Gender Authenticity Research Articles

Correction of the Values of the Classification Feature of Objects on the Example of the Diagnosis of Multiple Myeloma

The clinical features of changes in multiple myeloma indicators of different types associated with the gender of patients (objects) are considered. The methods of data mining examine the truth of the statement about the presence of many patients for whom gender is not significant in making a diagnosis. It is proposed to use the preprocessing of heterogeneous data to unify the description of objects in the binary space. The conditions for selecting and removing noise features from the set are determined. In order to reduce the dimensionality of the space, latent features are calculated by groups of binary generalized estimates of objects. A criterion is proposed for dividing patients into the optimal number of groups, taking into account their gender authenticity. From these groups, a new classification of objects is formed, differentiated by gender. The formation process is illustrated through the visualization of object descriptions, recognition accuracy and selection of informative feature sets according to the new classification. The selection procedure is implemented according to the rules of a hierarchical agglomerative algorithm. The property of invariance to the measurement scales of quantitative traits is an important argument for using the obtained results on data samples from the general population.

Review: Pop Masculinities: The Politics of Gender in the Twenty-First Century Popular Music, by Kai Arne Hansen

Review: <i>Pop Masculinities: The Politics of Gender in the Twenty-First Century Popular Music</i>, by Kai Arne Hansen

Really, Truly Trans and the (Minor) Literary Discontents of Authenticity

Identity formation, questions of identity, shifting identities, perceived deviant identities, and reactions (social, political, cultural, individual) to them are the stuff of Bildungsroman as well as more “experimental” subgenres of long-form fiction. For minority/minoritized subjects and authors, questions of identity take on a different pallor: their work is expected to engage with questions of identity according to either or both how their subject position confronts marginalization and otherness, and how their subject position conditions every experience they have in the world, both inside and outside community. This inquiry investigates how contemporary transgender minor literature constructs dis/identity through authenticity. Imogen Binnie speculates in her 2013 novel Nevada on the concept of “Really, Truly Trans”, a cipher for identity policing and presumptions of sex–gender authenticity, based on cisnormative characteristics and, occasionally, inter-community phobias and proscriptions. More recently, Torrey Peters challenges measures of trans authenticity through both her titular detransitioner and his former partner in Detransition, Baby. Trans minor literature is an ideal testing ground for phobic public presumptions around “authentic” sex–gender and anti-identitarian strategies of those who are forced to confront purity tests and exclusion or suppression on grounds of authenticity, and each novel presses at phobic majoritarian dictates of authenticity and its presupposed value.

"Do You Ladies Relate?": Experiences of Gender Diverse People in Online Eating Disorder Communities

The study of eating disorders online has a long tradition within CSCW and HCI scholarship. Research within this body of work highlights the types of content people with eating disorders post as well as the ways in which individuals use online spaces for acceptance, connection, and support. However, despite nearly a decade of research, online eating disorder scholarship in CSCW and HCI rarely accounts for the ways gender shapes online engagement. In this paper, we present empirical results from interviews with 14 trans people with eating disorders. Our findings illustrate how working with gender as an analytic lens allowed us to produce new knowledge about the embodiment of participation in online eating disorder spaces. We show how trans people with eating disorders use online eating disorder content to inform and set goals for their bodies and how, as gender minorities within online eating disorder spaces, trans people occupy marginal positions that make them more susceptible to harms, such as threats to eating disorder validity and gender authenticity. In our discussion, we consider life transitions in the context of gender and eating disorders and address how online eating disorder spaces operate as social transition machinery. We also call attention to the labor associated with online participation as a gender minority within online eating disorder spaces, outlining several design recommendations for supporting the ways trans people with eating disorders use online spaces. CONTENT WARNING: This paper is about the online experiences of trans people with eating disorders. We discuss eating disorders, related content (e.g., thinspiration) and practices (e.g., binge eating, restriction), and gender dysphoria. Please read with caution.

Policing “Fake” Femininity: Authenticity, Accountability, and Influencer Antifandom

Although social media influencers enjoy a coveted status position in the popular imagination, their requisite career visibility opens them up to intensified public scrutiny and—more pointedly—networked hate and harassment. Key repositories of such critique are influencer “hateblogs”—forums for anti-fandom often dismissed as frivolous gossip or, alternatively, denigrated as conduits for cyberbullying and misogyny. This article draws upon an analysis of a women-dominated community of anti-fans, Get Off My Internets (GOMIBLOG), to show instead how influencer hateblogs are discursive sites of gendered authenticity policing. Findings reveal that GOMI participants wage patterned accusations of duplicity across three domains where women influencers seemingly “have it all”: career, relationships, and appearance. But while antifans’ policing of “fake” femininity may purport to dismantle the artifice of social media self-enterprise, such expressions fail to advance progressive gender politics, as they target individual-level—rather than structural—inequities.

