Second Lecture

SEX AND GENDER

What is sex?  What is gender?

Sex: predicated on anatomical and biological differences.  Makes one a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, and we simply take it for granted.  It's who we are at the very basic, physiological level.

Gender: A: is a more complicated concept.  Our gender identity is derived from a continuous and persistent sense of ourselves as male or female.

Until very recently, gender was not thought of as a tool of historical or sociological or political analysis.  Let me read to you a rather amusing definition of "gender" taken from the 1988 edition of the Dictionary of Modern English Usage:

Gender. n. a grammatical term only.  To talk of persons or creatures of the masculine or feminine gender, meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder

But as you know, dictionary meanings can easily change as history changes.  The word "gender" has been appropriated especially by American feminist scholars who wanted to insist on the fundamentally social quality of distinctions based on sex.  In other words, they were saying that biology does not determine who we are as individuals; it is society with its complex web of social and culturally determined roles that it assigns to males and females which gets to define gender.  Gender is therefore a social and/or cultural construct.  A construct, by its very definition, is something artificial, something created.  Created by whom?  Created by those who have the power, the ability, to create and enforce and maintain definitions and the roles generated by these definitions.  Therefore, when we talk about gender in any given society, we are also talking about the power relations in that society and how those power relations constitute or define people and their relationships with one another.  

These relations determine the behaviors, attitudes, values, beliefs, and so on that a particular cultural group considers appropriate for males and females on the basis of their biological sex.  Therefore feminists and other social theorists often talk about deconstructing certain social and cultural concepts; to unpack it so to speak, to decode it so as to lay bare the relations of power which inform and define the gender division.  In other words, what we term "femininity" or "masculinity" are not inherent characteristics in us but very subjective, maybe even fictional, constructs.  

There are three theoretical positions based on the use of gender as an analytical category:

1. The first position, used mainly by feminists, uses gender to explain the origins of patriarchal society. 
2. The second position uses Marxist theory to explain the economic subordination of women.
3. The third draws on different schools of psychoanalysis to explain the production and reproduction of the subject's gendered identity.

1) Patriarchal Society describes the gendered organization of a society in which men, as the economic providers of families, have socially dominant roles, while women, because of their reproductive functions and as economic dependents of men, have socially inferior roles.  In a patriarchal society, men and women are therefore basically unequal with men possessing all the economic power and the social power that goes with it. 

Biological differences between men and women become institutionalized into a set of social and cultural roles specified for each sex and defined as the norm.  Deviations from this norm are considered abnormal and threatening to the overall structure.

Most societies of the world have been or remain patriarchal; modern technological innovations, particularly in the twentieth century, made sweeping changes in the patriarchal societies of the West, allowing women to enter the work force and become economically independent.

2.  Marxist Theory is very supportive of the feminist critique of the traditional patriarchal society.  In essence, it repeats what the patriarchal position states; that the social subordination of women to men is based on their economic dependence on men.  Whereas the patriarchal position maintains that this is the natural order of things, sanctioned by religious tradition and human nature, the Marxist position states that it is the love of economic power that drives one group of people to wield economic control over other groups of people; therefore, this basic economic inequality explains not only the inequalities between men and women but between, say, factory owners and factory workers.  Class and gender inequalities are related in many ways.

It is not therefore the modes of reproduction but rather the modes of production that determine one's position in society; those who control the economic means of production are socially superior.

3. The Psychoanalytic School is concerned with the processes by which an individual's identity is created; it focuses on the early stages of child development for clues to the formation of gender identity.  Included among these processes are actual experiences and the centrality of language in communicating, interpreting, and representing gender.   By "language" is meant not so much actual words but systems of meaning.  For some belonging to this school, the unconscious is a critical factor in the construction of the subject; it is the location, moreover, of sexual division.

So basically this school is saying that our gendered identities are formed under the influence of the environment that we grow up in, our actual life experiences, our relationships, in other words the social and cultural conditioning that we are exposed to.

IT IS POSSIBLE TO COMBINE ALL THESE PERSPECTIVES AND STATE THAT GENDER IS IN A LARGE MEASURE DEFINED ON THE BASIS OF THREE IMPORTANT CONCEPTS:

TRADITION, IDENTITY, POWER

The first article we will read from the reader will discuss these three concepts so we can come back to it on Monday. 

HOW DO YOU THINK TAKING INTO CONSIDERATION THE CATEGORY GENDER WOULD OR COULD CHANGE THE NATURE OF HISTORICAL OR SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY OF HUMAN SOCIETY?  DOES IT MATTER WHETHER WE USE GENDER AS A TOOL OF HISTORICAL, LITERARY, CULTURAL, POLITICAL, ETC. ETC. ANAYLYSIS?  The French anthropologist Maurice Godelier has put it this way: It is not sexuality which haunts society, but society which haunts the body's sexuality.  Sex-related differences between bodies are continually summoned as testimony to social relations and phenomena that have nothing to do with sexuality.  Not only as testimony to, but also testimony for - in other words, as legitimation.

GENDER LEGITIMIZES AND CONSTRUCTS SOCIAL AND POLITICAL RELATIONSHIPS

Take a minute or two to think about how gender is invoked to legitimize many social conventions, perceptions, and institutions that we otherwise take for granted.