I give up...

...but not on everything.

It’s been weeks since I posted here, and with good reason. For the last month, I have been attempting to write a layperson-friendly history of the last several decades of public notions of gender, shaped by my research into clothing and my own understanding of gender studies and gender science. That was the plan, but I have arrived at a place where I am so humbled by my own ignorance that I have given up.

It’s my own fault, of course. As I often do, I bit off more than I could chew, and then tried to digest it too fast. Right now, I am reading three books on gender, four if you count both the 1956 and 1965 editions of Leona Tyler’s  classic work, The Psychology of Human Differences. Besides Tyler, I am reading Georgia Warnke’s Debating sex and Gender, helpfully described as “A concise yet rich guide to the sex/gender debates”. To top it off, I am working my way through Judith Butler’s latest work, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, using the audio and ebook versions simultaneously, because it is the only way I can manage it. These reading sessions are punctuated with excursions into my own articles and books, and conversations about gender with anyone who will listen. 

This has led me to an uncomfortable personal truth. The would-be translator should be fluent in the language of the text. I am not. I have struggled for years to learn the theoretical language used in Gender Studies, and it continues to baffle me.  I admit to having been in my own little silo (quantitative history and content analysis) throughout the 1980s so I missed the trend toward postmodernism that swept through the humanities and social sciences. Between 1990 (when Judith Butler published Gender Trouble) and 1993, when they released Bodies That Matter, I was up to my eyeballs in a campus-wide upheaval that eventually washed me ashore in a new department, surrounded by people speaking an unfamiliar language. My first American Studies Association meeting found me filling up an entire page in my yellow legal pad with terms I did not understand. Their use of familiar words in unfamiliar ways confused me. (I thought I knew what “discourse” meant; I did not.) “Hegemony” has never found its way into my writing. Long story short: I never learned the lingo.

Reading academic writing from unfamiliar disciplines exhausts me. I want to understand it, so I can connect their ideas to my own insights and discoveries. But wanting is no longer enough. Judith Butler is probably the most important theorist in the field, but I cannot translate their ideas into my own work on clothing. They focus heavily on linguistics; I study dress and fashion. There is, supposedly, a “language of clothing”; I would argue that the “meaning” of dress is conveyed in multiple languages, not just one.  Fashion trends and clothing traditions (which are two very different things) change so often and in such complex ways that categorizing them according to gender is impossible. For example, when we express our gender, we might use color. Pink is feminine, right? It is, except in 19th century France, or modern day India, or my son’s Ultimate team uniforms. Is a pink tuxedo feminine or masculine? Androgynous? Unisex? (whatever that means!) 

But it gets worse.

I have scanned the bibliographies of several major figures in Gender Studies looking for my own name. I have poured over the citations for my works on Google Scholar, the ultimate tool for self-obsessed academics. My conclusion: I am practically invisible. I once hoped that I was writing for them. I published my work because I thought they could use it, but either they read it and found it wanting, or it never crossed their radar. (The latter is more likely, I hope)

I hereby admit, to all of Substack, that I am incapable of translating my research into gender theory language, much less providing a reader-friendly history of Gender Studies. (Instead, see Wikipedia, and good luck with that.) At age 75, after decades of this struggle, I am giving up. Maybe it’s time they read my work and translate it for their audience.

I need to get back to sharing what I have learned about gender by seeing it expressed in the ever changing language of fashion. See you soon.