Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!jarthur!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!aero!huxtable@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
From: huxtable@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: BOOK REVIEW: _Gender Blending_
Message-ID: <22150.25ce9c96@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>
Date: 6 Feb 90 15:44:54 GMT
References: <25C26AAE.27180@paris.ics.uci.edu> <922@calmasd.Prime.COM> <25C9FF6C.16128@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Sender: nadel@aerospace.aero.org
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In article <25C9FF6C.16128@paris.ics.uci.edu>, tittle@blanche.ics.uci.edu (Cindy Tittle) writes:
> In article <922@calmasd.Prime.COM>, nef@calmasd (Nancy Fox) writes:
> [Commenting on my review of _Gender Blending_]
> 
> |One thing that has occurred to me is that, though I don't look
> |masculine, I don't act or look feminine, so that leaves masculine
> |as the alternative.
> 
> Devor covers this in her book.  There have been studies done
> that show people really require very few cues to determine
> masculinity, but more to determine feminity.  Thus the absense
> of feminine clues leads to assumption of masculinity, but not
> the reverse.

In _Gender:  An Ethnomethodological Approach_, by Suzanne Kessler and
Wendy McKenna, they discuss this.  Their goal was to determine how
gender attribution is made, i.e. how a person decides (usually within
a few seconds) whether the person before them is male or female.  It
seems that if you have facial hair, or one of a few other cues, you
are male.  If not, you are female.  Parts of the book are a scream.

The most annoying thing about gender (to me) is that you have to be
one or the other.  You can't be both, you can't be neither.

I've ordered _Gender Blending_.

-- 
Kathryn Huxtable
huxtable@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu