On the Interactional Resignifiability of Sex and Gender: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Sociology, Linguistics, and Gender Studies

• In Event: Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Theory, Methods, and the Body

Abstract

No matter how an individual identifies, they are made legible within the social and political fabric they exist in, within a capitalist system dependent on hegemonic notions of truth. Gender is also historical: Nobody exists isolated from the discourses and developments that have saturated the words sex and gender with meaning. In Western discourses, binaries such as woman/man, femininity/masculinity, gay/straight, cis/trans are essentialized and biologized. Scholarship on these categories has come to different conclusions about their origins, their universality, their generalizability and their usefulness. I want to push linguistics and sociology outside of their boundaries of a purely discursive and situational framework of gender performativity. I argue for a reckoning with the fact that while gender might be constructed through language and interaction, it is also enforced institutionally and politically, which begs the question of agency: Is it accurate to describe gender as entirely interactionally (re)constructed? I will consider sociological scholarship on gender and sex that has given us insight into the category sex as inherently racializing, with a centering of historical-material conceptions of the body as a fruitful avenue toward a truly interdisciplinary inquiry into those categories that strengthens the ties between sociology, linguistics, and gender & trans studies.

Author

• Paddy Lehleiter, New York University