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Gender & Society
DOI: 10.1177/0891243208326529
2009; 23; 112 Gender & Society
Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman
Accounting for Doing Gender
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ACCOUNTING FOR DOING GENDER
CANDACE WEST
University of California–Santa Cruz
DON H. ZIMMERMAN
University of California–Santa Barbara
W
e’re delighted to have “Doing Gender” and its sequelae as the subjects
of this symposium. The serious readings of our work by Professors
Connell, Jones, Kitzinger, Messerschmidt, Risman, Smith, and Vidal-Ortiz
do us honor, and we welcome the chance to address them. We use our
response to reflect on, clarify, admit, and expand on what we said originally
and what we have said since. As important as the path taken, however, is the
theoretical path ahead, and we will comment on that as well.
REFLECTION
What Raewyn Connell calls our “classic and beautifully constructed
paper” (thank you!) was actually written considerably earlier than it was pub-
lished. The initial ideas for “Doing Gender” came in 1975 and 1976, while
we were trying to reconcile findings on the use of interruption in conversa-
tions between women and men (Zimmerman and West 1975; West and
Zimmerman 1977) with prevailing formulations of sex role theory. We pre-
sented “Doing Gender” at a meeting of the American Sociological
Association in 1977; we spent the next ten years trying to get it into print.
Between 1977 and 1987, this work was rejected by some of the most
respected journals in our field (including Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society and Social Problems). In fact, Erving Goffman, one
reader of an early draft, passed away in the time it took to get the paper
published. During those ten years, we continued to circulate pre-publica-
tion versions to friends and colleagues, and we continued to refine and
polish the paper in response to their remarks. We were more than gratified
to see “Doing Gender” finally published in 1987, but the “responses . . .
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 23 No. 1, February 2009 112-122
DOI: 10.1177/0891243208326529
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to Stacey and Thorne” (1985) to which Connell refers—and the “para-
digm shift” that James Messerschmidt references—had not yet appeared
when we wrote it.
In 2008 though, our original idea has taken on a life of its own—a much
more lively one than we could have anticipated when it was published.
Barbara Risman contends that “the concept has been so integrated into the
sociological lexicon that [its] feminist critique sometimes disappears
entirely” and Nikki Jones suggests that the use of ideas “in ways that may
or may not have originally been intended by their authors” is, in fact, a
tribute to them (Risman 2008; Jones 2008). Today, “doing gender” often
appears in print without acknowledgment of its source, and some scholars
(such as Judith Butler) play on our wording (Undoing Gender, Butler
2004) without ever citing our work. Because our original conception has
been deployed in so many different ways,
1
we restate it here to provide a
platform for what follows.
CLARIFICATION
Our point of departure was, as Connell notes, the story of Agnes, a
19-year-old single white woman who came to the University of California–Los
Angeles seeking sexual reassignment surgery in 1958. Harold Garfinkel
(1967) employed her story as a methodological device to make observable
what, as we phrased it in 1987 (West and Zimmerman 1987, 131), culture has
concealed: the accomplishment of what is taken to be one’s “natural” or
“essential” nature (cf. Goffman 1977). Prior to her surgical reassignment,
Agnes faced a number of challenges: (1) She had to convince the
medical/psychiatric establishment that she was “really” female; (2) to do so,
she had to present herself as such and live in society as a woman; (3) and,
given the requirements of “passing,” she had to preserve the secret of her
penis (for a complete list of her challenges before and after surgery see
Garfinkel 1967, 135–36).
To tap the lessons of Agnes’s practical circumstances, we analytically
distinguished between sex, sex categorization, and gender. A clinician’s
initial assignment of a newborn to a sex (female or male) is ordinarily jus-
tified
2
on the basis of the possession of female or male genitalia—
although chromosomal and hormonal criteria may be applied when the
“facts” of the matter are equivocal. But sex categorization involves the
display and recognition of socially regulated external insignia of sex—
such as deportment, dress, and bearing (cf. Goffman 1956). The relation-
ship between sex category and gender is the relationship between being a
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114 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2009
recognizable incumbent of a sex category (which itself takes some doing)
and being accountable to current cultural conceptions of conduct becom-
ing to—or compatible with the “essential natures” of—a woman or a man.
