IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-24449-8_3.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Theorising Performing Gender

In: Performing Gender at Work

Author

Listed:
  • Elisabeth Kelan

    (King’s College London)

Abstract

In many everyday discussions and social science research, gender is perceived as static and as a property of people. To challenge this essentialism, which constructs men and women as fixed entities, the notion of the social construction of gender has become central to gender theories over recent decades. However, this theoretical insight is often difficult to translate into research practice. Instead of showing how gender is constructed, many studies claim to see gender as socially constructed but then treat gender as a stable, self-evident category within the research (Alvesson and Billing, 2002; Cameron, 1995; Hagemann-White, 1994; 1995; Speer, 2005). Cameron expresses this as follows: [A] huge proportion of empirical investigations begin by repeating the axiom that gender is constructed and then blithely proceed to ignore it. The question they pose is not how social subjects come to be constituted as women and men, but rather how these already constituted and gendered subjects behave, and especially how their behaviour differs. … This is to assume the very thing you ought to be explaining. (1995: 143)

Suggested Citation

  • Elisabeth Kelan, 2009. "Theorising Performing Gender," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Performing Gender at Work, chapter 3, pages 40-69, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-24449-8_3
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230244498_3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-24449-8_3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.