To be (different) or not to be: The role of gender in constructing diplomatic speeches

With an increasing number of female political leaders worldwide, there has been a debate as to whether female politicians could bring alternative voices into politics, which has long been dominated by males. Some scholars highlight the role of gender identity, while others stress the masculine traits of political leadership. To contribute to this debate, we propose the idea of gender authenticity and argue that female politicians can strategically highlight their feminine traits and femininist consciousness even in a highly masculine environment. We compare the diplomatic speeches delivered by Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, who both served as secretary of state under former President Obama. Based on the framework of gender authenticity, we empirically examine how the remarks of these two top diplomatic officials differ in their topical, linguistic, and conceptual dimensions. While the political speeches of Clinton and Kerry behave similarly in terms of their linguistic styles, there are gendered differences in their topical and conceptual dimensions. The results suggest that Clinton pays closer attention to issues of women's rights and human rights, and that she also adopts a more feminine style in her interpretation of the concept of power.

Sacred Self-Expression: Love and Trans Authenticity

Theistic cosmologies have inspired many religious communities to alienate transgender individuals. While the growth in tolerance among congregations and institutions is important, there remains a pressing need to address the cosmologies at the root of intolerance. A re-examination of theological conceptions of God and the human person reveal not only acceptability, but significance, in the trans experience itself. Synthesizing gender studies with theology, this interdisciplinary article argues that God’s nature as deeply personal Love implies a sacredness in gender authenticity. The human person is part of an evolution toward deeply personalized consciousness. Gender, when freed from rigid constraints, is a social expression of this personalized self in a common cultural language. As infinite Love, God actualizes in the universe in deeply personal love. Therefore, by personalizing knowledge of one another and enabling deeper love between human persons, gender authenticity, in its fluidity, ambiguity, and continuous newness, deepens God’s existence. Ultimately, I argue, expressing one’s authentic gender(s) is a sacred act.

Trans traveling and embodied practices: Panopticism, agency, dress, and gendered surveillance

We examined trans individual's enactments of gender authenticity negotiations with a unique perspective considering the intersections of dress and travel. We drew upon the concepts of power, agency of the body, and dress and ambivalence to examine relationships between embodied practices, traveling, and society by conducting 15 semi-structured interviews with trans individuals. Through our work we argue that dress and appearance-related practices while traveling play an integral part of negotiating gender identities in ways that feel authentic to the self for trans individuals. Part of these authenticity negotiations sometimes involve moments of lacking authenticity through self-surveillance in order to manage liveable and safer lives in unknown or even familiar spaces.

Masculinity and Chineseness in post-1950s Hong Kong Cantonese opera

This paper examines the dynamics between cultural ideals and political powers enacted in women’s cross-dressing performance in Cantonese opera, a regional operatic form that has been shared by Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong and Guangdong in mainland China since the early twentieth century. Despite their popularity in Hong Kong, cross-dressing actresses are sometimes viewed as “fake men” or only substitutes for male actors. Contextualizing this stigma within Hong Kong’s colonial history and the cultural inferiority complex deeply rooted among Hongkongers, I investigate how the discourse of gender authenticity intersects with that of the cultural authenticity of Chineseness. This paper shows that the female cross-dressing body in Cantonese opera is not an appropriation of privileged masculinity or Chineseness. Rather, it is a performative means for problematizing orthodox and peripheral Chineseness.

Rescuing Masculinity: Giving Gender in the Wake of China’s Marriage Squeeze

China’s marriage squeeze poses a profound challenge to the construction of masculinity in rural regions, where marriage continues to play an important role in the production of gender identities, marking manhood and its virtues. What are the consequences when men fail to marry and to assert respected male seniority? We show that in the context of China’s imbalanced sex ratio, family members attempt to rescue or restore the dignity of their sons and brothers by “giving gender,” gestures of care that are aimed to bolster gender authenticity and thereby strengthen a young man’s marriage prospects. By discussing both the intergenerational and intragenerational dynamics of gender collaboration within the family, we furthermore challenge existing studies that project gender antagonism in the wake of radical demographic change, while complicating the image of China’s rural bachelors as social outcasts.

