GENDER AS GENRE: Twice in the past two weeks, while rooting through bins of children’s clothing to find the best things for the women we serve at the pregnancy center, I’ve found cute little t-shirts emblazoned with figure-skating logos. Cute, ruffly, pink, indisputably girly t-shirts. And I mean, I love Oksana Baiul as much as the next person, and this program makes me want a cigarette afterward, but my overall preference turns out to be for men’s singles skating. I want a way of thinking about gender which allows men and women to be different–allows Man and Woman, He and She, to be iconic realities whose divergences are as vivid as their similarities–without parceling out some activities or emotions as pink or blue.

There needs to be a way of talking about gender which neither marginalizes la difference, nor falls back on rigid and deeply culturally-contingent patterns of behavior. Saying, for example, that children do best with both a mother and a father is not reducible to saying that children need both a nurturing person and a challenging person. Gender isn’t function. I’ve written about this here (actually, that post says much of what I wanted to say in this one, so maybe just consider this a reminder and footnote!), and I liked a lot of what Christopher C. Roberts said about it in his book Creation and Covenant.

One partial analogy might be genre. Every emotion and gesture can be found in different genres, and yet those emotions are evoked differently and those gestures signify different things depending on genre. A woman standing at her window, nervously twitching the curtain with her fingers, means something different in a romantic comedy as vs. a suspense flick. Hope is evoked differently in horror vs. noir.

The analogy is only partial. For a Catholic, while the specifics of gender are culturally-contingent the existence of gender difference is not; and you do have to pick one, man or woman are your only options within the Catholic faith as far as I can tell. Obviously those things aren’t true of genre. But I hope the analogy can illuminate the possibility of talking about real difference without being reductive or functionalist, without dressing boys in the camouflage onesies and the soccer/football/basketball sleepers while girls get the flower- and butterfly-decked outfits.

I’d be interested in any thoughts you all have along these lines….