Southern Theory

Why does gender shape almost every aspect of society—from how we raise children and divide labor to who holds political power or who is expected to care for the sick? In Gender, Raewyn Connell and Rebecca Pearse take readers on an engaging, research-driven journey through one of the most fundamental organizing principles of human life. The authors argue that gender is not simply about difference—it is an evolving social structure that penetrates our lives at individual, institutional, and global levels. To understand gender is to understand how societies function, change, and reproduce inequality.

Connell and Pearse define gender as the structure of social relations that centers on the reproductive arena—the ways society interprets, organizes, and acts upon the biological distinctions of sex. But unlike biological determinists who attribute gender roles to nature, the authors show that gender is made and remade through daily social interactions, work practices, family arrangements, and political systems. These arrangements create what they call a gender order: a system of relationships, hierarchies, and expectations linking men, women, and other gender identities to power, production, emotion, and symbolism.

Unpacking the Gender Order

At its core, the book explores how gender organizes both intimacy and institutions. The authors explain that anyone observing the everyday realities of the modern world—unequal wages, male-dominated parliaments, female care workers and housewives, or the cultural worship of masculine power—can see that gender runs through everything we do. Connell calls this organized pattern the gender order, which operates both globally and locally. Gender doesn’t just divide people by sex; it distributes resources, value, and legitimacy unequally between them. A man’s average income, status, or access to authority remains higher than a woman’s not because of instincts but because of the ways economic and political institutions are structured.

This approach invites you to see gender not as a fixed difference but as a web of relationships constantly in motion. Connell and Pearse point to multiple examples across cultures—from Australian workplaces where women’s employment remains concentrated in clerical and caregiving roles to African compounds where notions of leadership and manhood intertwine with political struggle. Every social institution, they argue, has a gender regime—a local pattern of gender arrangements that contributes to the broader gender order of a society.

Four Dimensions of Gender Relations

To make sense of complex realities, Connell identifies four interdependent dimensions of gender: power, production, cathexis (emotional relations), and symbolism. These dimensions interweave in daily life: power defines hierarchies; production shapes economic division; cathexis patterns our affections and sexualities; and symbolism frames cultural meaning. Their interaction produces both stability and the potential for change. Feminists like Sylvia Walby and Juliet Mitchell demonstrated earlier that gender operates in multiple social structures; Connell refines those insights into a coherent analytic model applicable globally, from mines in South Africa to parliaments in Europe.

Gender as an Arena of Politics and Change

The authors show that change is inherent in gender systems. Every interaction and institution both recreates and reshapes gender. The struggles over women’s voting rights, workplace equality, and LGBTQ+ inclusion are examples of how people challenge dominant gender orders. Yet resistance can also provoke backlash—seen in anti-abortion legislation, online misogyny, or nationalist movements that glorify patriarchal masculinity. Understanding gender’s flexibility helps explain why reforms are uneven across societies.

Connell and Pearse connect these dynamics to a global scale. Modern globalization, they argue, has exported Western notions of gender through colonialism, capitalism, and institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations, shaping a world gender order. However, this order is not uniform. Local histories, religions, and economies yield diverse gender regimes—from the rigid patriarchies of post-Soviet Russia to the feminist reforms of Scandinavia.

Why It Matters Today

Understanding gender as a dynamic social structure gives you the tools to read the world differently. When you interpret a political photo of mostly male leaders, you can recognize not just an image but the product of historically entrenched gender hierarchies. When you see debates about parental leave or same-sex marriage, you’re witnessing struggles over how the gender order defines family, labor, and love. Connell and Pearse call for a vision of gender democracy: a transformation of gender relations toward equality without erasing difference or the joys of gendered expression. Gender, they suggest, is both a site of oppression and creativity—a domain through which humanity can imagine fairer, more sustainable futures.

Connell introduces the idea of gender regimes—the patterned arrangements of power, division, norms, and emotions within an institution—and shows how these link up to a society’s overall gender order. Understanding your school, workplace, or government through this lens reveals how gender shapes routine life far beyond personal identity.

From Playgrounds to Parliaments

For example, Barrie Thorne’s study of American elementary schools and T. Dunbar Moodie’s research on South African mines show how gender is institutionalized. In schools, ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ play on opposite sides of playgrounds, learning early the cultural scripts of separation and hierarchy. In contrast, all-male mines in South Africa established elaborate masculine hierarchies—where even same-sex relationships among miners reproduced gendered structures of dominance. These regimes mirror societal patterns where men maintain authority in public life and women dominate caregiving roles.

Structure and Change

Despite their persistence, gender regimes change over time. In workplaces across New South Wales or Chile’s fruit industry, automation, women’s entry into paid labor, and equal opportunity laws have unsettled old gender dynamics. Still, Connell observes that change is uneven—managers may accept women workers but leave deeper hierarchies untouched. This tension between continuity and transformation is central to understanding modern gender politics.

