Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 67:1 (Mar 2024)
Article: Gender Identity Theory And Christian Anthropology
Author: Abigail Favale

JETS 67:1 (March 2024) p. 125

Gender Identity Theory And Christian Anthropology

Abigail Favale*

* Abigail Favale is Professor of the Practice in the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, where she holds a concurrent appointment in the Department of Theology. This article is a lightly edited version of her plenary address at the ETS annual meeting, November 16, 2023, which she presented as an invited guest, and portions of which were adapted from Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2022). She may be contacted at [email protected].

Abstract: This essay traces the genealogy of the concept of “gender” through the twentieth century, from its origins in the existentialist philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir through Judith Butler’s gender theory, and into the contemporary emphasis on gender as a subjective identity. After sketching the origins and key claims of this gender paradigm, the essay compares these claims with the underlying worldview and theological anthropology of Genesis, showing points of contrast in the two paradigms’ understandings of creation, reality, embodiment, sexual difference, language, and freedom.

Key words: gender theory, sexual difference, theological anthropology, sex, gender, feminism, Genesis

This lecture will explore “the genesis of gender” in two ways: first, the more or less linear story of how the concept of “gender” has developed and changed forms over the last seventy years or so. The second part of the lecture will move into a worldview comparison between what I call “the gender paradigm” and the Christian paradigm, or worldview, that is presented in Genesis.

I. The Gender Paradigm

Let’s start with the Gender Paradigm. I like to start the story of gender’s genealogy with Simone de Beauvoir. That may seem strange, considering that de Beauvoir does not actually use the term “gender”—her book is called The Second Sex—but she introduces the concept that the term “gender” would soon come to name. That concept is expressed in her well-known line, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”1 That statement is the mustard seed of gender theory.

When de Beauvoir writes that one is not born, but becomes a woman, she is driving a wedge between the idea of “woman” and “female,” arguing that “woman” is a social and cultural fabrication that is layered onto the biological reality of femaleness.

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This prefigures the turn toward the concept of “gender,” which would take hold in the 1970s, largely through the...