[2] This façade furthers a system through which individuals are judged in terms of their failure or success to meet gendered societal expectations, called the accountability structure.
In their article, West and Zimmerman use examples such as bathrooms, sports, coupling, conversations, professions, and the division of labor to illustrate the ways in which gender is prevalent in many taken for granted activities.
West and Zimmerman take issue with this piece of Goffman's perspective, claiming that this masks the ways in which gender displays permeate nearly all social situations in that individuals cannot avoid being interpreted as masculine or feminine.
[7] Deutsch uses examples of studies that use West and Zimmerman's work to illustrate how normative gender ideals are apparent in a variety of contexts.
[15][16][17] A 2009 article by Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook expands upon West and Zimmerman's initial framework for "doing gender" by emphasizing how it is impacted by heteronormativity.
[18] They found that heterosexual norms were disrupted when biological sex and "doing gender" differed, due to the perception of a natural way to be male or female.
[18] Sonny Nordmarken supports this argument by suggesting that people learn to express themselves based on the social expectation that gender and biological sex must match.
They also explain that various time periods and regions of the world have different standards and norms according to how the sex and gender systems have been enacted there.
[3] Determining gender is regarded as a subjective behaviour based on an individual's personal views and experiences, according to the aforementioned sources.
She states that their proposed systems of accountability are used to justify the argument that "doing gender" is compulsory, however, Darwin contends that they fail to consider the impact of social change.
[2][10] Nordmarken critiques these works for failing to consider "doing gender" outside of a hegemonic framework, which excludes populations who do not hold themselves accountable to binary ideals.
The author explored "doing gender" through a "queer trans paradigmatic"[19] lens where he observed people being allowed to inform others of their identity, rather than having others making assumptions based on body-related cues.
He suggested that using pronouns de-emphasize people's accountability to gender-related social standards, lessening the importance of gender norms and assumptions.
[1] In 1995, Candace West and Sarah Fenstermaker identified gender, race, and class as the three fundamental means of categorizing social difference.
[24] They sought to extend the idea of gender as an ongoing interactional process into the realms of race and class by asserting that the intersection of these three categories could not be thought of in strictly a mathematical or hierarchical sense.
[24] That is, equating these concepts to variables in a statistical model tasked with predicting life success in society will result in an inadequate understanding of systemic inequalities based on race, class, and gender.
The authors also highlight how simply placing communities facing immense social disadvantages, such as poor black women, at the bottom of an abstract listing of vulnerable populations in the United States offers little information about how the interaction of race, class, and gender constrains and directs various aspects of their lives.
The authors assert that the reason race and class were not adequately considered in earlier works is because the feminist movement has historically been the province of white middle-class women in the developed world who were not sufficiently affected or attuned to the nature of these corollary oppressions.
Furthermore, few women outside this privileged lot were able to gain access to institutions of higher education, which might have permitted them to engage in the academic discourse and activity about such shortcomings.
[25] Perhaps overt racism and classism (and sexism) is less apparent today in these institutions, but the tendency remains for those in positions of power to view the world in a way that discounts the experience of marginalized groups.
[26] The central theme of "difference" in this article intends to illustrate how the concepts of race and gender have been falsely conceived as biologically bound predictors of behavior and aptitude among those who of a certain skin color or sex.
Experiencing the world through the interaction of these "essentialized" characteristics and especially through dominant group's frame of reference (power interests) produces a pattern of thought and behavior that reproduces these social inequalities.
This theme has been further addressed by Karen Pyke and Denise Johnson (2003) where they integrated the concept of "doing gender" with the study of race.
[27] They explain that being part of racially or ethnically marginalized communities can lead to conflicting gender expectations from society and their own cultural values.
Pyke and Johnson (2003) conducted a study with one section focused on how Asian American women do gender differently depending on their setting.
[27] West and Fenstermaker (1995) state that social science research has rendered dubious any claim that race can simply be conflated with color; gender with genitalia; class with paycheques.
[24] The authors acknowledge that class appears less prone to ideas about natural social differentiation, but argue that within capitalist societies, it is often assumed that one's economic situation acts as a direct indication of one's capacity to achieve, further engraining sexist and racist assumptions.
Given the general observation that powerful groups display heavy reliance on these ideas of natural subordination, many liberationist thinkers have concluded that this essentialism would be a prime rhetorical vehicle to subvert.
This still left a somewhat gaping theoretical vacuum, one that continues to be felt by people struggling with the challenge of fundamentally altering their social cosmology.
That is, race, class, and gender aren't just objective scientific facts, but dynamic processes of culturally constructing cues for moral behavior (for which one can be held personally accountable) in a particular circumstance.