Title: Gender Order – Literary Theory and Criticism
Headings: Literary Theory and Criticism
Literary Theory and Criticism
Gender Order
FURTHER READING
Share this:
Like this:
Trackbacks
Leave a Reply
Cancel reply

Content: For Connell, empirical research has uncovered three major structures of gender relations, or the major ways in which the agency or practice of women and men is constrained. The three structures, of labour, power and cathexis (concerned with emotional relationships, including sexuality) constantly interweave with each other creating the ‘ gender order’, or the overall structure of gender relations in a particular society, at a particular time in history. For Connell, as for Matthews (1984), gender relations are regarded as in process, the outcome of human practice or agency, subject to resistance as well as conformity, contestation as well as acceptance. All this means that gender relations are open to disruption and change. Connell argues that there are ‘crisis tendencies’ in the contemporary gender order of the industrialised world. For example, in family relationships, Connell says that state policies have disrupted the legitimacy of men’s domination over women (via laws on divorce, domestic violence and rape within marriage, independent pensions and taxation for married women, for example). Connell also identifies a tendency towards a crisis of sexuality, where forms of heterosexuality which privilege men over women have come under pressure from women’s more assertive sexuality and from gay sexuality. A further example of a tendency toward crisis in the gender order is the joining together of women and men in groups which challenge the current patriarchal gender order, such as women’s liberation movements, gay liberation, and anti-sexist politics among heterosexual men. In Connell ’s view, it is through individuals and groups, collectively and on a mass scale, ‘prising open’ the crisis tendencies in the contemporary gender order that gender inequality, along with other forms of inequality, can be eradicated. Marshall (1994) finds the concept of the gender order valuable for the analysis of gender, particularly for understanding the relationship between individual gendered subjectivities and gender as a social structure.