Gender(s)

The MIT Press Essential Knowledge

by Kathryn Bond Stockton

Why gender is strange, even when it's played straight, and how race and money are two of its most dramatic ingredients.

In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kathryn Bond Stockton explores the fascinating, fraught, intimate, morphing matter of gender. Stockton argues for gender's strangeness, no matter how "normal" the concept seems; gender is queer for everyone, she claims, even when it's played quite straight. And she explains how race and money dramatically shape everybody's gender, even in sometimes surprising ways. Playful but serious, erudite and witty, Stockton marshals an impressive array of exhibits to consider, including dolls and their new gendering, the thrust of Jane Austen and Lil Nas X, gender identities according to women's colleges, gay and transgender ballroom scenes, and much more.

Stockton also examines gender in light of biology's own strange ways, its out-of-syncness with "male" and "female," explaining attempts to fortify gender with clothing, language, labor, and hair. She investigates gender as a concept--its concerning history, its bewitching pleasures and falsifications--by meeting the moment of where we are, with its many genders and counters-to-gender. This compelling background propels the question that drives this book and foregrounds what is "the opposite sex," after all? If there is no opposite, doesn't the male/female duo undergirding gender come undone?

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, Gender, Theory, Queer, Politics

256 pages, Paperback

Published August 31, 2021

About the author

Kathryn Bond Stockton is Distinguished Professor of English and inaugural Dean of the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah. She is the author of Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer,” The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (both finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies), and Making Out (finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award for memoir), among other books.

Reviews

[Ömer]

BİTİREBİLDİĞİME İ-NA-NA-MI-YO-RUM! Bugüne kadar yaptığım en zor ve en sıkıcı çeviriydi galiba :(

[J. Nic Fisk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think a lot of the poorer reviews and ratings come from misaligned expectations. This book is not about the idea of gender as a personal, lived experience but rather a historical, sociological investigation to where gender comes from, how it shapes itself and all it touches, and why and how it's changed. The author has a central theme or 3 throughout, namely that gender is inextricably tied to race and class (a point made quite well, except, in my opinion, at the very end) and that is very strange and self sabotaging as a concept, even when examined in the most presently normative, gender conservative ways. If you want a brief, expressive introduction on gender (broadly) and don't mind (or even value) the addition of an authors distinct voice and scholarly vantage, then you really can't find something better than this. But it is not an intro to gender in the sense that it'll get your grandpa to understand "them transgenders they keep hearing about on the news". It's much more of a history/sociology/philosophy scholarly introduction.

It doesn't get 5 stars for me largely because I feel the last fifth or so the book really fumbles the landing. I actually quite liked the injection of disability and debility into the conversation and consideration. But they had this chance to tie everything back into itself and summarize. Instead, they contextualize their work with what at the time were recent happenings (many of which were monumental and will become history itself!) but it really failed to leave me with a coherent and succinct message, other than the conversation about gender is inextricably linked to other social (but very real) contructs.


Personally I'm very grateful to this book as it got me out of a circular funk in my own thoughts about gender (and, how when you look to closely, the bottom falls out).

[Amelia B · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think that this book offers a lot of really interesting thoughts surrounding gender and the intersectionality of gender and other identities such as race, class, age, and sexuality. However, Bond Stockton writes it in such a windy, confusing way that often times you cannot even parse out what she is trying to say. Ultimately, there are so many better books and essays that are saying the same things. You could literally just read any of the works that she references and takes insanely large pull quotes from.

[Topher · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a lot of profound and interesting points made in this book, and I was also pointed towards several interesting authors, books, and resources I had not heard of before. The author’s voice comes through very strong in a somewhat pretentious academic way that grated on me at times. The important arguments could have been made using much simpler and clearer language, but they are important points nonetheless. If you’re looking for a thought-provoking read about the hypocrisy and complexity of “gender” then this is a good one

[Gabriel Daniel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Girl never write again. Some cool perspectives here tho

[Sawyer · Rating 2 out of 5]

informative but so poorly written

[Creed Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the topics explored had so much potential, they were simultaneously undeveloped and over explained. Also it seemed like the author couldn’t really figure who the audience was, resulting in really dense academically written sections and random pages of prose???

