Social constructionist theorizing on gender provides a perspective rather analytically distinct from psychoanalytic frameworks and social role theory (Connell 1995). Here I hope to show that social constructionist theorizing on gender is not so analytically distinct from several other "new social science" perspectives, particularly poststructuralist and deconstructionist ones. This paper attempts to understand the overlaps and connections between these paradigms. In making these connections, I will sketch the most important elements of the social constructionist paradigm concerning analyses of gender and then turn to an analysis of its overlaps and disjunctions with other new social science paradigms.

Philosophies of science and introductory textbooks tend to write histories of paradigm ascendance and fall as if paradigms were (eventually) defined and uncontested entities. Perhaps the social constructionist paradigm on gender is still in its adolescence, but it seems there is no "paradigmatic statement" of the field. Rather, the methods and theoretical frameworks seem contested and unsettled. R.W. Connell notes the lack of settled paradigm for social constructionism in his book on knowledges of masculinities. But there are, of course, common themes in social constructionism.

If there is a paradigmatic statement of social constructionism on gender, it might be West and Zimmerman's "Doing Gender" (1991). In any case, it seems a good place to start. Their goal in this particular article is:

to propose an ethnomethodologically informed, and therefore distinctively sociological, understanding of gender as a routine, methodical, and recurring accomplishment. We contend that the "doing" of gender is undertaken by women and men whose competence as members of society is hostage to its [the doing of gender's] production. Doing gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine "natures" (13-14).

The three most important concepts from this article are all contained in this short, yet dense excerpt. The three concepts are the interactional nature of gender, accountability, and the doing of gender as rendering the world as if natural.

The interactional nature of gender is the theoretical concept most emphasized by West and Zimmerman. The authors base their analysis of gender as interactional upon several distinctionsgender, sex, sex category, doing gender. They define sex as the abstract principles of classification of male and female in biology and medicine. Sex as such is based upon shifting but agreed upon criteria in the biological field. Sex as such is also distinct from sex categorythe actual categorization either male or female (there are only two choices) that is assumed by most to correspond to sex. The first sex category is applied at birth in the biological classification and then is established every day in identificatory displays (like style of dress, hair, make up, etc.) and other aspects of "doing gender" that declare one's membership as male or female. After making these distinctions, West and Zimmerman turn to their concept of (doing) gender.

Gender for West and Zimmerman is interactional; it does not have an existence outside of the doing of it. It is an emergent feature of social situations in which establishing one's sex category is only one such feature. The language of gender as an accomplishment tends to highlight the need to establish one's sex category in interaction. Because situations in which sex category is ambiguous (as in interactions with androgynous individuals)¹ or consciously established (as in transsexuals like Garfinkel's Agnes),² illuminating the doing of gender in the sort of extreme case, the need to establish sex category is over-emphasized as constitutive of doing gender. Doing gender, as I read it, is much broader than establishing sex categorization as gender is done continually in interaction, long after sex category is established. 

The language of "accomplishment of gender", the "doing of gender", and "gender as an emergent feature" all make gender an action of individuals in contact with one another and an ongoing and never-ending process. Doing gender requires fitting behavior finely to the particular situation and modifying behavior as the situation demands. The concept of doing gender shifts gender as a characteristic or trait that "lives" in individuals to one that "lives" in interaction. Doing gender is always oriented towards an other, real or imaginary. Particularly, individuals orient their doings of gender in anticipation of being assessed or held accountable for those actions.

Accountability is the second key concept in the West and Zimmerman doing gender framework. Individuals' doings of gender and their outcome are oriented towards the perception and assessment of other individuals in interaction. Individuals do gender knowing that others will asses their actions and even comment on them. They may consciously orient their doings of gender so the outcome is assessed as gender-appropriate or purposively gender-inappropriateeither way individuals orient their behavior with the knowledge that by being assessed, they will be held accountable for their doing of gender.

to "do" gender is not always to live up to normative conceptions of femininity or masculinity; it is to engage in behavior at the risk of gender assessment. Although it is individuals who do gender, the enterprise is fundamentally interactional and institutional in character, because accountability is a feature of social relationships and its idiom is drawn from the institutional arena in which those relationships are enacted (23-24).

Because individuals are always risking gender assessment, they are always orienting actions towards accountability. 

