Configuring Gender: Explorations in Theory and Politics by Barbara Marshall (review)

HUMANITIES 153 instances it is hard to know whether individual experiences have any link to the wider Canadian identity. The related problem comes in the overlay of communication theory on the memoir format. The causality between communication, technology, and identity is complex and subtle. That is why the theories of Harold Innis and others were greeted with mixtures of enthusiasm, doubt, and cynicism. Yet Innis delved into a vast range of sources to make his point. A few memoirs simply do not provide the basis to permit a forceful causal relationship to be developed between communication and national identity. Further, the distance between this work and earlier theories may not be as great as Friesen would argue. Indeed, traditional themes of frontier dynamism and metropolitan tradition influence this work. >The story of politics in a settler society is the story of movements and outbursts, not of formal political parties. It is also a tale of slow, deliberate adaptation to circumstances that were less than predictable. It encompasses welfare payments, popular uprisings, religious revivals, and the building of schools.= Canadian sociologist and frontier theorist S.D. Clark said something similar more than a half-century ago. It is important to reiterate the main point though. Gerry Friesen has reopened a long overdue discussion. Now we need others to follow. It is time we rediscovered the issue of what it means to be Canadian. (DOUG OWRAM) Barbara Marshall. Configuring Gender: Explorations in Theory and Politics Broadview Press. 191. $19.95 While a number of authors have mapped the careers of key feminist concepts, few connect academic debate to popular misconceptions. As Barbara Marshall notes, while gender has become a standard concept in both social scientific and everyday understandings of social life, it has become >a portmanteau= for anything relating to sexual difference. The strength of Configuring Gender, therefore, is its critical interrogation of the ways in which distinctions between and among various phenomena attributed to gender, sex, and sexuality continue to trouble feminist discourse, both within and beyond the academy. As Marshall reminds us, the >findings= of the social sciences very often enter constitutively into the world they purport to describe: the trajectory of >gender= as a sociological phenomenon serves as an excellent example of this double hermeneutic. Thus Configuring Gender is no simple originary account, despite the fact that Marshall begins her exploration with an overview of the way in which gender was gradually mainstreamed into what eventually emerged as distinctly feminist sociology. In addition to bringing women=s experiences and interests into the academic fold, there 154 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 was a perhaps inevitable shift from a >sociology of women= to the >gendering of knowledge.= Within the social sciences more generally, gender was mainstreamed primarily through either role theory and categorical theory, wherein lies the source of many problems in the way in which gender has been taken up by policy-makers and social commentators. Specifically, gender has become >loosely synonymous with Asex@ and lazily synonymous with women=; paradoxically, explanations relying on socio-cultural process have become just as rigid and essentialized as pre-feminist explanations evoking natural differences between women and men. Within this context, feminist scholars more recently have called for the deconstruction of gender. Contemporary academic debates do not question simply distinctions between >sex= and >gender= upon which these concepts are based, but rather the continued salience of these concepts themselves. The context of these challenges includes, of course, lively debate within the women=s movement about >difference= and the inability for the concept of >women= to represent diversity among women. But they are also motivated by academic debate surrounding postmodernism and poststructuralism . As Marshall notes, those sympathetic to the postmodern turn are likely to criticize gender as based on faulty distinctions between nature and culture and as an over-determined narrative itself; those critical of postmodernism fear that the way in which gender has been taken up depoliticizes and/or erases the material bases of women=s oppression. In response, Marshall doubts that theory itself can be given credit for either political paralysis or political chaos; she contends B correctly in my view B that such disillusionment with a concept is surely a reflection on...