On Goffman the Gender Scholar

Nos iniciamos en esto del reblogueo, que a una retuitera como yo le parece de lo más oportuno, con este post de Tristan Bridges porque compartimos su entusiasmo por Goffman como referencia para estudiar las relaciones y coreografías de género, y nos parece injustificado su olvido o que cuando, como hacemos en nuestras publicaciones y ponencias, miramos lo que estudiamos, como los usos del móvil en las relaciones de apreja, con lentes goffmanianas, aún nos encontramos con incomprensión y sorpresa.

Inequality by (Interior) Design

When sociologists discuss performance theories of gender, we usually go back to Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s (1987) famous article “Doing Gender.” Some of us date this trend to Judith Butler, but few people bother to discuss some of the scholarship that predates this. West and Zimmerman relied almost exclusively on Harold Garfinkel’s* analysis of Agnes (a transgendered women who he met with as a part of a UCLA study dealing with “deviant” gender identities) to support their conceptualization.

Beyond the use of data, West and Zimmerman’s article was written in conversation with Erving Goffman’s theory of gender, or of “gender display” as Goffman wrote about it. Goffman wrote two pieces exclusively about gender. The first was originally published in Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication (1976) and later published as a book–Gender Advertisements (1979)–which included the essay along with a host of advertisements…