Many read West and Zimmerman as minimizing the importance of institutions in doing gender. The above excerpt points to how institutions affect individual's doings of gender. First, doings of gender (and interactions generally) occur in institutional arenas. Second, the idiom, or norms of appropriate gender, are drawn from the institutional arena. This excerpt gives us some idea of how West and Zimmerman theorize the structure-agency nexus or the relationship between institutions and individual interactions. Later in their article, West and Zimmerman elaborate on institutions a bit further in the third key concept in doing genderthe rendering of the world as if natural. The doing of gender makes institutionalized or structural arrangements based on sex category as if normal or natural and thus legitimate. This concept analytically ties together individuals in interaction and institutions.

doing gender also renders the social arrangements based on sex category accountable as normal and natural, that is, legitimate ways of organizing social life. Differences between women and men that are created by this process can then be portrayed as fundamental and enduring dispositions. In this light, the institutional arrangements of a society can be seen as responsive to the differences, the social order being merely an accommodation to the natural order. Thus if, in doing gender, men are also doing dominance and women are doing deferenceÖ, the resultant social order, which supposedly reflects "natural differences," is a powerful reinforcer and legitimator of hierarchical arrangements (32). Doing gender (as a sort of cumulative effect of individual doings of gender) makes particular actions appear as expressions of an underlying masculine or feminine "nature." For West and Zimmerman, particular doings of gender are "socially guided" by institutions and also constitutive of the idiomthe institutionalized understanding of gendered "natures." Although this structure-agency nexus is undertheorized in this article, this is the underlying assumption.

In this context, doing gender is also doing gender inequality. This means that most often in most contexts, in the doings of gender that are assessed as gender-appropriate, men are doing dominance and women are doing deference. The cumulative effect of such individual doings of gender makes it seem as though the idiom of men as dominant and women as deferent, or gender inequality, is a natural expression of underlying masculine and feminine natures. Institutional arrangements which foster, reinforce or are structured around gender inequality thus appear as if they accommodate natural, essential masculine and feminine natures.

R. W. Connell takes stock of the social constructionist paradigm on gender in his book, Masculinities. He elaborates the structure-agency nexus by calling attention to the importance of economic and institutional structures in social constructionist theorizing on gender. Institutions are important in the social constructionist view of gender in two ways. The first is the context of gender construction; doing gender is often achieved within organized institutions. Secondly, institutions (or more accurately, actors influenced by institutional interests) make and remake norms of gender in their own social practices that affect the way everyday actors do gender (normatively or non-normatively). In the institutional arena, gender norms find their idiom; but in contrast to role theory, gender norms are not simply internalized and then enacted by individuals.\

But rather than treat these [public conventions about gender] as pre-existing norms which are passively internalized and enacted, the new research explores the making and remaking of conventions in social practice itself. On the one hand this leads to an interest in the politics of norms; the interests that are mobilized and the techniques used to construct them (35).

This interest in how institutions construct norms on gender and then how the everyday individual makes and remakes norms in their daily doing of gender is not as clearly articulated in West and Zimmerman.

Connell discusses another theme that is entirely neglected in the West and Zimmerman article: the contested and contradictory norms of gender. He discusses masculinities, but I think his analysis can easily be extended to gender generally. He notes significant differences among masculinities and the contradictory and dynamic character of gender. West and Zimmerman allow for dynamism and contradiction but only in how some individuals purposively do gender inappropriatelysome doing so in pursuit of social change in order to disrupt normative or "appropriate" gender. Connell is allowing for dynamism and contradiction within normative constructions of gender. Different normative genders are produced from the same institutional setting³. The relations between these normative genders are not like a market of equivalent choice for actors, but some normative genders are hegemonic⁴.

To recognize diversity in masculinities is not enough. We must also recognize the relations between the different kinds of masculinity; relations of alliance, dominance and subordination. These relationships are constructed through practices that exclude and include, that intimidate, exploit and so on. There is a gender politics within masculinity (37).

The concept of hegemonic genders is important because it breaks from one-way socialization or internalization models. Hegemonic control of the "choice" in doing gender is not total, automatic, fixed, or unified. Hegemonic genders may be disrupted through negotiation by actors or even disrupt itself in institutionalized social practice.

