In our own polarized time, we are faced with an either/or position: either you are “for gender” or you are “against gender”. How did this happen? And why is the early feminist critique of gender rarely elaborated or clarified in our contemporary feminist retellings of how gender became “ours”? Gender as an analytic category has undergone many changes over the past few decades. During this time, it has stirred strong feelings and been placed at the center of political conflicts, but it started out as a grammatical term, referring to the sexed designation of nouns as masculine, feminine, or neuter. In the 1960’s the psychiatrists John Money and Robert Stoller, who were treating physically intersexed children, distinguished gender from sex in order to emphasize what came to be called the social construction of sex—that is the attribution of social meaning to naturally sexed bodies. Feminists picked up “gender” as they contested biological determinism, but there was no single theory that emerged. Instead, there were a multitude of different approaches, ranging from the essentialist to the constructivist, structuralist, standpoint, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic. These different theoretical positionings suggested quite different political strategies of resistance and change.
There has, therefore, never been a unified and common definition of gender among feminists, nor a shared defense of its uses. Most essentialist, but also many structuralist and standpoint approaches to gender assume a stable experience of sexual belonging. Even though this assumption may not automatically lead to a deterministic view of gender identity, it encourages a focus on experiences and group identities where political progress is measured by legal recognition and inclusion. In contrast, most poststructuralist approaches to gender, perhaps especially when influenced by psychoanalysis, assume a more contingent and ambivalent relation to gender, refusing the idea of unmediated experiences or identities that produce a stable subjectivity. They also tend to lead to a more critical vision of societal reforms and a more skeptical consideration of claims of inclusion. The early queer movement might be an activist example of this tendency. Radical advocates of change scrutinized the goals of assimilation and legal recognition and deemed them weak responses to oppression in a fashion similar to what bell hooks argued in relation to US racial reforms around the same time.
The liberal feminist approach defines gender as socially imposed norms and discriminatory laws, that are fixed on bodies already and unproblematically sexed. Hence liberal feminism, as well as liberal LGBTIA+ movements, commonly pursue legal inclusion and economic equality and favor research on gender norms and identities. The research aim is to show that norms change depending on time and place while the political aim is to design a legal system that can distinguish the norms that cause inequality and injustice and promote “good” norms or, as in the case of the most thoroughgoing liberal version, abolish all norms so that the individual can fully be their “authentic self.”
Reconceptualizing gender in relation to the body is an approach that sits in stark contrast to the liberal version which systematically and strategically has detached gender from sexuality. Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble targeted social contructivism alongside the essentialist approach whose proponents saw nature and genes as self-evident templates for gender. Anne Fausto-Sterling delivered a similar critique from the perspective of the natural sciences. She demonstrated how unexamined notions of sex and genes were filled with socially and culturally embedded meanings and hence always already gendered. From this perspective, the study of the construction and operation of “sex” became central to feminist research.
Those who adhered to the liberal constructivist approach had their reasons to try to keep gender separate from sexuality: the feminism of the 70’s and 80’s generated a vast array of theories and forms of criticism, but the one that won most political points in mainstream contexts was the one that presented a constrained definition of gender that could in turn sustain reformist calls for equality rather than the more complex and radical alternatives. It also turned out to be the most effective counterargument to the early conservative rejection of gender, which actually recognized the inherent radicalism of the category as potentially disabling the biological determinism both of identity and sexuality. The liberal feminist attempt to present a moderate alternative might at the time have helped to pose a practical reply to conservatism, but it also meant refusing the legitimacy of those other feminist versions. It might be that we today pay the price for this strategic choice.
To trace the effects of the liberal uses of gender, I would like to juxtapose that desexualized version of gender common in the later twentieth century with conservatives’ fear of gender, which they tend to over-sexualize. After the UN Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995, for example, feminist legal scholar Doris E. Buss attempted to place the conservative view of gender in relation to feminist thought at the time:
this opposition to gender is likely motivated, to a large degree, by the C[hristian] R[ight] UN and Vatican view that ‘gender’ fundamentally challenges the presumed correlation between biology and sexuality, a topic that has also been the subject of extensive feminist comment…. (270; my italics).
