Gender Theory in Troubled Times Kathleen Lennon and Rachel Alsop, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020 (ISBN: 978-0-745-68301-0)

Abstract

What started as a second edition of Theorizing Gender: An Introduction (co-authored by Annette Fitzsimons and Rosalind Minsky) instead became this self-conscious address on the metaphysics of sex and gender. The title of the book is telling. We are indeed doing gender theory in troubled times, and these troubled times are not separable from gender theory as it has developed over the decades. Just what is so very troubling? The authors observe, “there has been a resurgence of a very visible gender essentialism in everyday life” (6). It can be found in feminist communities that police the boundaries of the concept “Woman” (13), which has led to the so-called “TERF Wars” (see Pearce, Erikainen, and Vincent 2020). But Kathleen Lennon and Rachel Alsop also highlight that this metaphysical presumption underscores (among other ideological commitments) the rise of right-wing populism and new nationalisms—social orientations that typically endorse restricting the reproductive rights of those who gestate and reject the legitimacy of queer communities. Significantly, as the authors note, “in recent years these movements have launched attacks on gender theory itself” (6). With these contextual factors in place, it becomes clear that this book is an intervention in public discourse as much as an academic introduction to some of the most compelling developments of gender theory. The aim of this book is to argue against gender essentialism and to provide a convincing metaphysics that gives adequate emphasis to the body’s role in ego-formation—that is, to affirm that bodily differences make a difference to the subjects we become without conceding that bodily difference determines the kind of subject we are (20). Lennon and Alsop highlight that “those who adopt gender essentialist positions most commonly anchor them in biology” (22). Appropriately, this is the focus of chapter 1. There the authors focus on evolutionary psychiatry and differences of male and female brains, noting that evolutionary psychiatry has been roundly criticized for questionbegging, meanwhile research shows that “brains reflect the lives they have lived, not just the sex of their owners” (29). But what of the sex/gender distinction wherein gender refers to masculine and feminine styles of behavior and sex concerns the traits of the body: its hormones, genes, and morphology? The authors argue that sex itself is culturally constructed (31). There is no reason, beyond the social, that sex must be categorized into a dimorphic binary, for “several distinct biological markers of maleness and femaleness— visible morphology, hormones and chromosomes—are not always found together” (33).