Barrie Thorne's Gender Play (1993), which I read as a social constructionist study of the construction of gender in the play of girls and boys at school as structured to some degree by institutional practices, emphasizes slightly different but related themes of West and Zimmerman and Connell. Thorne, like Connell, looks at the complexity and contradiction in doing gender, but adds the contradictions within particular actions of girls and boys. Her metaphor of gender play evokes the complexity. She describes this meaning of play "as 'brisk, fitful, or light movement,' as in 'a play of colors.' These definitions recognize the sheer complexity of gender relationsthe multiple and contradictory meanings, the crosscutting lines of difference and inequalityÖ" (5). For example, she includes lengthy analyses of cross-gender chasing on the playground. It has multiple and sometimes contradictory meaningsit affirms boundaries but also crosses them, it has sexual meanings, aggressive meanings, moves into same-gender chasing and out to cross-gender chasing, it involves pollution rituals like "cooties", it is both just fun and games as well as serious gender play.

Thorne also emphasizes context specificity. The meanings and practices of doing gender must be understood as situated in specific and shifting contexts. Her emphasis on context is an outgrowth of the practice of ethnography (which is perhaps the preferred methodology of the social constructionist paradigm). Social constructions as well as ethnographies are grounded, moment-by-moment, and in shifting contexts. Connected with the specificity of context in meaning and social practices is the specificity of context in the importance of gender as an organizing principle. Thorne observes that the importance of gender fluctuates depending on situations. Some interactions are highly structured by gender difference and inequality, and in some interactions gender seems hardly relevant. In some situations, actors ritually mark gender boundaries ("girls-chase-boys"), in some gender boundaries are clear but not articulated (gendered seating in the classroom), and in others gender boundaries are blurry and not as relevant (lining up by color of shoes, rather than gender).

Despite different authors emphasizing the importance of different concepts, there are some general themes in the social constructionist paradigm. Social constructionist theorists question the taken-for-granted expressions of gender as based in natural or biological difference. They dispute functionalist paradigms that draw on structuralist models of one-way socialization (from adults to children) and the enactment of internalized norms in social roles. Social constructionists move away from individualistic explanations of gender to explanations based on interaction and groups. Gender is an ongoing process that arises out of interaction in the doing of doing gender. Individuals are held accountable for their doings of gender. Institutions and structures play a role in setting context for interaction and to a (greater or lesser) degree guiding the doing of gender as the doing of gender shapes institutional contexts. The very process of doing gender is that which creates the world as if it were natural and based on inherent difference. Although West and Zimmerman neglect the themes of hegemony, contested and contradictory norms of doing gender, and the complex and multiple meanings of doings of gender, these seem to be very important themes in social constructionism as well as themes with deep connections to postmodernist projects.

The social category of gender (and also gender inequality) for social constructionists arises from interaction. For the poststructuralists, gender, gender inequality and sexuality arise from discourse. Discourse is the site in which language is used and where meaning and subjectivity are constructed and contested. Discourse is communication, conversation, talk and written text. Chris Weedon explains the concept of discourse in poststructuralist theory:

Discursive fields consist of competing ways of giving meaning to the world and of organizing social institutions and processes. They offer the individual a range of modes of subjectivity. Within a discursive field, for instance, that of the law or the family, not all discourses will carry equal weight or power. Some will account for and justify the appropriateness of the status quo. Others will give rise to challenge to existing practices from within or will contest the very basis of current organization and the selective interests which it represents (1987, 35).

Given that discourse as conversation and talk is indeed one form of interaction, there are many overlaps and similarities between social constructionist and poststructuralist theorizing on gender and gender inequality. Poststructuralist theorizing on gender incorporates some constructionist foundations and builds new directions. Discourse is not only conversation and talk for poststructuralistsit is also written text. The poststructuralist focus on text is a break from social constructionist foundations. The focus on text sometimes takes theorists toward "deconstruction." Further, some critical theorists in this tradition engage in "double deconstruction" in which they partially deconstruct their own texts. This too is a radical break from social constructionism. These overlaps and disconnects in social constructionist and poststructuralist theorizing on gender will be drawn out below.

Judith Butler's poststructuralist theorizing on gender and sexuality is, in many ways, a version of social constructionism. Butler (1990) concurs with social constructionists that there is no biological or essential basis for gender and that gender does not correspond to biological sex. Butler also views gender (and sexuality) as performative in acts, gestures and enactments. Further, "[t]hat the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its realityÖ" (336). As for West and Zimmerman, for Butler there is no being of genderno existence of gender as a real categoryoutside of enacting gender. For West and Zimmerman, gender is enacted or performed in interaction; for Butler, gender is in discourse. Butler describes gender and sexuality as constituted effects of performance or of discourse. This is very similar to West and Zimmerman's gender as an emergent feature of interaction.

