Is gender a form of value, a form of capital? This paper, written in 1984, is not just a critique of superficial and essentialist ideas of gender, but also an attempt to understand gender from the specific viewpoint of value and commodity analysis. Instead of asking what follows from gender and how gender is performed, it asks what causes gender, what is the “stage script”, the way the performances are structured. Today, I might have written it differently, yet it has kept a critical edge that makes it interesting today also. The paper was published in Harriet Holter ed 1984: Patriarchy in a Welfare Society, University Press, Oslo 1984.
