Rattling the binary: symbolic power, gender, and embodied colonial legacies

Abstract

In 2009, the 18-year-old South African runner Caster Semenya was accused of being male and forced to undergo gender testing. After much obfuscation and misreporting, Semenya was cleared to compete as a woman. Semenya's experience exposes the problematic ways in which masculinity and femininity are harnessed to the categories of male and female as well as the ways in which they are embodied by men and women. This paper contemplates how binaries are mobilized and boundaries maintained -as is contemporarily evident in responses to Semenya's gender troubles. It reads Pierre Bourdieu's theory of symbolic power against an example of British Imperialism and illustrates how gender (and its uneasy mapping on to bodies) is implicated and imbricated in colonial historiography and knowledge practices. The paper concludes with Lois McNay's suggestion that gender is a lived relation, which requires coming to terms with the relationship between agency and experience, and recognizes that gendered people are the subjects of social analysis. At stake in this examination of symbolic power, gender, and lived experience is the recognition of the consistency and resilience in binary manifestations of symbolic meaning and the insidious ways in which gender is mobilized, enacted, and layered onto other dualisms.

Gender-inclusive clinical screeners: Using CBCLs and YSRs in a clinic-based sample of transgender/gender-diverse youth.

“…While this represents a step in the right direction, the scoring of the measures still requires selection of male or female scoring templates, meaning a colonial gender binary remains embedded into the framework of the assessment. The gender binary that these templates are based around is understood as an instrument of domination that has historically been and continues to be used by colonial powers for the subjugation of indigenous nations, many of which recognize three or more genders (el-Malik, 2014; Lugones, 2007; Morgensen, 2012). Further, a respondent may find it distressing when they are given feedback about the results, and they are informed that they were compared to either females or males that may not match their gender identity or, in the case of nonbinary youth, was not intentionally inclusive of their identity.…”