The Vitality of the Binary Gender Norm: The Entanglements of Wine Production, Biosociocultural Indicators, Reggaeton, Masculinities, Normality in Schools, and Water Management

Abstract

This article presents the binary gender norm (BGN) as an active and lively concept. To show how gender happens and manifests more as an entanglement than as individual cases in particular communities or locations, the study examines this operation in the context of six apparently unrelated case studies produced simultaneously between 2019 and 2021. Addressing the topics of wine production, biosociocultural indicators, reggaeton, masculinities, normality in schools, and water management, these case studies help show how the binary gender norm maintains itself in invisible ways and responds to any methodological practice employed. How does gender persist as an implacable force that produces stigmatized differences among humans, and why does it seem normal? How is it that, despite all the sophisticated theories and research practices, the binary gender norm finds a way to become gender again? The binary gender norm is familiar but illogical; it is also mutable, sympathetic, and playful. Situated in post-humanist thinking, this article presents a theoretical and methodological discussion on how the binary gender norm shapes itself to continue framing lives.

1. Introduction

Let me begin with a short story. In 2018, a group of female scientists from all over the world gathered for an international conference in Chile. A male authority from the university hosting the conference stood up to welcome the audience and mentioned that the World Economic Forum had just released its yearly report, where the gender gap is measured. The finding, presented as very good news, was that we will reach gender equality in 178 years. Reacting immediately, I gazed at the audience, feeling enervated and confused. Since I was sitting in the first row, I had to turn my head to observe the audience, watching for reactions to these unsettling data. Numbering more than 100 women, all scientists from different disciplines and countries, we listened to someone inform us that we needed to wait. I am not saying that this is an unusual story; I am saying that I was shocked because the data are commonplace. I thought to myself that the operations of the binary gender norm did not seem unfamiliar anymore.

In this article, I present theoretical and methodological research on the binary gender norm (BGN) as a concept with vitality (Barad 2003, 2007, 2010; Bennett 2010; Bleeker and Van der Tuin 2014; Kirby 2011; Rosiek 2018). In particular, I follow how the gender norm transforms and reconfigures itself to survive as a force that dictates the kinds of people that we can be. I commence the research by recognizing the prodigious number of sophisticated theories, social movements, and research methodologies that, over decades, have advanced the conversation on how gender as power persists as the frame for explaining discrimination, violence, and the different statuses of men and women (Butler 2006, 2019; Connell 2020; Fausto-Sterling 1985, 2000; Grosz 1994; Haraway 2008; Harding 2008; Jordan-Young 2010; Keller 1982, 1985, 2000). For example, cultural perspectives, which arise initially from anthropology (Lamas 2006; Rubin 1975), have conceptualized gender as the cultural expression of sex (Connell 2020). Thus, the origin of the gender system is reported from pre-capitalist societies where filial relations were based on incest and the exchange of women between men. Within cultural perspectives, the BGN has different translations depending on the time and place, which means that each group interprets the binary in different ways and exercises control over how the population does or does not comply with the mandate of the BGN. From here, it is argued that sex defines the two broad groups or forms of individuals that exist in many species and are distinguished as either female or male, especially given their reproductive organs and biological structures. These proposals have been vastly questioned, particularly in the work of Anne Fausto-Sterling (1985) and Sarah Richardson (2013, 2022). As an extension, sociological perspectives advance in the production of a set of definitions for the study of gender understood as a system of norms (Cislaghi and Heise 2020; Kessler and McKenna 1985).

From performative perspectives, it is argued that gender is the result of thinking about the world, as pressured, into a normative binary system: male/female (understood as different, exclusive, and complementary). In other words, the “gender differences” that we observe and take as real are the product of this organization, not the cause (Butler 1993). In other words, this system of opposing different genders pressures men and women to conform to differentiated roles that sustain what we understand as “gender differences”. Likewise, from a material—semiotic perspective (Barad 2007), the inseparable connections between the material and the discursive are rescued in order to understand the operations of binary thinking of gender. Under this perspective, gender is constantly produced not only by mainstream discourses and circulating knowledge, such as biology and psychology, but also by the materialities that assist in the production of essentialized difference.

At a different angle, scholars studying the effects of new paths of globalization have paid particular attention to the transformations in the labor market and household for women and men, and their effects on the revitalization of capitalism (Enloe 2013; Ong 2006). Another group of scholars has worked to question the dominant cultural assumptions of masculinity by exploring the relationship between masculinity and new forms of work, and the influences of non-hegemonic and racialized masculinities on the problematization of gender norms (Bederman 1996). A different perspective, queer theories have contributed to separating the idea of gender as distinct from that of the sexed body. This is critical to document the immeasurable nature of gender variance and its impact on the political and ideologized insistence to maintain the idea of the binary gender as the norm (Rasmussen 2006). Along with this, scholars working on processes of racialization have documented and historicized gender formation in relation to racial projects (Weheliye 2014), which is vital to recognize the co-constitution of both: race and gender as domination projects.

