuan yang bekerja pada sektor publik khsusunya perempuan dari kalangan bawah harus menanggung beban ganda atau Double Burden dalam bahasanya Mansour Fakih. Beban ganda adalah dua beban pekerjaan yang harus ditanggung yaitu beban sektor publik (menjadi seorang buruh) dan dalam sektor domestik (mengurus rumah tangga), beban ini khususnya ditanggung oleh kaum perempuan. Kaum perempuan bekerja di pabrik A misalnya untuk memenuhi kebuuhan rumah tangga untuk membantu pemenuhan kebutuhan rumah tangga, sepulangnya dari bekerja di pabrik perempuan masih dipaksa untuk memamasak, mencuci baju dan segala urusan rumah tangga. Perempuan bekerja pada sektor publik untuk memenuhi tuntutan ekonomi yang diautur kaum kapitalis sebagai bentuk penghapusan sekat gender lama yang diciptakan masyarakat. Sementara perempuan juga dituntut melakukan pekerjaan pada ranah domestik sebagai pemenuhan tuntutan dari puing puing gender hasil ciptaan masyarakat yang telah dirontokan oleh pergeseran jaman yang belum tersapu bersih.

Buku yang sangat menarik dibaca untuk menambah prespektif kita tentang gender, bahwa gender sebenarnya sudah terhunus dan dalam keadaan sekarat, akan tetapi masih ada perlawanan yang diciptakanya.

[Devon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and definitely somewhat controversial. I'd like to read some feminist critiques of it...Illich argues that we have lost gender in our modern capitalist economy, we have entered the regime of sex. Whereas gendered relationships and divisions were embedded in vernacular culture and ways of being, sex is abstract, we live as "equals", though with different genitalia....though clearly the subjugation of women is still an issue, ideally, we are all the same...

This book was written in the early '80s, and though its well documented (half of the text is footnotes and discussions of other authors works), I think that womens/queer/gender studies have come a long way over the last 30 years...

My main complaint of it is that he does not really address the fluidity of gender and in some ways romanticizes a past when men and women's opportunities in life were far more drastically shaped by their anatomy...

He makes many valid and striking points however, and he himself is careful to make it clear that he is simply trying to open up a space for discussion and examination of previously ignored phenomena....the disappearance of a highly gendered, yet complementary world of relationships between men and women, and the transition to one in which abstract humans compete for scarce resources...

[Magdelanye]

This is not an easy book and though I tackled it a few times, the language in addition to his retro approach made it difficult to get comfortable. Of course, he does have some valuable insight into the origins of modern versions of slavery and gender bias.

I hope this book surfaces again in my life but with my library still in storage I am going to shelve it for now as lost before I could finish, not quite half done

[Jeremy]

Mentioned positively here.

[Ari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Menyegarkan!

Dasar orangnya posmo kali ya... jadi memang ada letupan-letupan pemikiran yang sangat menarik. Misalnya ia menyatakan bahwa era kapitalisme inilah yang menyebabkan semakin terjadi "seksisme". Berrdasarkan asumsi ilmu ekonomi kapitalis tentang "kelangkaan", maka semua diasumsikan membutuhkan pendidikan.

Semua!
Oleh karena itu, di era kapitalis, manusia membutuhkan pendidikan tanpa gender yang harus diusahakan dan diinginkan oleh dua jenis kelamin. Ini secara antropologis dijelaskan Illich sebagai transmogrifikasi dari jender menjadi jenis kelamin.

Pendidikan tanpa jender inilah yang justru menyebabkan pelemahan posisi perempuan. Simpulannya pertumbuhan ekonomi memuat sifat menghancurkan jender-- Pertumbuhan ekonomi NEGATIF adalah syarat untuk mengurangi seksisme...

Cerdas! saya tidak bisa berhenti tertawa selama membacanya. :)

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gender, by Ivan Illich, is an erudite, controversial, fascinating, and deeply insightful book - and not always in that order. Gender is an attempt to articulate a new understanding of our modern times, not as a transition from a pre-industrial age to an industrial age, but from gendered ways of living to the economic regime of sex.

Gender, for Ivan Illich, means something different than the common conceptions of that term. Gender is a way of describing a "duality that in the past was too obvious to even be named, and is so far removed from us today that it is often confused with sex. By 'sex' I mean the result of a polarization in those common characteristics that, starting with the late eighteenth century, are attributed to all human beings." Gender is something which can only be described metaphorically. Gender is about a dance between men and women, who are distinct individuals with distinct speech, tools, tasks, and ways of living. Gender is not the same in every culture, but every culture has a duality between men and women.

