Judith Lorber, Night to His Day: the Social Construction of Gender (1994)
In Judith Lorber unsettles the taken-for-granted belief that gender is natural or inevitable. Instead, she shows how gender is something we do, a continuous and collective performance maintained through norms, institutions, and everyday interactions. The illusion of naturalness is what gives gender its power, making it seem like a fact rather than a process. This raises difficult questions: if we stopped doing gender, what social structures would collapse? How would workplaces, families, or public spaces be reorganized? Lorber pushes us to see gender not just as a personal identity but as a system that distributes recognition, resources, and control. If it is constructed, then who benefits from keeping it in place—and what would it take to imagine life otherwise?
To read more of Lorber's work, see .
Gender is a human production that depends on everyone constantly ‘doing gender.’