Importantly, theoretical perspectives that work on the relationship between nature and gender have been critical to understanding environmental inequalities (Alaimo 2016; MacGregor 2017; Plumwood 1993). A key contribution refers to the critique of scientific theories and evidence that present themselves as objective representations of something that is out there but hide the processes of racialization, classing, and genderization that frame their production. This urges us to question the role of science in constructing the unescapable narrative of humanity’s progress that has led to the degradation and crisis we face. Finally, a fundamental contribution is made from the feminist philosophy of science (Harding 1998, 2006, 2008, 2015; Keller 1992, 2002) which questions what science is or should be and underlines the attention and recognition of the cultural specificity of the epistemic authority of science, as we know it up to now, namely Eurocentric and masculine.

Today, we have a robust number of empirical research studies that have refuted binarism across a range of empirical findings, particularly in the areas of neuroscience, neuroendocrinology, psychology, transgender and non-binary identity research, and cognitive development research (Hyde et al. 2019). Indeed, research that has conducted meta-analyses of large bodies of research (Hyde 2005; Hyde and Linn 2006), particularly in the field of psychology, where gender differences are studied, shows that there are more similarities than differences in behavior between men and women. If there is no consistent data on differences between males and females, how is it that females continue to be underrepresented in science, more concentrated in unpaid work, more self-esteem-challenged adolescents, and lower achievers in mathematics and science? This is not a naïve question; it is more like an invitation to capture the illogical nature of these statements. Moreover, how is it that despite all the sophisticated theories developed for decades, we have become used to data that annually report about the gender gap? As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, the Global Gender Gap Index developed by the World Economic Forum that reports annually in the areas of health, education, economics, and politics confirmed in 2017 that closing the global gender gap would take 100 years. The year 2021 was 136 years and 2022 was 132. Given this trend in numbers, “closing” the gap seems unattainable, right? Is the BGN playing a trick on us? Do we need to “notice” gender differently? These are the questions that inspire the theoretical and methodological exercise presented in this article.

Besides the sophisticated trajectory of theoretical and methodological work briefly described above, I want to add another layer to the conversation by showing what happens when we give life to the BGN. To think of the BGN as an entity with vitality raises some interesting possibilities to know something else. These possibilities help us recognize the new “ways of noticing” (Tsing 2015) that we need to understand the power concepts possess (Colebrook 2002; Barad 2007, 2010; De Freitas 2017; Lenz Taguchi 2013; Lenz Taguchi and St. Pierre 2017; Mazzei 2017) to reshape and transform themselves, thereby enduring as forces that produce discrimination and inequality.

This article follows a deep contemporary anxiety. As a familiar concept rather than a hypothesis to be tested (Sanz 2017), the BGN becomes an implacable force that successfully explains the gender gap, violence, and discrimination. This indicates that we are confronting a highly contingent phenomenon that requires us to continually readjust our theoretical and methodological frames. As I intended to show with the vignette presented above, the BGN is not unfamiliar anymore. Instead, it is lived as natural and logical, which means that we must reconsider how to research highly malleable and mutable phenomena. Thinking of the BGN as a concept with vitality assists in this endeavor.

To rephrase something we already know, the BGN is defined as the well-recognized and widely approved binary that dictates radical, oppositional, and uncontested differences between men and women; as such, it validates and promotes the complementarity between them, and as a consequence, it normalizes the “either/or” place to occupy within that binary (Butler 1993, 2006, 2019, 2020; Connell 2020; Fox and Alldred 2015; McCoy 2012; Pratt and Rosiek 2023; Puar 2012; Prügl 2020; Richardson 2013; Ridgeway 2011; St. Pierre 2019, 2021). Like any other essentialized dualism, the BGN is presumed to have existed in the world antecedent to any inquiry (Rosiek 2018; Rosiek et al. 2020; St. Pierre 2019, 2021; Tsing 2015).