Gender is contrasted with economic sex where men and women are treated as the same, including having access to the same tasks, tools, speech, and ways of life. Under the regime of economic sex, discrimination invariably exists, and it will always end up worse for women. Economic sex is concerned with the human, and gender is concerned with male and female.

To persuade us of his thesis, Illich provides us with a variety of historical and anthropological data to back up his claim. In anthropology, he consistently claims that modern anthropologists have neglected the study and observation of gender when observing other cultures. This has hindered their ability to view the people they are studying. He highlights different ways that men and women had different tasks, roles, and speech in gendered society. While he does neglect to discuss counter-examples, I found his argument compelling.

When he looks historically, Illich sees the modern West going through four successive stages 1) gender, 2) the stage of broken gender brought about by new marriage vows in the 11th century, 3) economic sex, and 4) our modern time where we have a desexed, synthetic gender line.
I must, at this point, acknowledge the criticism Illich received for this book. Illich was basically cancelled for his arguments in this book. He did not get much critical engagement with his book and the ideas put forth, and his argument was viewed as offensive to many feminists. Because of the quick and harsh reaction against his book, it is hard to find good, critical engagements with it. Some of the feminist critics do make good points about Illich's disregard for non-gendered tools and tasks, use of anthropological data, and his neglect of the darker side of a gendered lifestyle (such as this critique by Arlie Hochschild).

On this last point, Illich's critics are on to a legitimate weakness of Gender. Illich did not do much to highlight how bad the reign of gender could be for women. And because he did not do much to highlight this, his critics found him an easy target to criticize as painting a one-sided and overly romantic picture of the past. However, I think this criticism, while making a fair point about Illich's lack of emphasis on how the reign of gender often was oppressive, also misses the mark in two aspects. First, while Illich did not make it a major theme of his book, he is not ignorant of the harshness of life lived under the reign of gender. He briefly acknowledges, for example that "while for a millennium women had been muted in a Church ruled by men, they now became equal penitents speaking in a muffled voice to the curate of a sexist regime." The fact that women lived in a world ruled by men, and that this was often bad for women was not something new to Illich. But neither was it something he focused much on. Second, and much more importantly, this critique says nothing about the main thesis of the book. Even if Illich neglected ways women were treated cruely under the reign of gender, that does nothing to challenge his idea that we used to live in a complementary reign of gender, and now we live in an economic reign of sex. Illich can, and does acknowledge both, such as when he says "Under the reign of gender, men and women collectively depend on each other; their mutual dependence sets limits to struggle, exploitation, defeat. Vernacular culture is a truce between genders, and sometimes a cruel one. Where men mutilate women's bodies, the gynaeceum often knows excruciating ways to get back at men's feelings. In contrast to this truce, the regime of scarcity imposes continued war and ever new kinds of defeat on each woman. While under the reign of gender women might be subordinate, under and economic regime they are only the second sex. They are forever handicapped in games where you play for genderless stakes and either win or lose. Here, both genders are stripped and, neutered, the man ends up on top." Cruelty and oppression exist in both the reign of gender and the regime of sex. Illich does not deny that. What his thesis puts forth as an idea is that oppression and cruelty are accidental features of gender, but essential features of economic sex. That, I believe is the most important idea put forth by Illich, and it is one his feminist critics do not target.

Gender is not a perfect book. Illich is attempting to critique our modern conceptions of sex by utilizing concepts our language does not have words for. This requires a view from above that neither Illich nor his critics have. He fails to adequately criticize a gendered society, and his view can easily come across as easily romantic. He also fails to adequately articulate how both men and women are human as well as men and women. They come across as too different, and the sameness and similarities between the two is diminished. However, the thesis put forward by Illich is illuminating and helpful in articulating a vision and understanding of deeply complementary relationship between men and women. While not explicit in the text, this vision of gender is a deeply Christian one that flows from the different binaries in the creation story, including the male and female binary. In a gendered society, men and women collectively depend upon each other with no ones tasks viewed as having greater value than the other. This was often not the case due to sin, but conceptually, a complementary relationship between men and women is articulated. Now that we are in the regime of economic sex, this conceptual complementarity has been destroyed and we are all left striving for unisex goods, tasks, and roles. This thesis is illuminating in helping articulate a Christian view of men and women, along with helping explain why our current debates about women's ordination and women in leadership are making such headway now versus the past. We are either left assuming that all of our fathers in the faith were sexist and discriminated against women and that we are among the first generation to finally recover the egalitarian vision of the NT, or we can assume that in the past relations between men and women in the body of Christ were able to move beyond discrimination and work together for good of the kingdom. A complementary relationship, which is still distorted by sin, makes more sense to me of what we see in the old and new testament than unisex men and women fighting for a scarce amount of leadership.

