Abstract
In this collection, we seek to advance contemporary discussions in postcolonial feminism and science and technology studies (STS) by examining how actors encounter binaries and norms that structure the space of gender recognition. The practice of identifying with, and being recognized by, a nation-state, a healthcare system, a market, an NGO, or any other legal, bureaucratic, or techno-scientific institution governing access to rights, resources, and recognition is a state of accomplishment in a Western legal and/or philosophical sense often referred to as “gender justice” such as found in the work of Martha Nussbaum (Citation2009; Citation2000). Nussbaum’s (Citation2000) capabilities approach adheres strongly to an idea of women’s emancipation and freedom as an intrinsic and universal right. While she accounts for hierarchy and subordination in societies that limit women’s capabilities, and cross-cultural forms of the good, her fixation on bodily separateness and autonomy is problematic for social scientists who do not share the normative liberal vision of a pre-social self. Thus, gender justice in the sense of individuated rights is not a neutral goal, nor is the process of achieving it driven by widely agreed upon criteria for defining “gender” and “justice,” a point which has been emphasized by postcolonial feminists in the Global South in particular. It is rather guided by gender normative frames and forms of gendered action, which enable or foreclose such access. Narratives that challenge any of the existing categorizations are also guided by gender normative frames, sometimes under the obfuscating label, anti-norms, which claim to act against hegemonic frames, only to do so by proposing an opposing frame, in a never-ending cycle. And while social scientists of gender widely recognize that “gender” is a practice of “doing” (West and Zimmerman Citation1987), and not intrinsically attached to persons, the problem of how actors engage with norms – the question of agency and structure – is still debated as a bidirectional power dynamic between actors and norms, through some version of “resistance,” “subversion,” or “subjectivation.” This linear focus fails to account for ordinary pragmatic competence in situated contexts. Therefore, the texts in this collection address two related problems: the first concerns the ongoing tension between opposing normative frames for “gender justice;” the second concerns the way feminist scholarship theorizes agency with respect to those norms. We propose that gender justice can be better understood not through bidirectional dichotomies of norm/anti-norm or agency/structure but rather through multivalent practices of engagement, what we call “justifying gender.”