Reconceptualizing the Real in the Struggle for Gender: From Gold Standard to Fragile Accomplishment

Abstract

The conflict surrounding gender categories in Britain between proponents of immutable sex-based rights and those advocating for diversity and self-identification is, at its heart, a conceptual conflict about what gender is, with the “real” deployed to confer authority and status on both sides. This is largely a mainstream conception of the real as independent existence and truth. While it can support different gender politics, it inclines toward protecting and validating existing common sense in ways that can impede transformative understandings. Does this mean, then, that the real should be dropped from progressive gender discourse? This article explores a different path, one that retains the real while reorienting its use. Focusing on the resistance that understandings of gender categories as plural, elective, and mutable face, it traces a conception of the real that can support rather than thwart the development and enactment of progressive institutional meanings—a project described as “conceptual prefiguration” (taking up meanings as if they were otherwise). To explore this revised account of the real, the article focuses on four issues: gender’s key contested qualities; the importance of imagining to the realization of gender; the relationship between realizing gender and other uses of gender, including representation; and the failed realizations and derealizations that also contribute to conceptual prefiguration. In concluding, the article argues for the real to be jettisoned as a gold standard when it comes to what gender means and is—to focus instead on gender projects worth realizing.

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