[Richard Lawrence]

Fascinating, obscure, opaque and insightful.

Illich argues that industrialisation and other forms of "progress" have deconstructed gender (a complex and esoteric complementality) and replaced it with "sex" (basically a means for discrimination).

Illich argues that to undo sexism and actually make people happier we should seek economic contraction.

Some parts of Illich's case are hard to follow and I think he makes some incorrect connections; but overall this was a fascinating read.

I note that Mary Harrington's more accessible works pick up some of Illich's best insights and applies his points more directly; for someone looking for clear insights useful in our culture, Harrington is probably a better starting point.

[Rex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful and odd as ever.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most important book on the topic written in the past 100 years.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly a fascinating (and at times difficult) read.

Illich sets out to show that modern society is ordered by "sex" while the pre-modern world was ordered by "gender".

The gendered world was one that is entirely different from our "sexist" world. In gendered society, both man and woman had a domain in which they operated along with the rest of the society. Women weren't "oppressed" because that very framing of things only exists in our "sexist" world. Men and women were simply different and lived and operated in different modes. Both had various forms of soft power they wielded within the larger society. What's more, social taboos would have completely eliminated the idea that a man could interfere in the woman's world or vice-a-versa.

In modern "sexist" society, both genders have been neutered and replaced with "sex". As sex, each are then expected to perform various "sexed" forms of labor to participate in the economy. In such an arrangement, the female "sex" is more or less the second sex as they have lost more than the man in the transition from a gendered to a "sexist" society.

But this problem is solved through the myth of progress. While both genders have been neutered, there is "hope" that the female sex can progress to become equal with the neutered male (as if such a goal were even worth attaining).

This is a good book to read if you ever find yourself disgruntled *both* with the way things are *and* with the way solutions are often proposed.

[Karoline · Rating 5 out of 5]

That was a wild ride! I would not ordinarily think to pick up a Marxist, Catholic, Austrian philosopher-priest for an imaginative window into modern mythologies of self, home, masculine and feminine, but now that I've read it, I recommend it. To understand how very weird our experience of the world is in modernity, you have to be able to get a little outside it - probably a few steps into the past - and that's what Illich enables us to do.

There's some weird stuff along the way, and I can't comment on the accuracy on all of the complex historic readings he arrives at, but none of that need detract from his central argument, which is very clear and persuasive: that modernity has stripped the world of gender - richly textured masculine and feminine modes of living and working side by side but not interchangeably - and replaced this "vernacular gender" with the "regime of sex," in which the interchangeable sexless worker, whose maleness or femaleness is irrelevant, competes with other sexless workers for the same space. This will inevitably tend to leave women in a second-best position, and to foster bitter competition and resentment.

He doesn't suggest answers, or even responses, but to see more clearly is a first step to navigating well.

[Jungle Julia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Spiace approcciarmi a questo autore, che per tantissimi versi mi incuriosiva, con questo testo completamente intriso del peggior tipo di morale cattolica sulla divisione sociale dei ruoli di genere. Illich, deformando in chiave cristiana le idee della seconda ondata di femminismo, cerca di suffragare in soldoni la complementarietà dei generi, dipingendola stucchevolmente come più conforme alla natura dell'uomo. A implicito beneficio maschile, ça va sans dire.

Meritevole di menzione, ma magari totalmente casuale, il fatto che anche qua su Goodreads quasi tutte le recensioni favorevoli sembrino prodotte da utenti uomini.

Termino queste righe di commento raccomandando un testo che al contrario smonta molti di questi preconcetti accademici su donne e ruoli di genere (in particolare all'interno della comunità scientifica): Inferiori, di Angela Saini.

[Josh Pendergrass]

Another excellent book by Ivan Illich. The thesis is that modern industrial society destroys our relationship to "gender". This society extinguishes all differences between the genders and each person becomes an atomized and replaceable cog in the industrial machine. Illich is NOT advocating for men and women to have "traditional" gender roles, or for anything resembling what we would think of as "patriarchy"; but rather for each gender to have a sense of purpose that contributes to the function of society, a yin-yang complimentary balance if you will. This can take a multitude of forms. I think that the conclusion of his thesis, though he does not state this outright, is that a society in which the genders can not each find a place, will no longer continue to function.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and thought provoking essay: Parsing gender and sex as it relates to the emergence of inquisitional religion and industrial/capitalist development.The thought of sexism (and bigotry) as the outcome of the loss of vernacular gender is captivating.