Gender as a Structure, Not a Trait

Connell critiques the notion that gender is a stable set of individual traits. Instead, gender is structural—an ongoing pattern of social relationships, analogous to class or kinship. Just as class structures define economic possibilities, gender structures define emotional and political ones. Women’s restricted mobility in patriarchal systems, and men’s disconnection from nurturing, result directly from these patterned divisions. Unlike structural determinists, however, Connell explains that structures set the stage for action but never dictate it completely. We reproduce and revise them every day.

Doing Gender

Building on Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s classic work ‘Doing Gender’ (1987), the authors remind you that gender is performed and held accountable in daily interactions. Every choice—from uniforms in schools to leadership styles in offices—reaffirms or contests a regime’s gender logic. But these performances are embedded in histories of inequality, which is why structural analysis matters: it moves beyond individual blame to systemic understanding.

Ultimately, Connell’s point is that institutions are gender factories. Whether it’s a factory floor, a classroom, or a bureaucratic office, each has rules about who works, leads, and nurtures. Recognizing these rules helps you see how gender inequality isn’t accidental—it’s built into the architecture of society.

Connell’s four-dimensional model—power, production, cathexis, and symbolism—provides a toolkit for analyzing gender relations. Each dimension shapes how people live gender: through authority, labor, feeling, and meaning.

Power: Patriarchy and Resistance

Power refers to who controls whom—and how. In patriarchal families, husbands are heads of households; in global systems, men dominate armies and bureaucracies. Yet power is contested: from women’s suffrage campaigns to Julia Gillard’s battle against sexist double standards, challenges to gendered authority reveal moments of change. Connell also includes “discursive power”—the cultural scripts that make male dominance seem natural, such as courtroom norms that put rape victims, rather than defendants, on trial. Post-structuralists like Michel Foucault inspired this broader understanding of power as diffuse and productive, not just coercive.

Production: Labor and Capital

Gender organizes who does what work and under what conditions. Historically, women’s labor was confined to unpaid domestic work, while men dominated wage labor. With capitalism’s expansion, this division deepened. Scholars like Maria Mies and Øystein Holter show how capitalist accumulation relies on both colonization and “housewifization,” turning women into unpaid dependents even as global industries exploit their cheap labor. Today’s factories and service industries—from garment plants in Bangladesh to call centers in Mexico—still bear these marks of gendered economies.

Cathexis: Emotion and Sexuality

Cathexis captures the emotional dimension—love, desire, care, and hostility. Drawing on Freud and Arlie Hochschild, Connell explores how feelings become gendered. Society expects women to supply emotional warmth in homes and work (“emotional labor”) while men suppress vulnerability. Yet these boundaries blur—same-sex loves, “new fatherhood,” and workplace empathy all challenge traditional emotional divisions. The fact that affection and aggression are linked to social hierarchies underscores that gender reaches into our deepest feelings.

Symbolism: Meaning and Culture

Every culture encodes gender in its language, images, and rituals. Connell traces symbolic power from Lacan’s theories of “phallocentrism” to modern media stereotypes. Symbols of masculinity—warriors, CEOs, soldiers—overlay real hierarchies with mythic justifications. Feminist and queer theorists disrupt these codes: Chicana filmmaker Rosa Linda Fregoso’s work, or queer activists’ playful performances, show how cultural representation becomes a site of gender politics. Symbolic change, Connell suggests, can ignite structural transformation by reshaping what societies imagine as normal.

The four dimensions aren’t separate silos—they constantly intertwine. For instance, emotional labor (cathexis) is tied to workplace hierarchies (production) legitimized through cultural ideals of femininity (symbolism). This interplay explains why gender endures and why changing it demands action across all fronts.

No person experiences gender in isolation. Connell joins thinkers like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins in showing how gender intersects with race, class, and ethnicity to shape distinct life experiences. Intersectionality, in Connell’s terms, is not a geometric crossing of lines but a dynamic interplay among structures that mutually transform one another.

When Gender Meets Other Systems

Take Chicana filmmaker Rosa Linda Fregoso’s analysis of Latino cinema: gender meanings depend on race and class positions. Similarly, studies of prison life reveal how masculinities are reconstructed through racial hierarchy and scarcity. For women, ethnicity often determines access to land, safety, and autonomy—as seen in Bina Agarwal’s work on South Asian rural women where caste and kinship shape property rights. Connell applies these insights globally, illustrating how gender regimes in postcolonial contexts are inseparable from histories of empire and capitalism.

Intersectionality in Action

Connell argues that intersectionality isn’t simply academic—it drives real change. Feminist and anti-racist movements that recognize overlapping oppressions can better address inequality. For example, South African men in Tina Sideris’s studies attempted nonviolent masculinities amid both patriarchal and post-apartheid struggles. Their work shows that transforming one axis (gender) often requires confronting others (race, class, colonial legacy).

This perspective helps you see why policies that treat “women” as a single group often fail. Gender democracy must engage diversity, acknowledging power differences among women themselves. Intersectional awareness turns feminism from an identity claim into a transformative social strategy.

If gender shapes global economies and politics, it also defines the intimacy of personal life. Connell and Pearse examine gender in families, childhood, sexuality, and identity formation to show how global structures play out in daily emotions and bodies.