[ifonly · Rating 2 out of 5]

The information is good. The author writes in an artsy way that makes understanding hard. Her writing style often feels like she’d rather be writing poetry, but she accidentally got stuck writing this instead. At certain points in the book, the reader is expected to have very little knowledge of the subject; at other points, the reader is expected to have more than a basic understanding of gender. I thought this book was supposed to be education-focused? There at certain points at which the conclusions of arguments are assumed instead of achieved. I wish this book was better than it was, and I wish it was actually focused on being educational.

[Samantha Zarate · Rating 5 out of 5]

bro gender really isn’t a piece of cake

[Ayser Uzunyaşa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Çeviri çok kötü gerçekten!

[Personaonthepodium · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is clearly a book written by a cultured person that knows what they say about gender. However their choice to use a poetic and flowery language made their message almost unintelligible at times. I personally think that a topic as delicate and as central to today’s society needs clarity, and a book that leaves the reader more confused than before does not add to the conversation very much

[Amanda Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

As someone has read lots of books on this topic, I found Stockton’s critical framework lacking and the contextual build of the book lacking as well. There were interesting tidbits, to be sure, but I couldn’t get on board with her seeing race and sex combinations as separate sexes, rather than working in an intersectional way.

[Steve]

Read a third of the book. Author is smart and has a sense of humor, so that’s good, but the writing is a mishmash and isn’t coherent. She acts as if clever literary quotes prove a point, but the best they can really do is to illustrate a point. There’s a bit about the science of sex/gender but I don’t trust that she’s using good scientific sources.

[Seth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stockton clearly knows her subject, but is more interested in rhetoric and pursuing an intersectional narrative than in things like clarity, precision, and rigor. The result is mix of interesting factual information (whose veracity I have no particular reason to doubt), mildly obscurantist prose, some trivial claims annoyingly presented as though they should be surprising (e.g., "Money is in our gender!" which is just Stockton's shorthand for bloody obvious things like "Medical transition isn't free"*), some claims that should be taken with a healthy dose of salt, and some claims that should be chucked straight in the wastebasket. I often had this image in mind while reading:

Most egregiously bad claim, which is also arguably the closest thing the book has to a central thesis:

Have we ever had, then, a two-sex system, “man” and “woman,” in this country’s history? Since this nation’s founding, we have consciously, often legally, had at least a six-sex system (with more sexes beyond the thirteen colonies): white woman, white man, Black woman, Black man, Native woman, Native man . . . This becomes more stunning the more one considers it, raising the question: who is my “opposite,” my “opposite sex”? There are no opposites with six or more sexes.

I have absolutely no idea how Stockton is defining 'sex' here. Certainly, this isn't supported by the only definition she explicitly gives early in the book, which, to her credit, is a perfectly sensible definition grounded in developmental biology. She hints (here and in an earlier passage) at defining 'sex' as anything that serves as a basis for legal discrimination, but that seems utterly bizarre and unmotivated, makes the focus on race alone arbitrary (what about age, marital status, etc.?), and doesn't fit with the "consciously, often legally" bit anyway. "But what about intersectionality?" you might ask. Well, as Stockton herself says, the central claim of intersectionality is that the experience of being female and black, for example, is not simply the sum of the experience of being female and and the experience of being black. Intersectionality, in other words, is committed to viewing race and sex as distinct categories that intersect with non-additive results. It can recognize Stockton's six categories, but definitely not as sexes. There is no argument anywhere in the book for this galaxy-brained attempt to assimilate race into sex.

I'm not going to say you definitely shouldn't read this book - like I said, it contains some interesting information and ideas, and it wasn't so bad I stopped reading. But I would say that you must have a functioning bullshit detector and also tolerance for that "six-sex system" level of bullshit for it to be at all worth reading. And there's got to be some better book on the subject out there.

* Worth noting that this comes up in the context of the US military refusing to include transition in the medical benefits it provides, supposedly because that would be too expensive. Oddly, Stockton just takes the excuse at face value, rather than considering what the cost would actually be and putting it in the context of the military's frankly absurd budget.