The religious right in particular claimed “gender” meant more than “just” gender, as if it were code for, or hid, something that the constructivist and liberal definition did not acknowledge. Buss noted this concern and found it symptomatic– not of inconsistencies or weaknesses in the position held by the Vatican and the conservative right – but of the difficult and heated feminist debate at the time:
Indeed, the C[hristian] R[ight] UN and Vatican insistence that gender – the social rather than biological construction of sex roles – inevitably challenges heterosexuality goes to the heart of recent feminist debates about the problematic erasure of sexuality from some understandings of gender. For some feminist theorists, social constructionism, and the reification of the sex/gender dichotomy have functioned to naturalize sex as heterosex. The insistence on gender as socially constructed and sex as biology, positions ‘sex’, and the existence of two sexes – male and female – as unquestionably ‘natural’, and desire as unquestionably heterosexual…. Ironically, the CR UN and Vatican are raising the alarm about the radicalism of gender at the same time that some feminists are bemoaning its potential impotence (271; my italics).[1]
The internal debate Buss referred to focused on how sexuality was “attached” to gender. Those feminists bemoaning gender’s impotence as a language of radical change thought gender to be steeped in hierarchical heterosexuality: masculinity meant being dominant, femininity meant being submissive; dominant women were “manly,” submissive men “effeminate.” A lesbian relation was hence only “truly” between two women if neither of them were dominant nor submissive. The queer response to this at the time was prompt but divided: one side, usually exemplified by Gayle Rubin’s article “Thinking Sex,” insisted on a separation between gender and sexuality, a position that was both inspired by and an inspiration to sexual radicals and liberals alike. The other side insisted on a more unconsciously formed relation between sexed identity and desire. This position has been especially associated with Theresa de Lauretis and Judith Butler, albeit each inspired by psychoanalysis in different ways. “Can sexual practices ever fully be divorced from questions of gender or do questions of gender persist as the ‘unconscious’ of sexual play?” Butler asked in 1994. “Such a question is not meant to return us to the pathos of an irrefutable ‘sexual difference’, but to suggest that the ’break’ with gender always comes at a cost and, perhaps also, with its spectral return. The normative weight of gender is not suddenly thrown off at the moment in which we imagine ourselves to be fully identified with what we do.” (3)
The genealogy of feminism’s complex and critical relation to gender is, I believe, important to keep in mind as we move forward now. It is significant for us to see that the right-wing reaction that we know today as “anti-gender,” emerged around the same time as the internal feminist debates took place (see, e.g., Buss 1998; Butler, Undoing 174-203; see also Scott 2013). It is equally important to note that the apparently hegemonic feminist defense of gender today – mainly found in organizational and activist contexts – tends to align itself with a more or less explicit constructivist view of gender, now merged with a standpoint definition of gender identity, wherein gender mainly refers to norms and ideals connected to femininity and masculinity and gender identity to an inner sense of being “a gender” (of any kind) that may, or may not, align with a given body. For example, in 2026 the World Health Organization states that gender is
[…] the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time. Gender is hierarchical and produces inequalities that intersect with other social and economic inequalities. Gender-based discrimination intersects with other factors of discrimination, such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability, age, geographic location, gender identity and sexual orientation, among others. This is referred to as intersectionality. Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs. Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity. Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth (WHO, 2026).
In research contexts, this kind of intersectional approach to gender – commonly part of a structuralist and/or standpoint tradition – tends to be merely descriptive. In this view, individuals have a gender which positions them differently in relation to each other, as well as to social institutions, in a similar way as other sociological categories, such as race and class. The sociological understanding of gender blends into the idea of gender identity and organizes quests for economic equality and liberal emancipatory politics. This approach, moreover, fixes gender not as an imposed norm or identity, but as a property of an autonomous subject. As long as there is a subject that claims a gendered identity of any kind, the sovereignty of the subject remains intact and unassailable. This is a stance, however, that risks depoliticizing those very regulations that produce gendered hierarchies and subjectivities, turning attention to individual or collective experience rather than to the operations of power that produce that experience.
Other risks arise as well. As feminist scholar Elizabeth Weed notes: “In the current time of identity politics… a challenge to the authority of lived experience can be construed as an intolerable affront.” (Weed, Reading 35) She continues, “Of course, I refer here not to the actual nature of the lived experience but to the particular discourse of certainty that prevails in some circles, even if the truth involved is expressed in the service of subjective ambiguity.” (35) Indeed, most feminist, queer, and trans responses to the right-wing attack on so-called “gender theory” have entailed a deepened defense of identity in the name of a claimed true experience. This specific defense has not only made mainstream scholars in the by-now-solidly-institutionalized field of gender research unwilling to reflect on these reactions, but also made them suspicious, almost fearful, of any internal attempts at questioning gender not only as a social category but also as identity, even though challenging truth claims about gender is the very practice upon which much of the emergent field was built earlier, whatever its advocates’ theoretical influences.
