A post by Luke Roelofs

What is the relationship, if any, between gender and imagination? Of course one familiar point is that we often face interesting challenges in imagining across demographic and interpersonal difference, and gender difference are a prime example of that. But I’m interested in the thought that gender might be connected to imagination in a closer and more distinctive way.

Here’s one reason for thinking that: gender seems to have an especially close connection to the notions of expression and presentation, and through them to aesthetics and individual creativity. That is, at least for some people, gender expression seems to be an integral part of gender. ‘Expression’ here means everything about a person that can be perceived by the senses - what they wear, how they stand, their body, their gait and mannerisms, etc. And ‘integral’ here doesn’t mean definitive - I’m not saying that one is a woman iff one dresses like a woman. Rather, ‘integral’ means something like ‘central to why gender matters and how it’s understood’. The desire to look (and sound, move, etc.) a certain way, to appear a certain way to others and to oneself, seems to be central to some people’s sense of their relationship to their gender. Indeed, seeing someone’s gender presentation can play a key epistemological role in how people come to know about their identity.

For example, in her memoir Fun Home, Alison Bechdel describes her first experience seeing a butch woman and “recogniz[ing] her with a surge of joy”, after which “the vision [...] sustained me through the years.” Her father’s acerbic question zeros in on the issue of appearance: “is that what you want to look like?”

This phenomenon is easiest to see in the experience of trans and gender-nonconforming people, just because their experience of gender becomes salient by its contrast with mainstream expectation. Bechdel presumably wouldn’t remember the vision of the truck driver so vividly if it hadn’t been such an outlier relative to the thousands of images of gender she had already seen and processed. But it’s not hard to recognise a similar role being played by gender expression in the way that many other people learn and relate to their genders, less attention-grabbing because it largely goes ‘with the grain’ of their social surroundings.

That’s not to deny that other identity groups have characteristic sorts of visual and otherwise sensory appearance - both bodily ones (e.g. accent, skin colour) and sartorial ones (e.g. dressing like an upper-middle-class professional). But part of me wonders if expression is less integral to those identities. In those cases it seems we can get considerable mileage out of something like the following picture: because members of those groups tend to look, speak, dress, etc. in certain ways, an association is formed between those ways of looking, speaking, dressing, etc. and the group; individuals can then use them to signal their relationship (affiliation, divergence, or something else) to the rest of the group. The idea of a driving personal need to express something individual feels out of place - one’s race or class seems tied more to one’s relationship to a community than one’s relationship to oneself.

Consider also the social prominence and persistence of drag, which is a paradigmatic way of playing creatively with gender expression. People might try to draw a superficial analogy with practices where members of one race or culture put on exaggerated versions of the dress associated with another, but this just serves to highlight the sharp contrast in how such practices actually function. Racial caricaturing functions as mockery of the group being imitated, for an audience drawn from the group doing the imitating. But a drag queen show isn’t a vehicle for men to make fun of women; Ru Paul’s drag race is (at least by some available measures) more popular with women than with men. It seems like for some people, seeing the parodic and exaggerated performance of their own gender feels validating and relatable, rather than mocking. This might lend some credence to the suggestion sometimes made that ‘everybody is in drag’; that a drag performance reflects viewers’ own everyday activity back to them in clarified form, just as e.g. visual art reflects the structures of everyday visual perception.

The idea that we’re all, in some sense, ‘in drag’ might suggest a view about gender analogous to the view Neil Van Leeuwen has defended about religious affiliation: that what is usually assumed to be exclusively a matter of belief might really involve an attitude closer to imagination. This might go as far as the ‘gender fictionalism’ defended recently by Heather Logue, on which gender doesn’t exist but we organise our social identities by pretending it does. As Logue notes, this might have an affinity for Butler’s famous claim that gender is ‘performative’; alternatively it might be at odds with that claim, because if gender is essentially performative then there might not even be room to distinguish real from pretended ascriptions of it. Or it might stop at a more moderate constructionist realism, on which gender is real but socially constructed, and the activities which construct it might prominently involve imagination and/or pretence.

Regular readers may at this point be wondering how I’m understanding the term ‘imagination’ that’s appeared so many times so far in this post. I mostly just want to present some suggestive observations that might prompt further theoretical elaboration, so a sharp definition might do more harm than good. But the more-or-less minimal features I’m associating with the term are roughly two: positively, the imagination involves sensory images, and negatively, the imagination is less committal than attitudes like belief - it allows for play and creativity without a requirement of sincere endorsement. Both of these features seem to me to be vividly present in a lot of people’s experiences of gender, and I’m interested in thinking about what that might mean.

References

Bechdel, Alison. (2006). Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Butler, Judith. (1988). “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519-531.

Cracker, Miz. (2017). “The Girls Who Love Queens: Drag’s Biggest Audience May Soon Be Young Women.” Slate: https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/01/why-drag-queens-biggest-fans-are-increasingly-young-women.html

Logue, Heather. (2022). “Gender Fictionalism.” Ergo 8: 28. doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.2229

Van Leeuwen, Neil. (2014). “Religious Credence is not Factual Belief.” Cognition 133 (3): 698-715.

YouGov, (2022). “RuPaul’s Drag Race Popularity and Fame” Retrieved January 2023.  https://today.yougov.com/topics/entertainment/explore/tv_show/RuPauls_Drag_Race