ABSTRACT
In late twentieth-century capitalism, gendering has invariably to do with commodity consumption. We buy into a gender in the same way we buy into a style. It makes no difference whether we choose unisex or an ultra-feminine image, the act of buying is affirmed and the definition of gender as commodity is maintained. As Marx defined it, the commodity form is the negation of process and the social relations of production. When gender is assimilated to the commodity, it is conceived as something fixed and frozen: a number of sexually defined attributes that denote either masculinity or femininity on the supermarket shelf of gender possibilities. Currently, we witness the wholesale, uncritical acceptance of the word “gender” into professional discussions and practice. To give an example, I recently attended a women’s faculty committee meeting where the discussion focused on salary discrepancies between men and women employees. The word “gender” was the single most frequently used term and it never designated anything more than men versus women. In fact, the discussion of the university’s use of genderbased studies of salary seemed to suggest that the only gendered subjects are women. Such widespread uncritical usage of the term relegates gender to a onedimensional conceptualization of men and women. It negates the possibility of seeing gender socially and historically, and it promotes the essentialization of sex as the basis for gender definition.