Viewing the BGN as a phenomenon with vitality helps me recognize the tricks it plays on us. It is sympathetic, for instance, and therefore, some people accept it or fail to recognize the danger in it. In presenting itself, the BGN uses other concepts, including hegemonic femininity and masculinity, the traditional family, heterosexuality as the norm, reproduction as the purpose of humankind, bonds, and the commitment to care for others while eliciting sympathy and appearing benign. In this manner, the BGN seems like a victim. For instance, when people justify sexism, they shrug their shoulders and remark, “Well, this is how things are”. This example reveals how the BGN covers itself to appear natural. In another trick to maintain its power, the BGN presents itself as culture. It follows that the BGN seems to vary across different times and places, changing its definition opportunistically. Modifying the definition of the gender norm reflects changes in our understanding of what it means to be human.

Thus, I pose this question: how can we remain safe in a world that allows anyone to sympathize with the BGN? The BGN is among us, disguising itself and assuming myriad shapes—gender gaps, stereotypes, roles, social norms, biological differences, performative acts, and many others. With these disguises, it creates an epistemological barrier, limiting what we can think and know. This is important. It directly affects the possibilities of change that we may or may not have. How can we avoid the BGN’s operations if we cannot see or recognize them beyond the language of stereotypes, prejudices, or gender gaps? One of my recurring concerns is that today, we can only recognize the BGN’s presence through its effects; we know about rape, we observe how institutions discriminate against women, and we see gender gaps. Yet, I ask, when we explain the gender gap, what exactly are we explaining? This serious question reminds us that while narratives of the gender gap, stereotypes, discrimination, and many others comfort us because they are familiar, they make sense of nothing.

In this article, I present a three-year study in which six simultaneous and apparently unrelated cases are used to examine the operations of the BGN as an entanglement of happenings, more than individual cases. I provide a short description of them for the reader to have a sense of what they intend to do. The focus of this paper is not on their particularities but on the totality they represent when we are interested in knowing the different shapes the BGN takes to continue being “gender”. I describe the theoretical and methodological exercise to think about the six cases as a whole. In other words, my point is that to capture the many shapes the BGN takes, I have to use these apparently unrelated cases to practice a different way of noticing how gender persists as an essentialized difference between men and women. Because the BGN is such a cunning and slippery concept, we need to explore ways to study it accordingly. To show how gender happens and manifests more as an entanglement than as individual cases has helped me in this endeavor.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. How Disconnected Things Hang Together

Between 2019 and 2021, I led a major interdisciplinary project funded by the Chilean government. Fifteen research representatives from biology, anthropology, ecology, geography, aesthetics, sociology, education, psychology, philosophy, journalism, literature, and the arts worked together to produce data on how the BGN operates in a variety of cases. The purpose of this study is to understand how the BGN works and manifests itself across cases. Thus, the research team designed six cases with specific research questions, research methodologies, and analytical frameworks. These cases were proposed without following any previous indication. They had to reflect the interest and expertise of the different teams involved. The assumption behind this decision is that to be able to document the operations of the BGN as an entanglement more than as isolated events, the cases had to reflect different scales and densities. We developed this list of cases: gendering wine production; biosociocultural indicators; reggaeton; masculinities; normality in school; and hydro-feminisms. The six cases act as one phenomenon in which there is no single event but rather connections or relations (Barad 2003, 2007, 2010; Braidotti 2013; Braunmühl 2017; Deleuze and Guattari 1987). As an assemblage, the cases reveal how the BGN changes, reshaping and disguising itself. I was able to note particular ways in which the BGN performs its work, as I present in the conclusions.

Produced simultaneously, the cases show how gender happens and how it manifests more as an entanglement than as individual cases in particular communities or locations, given that, to read the happenings of the BGN across sites, I had to pay attention to the active contribution of normalized discourses, material agencies, habitual social practices, normative affordances, biocultural boundaries, and power hierarchies in the production and shape of the BGN. The challenge is to understand these cases as simultaneous occurrences in which the complexity of each one’s entanglements is relevant for documenting the means by which the gender norm introduces itself as an organizing force in apparently unrelated ways.

I contend that when conceptualized as a concept with vitality, the BGN provides a rich political context for exploring the organizing capacities of concepts to continue producing inequalities. To document the BGN as a transformative force that regulates life, we need to heighten our sensitivity to its range of operations. The BGN actualizes itself to become gender again, and this feature is important for understanding why we still view the gender gap as a natural and familiar phenomenon. Its mode of action leads us to believe we are solving an issue arising from its effects, but as soon as we form that belief, it transforms itself, becoming gender again.