Butler is particularly concerned with another key concept in social constructionist thinking on genderthat is, the way in which doing gender (or discursive constructs of gender) makes gender seem as if it was an expression of an underlying masculine or feminine nature. The performance of gender naturalizes the categories of gender; gender becomes an effected illusion as essential representation of a real, natural and underlying core in individuals. 

acts and gestures articulate and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality. If the "cause" of desire, gesture, and act can be localized within the "self" of the actor, then the political regulations and disciplinary practices which produce that ostensibly coherent gender are effectively displaced from view. The displacement of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a psychological "core" precludes an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated notions about the ineffable interiority of its sex or of its true identity (Butler 1996, 337).

In this above quote, Butler foregrounds the political implications of a social constructionist analysis. The analysis of gender as arising discursively makes gender a "function of public and social discourse" (1996, 336). As in West and Zimmerman's analysis, Butler tries to show that "political regulations and disciplinary practices" [in West and Zimmerman, "institutional arrangements"] seem as if they are accommodating the natural order of sexual difference. The naturalizing effect of gender performance individualizes gender identity, making it seem a surface representation of an identifiable and essential psychological core. This psychological core appears as if it emerges to represent itself in interaction, discourse and ultimately in political and institutional arrangements. These illusions, the naturalization of gender and the individualization of gender depoliticizes gender and displaces from view political practices and institutional arrangements. I read Butler's writing as a disruptive practice in itself, meant to denaturalize gender and re-place into view political practices and institutional arrangements which regulate appropriate genders and reify the binary categories.

Butler's analysis overlaps with social constructionist analysis again in the social constructionist concept of accountability where actors orient their actions with an eye towards being held accountable by others' assessment of their actions as gender-appropriate or gender-inappropriate. Butler does not emphasize accountability much in her analysis, but she certainly uses the concept. She speaks of compulsory heterosexualized genders and compulsory performance. "It is a compulsory performance in the sense that acting out of line with heterosexual norms brings with it ostracism, punishment, and violence, not to mention the transgressive pleasures produced by those very prohibitions" (Butler 1991, 24).

Above I have outlined the fundamental similarities between Butler's theorizing and West and Zimmerman's constructionism. There are convergences here around the three important concepts from the West and Zimmerman piece: interactional nature of gender, accountability and the doing of gender rendering the world as if natural. Butler would state the three concepts a bit differently, perhaps: the performative nature of gender and sexuality, compulsory heterosexualized gender, and the naturalizing effect of gender performance. From this convergence, Butler then moves in new directions.

The structure-agency nexus is theorized a bit differently in Butler's work than by West and Zimmerman. In both cases, I read this structure-agency nexus as undertheorized. West and Zimmerman, I think, view gender-appropriate actions as socially guided by social structure and institutionalized practice. At the same time, and more emphasized in their work, the doing of gender by actors constitutes the institutionalized understanding of what is gender-appropriate and reflective of underlying natural gender. Perhaps this tone is an outgrowth of West and Zimmerman's ethnomethodological approach and focus on the micro-level, but individual agency seems emphasized over institutional or structural determinism. Butler is more in line with Connell's look at institutional practice effects on how actors do gender, appropriately and inappropriately. In Butler's work it is both individual actions, gestures, enactments and institutional practice which produce the category of gender, gender identity and sexuality. In the lengthy quote above "the political regulations and disciplinary practice produce that ostensibly coherent gender" (Butler 1990, 337). But also, "it is precisely the repetition of that play [the performance of being a lesbian] that establishes the very category that it constitutes" (Butler 1991, 18). For Butler, both agency and structure are constituted by discourse.

It is here where some of the cleavages between social constructionism's gender and poststructuralism's gender become apparent. In West and Zimmerman's analysis, gender lives in interaction; in Butler, gender lives in discourse. Face to face interaction and conversation is only part of discourse. In Butler's analysis, discourse is also texts, institutional practices, laws, media, etc. Because gender also lives in such things as texts and laws, it has a reified "life of its own" outside of interaction in theoretical, political and "everyday" discourse. But in all the spaces in which this reified (heterosexualized) gender resides, gender is unstable. 

