SEX AND GENDER

 



SEX

·        The term sex and gender are concepts used by academicians, researchers and feminist writers to make a distinction between the biologically different male and female and between socially different man and woman.

·        Sex: refers to the biological attributes in humans and animals.

·         It is primarily associated with physical and physiological features including :

CHROMOSOMES

GENE EXPRESSION

HAROMNE LEVEL

REPRODUCTIVE/SEXUAL ANATOMY

·         Sex is usually categorized as female or male but there is variation in the biological attributes that comprise sex and how those attributes are expressed.

·         Thus when an infant is born, the infant comes to be label as boy or girl depending on their sex. The genital differences between male and female is the basis of such characterization.

·         Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1972) written at the end of 18th century in England. Wollstonecraft uses the notion of sex in order to discuss and criticize the entire process that went into making women different from men which today we might call process of social construction.

·         She believed that women were brought to be weaker sex unlike men who were granted capacity for rational thought and political action.

·         Judith Butler argues that sex is natural and comes first. Gender is perceived as secondary construct which is imposed over the top of this natural distinction.

·         Butler argues that sex itself becomes a social category. Sex though seen as biological is as much a product of society as it gender.

 

GENDER

ü  The concept of gender in feminist writings and other sociological discourses became popular in the early 1970s.

ü  Gender refers to socially constructed

ROLES

BEHAVIOURS

EXPRESSIONS

IDENTITIES

of girls, women, boys, men and gender diverse people.

ü  It influences how people perceive themselves and each other, how they act and interact and the way power and resources distributed in society.

ü  Ann Oakley in her book Sex, Gender and Society (1972) explores the term gender.

ü  Oakley says that in the western culture women play the roles of housewife and mother. This is because women are made to play these roles because of the biology.

ü  The Western culture also believes that any effort to change the traditional roles of men and women in society can cause damage to the social fabric of the society.

ü  Oakley concludes that this view regarding the roles of men and women helps to support and maintain the patriarchal society.   

ü  Simone de Beauvior in her book The Second Sex says that “One is not born rather becomes a Woman”. She explained that gender differences in the society make the man superior through his role as the bread winner. It gives him a position of power in the society and family.

ü  Shulamith Firestone in her book “The Dialectics of Sex (1970) suggests that patriarcy exploits women’s biological capacity to reproduce as their essential weakeness. She explains that the only way for women to break away from this oppression is to use technological advances to free themselves for the burden fo children.

ü  Gender is a social, psychological and cultural construct and it is developed in the process of socialisation. Different societies and cultures may therefore have different understandings of what is ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. 

Societies create norms and expectations related to gender, and these are learned in the course of people’s lives – including in the family, at school, through the media. All of these influences impose certain roles and patterns of behaviour on everyone within society. Gender norms – often limited to notions of masculinity and femininity – change over time, but are usually based on a heteronormative order which stipulates that there are two sexes (genders) and they are attracted to each other. People who do not appear to fall under this binary notion of gender often suffer from exclusion, discrimination and violence.

ü  Gender is both an analytical category – a way of thinking about how identities are constructed – and a political idea which addresses the distribution of power in society.

ü  Gender norms are learned and internalised by all members of society.

ü  Gender norms vary across different cultures and over time.

ü  Traditional gender norms are hierarchical: they presuppose an unequal power structure related to gender that disadvantages mostly women.

ü  Gender is not necessarily defined by biological sex: a person’s gender may or may not correspond to their biological sex. Gender is more about identity and how we feel about ourselves. People may self-identify as male, female, transgender, other or none (indeterminate/unspecified). People that do not identify as male or female are often grouped under the umbrella terms ‘non-binary’ or ‘genderqueer’, but the range of gender identifications is in reality unlimited.

ü  Gender is deeply personal to every individual: some people recognise their gender identity early in childhood, and some only later on.

ü  Gender intersects with other categories, such as class, skin colour, ethnicity, religion or disability. 

ü  Gender is something we express (gender expression), sometimes intentionally, and sometimes without thinking. We communicate our gender in a number of ways, for example by the way we dress, the way we move, our hair style, and the way we interact with others.

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