This study is framed by post-humanist thinking, which allows me to orient myself through at least three important criteria. First, ontological pluralism helps me think of the BGN as stereotypes, gender gaps, performative acts, and biological differences that together produce gender as we know it. Moreover, it allows me to conclude that the BGN’s power resides in the either/or nature that forces us to choose when we define gender, and this is how it reproduces itself. Second, post-humanist thinking proposes an affirmative way out rather than merely a critical mode of analysis; this allows me to understand how to research the vitality of concepts and where to look to advance the process of transformation. Third, a post-humanist framework underscores the ethical and political implications of the modes of inquiry we choose (Barad 2007, 2010; Gullion 2018; Rosiek 2018, 2020; Rosiek and Adkins-Cartee 2023; Rosiek et al. 2020; Todd 2016; Van der Tuin 2014). Consequently, concepts such as the BGN do not exist prior to and independently of the methodologies we use. Therefore, we must accept responsibility for the kind of knowledge we produce.

Methodologically speaking, assuming that the BGN is not passive means that it presents itself as real and unique in any methodological practice we use. The BGN manifests as stereotypes, unequal distribution, performative acts, biological differences, and cultural particularities. It shapes itself in the clash of research practices and conceptualizations, reorienting itself toward directions that allow it to continue as an obvious and familiar way to arrange life. In this article, wine production, biosociocultural indicators, reggaeton, masculinities, normality in schools, and water management exemplify significant moments in the workings of the BGN as an active and vital concept. However, by reading through multiple cases with different methodologies, questions, and purposes, I have learned that noticing the operations of a force such as the BGN requires a different approach.

To analyze the cases, I read the six cases as interlocking moments to produce an understanding of the operations of the BGN. I use a diffractive reading (Barad 2003, 2007, 2010; Haraway 2016; Juelskjær et al. 2021; Mazzei 2014; Murris and Bozalek 2019; Schrader 2012) which allows me to consider that pieces of information produced in the cases, independently, are not isolated existing texts with precise boundaries among them. What is important to have in mind is that, methodologically speaking, the cases have to be produced in disconnection with one another. This feature is key to produce meaning. As texts are relationally read through each other looking for intensities and unexpected relations to understand the phenomenon of the BGN, new ways of noticing are possible. In order to orient myself, I prepared a set of questions to read through different reports prepared by the research teams: when does gender matter? What is the shape gender takes? What is scary about gender? What is the notion of human and non-human when the notion of gender changes? Also, I used a set of concepts to help me think with the cases, “see” what the BGN was doing, and how it changed. “The familiar” and “monstrosity” were significant triggers to think differently, particularly because I was able to see that the BGN feels familiar until it kills. The BGN as a monster always escapes. We can never fully capture or know it. This is an important feature of how the BGN works.

I am interested in disrupting the persistence of gender inequalities despite decades of research, and utilizing multiple research cases, as an entanglement has helped me explore the vitality of gender as a norm, for it responds to every methodological and analytical frame. Simultaneously studying the operations of the gender norm across different cases helps us understand why investigating gender’s modes of operation requires other “ways of noticing” (Tsing 2015). As the research progressed, I understood the political importance of documenting the chain of events across cases and thereby unraveling the ways that gender organizes itself in different and seemingly unconnected spaces. The entanglement of meanings, practices, objects, human beings, and affects across the various cases was an important component to understand and document. For instance, the BGN operates in the wine industry by segregating roles and jobs but takes a different shape in the schoolyard, where it dictates formalized ways of being male or female as natural and appropriate. These practices of differentiation need to happen simultaneously, and therefore, the BGN becomes inevitable (Matus 2019). In what follows, I share some of the decisions we made in developing the cases. Later, I provide a short description of each case. Then, I present some of the noticed operations of the BGN when understood as a vital concept that transits through the cases. Finally, I present some conclusions.

2.2. Building a Case to Track Binary Gender Norm’s Vitality

In general, these six case studies are intended to serve as units for analyzing and communicating the phenomena of the vitality of the BGN and its different shapes and operation in changing spaces and times. Therefore, the cases combined in-depth interviews, ethnographic observations, focus groups, participatory observations, and fieldwork with other methodological tools, including socio-geographical descriptive data. We selected the tools on a case-by-case basis according to each case’s particular needs and each tool’s particular capacity for unpacking and communicating the normalized problems associated with gender inequalities. The data culled through these multiple practices constitute empirical material (Denzin 2013) for tracking the BGN’s transformations and understanding that process.

These case studies may be understood in a broad sense as mixed qualitative-ethnographic-narrative-quantitative approaches to situated problems. We approached them in critical dialogue with the notions of the case study found in sociological, philosophical, anthropological, and clinical studies. We opted to develop our case-study methodology initially through concrete cases instead of specifying the concept a priori based on given methodologies. Hence, the team first agreed on some criteria to define a “case” for our context, which required discussing various notions of “case” from the range of disciplines mentioned above, as well as political interests. Subsequently, we divided the research team into three sub-teams to explore how to define, describe, and analyze possible cases according to an initial and open conceptual framing, also piloting case studies that planned for development during the second and third years. Here, I summarize the general orientations we selected for producing cases.