[Josiah Hasbrouck]

july 2024:
Much went over my head; warrants revisiting

may 2025:
you'd think this was my favorite book of all time given the number of times i have read it in the last 11 months

[ariana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short but striking work chronicling the loss of Gender and the creation of “sex” coincident with the rise of capitalism.

It’s helpful to keep in mind while reading Illich that he uses the terms gender and sex in almost the opposite way that contemporary conservative culture warring would have us define. For Illich, what he calls vernacular gender is the real, substantive stuff of human duality, an ambiguous complementarity that is dysymmetrical; it is neither mirror nor shadow. (Providing a physics analogy: “light can be reduced neither to a wave phenomenon nor to a particle phenomenon. In either case, too much is left out.” p. 69 footnote).

What he calls sex (that is, economic sex) is the fabricated, un-real dream that is imposed on us by capitalism (or the cooler-sounding “cash nexus”: commodity production & dependence.)

While Illich intentionally avoids Marxist and feminist lenses in this work (because “their sex-conscious use of political economics eliminates the ambiguities of gender by means of a double filter”*), he even more intensely wants “to avoid stooping to engage in any argument with those who are taken in by the fashionable rhetoric [of those who] start from the postulate of biological determinism…” (p. 76) I am baffled that some critics accuse him of essentialism, or biological determinism, when much of this work is dedicated to the fact that gender, as Illich means it, is indeed culturally relative to some degree, and arbitrarily socially constructed. His extensive research (in how many languages??) on these gendered worlds was itself a delightful read even if only for his enthusiasm for the subject, shining through discussions of spindle handles and grain harvesting methods amidst gigantic footnotes that comprise half the text and take up much of each page. You think you’re reading just one essay when new ones keep popping up concurrently in the footnotes!

Gender is something lost to modern man (he is Homo economicus). We do not have gender in a capitalist system. Capitalism destroys gender. We are now productive individuals with secondary attributes, changeable indeed with the advances of surgical & therapeutic technologies, pasted on top.

Long quote for funsies:
“Gender is substantive. This is not true with sex in the economic neuter. In the perspective of the neuter, sex is a secondary attribute, a property of an individual, an adjective characteristic of a human being. The concept of sex role could not come into being until society’s institutions were structured to meet the genderless needs of genderless clients with genderless commodities produced in a genderless world. The sex role builds on the existence of genderless man. One’s sex, however, is not perceived as just one more role, one more outfit to don, one more well-fitting or ill-tailored suit for special occasions… Most people consider the sex role less changeable; women know that they are stuck with it in an oppressive way. But, like it or not, to have a sex role—be it imposed, or resented—is something other than belonging to a gender. It is one thing to say that you are a man or a woman, and something quite different that you are a human being of male or female sex.” (p. 81)

*Whatever that means. I docked a star for these sometime bewildering statements that go without further explanation. Maybe I lack the intelligence for them.. but they are still amusing and provoke my curiosity anyway. :)

...

TL;DR, industrial economies are inherently sexist, women are always discriminated under such a system, industrial economies destroyed culture and peoplehood, the only way to fight sexism (and other ills such as climate crises) is to enact negative growth/aim towards subsistence living; heterosexuality and homosexuality as categories of *being* are brand new & are products of the Victorians being freaks with racist Darwinian presumptions, the concept of the “married” “conjugal unit” (~nuclear family) of taxable individuals is an intensely modern invention, the Church as a human institution is complicit in all this for trying to universalize the conscience… and everyone is the loser for having become modern plastic people.

But please do read this, as there is much more food for thought within these pages. I didn’t even mention the witches and gargoyles! Pagan rites! Crossdressing priests! Oh my!

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Following up largely on ideas he formulated in Shadow Work, Ivan Illich reveals how the loss of the distinct but complementary gendered domains of vernacular cultures is essential to understanding the rise of our modern industrial world. This is a process of destruction Illich traces from the 11th century onwards.

Gender is a text loaded with engaging and perceptive insights into the true nature of our times and of our past that no other critic of modernity comes close to grasping and revealing. This is one of Illich's most important books, as it reveals what in many ways is the foundational thing we have lost from the now distorted and hidden world of our ancestors. Yet it seems to also be one of his most underappreciated works, likely due to its strong critiques of the intellectual blindnesses and shortcomings of certain left-wing movements that Illich would at one time have been broadly associated with. For example, feminism's fight for equality, according to Illich, is only a further surrender to the same matrix responsible for the disenfranchisement and distinctly modern discrimination against women - ie. the unisex perception of the world created and fostered by the industrial age.