Cisgendered Organizations: Trans Women and Inequality in the Workplace

This article responds to calls to better understand how intersecting “inequality regimes” operate in organizations. Through in‐depth interviews with 25 white trans women about their workplace experiences, my analyses highlight how trans women navigate relational practices that are simultaneously gendered and cisgendered—that is, practices that maintain cultural connections between sex and gender and maintain gender as immutable. Findings demarcate three distinct mechanisms by which cisgenderism, a system that devalues women and trans people, operates and strengthens hierarchical privileges at work: (1) double‐bind constraints; (2) fluid biases of cissexism and sexism; and (3) group practices of privilege and subordination. In the first regard, analyses reveal unique double binds that trans women face—binds that dictate contradictory feminine and masculine ideal worker expectations but also expectations of gender authenticity. Second, I find that trans women often hover between two subordinate statuses (i.e., gender and transgender status) in a given workday, a fact that prods a more fluid conception of cisgenderism. Finally, this study highlights how cis men collectively mobilize through group practices to repair cisgender system breaches. All three dimensions are critical for understanding the production of workplace inequality between not only trans women and cis men, but all feminine‐identified workers.

Court and Sparkle

“Court and Sparkle” looks at effects, ideas, and diversions in discourses around gender authenticity in sport through two 2010 controversies. One involved Kye Allums, who came out as transgender right before his third season playing NCAA Division I basketball for George Washington University, announcing plans to stay on the women's team that he had a scholarship to play for. The other involved the figure skater Johnny Weir, whose departures from masculine norms had long been part of his public reputation and who was competing for the United States in the Winter Olympics when two broadcasters joked that he needed a “gender test.” By staging something of a queer sports-studies date between these two athletes from extremely different sports, I highlight the vast reach of dubious binarisms that ought to be easily dismissed as well as how gender policing plays out in the particular contexts of institutionalized racism in which it occurs. With Allums, systemic racism inside (and outside) education contributes to staging a debate about whether Allums deserves to keep an athletic scholarship he received as female instead of about why attending or remaining at George Washington depended on basketball in the first place. With Weir, the articulation of bigotry in terms of needing a “gender test” builds intentionally on the history of subjecting Olympic athletes competing as female to medical “sex verification” testing, while the use of the racialized category Russian, by or against him, to designate “gender outlaw” depends on long histories in US skating of rejecting particular racial, ethnic, and national cultural and political models.

Lesbian Generations—Transsexual... Lesbian... Feminist...

Lesbian Generations— Transsexual... Lesbian... Feminist... Susan Stryker I interpreted quite literally, perhaps tooliterally, Leila Rupp's kind invitation to "speak informally for about ten minutes" in the roundta ble on lesbian generations by putting the emphasis on "informally" and extemporizing some rather haphazardly organized thoughts on what generation of lesbian I considered myself to be. The venue being the Big Berks and the personal, of course, still being political, I assumed in framing my remarks that an ample amount of autobi ographical reflection would be, it not original in its methodological implications, then intelligible or at least excusable under the circum stances. When my turn came to speak, I offered an impromptu per formance in which I sought to cite generational, ethnic, national, and class-based competencies of lesbian identity, while simultaneously ironically distancing myself from those very norms through a calcu lated and strategic cultivation of affect. By which I mean to say: I tried to make people laugh, and I was pleased to have succeeded through a variety of techniques (gesture, expression, phrasing, timing, embod ied context) that don't render well on the printed page. You had to be there — but what follows is a loose rendition of that performance into text. I tried to be funny (1) to demonstrate that lesbian feminists can, in fact, have a sense of humor, and (2) because ironic distancing—a self-protective critique from within of something I actually care about FeministStudies39, no. 2. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 375 376 Forum: Lesbian Generations being part of—has been a mode of survival for me as the particular sexual and gendered subject that I am. As decades of feminist injunc tions to be mindful of intersectionality have taught us, all identities are complicated; none can be articulated in monolithic purity and isolation, nor can the messily lived complexity of identity's inter mingled attributes be disarticulated and hierarchically arranged other than by conceptual and narrative operations that are always political and often violent. While I don't deny that my whiteness, upward eco nomic mobility, level of educational and professional attainment, or coastal cultural mores inform my lesbian identity, these intersec tions have not been particularly difficult to occupy; they are, after all, forms of privilege. Being transsexual—well, that's presented more of a challenge. Being transsexual and lesbian, with one identity being no more or less ontologized than the other and no more or less con structed, has been a fraught identitarian intersection indeed. Hence, as Donald O'Conner put itso eloquently in Sincjin' intheRain, "make 'em laugh." Contemplating other approaches to this conversation just makes my stomach churn. Taking things too literally, by the way, such as the way I took Leila Rupp's invitation to participate on the lesbian generations roundta ble, is something transsexuals are often accused of doing—literaliz ing that which is properly metaphorical. For example, I might, when called upon to do so, defend my practices of embodiment or stake my claim to gender authenticity by protesting that Simone de Beau voir herself said, "One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one," to which a critic would reply, "But she didn't mean it like that. Why do you always have to be so literal?" I was born in 1961, which means I'm turning fiftythe summer that I'm writing this. I graduated from high school and started college in 1979. The words feminist, lesbian, and transsexual were the labels available to me in my native English at the time that I was doing my formative identity work, and they all stuck. Eventually. Transsexual was the one I consciously wrestled with from the earliest age. I came across the term in a Dear Abby advice column published in my hometown newspaper in southwestern Oklahoma in the early 1970s when I was about eleven. I had always felt transgendered, but had never before that moment seen reflected back to me from the world one scrap of evidence that such feelings might map onto an objective reality shared Forum: Lesbian Generations 377 by others, rather than being just a subjective perception of my own. I immediately rushed down to my public...