To reach such an ambivalent, almost self-erasing and self-contradictory position, requires a special kind of relation to truth, history, and epistemology. As Weed puts it, “One might say that what animates the truth of the gender identities is a twist particular to these times having to do once again with how one knows. That twist, that insistence on a derived truth, participates in a cultural logic of knowing that is fetishistic.” (37) It is a cultural logic in so far as it is shared with others outside the field, even with its critics: “If those in the tweeted camp of gender multiplicity know, as unequivocally as the advocates of two genders, who and what they are, it seems that the winner of the tweet contest is the discourse of certainty itself, and that which is lost is the very idea of the impossibility of knowing.” (39)
If this is where gender has led us, what can be done about it? Does gender contain other possibilities that can be used against this discourse of certainty? To answer this, I think it might be fruitful to ask what the present definitions of both gender and gender identity have in common. It seems as though they share roots in the more liberal side of queer theory that is most widely endorsed today by those opposing the conservative attack, not only by activists but also by policy makers and liberal politicians. Older radical feminist versions of gender, in contrast, have faded and lost traction, perduring perhaps only in the mirror of right-wing fantasies of complete and complementary genders (something Catherine MacKinnon of course vehemently opposes). Similarly, an alternative queer response from the turn of the twentieth century, one influenced by psychoanalysis and the poststructuralist feminist concern with difference and its instability – has almost disappeared both from most activist discourse and academic gender research. At the same time, the detachment of sexuality from gender (or its “liberation”, as sex radicals would phrase it) is assumed as a given to help the political mobilization of the trans-movement in a world that prefers gender to be proper and void of desire. The sexual liberation movement had already started this separation some decades earlier when Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” was taken up as the academic manifesto for an emancipationist queer theory, “free” from both feminist concerns and burdensome theories of gendered subjectification.
Feminists in the 1990’s and early 2000’s argued quite heatedly for and against the concept of gender itself. Some scholars with a non-identitarian and post-foundationalist view strongly advised against a research field founded on a “proper object” such as “gender” or “sexuality” or any other identitarian marker (Butler, “Against”). In this view, Gender Studies simply did not make sense as a field of inquiry. Feminist thinkers holding this position argued strongly against basing research, or even activism, on one’s own subject formation (Brown, States; Wiegman, “Feminist”). It has become evident, however, this this hope for a feminist field of inquiry that could overcome identitarian ontologies has perhaps always been that – a hope. The “all-inclusive” move that Wiegman identified as a possible step for the survival of identitarian feminism, which I here have named “liberal constructivism”, has not only happened, it has provided identitarian feminism new vitality. What has flourished is a reformed standpoint feminism, less Marxist and more intertwined with liberalism than before, where a “proper subject” could be saved through a new truth claim on experience. Had the discourse of certainty thus entered the field through the backdoor?
Maybe those of us who retain that hope for inquiry free of identitarian certainties need to acknowledge this loss to be able to recognize what motivates the field of gender studies today. No matter what we might call this new paradigm, or what genealogy we might give it, it presents itself as a strong defender of the very same politics of identity that were scrutinized and deconstructed by the poststructuralist and post-foundationalist thinkers in their work on gender some decades ago. It was perhaps specifically because of this unrecognized disappearance of gender as critique that gender appeared in unexpected new guise within the field: a move from “gender” (heterosexual, dichotomized) to “gender identity” (transitive, individual) where attempts to understand the “lure of gender” (Weed “Gender”) shared by all – straight, gay, trans, cis, conservative, progressive – became tantamount to being “paranoid” and “too critical”. In short, we might ask, in this era of resurgent essentialism, what happened to the anti-essentialism that drove a significant sector in the fields of gender studies, feminist studies, and queer theory? Might, at this apparent impasse in both politics and scholarship, a revitalized sense of gender as critique have something important to offer?