Butler brings in psychoanalytic concepts in talking about this instability. The instability comes from psychic excess and that which is excluded in gender presentation and in sexual practice. Gender presentation makes gender appear as if it were coherent, stable and an expression of an underlying natural core. This presentation (and Butler adds sexual practice, as well) always denies another reality that is in the unconscious. Butler terms this "psychic excess," and it returns to haunt heterosexualized gender presentations. Thus this unnaturally reified gender is compelled to repeat itself over and over to redefine its boundaries. Because any presentation will always leave off psychic excess, all presentations are compelled to repetition. 

Butler reads this compulsion to ritually repeat gender performance as a sign of gender's instability as a reified, naturalized category. 

the psychic [is] that which exceeds the domain of the conscious subject. This psychic excess is precisely what is being systematically denied by the notion of a volitional "subject" who elects at will which gender and/or sexuality to be at any given time and place. It is this excess which erupts within the intervals of those repeated gestures and acts that construct the apparent uniformity of heterosexual positionalities, indeed which compels the repetition itself, and which guarantees its perpetual failureÖif heterosexuality is compelled to repeat itself in order to establish the illusion of its own uniformity and identity, then this is an identity permanently at risk (Butler 1991, 24).

The same mechanism which establishes the reification and naturalization of gender reveals the instability of heterosexualized gender categories. In the instability and in the need for constant repetition is the promise for social change.

Butler's emphasis on the ritual repetition of heterosexualized gender, the excess of the reified construction of gender, and on the instability of categories of gender marks one rift between her project and the social constructionist project. Another rift is the treatment by Butler (and poststructuralists/postmodernists generally) of subjectivity. Butler asks a question that social constructionists do notshe asks, what does it mean for the subject that attributes like gender and sexuality reside in discourse and are not interior within the self? Butler concludes that it is not only sexualized gender that is produced in discourse (as a coherent, stable, essential, underlying core), but it is also the self or the "I" which is produced. Subjectivity is, then, disunified, incomplete, incoherent. This is why Butler says that gender is performative but not done by a performer. There is no prior subject who freely and willingly performs gender. The appearance of such a prior, volitional subject is also an effect of the performance. 

Donna Haraway's writing figures subjectivity differently, but she also sees subjectivity as disunified, in conflict and not representing an underlying coherent self. She writes a "Manifesto for Cyborgs" where she articulates a vision of the postmodern subject (1991). This postmodern subject contrasts with the subject of modernism. Modernist discourse sees individuals as free-willed agents who act in a rational calculus of cost/benefit analysis. This agent or subject is the "modern Man." His actions express an underlying, essential, unified self which he embodies. Postmodern subjects, for Haraway, are characterized by disunified and fractured selves. Not only does Haraway question the bias of the assumptions of the Modern subject (that he is white, western and male,) but she also questions that the actions of subjects betray any underlying unified self. Postmodern subjects are disunified, always partial and their subjectivities situated in the (social, historical, political) contexts in which they act. Instead of being unified whole selves, cyborgs blur distinctions and categories, especially the human-animal distinction, the human-machine distinction and the physical-non-physical distinction. Cyborg subjectivity is not a choice as were modernist counter-hegemonic subjectivities that claimed transcendent authority grounded in "real" material relations. Cyborg subjectivity is one given to women and men (in contradictory relations of domination and misogynist militarism as well as promise). Cyborgs, unlike modern Men, are fully implicated in relations with women, men, animals, machinesthe world.

Social theorist and filmmaker, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, is well known for her figuring of subjectivity as Not-I. Trinh, like Haraway and Butler, is skeptical of origin stories where subjects have a "pure origin" and a "true self." Instead Trinh figures subjectivity as "infinite layers" (1989). She means by this that the top superficial layer of a person cannot be peeled off to discover what is true, original and authentic underneath. Instead, the self has infinite layers and is constituted by these infinite layers. Trinh also figures an interactional basis for the self. She tells us that categories always leak and the line dividing me from you, us from them, and him from her are unclear. The self is often between these categories in interaction and discourse. 

Poststructuralism's focus on discourse and texts shifts it from social constructionism's project in another way. Many poststructuralists look at writing as a social practice to be analyzed. They look to analyze how reality is constructed through categories of representation in the discourse of the academic text. Much of Joan Scott's article, "Experience" (1992), is a call for this kind of analysis. This project is deconstructive in that it is a critique that seeks to expose the (artificial) construction of categories of representation in texts which take for granted as natural these categories.

