Naturalization of Gender

Naturalization of Gender, as theorized in Ruti's work, names the ideological operation by which socially reproduced arrangements of sexual difference are misrecognized as expressions of biological or ontological necessity. Rather than describing a neutral factual order, the "natural" character attributed to gender difference functions as an ideological alibi: it renders invisible the phallocentric cultural edifice — rooted in the fantasy of complementarity between "naturally incomplete" sexed beings — that actually organizes the asymmetric distribution of affective, relational, and social labor. The naturalization is not a simple error of knowledge but a structurally motivated misrecognition that actively denigrates women by translating systemic, historically contingent disadvantages into the immutable language of nature. Crucially, Ruti notes that gender-based naturalization is more insidious than analogous operations applied to race, precisely because the fantasy of complementarity — the heteropatriarchal myth that men and women are each other's natural completion — lends ideological grounding to differentiation that appears grounded in the body itself.

The concept also has a critical dimension directed at second-order ideological recuperation. Even feminist strategies that recode "feminine" traits as sites of empowerment, rather than dismantling the binary that produces those traits as "feminine" in the first place, are identified as complicit in naturalization. This move — what we might call ideological recoding — leaves the underlying phallocentric structure intact while producing the appearance of liberation, thereby functioning as a mode of what the corpus elsewhere calls cruel optimism: an attachment to a remedy that reproduces the very condition it claims to overcome.

This concept appears exclusively in mari-ruti-penis-envy-and-other-bad-feelings-the-emotional-costs-of-everyday-life across three closely spaced pages (74, 82, 92), functioning as a through-line in Ruti's feminist-psychoanalytic critique of heteropatriarchy. Its home in the corpus is the intersection of ideology critique and psychoanalytic theory of fantasy: naturalization of gender is precisely what the concept of Ideology names in its most specific, gendered register — a structural operation that is not merely false consciousness but a libidinal arrangement (grounded in the fantasy of complementarity) that constitutes everyday social reality while foreclosing critique. The concept thus extends the canonical account of Ideology (which emphasizes that ideology functions through enjoyment and non-knowledge rather than through mistaken belief) by specifying the fantasy — complementarity, natural incompleteness — that supplies gender ideology's jouissance-support.

Its relation to Fantasy is equally direct: the "fantasy of complementarity" that grounds gender naturalization is precisely a Lacanian fantasy in the technical sense — a structured fiction that gives desire its coordinates (here, heterosexual desire organized around the myth of natural completion) while covering over the constitutive lack in the Other and in the subject. Naturalization of Gender also connects to Lack, insofar as what the ideology conceals is that both sexes are constitutively lacking and that no natural complement can fill that void. The concept additionally resonates with Cruel Optimism (recoding feminine traits as empowerment is an attachment to a figure of remedy that perpetuates the problem), with Anxiety (gender stereotypes manage the anxiety of relational failure by reducing it to intelligible, gendered categories), and with Singularity (naturalization is precisely the suppression of singular difference in favor of generic, binary categories). The concept does not appear elsewhere in the 82-source corpus, marking it as Ruti's specific contribution to a feminist-Lacanian critique of phallocentrism.

Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday LifeMari Ruti · 2018 (p.82)

the naturalization of gender differences cannot be separated from the denigration of women… Translating such structural factors into the idea of natural gender differences is intellectually shortsighted.

The phrase "cannot be separated" is theoretically loaded because it posits an internal, structural — not merely contingent — link between naturalization and denigration, making the ideological move itself the mechanism of harm rather than a neutral descriptive error. The contrast between "structural factors" and "natural gender differences" encodes the entire critique: ideology is precisely the operation of translating the former into the latter, laundering social reproduction through the discourse of nature.