We conceptualized this as an ongoing situated process, a “doing” rather
than a “being.”
Following Garfinkel (1967), we thereby transformed an ascribed status
into an achieved status,
3
moving masculinity and femininity from natural,
essential properties of individuals to interactional, that is to say, social,
properties of a system of relationships. Moreover, we argued, because
accountability is a feature of social relationships, the accomplishment of
gender is at once interactional and institutional—with its idiom drawn
from the institutional arena where such relationships are enacted (West
and Zimmerman 1987, 137). Hence, the political implications: If the gen-
der attributes deployed as a basis of maintaining men’s hegemony are
social products, they are subject to social change (however challenging
such change may be).
With the publication of “Doing Difference,” West and Fenstermaker
(1995) extended our ethnomethodological perspective to provide an under-
standing of how gender, race and class operate simultaneously with one
another. We conceptualized difference as a social doing, a mechanism for
organizing “the relations between individual and institutional practice, and
among forms of domination” (West and Fenstermaker 1995, 19). In brief,
we argued that members of society “do difference” by creating distinctions
among themselves—as incumbents of different sex categories, different
race categories, and different class categories. Invidious in character, these
distinctions are not natural, normal, or essential to the incumbents in ques-
tion. But once the distinctions have been created, they are used to affirm dif-
ferent category incumbents’ “essentially different natures” and the
institutional arrangements based on these. Ultimately, “patriarchy, racism
and class oppression are seen as responses to those dispositions—as if the
social order were merely a rational accommodation to ‘natural differences’
among social beings” (Fenstermaker and West 2002, 207).
Dorothy Smith disagrees with how we translate the political categories
of gender, race, and class into the objects of sociological investigation. In
her view, these categories are not adequate to encompass actual “social
relations,” which rest on the structural arrangements and resulting inequal-
ities that facilitate or constrain people’s lives. Smith’s remedy, following
from her reading of Marx, is to transcend such categories and examine the
lived experiences of actual people subject to relationships of inequality.
While we do not have space for a fully elaborated discussion of her objec-
tion, we can outline certain features of it and sketch how we might respond.
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Consider the notion of social relations. Smith touches on the broad cat-
egories of history and social structure, including relations of production
and technology, “human species being,” and the biological/neurological/
evolutionary factors in our primate heritage (Smith 2008). Our focus on
gender, race, and class as social doings does not contradict the develop-
ment of a model that integrates these doings into a more comprehensive
account.
With regard to the issue of the adequacy of such categories to deal with
the actual lives of persons in society, we reiterate our conception of the rela-
tionship between categorization and accountability as involving observable
practices in interaction. As Jones points out, the young women she studied
knew full well that their very survival depended on their accountability as
African American inner city girls—they approached men on the street
“aggressively” to stop them, but then they behaved “demurely” while
advancing their pleas for help. This does not require us to assume that inter-
actions are free floating events unconnected to other features of social life
(although the empirical specification of such connections is far from a triv-
ial matter). But interactional organization remains the primordial scaffold-
ing of everyday life, whatever other organizational forces impinge on it.
The research challenge is to show how these forces mesh, for example, how
history intersects with the interaction order.
Case in point: The meanings people attach to particular gender-, race-, or
class-appropriate conduct come from “historically specific institutional and
collective practices in the ‘natural’ (and thus, ‘rightful’) allocation of mater-
ial and symbolic resources” (Fenstermaker and West 2002, 213). Thus, for as
long as members of U.S. society believed that “girls are no good at math”
(i.e., it’s not in their nature), schools could counsel white middle-class girls
against advanced math classes and counsel working-class girls of color
toward vocational training. The former President of Harvard University
could then explain the resulting dearth of women in math and the sciences
4
as a result of innate differences in ability between the sexes (Dillon 2005).
But once the normative conceptions of appropriate conduct for girls changed,
so too did opportunities and funds for girls in math and science—and, as we
write, U.S. journalists report that “Girls = Boys” when it comes to math
(Krieger 2008).
5
A more proximate task is to more fully understand how interaction
operates to sustain relations of inequality (cf. Kitzinger 2008). To be con-
cerned with that question does not deny the relevance of other questions,
but it does insist on a careful focus on the interaction order, and resistance
to its assimilation into questions appropriate for other domains of inquiry.
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