Scott's work is to deconstruct the texts of historians. She calls for critical feminist historians to make their project not a filling-in of the gaps of "orthodox" history (which excluded voices of women and non-whites). Instead, she calls for inquiry into the practices of such historians which excluded such Others in the first place. Scott believes the answer to this line of inquiry is to be found in a deconstruction of the ways in which historians themselves construct or produce categories of representation for the subjects they studycategories like gender, sexuality, race and experience. The subjects of historical study too construct such categories in their own discursive practices which scholars then rely on for historical analysis. Scott calls for a disruption of the irreducible authority of experience in writing history in favor of analyses of the ways both historical subjects and history-writers themselves construct (categorized) experience of historical subjects in discursive relational social practice.

To this end, Scott calls for a reframing of the object of study in critical historical accounts. Kathleen Canning observes that this "might signal a whole new kind of historical investigation, the history of homosexuality instead of homosexuals; of 'blackness' instead of blacks; of the construction of the feminine instead of women" (1997, 423). Such deconstructive histories, for Scott, would question the constitution by historians of subjects as fixed, autonomous and prior to the historical contexts in which they experienced, spoke and wrote. In alignment with Haraway's call for situated knowledge (1991), Scott views such deconstructive projects as illuminating the importance of the position or situatedness of the (historical) subject and of the scholar. It is Scott's hope that the historian will examine her situatedness in the production of her knowledge. This will undermine false claims to objectivity and neutrality.

Elizabeth Canning criticizes poststructuralists for not applying the same standards to themselves in disrupting the naturalness of discursive categories. She writes, "[s]ignificantly, Butler and Scott invite feminists to reinscribe concepts like subject or agency but do not suggest a rewriting of deconstruction or poststructuralism itself" (421). Stephen Pfohl suggests that the most radical of critical theorists do engage in such a double deconstruction in which they question the authority of their own texts.

more radically reflexive enactments of this perspective recognize even their own "truthful" depictions of others as "social science fictions" that are, at best, partial, socially situated, and evaluatively charged (mis)recognitions, allied in the provisional and contradictory service of certain narrative constructions (of objectivity) in opposition to others. Such critical reflexivity requires a doubled analytic movement. This involves the tension-filled and contradictory recognition that both the "objective" claims-making of others and the claims we make concerning others are forever being (re)constructed in the transferential space of a given sociological story. This is HIStory. This is sacrifice (1993, 405).

Indeed this double deconstruction comes at the price of a painful sacrifice. But the price of this sacrifice may not be as a great as the price of that which is sacrificed in less reflexive theoretical constructions.

Such a doubly deconstructed position requires that poststructuralist authors approach their own texts as discourse in the same manner in which they approach other texts. Thus their own texts construct categories which become reified illusions or fictions. This radical deconstructionism would approach theorizing as socially constructed, and thus the knowledge that comes out of the interaction of writer with reader or lecturer with student is not objectively true but legitimated through the ritualized repetition of knowledge claims. Theorists who embrace this radical reflexive deconstructionism tend to relinquish authority over the interpretation of their own texts as the truths of their work lie in the reading. Avery Gordon speaks to this relinquishing of authority: "Because the conscious intentions and desires of the writer form a kind of interference pattern within which a writing and reading occur, I am perhaps the least qualified person to unscramble the codes that are used and which the text itself produces" (1990, 40). This double deconstruction is connected with Donna Haraway's project of situated knowledge. For Donna Haraway, feminists must simultaneously recognize the "radical historical contingency" of all knowledge claims and responsibly create "faithful accounts of a 'real' world." For this project, theorists must reflexively recognize themselves as implicated fully in the world and reject scientific objectivity and totalizing theory in favor of "specific positioning, multiple mediation [and] partial perspective" (1991, 3). Cyborgs prefer situated knowledge in partial perspective. Objectivity can only be achieved through reflexive recognition of the situation from which knowledge is produced. Objectivity is also gained through the recognition that any account of the world is only a partial perspective. Through the networked web of other partial perspectives, we can achieve an understanding of the world which comes closest to a representation of the truth of contradictory social relations.

