Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 2
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Politicized (Re)Productions of Gender and Our Debt to John Money / Bruce E. Drushel and Michael Johnson Jr.
<1> When the pioneering psychologist John Money died in Baltimore in 2006, accounts in the popular press were surprisingly scarce and low‐key. Major newspapers in New Zealand (where Money was born), Australia, and Canada provided similar 300‐word to 500‐word obituary‐type stories (see “Sexologist,” “Kiwi Sexologist,” “Sex Researcher Coined”). An item in the ironically‐named “First with the News” edition of the Courier Mail in Australia ran on July 27th, some three weeks after his death and more than two weeks after reports elsewhere (“Sex Researcher Helped” 83). In the Washington Post, notice of Money’s death was placed ignominiously below the headline obit for the founder of a mattress factory (“Luis Barragan” C‐7). Few outside the world of scholarly work in sex, gender, and sexuality were aware a seminal and controversial figure had exited the stage.
<2> Not that John Money was universally loved or lauded: while filmmaker Peter Jackson, best‐known for the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, reportedly had optioned the story of an intersexed boy who had been a patient of Money’s (Eaton 7), and while Routledge published a 200‐page hardcover anthology of pieces by his fellow sexologists as tribute to commemorate his 70th birthday (see Coleman), reviews of the tribute noted some had regarded Money as a fraud and recounted his role in the tragic decision to sexually alter the boy, who as an adult eventually committed suicide.
<3> But his work was significant and likely informed the later work of Butler, Halberstam, and even Foucault. In 1955, when “gender” was a term largely used in reference to nouns, Money had proposed it as a behavioral construct in which elements in the social environment influenced the sexual and affiliative behaviors of individuals. He was credited with being among the first to argue extensively for distinctions between biological sex and gender, a tenet now almost universally recognized in both humanistic and social scientific inquiry.
<4> This issue of Reconstruction is about gender and the ways in which our construction(s) of it have evolved in an environment in which politics, class, race, and economics all play a role. Despite the extended reference to his work that begins this piece, this issue certainly is not intended as a belated tribute to Professor Money (we would, after all, be seven years later even than the Courier Mail.) The critical scholarship contained herein is a marked departure from the methods and focus of Money and his contemporaries. Besides, one tribute volume per lifetime probably is sufficient. But it is an acknowledgment of our debt to a once‐famous colleague now lesser‐known but whom we should know better.
<5> The special issue begins with an examination of the ways in which gender studies is approached at colleges and universities. Given that many of the programs have been around for decades, it is not surprising that, while many began with a common set of goals, methods, and subjects for study, approaches would change with time, institutional values and priorities, personnel, and changes in perceptions of the relevance of key issues. Christine Wood analyzed women’s/feminist/gender studies programs at University of Michigan/Ann Arbor, University of Illinois/Chicago, San Diego State University, University of Washington, and University of California/Santa Cruz and generally found the divergence she expected, though the models for change varied with the institution.
<6> The study of institutional change, including forces within and external to the organization, also characterizes Christianne Gadd’s article on The Advocate, the oldest national publication in the U.S. targeting the interests of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities. Her emphasis is the complicated and frequently contentious relationship between the magazine and queer women and queer people of color. While previous examinations of this relationship have focused purely on the economics of the magazine business and the historical assumptions of the relative lucrativeness of various segments of The Advocate’s readership, Gadd’s analysis takes a wider view, considering also ownership, staffing, and the broader social and cultural events and issues that have characterized the magazine’s more than four decades.
<7> Claudia May’s essay, “Prisms and Refractions: Portrayals of Domestic Laborers in Ann Petry’s The Street and Alice Childress’ Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life,” considers, not the relative absence of women and people of color from what we read, but rather the strategies evident in two works in which they are front and center. Using the metaphor of the prism and its ability to refract images—reflected light—to illuminate two distinct authors’ representations of domestics, May argues that, just as a prism takes frequently harsh light and modifies it, separating it into its component wavelengths, so too may women of color function as very human mechanisms by which the harshness of prejudice based upon gender, race, and class be deconstructed, its true nature revealed, and its intended effects at least to a degree ameliorated.
<8> As John Money first proposed nearly six decades ago, whether it is accomplished by books, magazines, the classroom, or other means, gender is not naturalistic but a social construction. The construction and politicization of hegemonic masculinity’s whiteness is critically investigated by Rich King’s essay. Here, he links the complex ways in which masculinity is racialized through sports mascots and the heavy sociocultural investment that these emblems reproduce. King makes the case that the use of native American mascots is as much about gender as about race and ethnicity: that it likely was a response to crises in masculinity and its perceived softening with the coming of modernity. "Indianness" effectively offered proponents of male-dominated team sports a means for transcribing the bravery and primal ferocity of native Americans onto white male athleticism.
<9> Next, Bruce Drushel explores the question of why mainstream media represent male drag performance as largely the province of the middle‐class white (and frequently straight) male in spite of lengthy traditions in the gay African‐American and gay white communities and among the poor and working class. He traces the tortuous history of so‐called “feminized masculinity” from its roots in Europe and Asia to urban centers of the U.S. in the late‐19th century, revealing that racial and class tensions early in the 20th century, along with lingering social segregation by race in the south and white flight in the north and Midwest, led to schisms in the once‐racially integrated practice of male drag. In the ensuing years, biases among the mainstream media rendered the drag traditions of African‐American and the lower classes—even the iconic drag balls of Harlem and other communities—virtually invisible.
<11> Finally, with an eye to the future of gender, Evangeline Heiliger examines the evolution of femininity through what she terms “fair trade femininities”: gendered business practices that are a manifestation of ethical consumerism as well as the growth and prosperity of women‐led and women‐only commercial models. Heiliger uses as her focus the case of Café Femenino, a successful enterprise in which female Latin American coffee farmers sell their product to roasters and retailers in North America, who agree to donate a portion of their profits to women’s shelters and halfway houses in their local communities. The operation upends traditional models of global north feminist rescues of women of the global south by emphasizing both the empowerment of the latter and the global nature of subjugation and marginalization.
<12> We hope you find the articles in this issue, as we have, to provide what are effectively a series of progress reports on the evolving discourses of gender, with particular attention paid to its global dimensions and to its interactions with class, race, and ethnicity. It is of course far from a complete report, for gender is far too wide‐ranging, multi‐faceted, and insidious to be captured, even in snapshot form, in a single issue, single journal, or single catalogue for that matter. But we hope that, as with the passing of Professor Money, it facilitates an opportunity for reflection upon all that has occurred in a relatively brief time as well as the challenges of the more intractable issues yet to be explored.
Work Cited
Coleman, Eli. John Money: A Tribute. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 1991.
Eaton, Dan. “NZ Sex Researcher John Money Dies.” (Christchurch) Press, 11 July 2006: 7
“Kiwi Sexologist Dies in U.S. Hospital.” New Zealand Herald, 10 July 2006.
“Luis Barrigan Mattress Firm.” Washington Post 16 July 2006: C‐7
“Sex Researcher Coined ‘Gender Identity.’” (Toronto) Globe and Mail, 11 July 2006: S‐7
“Sex Researcher Helped in Gender Identification.” (Australia) Courier Mail, 27 July 2006: 83.
“Sexologist, Psychologist. Died Aged 85.” New Zealand Herald, 15 July 2006.
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