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 the French sociologist 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 the Canadian philosopher 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.

Roger Brubaker's IWM Lectures in Human Sciences will trace both the initial, largely uncontroversial institutionalization of the category in medicine, law, data-gathering, and pedagogy, as well as the bitter public wrangling that has engulfed it in recent times. The quiet institutional embedding of the category, as well as the recent wave of public controversy, have followed broadly similar lines throughout the Western world. Yet, there have been significant variations and national specificities, both in the routes to the initial institutionalization of gender identity and in the contours, timing, and salience of its contestation. In these lectures Brubaker focuses primarily (though not exclusively) on the United States, although much of his analysis has more global application.

To sidestep debates about what constitutes gender identity, 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 consequences, 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 deep 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 analyzes the performative, productive, interactive, and regulative workings of the gender identity category. He addresses the category’s performative functions by treating 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 addresses the productive workings of the category by showing how it brings into focus, and in a certain sense brings into being, new kinds of people. He traces the interactive workings of the category—the “looping” processes, to use Hacking’s term, through which the category has interacted with the people classified, or who have classified 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. Brubaker also explores the regulative workings of the category by showing how what he calls 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: Anna Durnova, professor of political sociology at the Department of Sociology, University of Vienna (TBC)