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Is "gender" still a useful concept for social analysis? This paper answers positively to this question by reconceptualizing gender for a more open understanding. From an interdisciplinary perspective it takes up several important contributions in the last decade to determine a major theoretical problem they faced. Recent theoretical attempts can be categorized in three distinctive approaches by the analytical concepts mainly used in these attempts: the action approach, the social structure approach, and the power approach. This paper examines representative theories from each of these approaches. The theory of Judith Butler (literally criticism) and West and Zimmerman (sociology) from the action approach, Iris Marion Young (political philosophy) from the social structure approach, Ehara Yumiko (sociology) from the power approach. Focusing on different aspects of gender, these theorists commonly faced the problem of subjectivity and objectivity. Although they try to theorize gender as part of objective structure of society, their arguments lead them to a point where they have to confront the fact that the social is fundamentally constituted by the subjective. Yet they have so far failed to fully explore its implication so that they remain unable to grasp the whole spectrum of the gendered social reality, which is inherently pluralistic. This paper draws on the theory of social institution by Seiyama Kazuo, one of the most sophisticated theoretical statements within the tradition of interpretative sociology, and apply it to the theorizing of gender. Although Seiyama does not focus on gender, analytical concepts he provides are nonetheless useful. His main theoretical contribution is that he establishes the centrality of the subjective within the social, as well as that he shows a clear understanding of how the social reality takes on such powerful objectivity for social actors. He distinguishes two components in the social reality, namely, purely "empirical existence" and "ideal existence." Ideal existence exists only in the social reality, which is ultimately constituted by the actors' meaning-endowing subjectivity, but nonetheless forms a fundamental component of the social reality. "Woman" and "man" can be understood as primary examples of such ideal existence. Thus understood, the concept of gender will enable us to relate to the centrality of subjectivity in the constitution of the gendered social reality. This also opens up new horizons for the gender analysis that have tended to narrowly focus on identifying injustice suffered by women, to fully incorporate the enabling as well as constraining construction of gender in a variety of contexts and contents into both empirical and normative analysis of the social.

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