The burdens of the flesh: star power and the queer dialectic in sports celebrity

In this article I argue that when contemporary male sporting icons are used as promotional figures they are inevitably translated into the discourse of embodied sexualisation that dominates current branding strategies in celebrity culture. This presents them as sexualised objects, which is a discourse of representation that has been traditionally reserved exclusively for women and gay men in popular culture. Queer analytics direct our focus to the representational strategies through which dominant discursive categories of gender and sexuality are maintained and potentially disrupted. I suggest, therefore, that the current modes of representation celebrity culture render sports celebrity as a potentially queer cultural location because the ontological coherence of masculinity is destabilised through its interpellation as a sexual object. I argue that this construction of sporting masculinity is inevitable when it is drawn into celebrity branding culture. This inevitable queer destabilisation of traditional hetero-masculinity needs to be recuperated to maintain the commercial authenticity of sports masculinity. I argue that a queer dialectical momentum operates within strategies of representation to achieve this recuperation, whereby we are reminded that the desirable athletic and toned flesh on display is authentically and avowedly that of heterosexual icons. Sporting masculinity therefore retains its gendered authenticity through a dialectical relationship with the necessary requirements of celebrity culture.

Locating the Modern Mexican in Josefina Niggli’s Step Down, Elder Brother

“Locating the Modern Mexican in Josephina Niggli’s Step Down, Elder Brother ” turns away from Niggli’s more popularly studied Mexican Village to her second novel, published in 1947. The shift to Step Down, Elder Brother , which focuses on the industrial city of Monterrey instead of the Mexican village, opens up a set of questions about what it means to be Mexican in the modern, post-Revolutionary moment. Niggli’s interest in the Mexican frontier’s major city provides a surprising definition that runs counter to the one provided by her first novel. Instead of focusing on discourses of mestizaje and indigenismo as the defining qualities of Mexican identity, she suggests “Mexican” is a spatial category instead of a racial one. Further, this essay contends that this definition reconfigures Niggli’s relationship to a Chicana literary tradition, where she has been positioned as a precursor to “the new mestiza ,” thus interrogating the use of the autobiographical in literature and intersecting issues of racial and gendered authenticity.

The Doing and Undoing of Gender: The Importance of Being a Credible Female Victim

It is increasingly argued that gender is something we ‘do’ (or ‘undo’) rather than ‘are’. The doing of gender, or the accomplishment of gender, becomes credible when it conforms (in broad terms) to certain normative conceptions of gender. Resistance to, or subversions of these norms, or the failure to appear credible, deny the individual a gendered authenticity. Attempts to unshackle notions of gender — to ‘undo gender’ and to accept the outcome as authentic, open and fluid — have been matched with concerns that this theoretically empowering process may result in the loss of political power — the notion of woman (or man) in whose name we can act being lost as the binary is eliminated. These tensions are explored in the context of the UK Sex Discrimination Act 1975 (rev. 1986). This article demonstrates how the doing and undoing of gender in an employment tribunal accomplishes or negates the ‘authenticity’ of gender.

Assessing Gender Authenticity in Computer-Mediated Language Use

Although a substantial body of research exists on gender differences in computer-mediated communication, relatively little empirical attention has been directed toward how people perform a different gender online, or to what behavioral cues other participants attend in assessing others’ real-life gender. This study analyzes deceptive gender performances and assessments of their authenticity in The Turing Game, a publicly available synchronous text chat environment that supports spontaneous identity games. Content analysis of game logs shows that contestants produce stereotypical content when attempting to pass as the opposite gender, as well as giving off stylistic cues to their real-life gender. However, contrary to previous evidence that people judge online gender authenticity on the basis of linguistic styles, the judges in The Turing Game base their assessments mostly on stereotyped content, leading to a high rate of error. These findings are interpreted in terms of signal costs and conscious accessibility of cues.