Our criteria included the requirement that the cases must respond to the fundamental assumptions that we defined. First, the cases could not be transparent or neutral. In other words, each case had to answer the question of how the chosen methodological practice either constitutes the BGN or considers what it is. In other words, each case had to assume that the binary gender norm does not exist independently of knowledge of it and, moreover, had to be capable of explaining it. Second, each case had to describe its boundaries, as well as the scope and limits of knowledge, thereby providing its disciplinary organization. Given that each case included several disciplines, the following aspect of this requirement was particularly relevant: the means by which cases classify propositions as either “their own” or “outside” their disciplinary boundaries was not simply an intellectual matter but also became a political concern. Third, the case’s focal phenomenon had to be amenable to being historized; this meant that the concepts could not carry the index of any origins because that notion was eliminated by framing the BGN as a concept with vitality. Fourth, the cases are not organized by oppositional categories; they assume that binaries have little real value while still recognizing their persistence.

In conclusion, the case studies were required to undo the stability commonly associated with the gender norm’s operations and effects, focusing instead on how the man/woman arrangement has a life of its own. As a habit of mind, the BGN feels comfortable. Therefore, as researchers, we were ethically committed to trying to recognize the tricks it plays on us.

2.3. Cases

2.3.1. Gendering Wine Production

This multi-method case study analyzed how the BGN functions as a blindfold. Specifically, gender-neutral arguments are presented as progressive discourses that contrast with the traditional macho attitudes attributed to peasants and traditional male wine producers. The study commenced with a very general question concerning gender issues in the emerging national domain of cultural and economic practices of wine production and consumption. In Chile, this domain has developed during the last 20 years, slowly emerging as a so-called wine world. As expected, the discourses and practices around wine in Chile are exceptionally relevant to national identity. This case analyzed three types of data. First, a cartographic analysis considered the relations among cultural, social, economic, and hydric factors as well as land shaping, urbanization and transport, and agroindustrial practices, analyzing them with the available standardized indicators. Second, a description of social and economic issues of one of the most traditional zones of wine production, which has been characterized as low-quality wine production for popular consumption in Chile. Third, a discursive analysis of written and published marketing material about wine described how the wine world is assumed to be oriented toward elite consumers. This analysis addressed discourses such as the following: innovation; the wine industry as an invigorating force for promoting the values of traditional, affluent families; and the role of women in the wine industry.

2.3.2. Biosociocultural Indicators

This conceptual, empirical, and experimental case examined the production of data and scientific knowledge related to the climate crisis and biodiversity through queer feminist epistemologies of science. Articulating the BGN as a material-semiotic agency with data on biodiversity and climate change required a questioning or skeptical stance toward the nature-culture division that is usually taken for granted, the stability of knowledge, and the link between scientific knowledge and policy design. This was not a conversation about how scientific projects with critical consequences for inequalities are shaped by the dominant conceptualizations of class, race, gender, and sexuality, or of imperialist, capitalist, and colonialist interests (Harding 2008). Rather, the focus was turned to the epistemological and ontological assumptions that the nature-culture division promotes, as we shape the worlds we live in through research. For instance, gender inequalities and gaps can be seen as the product of environmental crises rather than as both the cause and the effect. Therefore, both the climate crisis and the BGN as an ordering activity provided rich scenarios for developing a narrative on how the biological, the social, and the cultural, all understood through a flat ontology (Barad 2003), may offer new explanations of our failure to achieve equality. This case was based on interviews with biologists, ecologists, geographers, and entomologists from Chile and Australia. The ethnographic data were obtained from fieldwork completed in the Patagonia Research Station (located in the extreme South of Chile); fieldwork in the community of Toltén (located in the South of Chile and inhabited primarily by indigenous communities); and from work with small communities and researchers from different disciplinary areas.

2.3.3. Reggaeton

This case focused on a series of reactions to a television report about reggaeton in 2016 in Chile. This television report featured a philosophy graduate, feminist activist, disc jockey, and communicator, who commented on the music genre and was interviewed under the title, “Expert on Reggaeton”. This label caused a considerable outcry, generating reactions in Chile’s social networks in particular. Some comments took the form of memes, and some were quite violent, which led to additional interviews of the expert, both on television and in other media. This case included the expert in the research team. Together, they analyzed a range of themes as intertwined phenomena, including feminism, reggaeton, fatphobia, social networks, and the mass media.

2.3.4. Normality in Schools

This case revisited ethnographic information produced between 2017 and 2019 in school spaces for the purpose of understanding how normality is produced in school spaces. As a phenomenon for research, normality (Davis 2013; Cryle and Stephens 2017; Matus 2019) was understood as heterosexuality, whiteness, bourgeois values, and hegemonic femininity and masculinity, among others. In returning to this ethnographic data, the objective was to think of it as “empirical material” (Denzin 2013) that could help trace other phenomena. To trace the production of the BGN, we connected the data to two questions. First, how are women represented as second-class citizens? Second, how is hegemonic masculinity produced and sustained in school spaces? Organizing the information in two different scripts, we produced two short films in collaboration with an audiovisual team. Our interdisciplinary team constructed films depicting two processes. In one, women were portrayed as second-class citizens. In the other, men were depicted as exercising a type of masculinity that serves to surveil the representation of women as second-class citizens and vice versa. These two processes must happen simultaneously to maintain the operation of the BGN as such.

2.3.5. Masculinities

This case addressed issues of the prevention of gender violence and asked about the place of men and masculinities in Chilean social policy. The case began in the middle of October 2019’s social and political breakdown, which included street fighting and looting, violence perpetrated by the State, and human rights violations. In this context, the case explored how violence is related to men and masculinities. To understand how violence and gender violence are defined, it analyzed various official documents. These included international agreements signed by the Chilean State such as CEDAW and the Belem do Pará Convention as well as domestic social policies addressing gender violence. This case also charted the organizations of civil society that work to eradicate gender violence. Some of the findings indicate that in Chilean policy, the notion of men as perpetrators rather than gendered subjects undermines the goal of addressing gender violence against women.

2.3.6. Hydro-Feminisms

The Chilean state’s model of water management is recognized as a paradigmatic case of managing nature through free-market logic. One of the model’s foundational assumptions is that water is a product, and therefore, privatizing its ownership and free trade is part of the productive cycle. As expected, representing water as an economic resource has expanded existing power asymmetries and deepened socioenvironmental conflicts; among them is the unequal distribution of water resources by gender. This case proposed that although an important critique of the neoliberal system had addressed the regulation of water resources, it overlooked the dimension of gender. This case study explored how the present model of hydric management (re)produces gender stereotypes related to the concept of water, which are used to normalize other differences and support the operations of the free market. The case’s findings include a hydric gender gap, which can be seen through a quantitative analysis of the country’s volumetric distribution of water and its special distribution of the properties where water sources are located.

As the reader may notice, relationships among these six cases are not immediately apparent. They are not disconnected; however, they feed each other in a continuum, which is essential for the BGN to operate as it does. The cases described above address a broad range of open events in which a network of elements cooperate in a specific spacetime. Each case, therefore, involves several empirical, conceptual, and political elements, which have different emphases. My purpose is to elucidate what is gained methodologically by regarding gender as a concept with vitality, as opposed to a mechanically self-reproductive phenomenon. The simultaneous production of the six cases helps me to look through the cases, to think with the cases, and to understand the extraordinary intensity of the operations of the BGN. I realized how it picks on different explanations to continue presenting itself as real and objective. Sometimes it takes the shape of happenings in low-profile events, sometimes as common explanations. These cases differ in their objects of study, research questions, research practices, and the results they communicate as conclusions. Furthermore, the cases are defined as having been initiated by short-term communications that illuminate larger social processes. Nonetheless, the six cases function as an entanglement in which the BGN adapts itself to become gender again. In order to characterize the operations of the gender norm through the apparently unrelated cases, I complicate the sameness among cases and look for the edges among them. This exercise shows me that the BGN moves along different topics and takes different shapes that respond to the particularities of each of the cases, but when I address the six cases as an entanglement, the BGN does not stay fixed in one case as only one explanation but travels back and forth between cases, so what it is assumed to be the beginning and the end of a case are, in fact, lively animated zones in which it recuperates forces to transform itself.

The objective of reading through cases was to understand what BGN can show us when we examine its apparently unrelated operations in different contexts.

3. Results

A Different Way of Noticing

Working with six cases simultaneously, as an entanglement, allowed me to understand the political and ethical consequences of the vitality of concepts. I was cautious not to choose cases rooted in ideas that continue feeding the concept of gender as biases, economic and labor stratification, or as the ways that various status signifiers intensify the meanings of “women” and “men” in different contexts of discrimination. Instead, I assumed that all these ways of documenting gender are already present in the cases.

