Gender Requires Participatory Sense-Making: A Genre-Theoretical Approach [Poster]

Gender is said in many ways: from social structural positions to personal gender identification. I argue (2021; 2023; 2024; Forthcoming) that a crucial link lies in intersubjective embodied dynamics, when these are understood as “participatory sense making” (di Paolo et al. 2018). Between agents emerges someone’s link to dynamically shared gender-genres, making sense of them and shifting that gender-genre.

What does such a view involve, normatively and ontologically? 

The poster visualizes how gender-genres are involved in enacting a person's gender. It clarifies several consequences both for the ontology of what someone’s genderedness consists in and for normative horizons: (1) (multi-)perspectivity, ambiguity, and contextuality of a being’s gender; (2) dynamic sharing of gendered starting points for intersubjective coordination at a larger level of organization; (3) normative implications for self- and other-identification.