Gender Norms and Intersectionality: Connecting Race, Class and Gender

227 Pages·2019·1.434 MB·English

by  Riki Wilchins

Gender Norms
& Intersectionality

Gender Norms
& Intersectionality
Connecting Race, Class,
& Gender
Riki Wilchins
London • New York
Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
6 Tinworth Street, London, SE11 5AL, UK
www.rowmaninternational.com
Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield
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With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK)
www.rowman.com
Copyright © 2019 by Riki Wilchins
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic
or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written
permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB 978-1-78661-083-6
PB: 978-1-78661-084-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN: 978-1-78661-083-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-78661-084-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-78661-085-0 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
To Gina and Dylan Jade—you are my life. Thank you for tolerating
the long hours devoted to writing this book instead of to you.
Appreciation
I’d like to express special thanks to Dhara Snowden at Rowman & Littlefield
International for being the first among dozens of editors I approached to “see” how
a book devoted to gender norms could work, and then for championing this book
and making it possible; to Camilla Saly, for her endless edits, ideas for strengthening
(and trimming!) my text, and continual funny, funky asides that kept me in stitches
during manuscript re-editing (my least favorite thing); and to Kevin McElrath,
for his patient proofreading, researching studies, and work on chapter references.
I would particularly like to thank TrueChild’s present and past board members,
especially our current cochairs—Jules de la Cruz and Cynthia Neff—who have stuck
with this work through the years and patiently nurtured its growth: thank you for
believing in me and the vision. Finally, I’d like to express my personal appreciation
to Barbara D., whose support was pivotal in providing the time and space to write
this book, something every author needs and so many fail to get—thank you!

Contents
Foreword: Why This Book ix
Part I: Understanding Gender Norms 1
1 A Gender Vacuum 3
2 About Gender & Gender Norms 17
3 International Institutions & Gender 43
Part II: Gender Norms & Education, Health, Violence 55
4 Sexual & Reproductive Health 57
5 Education 73
6 Health & Wellness 95
7 Violence & Bullying 109
Part III: Gender Norms & Youth of Color 127
8 Young Black Women & Health 129
9 Young Latinas & Feminine Norms 143
10 Young Black Men & Masculinity 155
11 Women & Girls in the Global South 173
vii
viii Contents
An Afterword: Four Issues Not Covered 187
Index 195
About the Author 209
Foreword
Why This Book
About three decades ago, I began searching restlessly for tools that might help me
comprehend the immensity of disapproval and hostility that my transitioning from
male to female had begun arousing in others. I had a strong emotional reaction to
what was happening to me of course, but I wanted ideas—a framework for under-
standing it as well. Like most of us, I grew up never really questioning the idea of
distinct, binary genders. Yet I found myself brought into daily and often harsh con-
flict with it. But my search was not going well. This was a time when transsexuals
(“transgender” had not been coined yet) were still virtually unknown, and widely
considered weird and deviant.
What I found were mostly antitransgender diatribes from self-described “radi-
cal feminists,” or else medical texts describing my psychiatric “disorder.” Both were
stigmatizing and personally painful, if in very different ways. There were a few early
and very earnest autobiographies by transsexual authors, clearly aimed not at helping
me understand myself, but rather at a cisgender (that is, nontransgender) audience,
clearly hoping to win greater tolerance from a skeptical and hostile world.
I did find many feminist texts critiquing “the patriarchy” that looked promising
at first. But they were not critiques of binary genders per se, but merely with that
system’s very unequal distribution of power and privilege. None of them seemed
interested in looking “upstream” to question the very idea of binary man/woman—
an idea that my body was busy transgressing.
Even transsexual authors took binary genders as a natural, God-given property
of bodies. Male/female, man/woman, masculine/feminine—these were the starting
points for all discussion, not the basis for dialog and inspection.
ix