I conceptualize the BGN as an active concept that has been able to respond to multiple theories, research practices, and analyses. Through the cases’ topical variety, I have learned that gender can escape and find a way to persist as gender as we know it. Thus, to study gender and demonstrate how it can escape and persist, we must be able to present multiple, different sites and operations (Sauzet 2021).

I recognize the role of discourses, practices, and materialities in the production of gender as difference. Nevertheless, I experiment with the possibility of acknowledging and analyzing something that is always left holding. The reality of gender happens in the clash of different disciplines, research questions, and methodological practices. Therefore, when simultaneously working with different cases, we display the incommensurability of gender realities that emerge from different sites. As Anna Tsing (2015) proposed, we need “to encourage an art of attention vitalized by situated differences of perspective; a mode of attending to the world that draws power and purpose by recognizing that one is taking part in a necessarily iterative and shared endeavor (p. 21)”. In other words, the different cases we produced are the ground from which we might respond to the inescapable challenges presented by gender as a binary norm.

To examine how the BGN is manifested in apparently unrelated cases, we must pay attention to the ensemble of objects, practices, experiences, feelings, and representations that make the gender norm what it is. We must determine how the ensemble’s parts hang together and trace the associations that lend coherence to the gender norm. I continually ask how the different research practices employed in the cases can be equivalent and how the resonance among the cases permits us to theorize gender as a vital concept. I answer this question by proposing that the gender norm is not defined by any single mechanism, such as bias, biological essentialism, economic structures, psychological limitations, or discursive processes. Instead, I propose that the gender norm is an ordering activity that at times involves all of these mechanisms in unexpected ways.

If I had taken a conventional approach to data analysis, I would have proposed distinguishing the cases according to the various types of research and then analyzing them one by one.

How we investigate the binary gender norm’s operations is critical to changing its nature. In what follows, I present some of the BGN’s features that operate across the cases.

4. Discussion

4.1. The Binary Gender Norm Is Familiar but Illogical

The concepts we use to describe the phenomenon “are not ideations but specific material arrangements” (Barad 2007, p. 144). The different meanings we confer on gender are “possible through specific material practices” (Barad 2007, p. 148). I contend that gender is an active agent that assumes different forms depending on how research practices frame it. Gender acts, plays, and presents iterative transformations to particular research practices through the different dynamics of those theories and practices. As a norm, gender dictates the unfair ways that we arrange institutions and our daily lives. It is constituted by the methodological and semiotic apparatuses we use to interpret it; it is also constituted by the activity of a world that obdurately differs from our interpretation of it. In other words, gender becomes gender again, despite our many critiques of incommensurable theoretical frameworks. Some questions continue to resonate. How can the gender norm be simultaneously explained as the following: the biological difference between men and women, naturalized cultural and psychological interpretations of that biological difference, unbalanced economic structures that denigrate women, and discursive, subject-producing practices that affect the human experience? How and when should we emphasize one of these or another? I have learned that we must be suspicious of any single explanation of gender’s operations. To acknowledge that knowledge practices are derived from any single perspective would be to explain the operations of the gender norm as specific material arrangements that participate in reconfiguring the world of inequalities.

4.2. The Binary Gender Norm Is Mutable

The BGN has all the attributes needed to explain something. Among other things, it introduces itself as an essential attribute of socialized people; yet, in some ways, it alludes to evolution. It embodies differences, demonstrating the notion of “the other” and disseminating ideas about what is to be human within a particular social and cultural context. It “reflects the cultural values invested in ‘otherness’” (Wright 2020, p. 179). The gender norm’s historical function has been to provide a clear and straightforward example of how discrimination develops and to establish what constitutes an acceptable human subject on a direct, somatic level. It is also seen as a narrative that assigns meaning to a particular body or action and as such, it can change the way in which an existing body is perceived. The BGN’s shape differs across time and from place to place, just as what frightened or inspired people 20 years ago differs from what frightens or inspires them today. In other words, we continue to reproduce gender as a dynamic and vital concept by using whatever we have at hand, and that always requires rethinking the kinds of human beings we are. The BGN lives among us and is capable of harming anyone; it is invisible, and it finds explanations and justifications until it kills. It hides in schools and other faceless institutions where it expresses itself as an everyday aspect of life.

4.3. The Binary Gender Norm Is Playful

The BGN introduces confusion about what could be considered fully human. It always has an opinion about the boundaries and limits of acceptable humanness. In Western cultures, it articulates narratives of the self and others in the form of strange bodies and unconventional behaviors. It reacts to confusion when the confusion overturns or disturbs the civil canon. It also has a peculiar way of relating to research practices. It sometimes behaves as stereotypes but other times as numbers describing unequal distribution, biological differences, human rights, abuse, or violence. This peculiarity suggests that the gender norm always escapes and finds its way, and therefore, it can never be fully known or captured; indeed, this is part of its very nature.

