Making Gender Work: Disruptions and Innovations in Gender Infrastructure

• In Event: Feminist Engagements with the Im-materialites of Gender and the West

Abstract

Several states in the U.S. have recently added nonbinary gender options to birth certificates and driver’s licenses. This is an innovation in recognizing multiple genders, as well as a disruption in traditional government bureaucratic and knowledge work. Changing one’s gender on identification documents is a complex process and doesn’t necessarily translate well between government bureaucracies, particularly when moving between states or trying to match state and federal documentation.
In this paper I propose an analytical framework for understanding gender as a form of social infrastructure. Gender clearly has the properties of infrastructure: it is embedded in other social practices and institutions, it is used daily without needing to be reproduced by the user, it has a global scope, it has become naturalized to the point that most people take it completely for granted, and it has become dramatically more visible to people in recent decades as queer and trans people have come out of the shadows and begun publicly upending gender.
Infrastructure asks after the material practices and institutions that enforce and maintain gender. Infrastructure also asks that we specifically examine the maintenance of gender. What bureaucratic and technical work makes gender infrastructure function? How does this work change when gender infrastructure is disrupted? As multiple states create nonbinary gender options, how do they implement changes to the infrastructure, and how do these changes translate to gender infrastructure in other contexts? Ultimately, how do these changes to infrastructure make visible the complex nature of gender itself?

Author

• Tristan Gohring, Indiana University - Bloomington