C hapter   2
Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman
DOING GENDER
This piece elaborates the ethnometiiQdological perspective on gender developed by Garfinkel and Kessler and McKenna (see introduction), revisiting Garfinkel's classic study of Agnes.
From J. Lorber and S. Farrell (eds) The Social Construction of Gender, London: Sage (1991). Originally published in Gender and Society, 1 (2) 1987: 125-51.
OUR PURPOSE IN THIS CHAPTER is to propose an ethno-methodologically informed, and therefore distinctively sociological, understanding of gender as a routine, methodical, and recurring accomplishment. We contend that the 'doing' of gender is undertaken by women and men whose competence as members of society is hostage to its production. Doing gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine 'natures'.
When we view gender as an accomplishment, an achieved property of situated conduct, our attention shifts from matters internal to the individual and focuses on interactional and, ultimately, institutional arenas. In one sense, of course, it is individuals who 'do' gender. But it is a situated doing, carried out in the virtual or real presence of others who are presumed to be oriented to its production. Rather than as a property of individuals, we conceive of gender as an emergent feature of social situations: as both an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements and as a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions of societv, . . .
To elaborate our proposal, we suggest at the outset diat important but often overlooked distinctions should be observed among sex, sex category, and gender. Sex
DOING  GENDER      43
is a determination made through the application of socially agreed upon biological criteria for classifying persons as females or males.' The criteria for classification can be genitalia at birth or chromosomal typing before birth, and they do not necessarily agree with one another. Placement in a sex category is achieved through application of the sex criteria, but in everyday life, categorization is established and sustained by the socially required identificatory displays that proclaim one's membership in one or the other category. In this sense, one's sex category presumes one's sex and stands as proxy for it in many situations, but sex and sex category can vary independently; that is. it is possible to claim membership in a sex category even when the sex criteria are lacking. Gender, in contrast, is the activity of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one's sex category. Gender activities emerge from and bolster claims to membership in a sex category.
We contend diat recognition of the analytical independence of sex, sex category, and gender is essential for understanding the relationships among these elements and the interactional work involved in 'being' a gendered person in society. . . ,
Sex, sex category, and gender
Garfinkel's (1967: 11S-40) case study of Agnes, a transsexual raised as a boy who adopted a female identity at age seventeen and underwent a sex reassignment operation several years later, demonstrates how gender is created through interaction and at the same time structures interaction. Agnes, whom Garfinkel characterized as a 'practical methodologist', developed a number of procedures for passing as a 'normal, natural female' both prior to and after her surgery. She had the practical task of managing die facts that she possessed male genitalia and that she lacked the social resources a girl's biography would presumably provide in everyday interaction. In short, she needed to display herself as a woman, simultaneously learning what it was to be a woman. Of necessity, this full-time pursuit took place at a time in her life when most people's gender would be well accredited and routinized. Agnes had to consciously contrive what the vast majority of women do without dunking. She was not faking what real women do naturally. She was obliged to analvze and figure out how to act within socially structured circumstances and conceptions of femininity that women born with appropriate biological credentials take for granted earl v on. As in the case of others who must 'pass', such as trans-vestites, Kabuki actors, or Dustin Hoffman's 'Tootsie', Agnes's case makes visible what culture has made invisible — the accomplishment of gender.
Garfinkel's (1967) discussion ol Agnes does not explicitly separate three analvt-ically distinct, although empirically overlapping, concepts - sex, sex category, and gender.
Sex
Agnes did not possess the socially agreed upon biological criteria for classification as a member of the female MX. Still, Agnes regarded herself as a female, albeit a female with a penis, which a woman ought not to possess. The penis, she insisted,