As this book particularly shows, Illich really stands in a league of his own. He is the anachronistic mind par excellence, and one never leaves his writings perceiving the world in the same way. Gender is one more testament to his legacy as an author whose work needs to be revisited and reclaimed with ever greater urgency. A must read.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book may have given an adequate diagnosis of Illich's contemporary society, but now seems dated. Many of his criticisms are objectionable if one does not view the modern "commodified" world as negatively as Illich does. While I cannot agree with his desire to return to a less commodified world, Illich's point that the shift towards a more market drive society and the concomitant shift towards viewing both men and women as genderless workers rather than males or females with corresponding gendered work required of them has profoundly shaped society is an important one. Illich's conclusion from this neutering of work is that sexism will always be with us. He does not however, make a convincing argument for why this is the case. I think Illich underestimates the extent to which our modern society can change to accommodate women's needs and desires. This is visibly on display now, as a large number of powerful men have lost their jobs and titles as a result of sexual harassment allegations against them. Obviously, this is not to say the world is just or equitable now, but I see no reason to dismantle the system we have as Illich implicitly suggests while we are still able to make progress within the system we have.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a challenging book to get through, not helped by the abundance of footnotes on almost every page. They frequently consumed up to one half of each. Ivan Illich is and was, during his lifetime, controversial. He was a Catholic priest, philosopher, and author who wrote numerous books describing his (often radical) views on education, medicine, gender, politics, and their impact and influence on societies and the people within them.

Gender, on the surface, does not present ideas that feminists would agree with. One concept that Illich goes into in great detail is his description of (pre-industrial) subsistence worlds where division of labour between the genders was harmonious and fruitful for the family and community as a whole. Women’s work would eventually be valued (in economic terms) at a far lesser rate than men’s—a tenet of inequality from our modern era’s perspective. Illich argues that this model (prior to the economic model of monetary exchange) gave men and women their own ‘domains’ of which they ruled with agency and purpose. This idea supports Illich’s main premise of the book, which is that given that industrial capitalism replaced gendered humans as unisex homo economicus—a neutered person who pursues wealth for his own self-interest and becomes an economic pawn by the capitalistic system—the opportunity for economic parity between the sexes is impossible. In this system, women, Illich implies, are at a disadvantage due to physical differences (not lesser), and bearing children leads to absences from the workforce for periods of time.

Illich argues that it is the economic model of capitalism that has punished women and that within this capitalistic model, women can never win. Illich implies that he wrote Gender to challenge the current premise that it is possible to achieve an equitable workplace, including equal pay for equal work—the system, he states, is inherently sexist (pages 4–6).

The real weakness in Illich's book, I feel, is his lack of constructive ideas to move forward and make it better for women in our current system, which Illich seems to abhor. I don’t buy his argument where he implies that women thrived in the pre-industrial era. I do, however, agree with Illich that the current model is imperfect, yet let’s be real—women are better off today than in the pre-industrial era. But it is helpful to look at today’s persistent economic wage inequality through the Illich lens as a catalyst for creating modern solutions and perhaps differing perspectives for today’s women.

I won’t elaborate further, as the book is dense and heavy. There were more concepts than I care to admit that I had difficulty wrapping my head around. I did find two good articles that summarize some of Illich’s arguments for those who might be interested: The Sad Loss of Gender and Corruption of the Best: On Ivan Illich.

Illich, though challenging, is definitely a worthwhile read—his radical views are thought-provoking and could be what we need to move equality for working women forward.

[ger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great essay on the difference between a 'Gendered' society and a Capitalist one based on scarcity and the interchangeability of the 'Sexes'. A lot of pertinent ideas on assumptions held by academics and the ignoring of gender through time. Written in 1982, it would be interesting to know what he would have thought of this decades obsession with gender and transgender. It is possible to make a guess though through his comprehensive detail. Illich is always worth a read.

[Sean Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm probably two or three reads away from really getting this, but still there were several insights that I found very helpful. For example, the observation that the apartment and the garage are two instances of the same kind of space, that is, "overnight storage for a productive resource" (119) was quite striking.

[Seth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Improves obviously in the last couple chapters. Illich has interesting things to say, but he buries his meaning deep within footnotes and obscure verbiage. Some of the statistical stuff near the beginning definitely feels dated nowadays, even if the general thesis probably holds.

[Simon van der Lugt · Rating 3 out of 5]

gender is nauw verweven met economische omstandigheden, okay, en nu?

[Valentín Serrano García · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful and inspiring, but...dated. This is one of those books whose insight and assumptions seem to have lost its aim.

[Keturah Lamb · Rating 4 out of 5]

book review coming to substack soon!!!