Part I: Rethinking Gender Identity

From its obscure mid-20th century beginnings, when it was first used in the context of psychological assessments of intersex individuals, gender identity has become a fundamental “principle of vision and division of the world,” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase. The concept is now written into laws, bureaucratic regulations, and court decisions and embedded in organizational policies and routines. Widely understood as a basic component of selfhood, it has altered what Ian Hacking has called “the space of possibilities for personhood.” Today, of course, gender identity is being challenged on multiple fronts. But these challenges were slow to emerge. Why did the far-reaching institutionalization of the category, today the focus of such bitter controversy, meet with so little opposition and attract so little attention until a decade ago? What changed thereafter, drawing gender identity into the vortex of culture war debates, but also prompting critical scrutiny from the liberal center? And how might one think and talk about gender identity in a way that might avoid some of the pitfalls and impasses of many current discussions? These are the questions Rogers Brubaker will address in his IWM Lectures in Human Sciences. 

To sidestep irresolvable debates about what gender identity really is, Brubaker proposes that we ask what the category “gender identity” does and how exactly it functions. This means focusing on the category rather than on the phenomenon—the inner sense of self—the category is supposed to designate. It means making the category itself—its history, its workings, its contestation—the object of analysis. Some may express doubt that the category “gender identity” pinpoints a clear, definite, and universally identifiable phenomenon. But the category itself is abundantly observable in public discourse, legislative provisions, administrative regulations, organizational policies, court decisions, medical textbooks and guidelines, pedagogic routines, and data-gathering practices. Regardless of whether the category points to a universal psychological truth, its discursive elaboration and institutional embedding across a variety of domains has made it a powerful and consequential social reality.

Brubaker’s first lecture analyzed the performative, productive, interactive, and regulative workings of the category. The lecture treated gender identity not as a category of analysis but as an actionable category of practice, a category that people and organizations can use to do a widening range of things. Brubaker showed how the category brings into focus, and in a certain sense brings into being, new kinds of people. He traced the “looping” processes, to use Hacking’s term, through which the category has interacted with the people classified, or classifying themselves, using the category, by following the category as it escaped from the clinic, began to circulate in public discourse, and came to be understood in new ways. And he showed how the “identity imperative”—the social and cultural obligation to think and talk about one’s identity through the prism of the deep-seated cultural ideal of authenticity and of an inner “true self”—requires young people to “have” a gender identity, to reflect on that identity, and to know and name that identity.

Rogers Brubaker is a professor of sociology at UCLA, where he holds the UCLA Foundation Chair. He has written widely on social theory, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, populism, and digital hyperconnectivity. Brubaker is the author of eight books, including, most recently, Grounds for Difference (Harvard University Press, 2015), Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities (Princeton University Press, 2016), and Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents (Polity, 2022).

Moderated by: Ayşe Çağlar, IWM Permanent Fellow

You can find the video recording of the lecture further below.