The journal Cosmos + Taxis has a special issue on gender, edited by Lauren Hall. The idea is to explore gender from the perspective of Hayekian social theory, which focuses on how social order emerges from experimentation. Here, I want to briefly review an article by Akiva Malamet and Mikayla Novak called “Gender as Discovery Process: Social Construction, Markets, and Gender.”
The idea is that people use market spaces to challenge and redefine gender roles in society. Rather than assume that gendered interactions are a constant space of power and repression, one can think about how market processes allow people to reconstruct gender. For example,
market-oriented economic activities are crucial in facilitating dynamic, and vibrant, choice-oriented environments conducive to the embodiment, expression, and practice of gender and gender diversity. As we illustrate, this can be seen in a variety of activities, such as the symbolic use of products in medical and other health innovations and the use of commercial sites, each of which affirm existing gender identities, and/or create avenues or spaces for new identities to emerge. Underlying these activities are what we call gender entrepreneurship, or an alertness (Kirzner [1973] 2013) to using markets to discover and leverage new opportunities to express gender. (Malamet and Novak 2023, 10)
In other words, people use market situations as a stage for a gender-oriented discovery process. by doing so, they can redefine gender as a role and form of expression in society. This is intuitive and the authors provides examples such as fashion and health care to make the point. These is a basic and sensible point, and I am glad this article is out there.
Bottom line: The world is a gendered staged and you get to decide your role in it.
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