The gender norm’s slippery nature enables it to infiltrate every space. It defies a singular identification. It hides behind the facades of compensation and equality. Gender’s diffuse and changing nature lulls us into believing that we locate “a” problem. The gender norm can be everywhere by virtue of its vitality; constantly among us, it can bypass our defenses and penetrate the intimate spaces of our lives.

My point is that the gender norm can become invisible. How could we capture a monster that we cannot see (Weinstock 2020; Wright 2020)? How do we identify the BGN and its continually shifting modes of power when it could be anyone or anywhere? Part of gender norm’s vitality lies in its capacity to transform itself, slip away, and alter its nature, allowing us to recognize its presence only through its effects.

This article has endeavored to address the gender norm in a way that reveals its vitality, as, during this research, I have learned that the BGN is often inserted into a familiar but nonsensical explanation that, under scrutiny, is found to explain very little.

5. Conclusions as Possibilities

In this research, I have shown ways to recognize the BGN’s invisible dimension, determining how the gender norm transforms itself, changes its mechanisms, and responds to different methodologies and theoretical perspectives. When we explain the gender gap or violence in school, what exactly do we explain? When we explain the existence of gender as a norm that perpetuates inequality, this actually explains nothing. Inserting gender into the narrative of the gender gap and differences is comforting because that narrative is familiar, but while that makes the gender norm seem comprehensible, it actually makes sense of nothing. The allegedly logical origin story (women have a lower status than men, are seen as sexual objects, and are paid less) remains irrational but is treated as rational because it does powerful ideological work by supporting cultural investments in the ideas of family and reproduction.

Some elements remain to be considered. First, the BGN can be understood or learned as stereotypes, gender gaps, performative acts, unequal distribution of roles, or biological differences, and this is not incidental but rather foundational. Second, the BGN acts powerfully as a mirror of biological, social, and cultural values, while at the same time building on the status of the human. Third, the BGN presents itself as logical and it adapts. It follows that the BGN’s shape differs across methodologies and theoretical perspectives. Thus, the gender norm continues to change, and we reproduce it with whatever resources we have. Fourth, the gender norm must be examined within the intricate matrix of semiotic and material relations that unceasingly generate it, despite contrary efforts. Fifth, the gender norm always escapes and assumes different shapes, resisting easy solutions.

The gender norm usually acts as an imperative for regulating life even when it opposes us. We find an example in the debate about whether schools should have a sexual education program. Some parents have concerns about exposing their children to the program though these same children may be targets of sexual abuse or other forms of violence. This example raises the question of what the gender norm is, and whether we can achieve gender equality and stop discrimination.

While I regret my pessimism, to believe we might simply create a new structure would be naïve. The gender norm has diverse behaviors and effects that cannot be encapsulated in the way the conventional sociological framework proposes. This means that we cannot assume that the gender norm cannot be generalized; we cannot derive the BGN’s meaning for society from what individuals think. Not only would that be a mistake, but it is precisely what the BGN wants us to think. Thus, even if every activist and research scholar struggling for human rights and equal treatment vowed to promote a life free of gender discrimination, the BGN would remain pervasive, powerful, and capable of appearing in another realm with the same naturalness. We would still have a violator—someone gazing at women’s bodies on the streets and educating boys and girls differently. There would still be transnational institutions that refused to discuss the BGN, speaking instead about social norms or generating surveys that document women’s progress in various domains. In other words, there is no way to escape. What are our chances? I propose that we experiment with another “way of noticing” (Tsing 2015) gender operations. What might we achieve with a different way of framing concepts?

The question is this: if we believe that gender consists of differences between men and women, is this belief consistent with the actual world? The answer is “No”. We have abundant evidence that the world’s complexity extends beyond binaries. What would need to be true about the BGN for it to become possible to be free of discrimination and experience equality? What would people need to think in order for statements about equality and non-discrimination to be true?

The six cases I employed to understand the shapes the binary gender norm takes show that while people, things, and relations convey vastly different and even contradictory implications about gender’s operations, there remains a common, underlying feature: the BGN is continually changing and requires different ways of being apprehended and discussed. To inspire hope and discuss discrimination, we must realize that while the cases may seem to present different topics, they all concern the same power structure, whose various mutations give it a way to explain horror, love, discrimination, and happiness. All of this happens at the same time. It is precisely this aspect of the BGN’s operations that is most frequently dismissed as unimportant. This article is an effort to take its vitality seriously.