Why Myriad Double Standards?

This is one in a series of blog posts in which I discuss some of the concepts and terminology that I forward in my writings, including my new book Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive. 

So in an earlier post, I discussed the concept of myriad double standards that I forward in Excluded. The idea is quite simple: Generally within feminism and queer activism, we have a fixed idea of the system that we are challenging—e.g., the patriarchy, heteronormativity, the gender binary, kyriarchy, and so on. Being fixed models, each of these acknowledges certain forms of sexism and marginalization while overlooking or dismissing others. The forms of sexism and marginalization that are ignored tend to become points of exclusion—for instance, if your concept of “patriarchy” does not include transphobia/cissexism, then your movement will exclude trans people; if your concept of “the gender binary” does not include biphobia/monosexism, then your movement will exclude bisexuals. And so on.

What is gender artifactualism?

This is the one in a series of blog posts in which I discuss some of the concepts and terminology that I forward in my writings, including my new book Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive.

So in Excluded, I introduce the term “gender artifactualism” to describe, “the tendency to conceptualize and depict gender as being primarily or entirely a cultural artifact.”[p.117] Gender artifactualist viewpoints are pervasive within feminist and queer activism, and within the academic fields of Women’s/Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Sociology, certain subfields of Psychology, and in the Humanities more generally.