Abstract
For the past 20 years, feminists have conceptualized gender as performative, a notion that has opened critical conversations around the intersectionality of identities, as well as how gender expectations are situated in time, geography, and other considerations. The mechanisms through which that performance is enacted, however, have not been as well explored, thus prompting Paechter’s central question: “If gender is performative … how do we know what to perform, and does this change according to circumstances?” (p. 152). This book explores the multiple mechanisms and social environments through which people learn the gender performances demanded of them by those environments and the individuals who inhabit them.
The text answers this question with the notion of communities of masculinity and femininity practice, suggesting that gender is learned through a series of negotiations with the performances of male or female conduct in multiple communities or social groups. Masculinity and femininity are thus conceptualized as negotiated and varied experiences at the micro- and mesolevels in addition to scripts dictated by macrolevel influences. For instance, children first learn what it means to be male and female by observing and engaging in the communities of masculinity or femininity practice represented by their own families. At school, they encounter another community of gendered practice, which may reinforce or contradict the gendered performances in effect in their families. Paechter suggests that children enter communities of gendered practice as apprentices; their full inclusion in that community of practice is signaled by their learned adherence to its rules of performance governing masculinity or femininity. To illustrate these negotiated performances of gender, Paechter moves chapter by chapter through the primary communities of practice surrounding many children’s gendered learning: family, nursery school, elementary and secondary school, and young people’s peer groups.
Although the text seldom introduces variations to the conventional male–female sexual and gender binary (its abbreviated but useful explorations of intersex bodies and sexual fluidity among young adults notwithstanding), Paechter effectively weaves together critical theory and research findings to illustrate the activities and values that are demonstrated by communities of gendered practice across the lifespan. By doing so, she clearly articulates the mechanisms by which people learn to enact masculinity and femininity. This presentation of gender as performed by different actors in diverse social settings is of central interest to social work students and educators, situating gender as a contested cause and consequence of behavior in the social environment.
Making the text immensely useful for social work educators and practitioners, particularly those working in residential or school settings with children and youths, Paechter closes each chapter with recommendations for intervention, strategies that may be useful in loosening rigid expectations of gender performance within certain communities of gendered practice. Writing in a voice that is both academic and readable, Paechter renders jargon and dense theoretical constructs comprehensible and accessible to even novice readers, making this a valuable addition to social work curricula that focus on critically understanding gender, sexuality, and the social environments in which they unfold.