Davina Cooper is Research Professor in Law & Political Theory at Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College, London, UK. Between 2018-22, she directed the ESRC funded research project on the Future of Legal Gender which explored the implications and stakes of abolishing legal sex and gender status. In October 2022, Professor Cooper started work on a two-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship entitled: "Gender and the Conceptual Imagination," which aims to advance understanding of conceptual prefiguration, as a methodological, empirical and theoretical approach, including in relation to gender.
This post summarizes her 2019 article, A Very Binary Drama: The Conceptual Struggle for Gender’s Future, which can be found at this link.
Britain is currently witnessing a fraught struggle between two divergent conceptions of what gender is. These competing conceptions of gender are not new; however, they have come to a head in the last 8 years catalysing around access to the categories of women and men. Government consultations on liberalising gender transitioning under the Gender Recognition Act is one central focus for a conflict that has also spread to include regulatory agencies, governmental politics, the courts, schools, and universities.
“Gender as domination” treats gender as a misleading fiction through which a hierarchical set of roles are imposed on binary, immutable, reproductive sex. A second competing approach argues that gender is plural and self-authorised, with (potentially) unlimited categories, and no fixed relationship to sexed bodies. Gender as identity diversity gives importance to including, recognising, and valuing people equally with different gender identities (nonbinary, genderqueer, agender, women, men, and so on) rather than aligning women and men (as gender categories) with specific bodily forms and seeing these embodied alignments as the formative structure for gender's troubles.
This article traces these different conceptions of gender as a springboard to thinking about gender’s contested present and future. There is no single linear thread from now to what will be, but rather a cluster of different movements involving aspirations and fears, anticipatory practices, and critical framings of gender’s “now”. My discussion addresses the conceptions of gender currently struggling for hegemony, and the tensions between them. It also emphasises the other conceptions of gender that exist – including accounts of gender as a system, institution, regime, performance, or language. These understandings currently receive insufficient attention within public debate. While they recognise that classes can form around subordinate statuses and that gender can give rise to different identifications, they treat classes and identities as the effects of societal processes rather than their cause.
At the heart of this article1 lies the question: can divergent conceptions of gender, developed for different tasks -- including to support minorities, maintain stability, and critique the status quo –- take on a more productive, less adversarial relation with one another?
Note that guest posts express the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the publishers and founders of A World Without Gender, which is expressly intended as a place where readers can encounter and explore different viewpoints on the topic.
Cite as Cooper, D. (2019). A Very Binary Drama: The Conceptual Struggle for Gender’s Future. Feminists@law, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/fal.655in feminists@law
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