The Personal Is Political

Through moving stories—like Connell’s late partner Pam Benton’s confrontation with sexism in medical treatment—the book demonstrates that gender power operates even in caregiving and illness. Gendered assumptions about female bodies and heterosexual norms guide how institutions “care” for women, often prioritizing restoring them to traditional feminine roles. This personal lens reveals how deeply political everyday life becomes.

Growing Up Gendered

Rejecting old socialization models that treat children as passive subjects of pink dresses and blue toys, Connell redefines learning gender as embodied practice. Children actively experiment, resist, and improvise gender norms within playgrounds, schools, and families. These practices continue throughout life as people develop gender projects—the lived trajectories through which they perform and transform femininity, masculinity, or other identities. Stories from eco-activist men, Russian post-Soviet women, and working-class lesbians illustrate the multiplicity of these gender projects.

Beyond Fixed Identity

Connell problematizes the idea of stable gender identity. Drawing on Erikson and Robert Stoller’s psychology, she argues that identity is plural, flexible, and discursively shaped. In queer and trans communities, gender becomes a site of creativity rather than conformity. Transsexual autobiographies, like Katherine Cummings’ Katherine’s Diary, reveal the pain and resilience involved in navigating body and society, but also highlight gender’s capacity for reinvention. Social embodiment—the integration of bodily and social processes—anchors these identities in real struggles over recognition and equality.

By situating intimacy within social structures, Connell turns everyday feelings into evidence of global systems. Your most personal experiences—love, shame, care, or desire—are political forces shaping the future of gender democracy.

Connell and Pearse widen the lens to a planetary scale, showing how globalization has created a world gender order. This is not one universal patriarchy but a web of interconnected regimes—corporate, state, and cultural—spread across the metropole and the periphery. Understanding this helps you grasp why gender inequality in one place often mirrors or sustains inequality elsewhere.

Gendered Corporations and States

Corporations like ExxonMobil or Toyota are not gender-neutral machines; they are gendered hierarchies where masculinized management cultures dominate. Rosabeth Kanter and Judy Wajcman’s research shows that women entering management face pressure to “manage like men.” The same pattern extends to global finance and trade networks, where the pursuit of profit privileges aggression and competition—traits linked to hegemonic masculinity. Patriarchal states mirror this logic: from colonial control to modern nationalist projects, governing institutions often reproduce male authority, whether in post-colonial Nigeria or neoliberal Singapore.

Gender Politics Across Borders

From the UN’s CEDAW convention to Latin America’s feminist indicators for equity, transnational activism has become a force reshaping global norms. Yet international gender politics face contradictions. While Scandinavian states promote men’s involvement in caregiving, global capitalism expands sweatshops employing underpaid women. Feminism’s challenge is to connect these local and global scales—to see that winning equality in one sphere means addressing inequalities elsewhere.

Gender, Empire, and Resistance

Empire and capitalism fused to export Western gender orders worldwide. From colonial missionaries imposing European family ideals to multinational corporations redefining women’s roles as cheap laborers, globalization has been deeply patriarchal. Yet the same global flows enable solidarity: networks like MenEngage mobilize men for gender justice internationally, and UN Women supports cross-border campaigns against violence. For Connell, this emerging global gender politics—uneven and contested though it is—offers hope for democratizing gender on a world scale.

In their later chapters, Connell and Pearse tackle gender’s intersection with the planet’s greatest challenge: environmental crisis. The authors trace how ecological degradation reflects patriarchal and capitalist values that privilege domination and profit over care and sustainability. Understanding this link opens new paths for action.

Ecofeminism and Its Evolution

Early ecofeminists like Rachel Carson, Françoise d’Eaubonne, and Maria Mies argued that the exploitation of nature parallels men’s domination over women. Carson’s Silent Spring ignited ecological awareness while facing sexist backlash. Later thinkers—including Vandana Shiva and Ariel Salleh—connected environmental destruction to “maldevelopment”: Western models of growth that devour both ecosystems and women’s labor. Yet others, such as Bina Agarwal, caution against romanticizing women’s closeness to nature, urging attention to class, caste, and property relations driving ecological inequality.

Masculinity and Environmental Management

Connell and Pearse show how global environmental politics remains male-dominated. Studies of climate summits and corporate “greenwashing” reveal masculinized rationalities that treat nature as a resource to manage through technology or markets. Figures like Richard Branson or Arnold Schwarzenegger exemplify “eco-modern masculinity”—combining business zeal and performative heroism under the guise of sustainability. Feminist researchers like Karen Litfin and Sherilyn MacGregor critique this technocratic approach, exposing how it sidelines local and female knowledge systems.

Towards Feminist Sustainability

True ecological transformation, they argue, requires gender transformation. Feminist economists and geographers—from Julie Graham and Kathy Gibson’s cooperative models to Donna Haraway’s provocative “cyborg ecology”—reimagine sustainable living beyond profit and patriarchal control. By valuing care, reciprocity, and nonhuman agency, these visions link environmental justice to gender democracy. You’re reminded that caring for the Earth and for each other are not separate tasks—they’re parallel dimensions of rebuilding society.