The forms of deconstruction I have outlined above, to a great degree, radically depart from a social constructionist project. I do not view them as incompatible but rather that deconstructionist poststructuralists take social constructionist key ideas and then modify and apply them to discourse and theoretical texts. Radical forms of this deconstructionist project do the same to their own texts, viewing them as partial, provisional and situated perspectivessocial science fictions. Such a view does not oppose fiction to non-fiction but views all knowledge and discourse as fictional. 

The poststructuralist reformulation of subjectivity is often criticized as denying agency and thus the possibility for individuals to act for social change. Many critics also find the call for partial perspective disabling as it may preclude the articulation of a alternative goal for which to strive (Hartsock 1990). Poststructuralists have responded in many ways to such a critique; one such response is in Gayatri Spivak's notion of strategic essentializing in making knowledge claims and counter-hegemonic political practice. Butler, addressing Spivak, argues instead for "strategic provisionality" rather than strategic essentialism (Butler 1991). Another way to address the critique is to look to what poststructuralists say about change-oriented political practice and draw out the implications for such practice from their theories.

First, some poststructuralists treat academic writing itself as a form of disruptive political practice. Patricia Clough calls feminist theorizing "a writing to save lives" (1994). Clough is suspicious of the distinction between theorizing and political practice. Theorizing is viewed as a polemical discourse of resistive promise. Further, the academy is viewed as a site of contested power and knowledge, not separate from the rest of the world. Feminist poststructuralism is a challenge to the academy and thus a political practice (to the extent that it is heard). Judith Butler speaks of the political nature of writing frequently in her work. She even asks, "If the political task is to show that theory is never merely theoria, in the sense of disengaged contemplation, and to insist that it is fully political (phronesis or even praxis), then why not simply call this operation politics, or some necessary permutation of it?" (1991, 15). Revising narrative and theoretical strategies for theorizing gender disrupts the categories of gender and then is itself subversive. But for Butler, disruptive, dissonant gender performance (more like what we usually think of as practice) is too an outlet for social change practice. She explicitly states that she is unsure which is the better strategy but notes that "performance may preempt narrative as the scene of gender production" (1990, 339). Performance is a scene of great political promise because "[gender] requires to be instituted again and again, which is to say that it runs the risk of becoming de-instituted at every interval" (Butler 1991, 26). Because the enacting of gender performance in discourse is the place where gender resides, its ritual repetition opens a space for disruption. One can imagine beginning a subversive repetition, and Butler figures drag as a more subversive repetition.

Haraway's epistemology offers us alternative resistance as well. Disunified cyborg subjects, for Haraway, react to their fractured split identities with coalition and affinity in politics and oppositional consciousness. Her alternatives for movement-oriented resistance are in "webs of connections called solidarity in politics," "response through coalitionaffinity, not identity" and "political kinship." This allows for the linkage of multiple struggles. But these are not easy strategies. Coalition-building and the creation of webbed networks are difficult to organize and tense places from which to act. However, the fruits of coalition action are worth the effort. The types of coalitions Haraway envisions do not simply offer space for Others to speak and join in action of already given frames of analysis and praxis. Instead these coalitions develop strategies and act directly out of the connections of varied and situated subjectivities/objectivities. Such power-reflexive engagements in coalitions themselves are resistive to homogeneous and totalizing political practice.

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Weedon, Chris. (1987). Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc.

West, Candace and Don H. Zimmerman. (1991). Doing Gender. In Judith Lorber and Susan A. Farrell (Eds.), The Social Construction of Gender. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

West, Candance and Sarah Fenstermaker. (1995). Doing Difference. Gender and Society. (9)1: 8-37.

2  West and Zimmerman's invocation of phenomenological/ethnomethodological theorists like Garfinkel points to importance of this tradition in social constructionism. 

3  Race and class difference seems very important to the notion different normative genders. West and Fenstermaker (1995) try to incorporate race and class difference in doing gender. In this article, individuals are held accountable for doing raced and classed gender. That is, I am not only held accountable in my doing femaleness but I am held accountable in doing middle class, white femaleness (or female middle class whiteness, etc.) From this analysis one might imagine normative genders as elaborated across race and classlower class, black femaleness; middle class, Hispanic maleness; middle class, white maleness; etc.4 Boston College as an institution serves well as an exampleI think of several normative genders for male undergraduates: athlete masculinity, fraternity masculinity, student government leader masculinity, sensitive artist masculinity, homosexual masculinity, etc. It is rather obvious that some of these masculinities are hegemonic and not as if a male student entering the university simply chooses from the range of equally validated genders.