[KT · Rating 4 out of 5]

A decent, enjoyable primer on gender

Particular highlights include:

Debunking brain sex believers, referencing Catherine Woolley: "sex differences in the brain are real, but they're not about differences in cognition or behaviour. You cannot extrapolate differences, that appear on a molecular/structural level to differences on behaviour

The book has good discussions of race and gender throughout including the difference in treatment between and views of Black/white men/women, such as Eldridge Cleaver claiming "normal", heterosexual relations between Black men and Black women are plagued by their loss of sexual opposition, given how similar and masculine they are
Cleaver's dated, homophobic, sexist thinking shows the incoherence of binary sex as a ground for heterosexual relations

Referencing Gayle Rubin's seminal essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" in discussing how marriage, heterosexual and labour, more precisely that labour differences between men and women, raising the question along the way as to why labour is divided along different genital configurations, insures the union of men and women by making the smallest viable economic unit - the marital household contain at least one man, one woman
So the division of labour is a device to produce heterosexuality

If biological and hormonal imperatives were as overwhelming as popular mythology would have them, it would hardly be necessary to insure heterosexual unions by means of economic interdependency

I also found the discussion on sexed restrooms in the USA and their origins in 19th century norms particularly interesting, in this case leaning on the works of Terry Kogan and David Shi, retelling how entrances and internal spaces e.g. dining rooms were separate for men and women and this extended and remained for restrooms resting on the assumption that women are a weaker, more vulnerable sex that needs protecting, and lest we forget the racial segregations of public spaces

[Dylan Wolff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. Her central thesis’s, that gender is bizarre and nobody can achieve “gender norm” is true and necessary to evaluate. Her secondary thoughts on the prisms that gender shines through is also important. But she actually didn’t spend much time really evaluating those claims or laying them out. She’s was Overly self congratulatory and pretentious, the book felt more like a grab back at trying to touch on how gender is influenced by every level of intersectionality than a serious inquiry into her primary ideas. I have no doubt the author knows a lot, but she did a lot more winking and nodding to how much she knows and expects you to pick up on than actually laying out serious arguments. For example, arguing with one non-scientists blog about how he feels about testosterone does not disprove that hormones effect gender norms or human behavior. The fact she even tries to make this claim off of such flimsy evidence (how she lays out the entire book) shows a profoundly slippery grasp of understanding what truth or evidence is

[⭐ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one was half/half for me. On one hand, Stockton handles a lot of important issues relating to gender such as race, class and disability. On the other hand:
- the prose is too much. it feels like the author almost wanted to write educative poetry.
- some parts expect no prior knowledge while others expect a certain level of knowledge (about oppression) which... isn't this supposed to be an introductory book?
- I feel like Stockton does a lot of generalizations. Like the '6+ genders in USA based on race' one. I get what she is saying but its not 'sexes' or 'genders' ; its the intersection of racism and sexism. (and other isms) I feel like shes speaking too much over racialized people.
In conclusion... it was okay. I wish Stockton dropped the purple prose bc its very hard to understand at some times.
extra: as a neurodivergent trans person, I wish she spent more time talking about disability and gender instead of spending like, 3 pages on it :/

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my preferred style, but KBS does as good a job as you can expect in under 200 pages (even if far too many of those pages are on how gender(s) intersect with everything else, before the reader really has any idea what we're using the word "gender(s)" to mean). I'm slightly surprised this hasn't been more controversial, since it makes the fairly obvious point that gender and sex are both constructions, and that the way biens pensants people use the word "gender" today can only be coherent if we more or less accept that there are more genders than there are people, so the centrist-liberal obsession with performing openness to people who have 'x' sex parts but '~x' gender is... not very convincing or helpful--and, too, the way that edge-lord hate mongers use the word "gender" can't make any sense at all, which is what you'd expect from hate mongers.

