Commentary on “Toward a Critical Relational Theory of Gender”

I wish to avoid the directly critical in what follows, since I find so much of what Virginia Goldner has written to be provocative, intelligent, and helpful. I differ in the desire to go further than she does in the deconstructive effort, to ask what the consequences are of opening the door unselectively to what is now treated as postmodernism in the form of deconstruction and relativism.1

There is a profound tension between social constructionism as an intellectual strategy and the view that the construction of gender and of gender differences is a universal principle of cultural life. I wonder if gender has always been a universal principle of cultural life or if the decision to construe the social relations of women and men as “gendered” is a late 20th-century conception. It seems to me that the gendering of social life as we now experience and name the relations between women and men is the result of a complex process of cultural and historical developments that have been associated with the emergence of Western, urban, industrial, consumer, and market oriented societies. We may be gendered, but were the social relations between women and men in other cultures (including historical cultures, such as 19th-century Persia or 16th-century Spain or 10th-century China) “gendered”? Of course such cultures appear to us to be “gendered,” but they surely did not appear to their members to be gendered. Much as men who had sex with men in