Accountable Conduct

Candace West and Don Zimmerman's (1987) classic and beautifully constructed article was written and published in interesting times. The mid and late 1980s saw a number of attempts by feminists to formulate accounts of gender and sex on a more coherent sociological basis: in Britain (Caplan 1987; Walby 1989), Germany (Hagemann-White 1987; Mies 1986), Australia (Connell 1987), and Canada (Smith 1987) as well as in the United States in responses to Stacey and Thorne's (1985) call for the missing feminist revolution in sociology. About the time West and Zimmerman were writing, the United Nations Decade for Women con cluded, although it took time for Northern feminist theory to digest its messages about the complexities and ambiguities of global gender poli tics (Bulbeck 1988). The vast political perspectives opened up by the women's liberation and gay liberation movements had shrunk as antifeminist governments came to power in Britain, the United States, and Germany; China turned toward misogynist capitalism; the Iranian revolution turned toward misogynist dictatorship; and neoliberals won control of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In this moment, feminist theorists in the social sciences faced a double task: building on the fundamental insight of the liberation movements that sex and gender involved a system of inequality, power, and oppres sion-and protecting that insight against the powerful tendency to fall into categorical thinking, which always degenerates into some kind of essen tialism. Theorists reached for different tools to help with these jobs: struc tural analysis, phenomenology, interactionism, Marxism, and political