[Ally · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never have I closed a book and felt I gained as much knowledge as this one gave me. I genuinely have pages of notes and endless questions and directions I want to explore further. The book took me so many places & intersected in so many ways; truly such a special piece of media to devour. I feel like the book strengthened my ability to form concrete arguments and opinions in such an incredible way that no book on this topic has done; although that may have a little more to do with how active I was in my material absorption.
Four stars because sometimes the rhetoric was just insanely confusing and unnecessary lengthy. There were so many times I had now idea where we were going & I think that was maybe her point (?) but I was confused. It was almost written like a TED talk, which was unique and fun sometimes, but mostly just led to the book being too complex.

[Brandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that is probably best read with a group for a class, as it’s very academic. However, it was well written and provided some really interesting insights into the workings of gender, race, and disability in our culture and society. I love her general premise that gender is “queer” (meaning weird or odd) for all of us. None of us “perform” our gender perfectly and we all have hidden depths that the surface doesn’t remotely touch on. There is a lot of violence and damage done when we hold rigid beliefs about what a gender is “supposed” to look and behave like. I found this book very hopeful. I personally am excited for the changes that we are experiencing culturally but realize it’s scary for many and that fear comes out in dangerous ways.

[grace · Rating 2 out of 5]

While this book brings up some interesting topics for discussion, the execution does not make it easy to understand. This author is a poet, and that is conveyed in her writing. But that means it was tough for me to comprehend many of her points because she used such flowery language. Since this is supposed to be an introductory text, I thought there would be more explicit definitions and thoughts. I appreciated that she brought in outside sources, but she did it in a way that confused me about what points she wanted to emphasize, especially since so many quotes were used.
This book was okay and did have parts that made me think deeper, but much of it wasn't very clear.

[Gracie S · Rating 1 out of 5]

i had to read this for a class this semester. holy yap lady, what are you even talking about? the only chapter that made actual sense to me and seemed like a real argument about the relationship between sex, gender, race, and how people choose to express themselves is THE LAST ONE. her writing is very much all over the place and hard to follow. you can most definitely get the information that was in this book in others without the expense of your sanity trying to translate everything stockton said.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I understand the critiques of Bond's often prose-y writing -- it does sometimes cloud the points she so aptly makes -- I thoroughly enjoyed this book. In fact, her writing style provided a joy to reading that texts of this calibur often lack. She cites delightful and contemporary resources and examples, and she provides an understanding of "gender" like no one ever has before. Read this book!

[Selim Kuru · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. It serves to the spirit of the MIT Essential Knowledge Series. Stockton focuses on the US exprience to explode identity politics and concepts of determined biological sex and identifiable gender with a focus on racial and class politics. Still Stockton’s approach establishes a good model for other geogrqphical and historical contexts!

[Rob Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt myself changing as I read this book. I can’t “unrealize” the many things that has happened in human history to imbue me with “reality” (e.g., gender, sex, race, class, etc.), and how powers incentivize my participation and complicity in this “reality.”
This book helped bring these systems; this manufactured “reality” into view.
This book is staying with me.

[Kim Brown · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book presents an interesting theory of gender. It draws many intriguing intersections. Unfortunately, the book is difficult to read. The prose is wordy and full of jargon. It is difficult to understand and follow the logic. It lacks scientific support. Overall, I am very upset and disappointed.

[kathleen creedon · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 rounded down. this was a good read, just a little dense (makes sense, since Stockton is a professor). I thought she covered all the intersectional bases very thoroughly, and her voice definitely comes through as a sort of casual surprise for something I was expecting to be more pedantic.

[Matthew Alonso · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this book. The topic of gender is vastly complex, but Kathryn does a great job of making the content digestible for those who seek to understand gender as a social construct or (and) seek to further the conversation to understand a deeper meaning.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

“… raising new questions gets at new potential for splitting what we see from what we presume.”
Offering a uniquely “American” perspective on gender, this is a nice jumping off point for learning about the gender spectrum.

[Flossie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just feels shallow and I don’t think Stockton has anything original to say. Also she just seems annoying as a person. Got about 75% through it but it felt like homework the whole time and so when I accidentally lost the book imma just take it as a sign not to look for it lol