I would argue that now more than ever it is important to disinter this powerful alternative consigned by so many to feminism’s past and take up anew treating gender as a critical category of analysis, at once refusing a pre-discursive understanding of sex and seeking to understand gender—the historically mutable attribution of meaning to sexed bodies—as an operation of power. This sense of gender provides the only approach naturalness of heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, as well as cis- and trans identities, including the desire to be both or neither. Doing so animates the desire and opens the possibility of changing everyone’s sense of masculinity and femininity, no matter who you are. This approach will not take gender as a given social category but rather trace its operations at both the individual and social levels.
It is understandable why the anti-intellectual attack coming from the right-wing has become the only “critique” of gender the fields of Gender Studies and feminist, queer, and trans activism seem to pay attention to. Such attention may well be strategically necessary, and the solidarity it engenders may well be enjoyable in a certain sense, since the criticisms come from outsiders who actively hate us. It is after all easier to build a field – and a movement — around a sense of unity and righteousness than around dissensus and “improper” objects and subjects. And yet, burying the earlier deployment of gender as the practice of real and daring critique has clearly led to disappointment and resentment having little to do with revanchist conservative articulations of gender and normativity.
When a critical perspective or question emanating from within the field surfaces, it is too often met either with refusal — “this is not the right time” — or a perplexed, even hostile, challenge: “whose side are you really on?” But those at odds with each other in a feminist-inspired field of gender studies are always also on the same side. As a scholar embracing this sense of gender as a category of critique I wish to defend feminist politics and research too, and believe that to be more important now than it has ever been in my lifetime. This is why now is always the right time for internal critique—without it we will fall prey to an enemy we all share. However, untouchable notions of “gender” and “gender identity” should not constitute a hill to die on: their modes of deployment today may encourage defending some genders and some identities while groundlessly criticizing others. This may embolden the right-wing, perceiving a kind of “unfairness” in our use of gender, feeding their phantasmatic ressentiment; it will certainly contribute to the further burial of our own critical traditions, those that have been at the heart of gender since the 1960s. This is neither an intellectually nor politically constructive path to follow.
Rather, understanding the field’s internal phantasms, desires, and resistances is of utter importance in our time, where the possibilities of “another way” seem to diminish on all fronts, both within politics and research. Understanding why many gender researchers, activists, and left politicians prefer and defend a liberal definition of gender could help us understand how liberalism came to be the only legitimate counterpart to fascism, even though we know it is not and should not be. With that insight, there might be a way to open up a third option: if not a way out, then at least other ways to draw the line of dissensus and to generate new affinities, other debates, questions, and engagements than those promulgated by liberal subjectivities. This third option was articulated this way by Joan Scott in 2008:
Gender, I would argue, is the study of the relationship (around sexuality) between the normative and the psychic, the attempt at once to collectivize fantasy and to use it for some political or social end, whether that end is nation-building or family structure. In the process, it is gender that produces meanings for sex and sexual difference, not sex that determines the meanings of gender. If that is the case, then (as some feminists have long insisted) not only is there no distinction between sex and gender, but gender is the key to sex (1428).
Can gender be saved then? And do we want to save it? Maybe we have had enough of gender after all (see Butler, “Speaking” 21)? Yet gender as critique might be an especially useful option today and it has been there, right in front of our eyes, for more than three decades, despite the repeated announcements of its demise. Fascist and conservative forces dominating much of Western politics today pose a dire threat not only to our research, but our lives. The death trap we find ourselves in is after all in many ways more real for this side than the right-wing. Yet that is not sufficient reason to make “them” our unique object of research. Those who are “against gender” by themselves comprise too proper an object, expected and predictable. Instead, perhaps we could also contribute to research we find more rewarding, intellectually demanding, and strategically useful even if it risks destabilizing the comforting and animating certainties that have crept into the field. Only by opening up alternatives can positions be thought and occupied otherwise, and if we want to make gender useful, we must generate and distinguish the critiques that come from us from the attack that comes from them. Exactly what that entails is not self-evident, but one thing is clear: feminist research and theory need once again to reclaim an alterity where “gender” points to a question, not a given identity; to a critique, not a description; to a symptom, not a grammatical rule.
Sara Edenheim is associate professor in History at Umeå Center for Gender Studies, Umeå University, Sweden. Her most recent publication is “The Unfamiliar State in Times of Ungrievable Loss” in Judith Butler and Marxism: The Radical Feminism of Performativity, Vulnerability, and Care (eds. Elliot Mason & Valentina Moro), Rowman and Littlefield 2025.
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[1] See also Scott 2013, 73f for a similar conclusion.
