Introduction to Sociology / Gender

Gender

For the grammatical concept, see Grammatical gender. For other meanings see Gender (disambiguation).

Gender is the range of physical, biological, mental and behavioral characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, the term may refer to biological sex (i.e. the state of being male, female or intersex), sex-based social structures (including gender roles and other social roles), or gender identity.

Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories. However, Money's meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, especially the social sciences and documents written by the World Health Organization (WHO). In many other contexts, however, even in some areas of social sciences, the meaning of gender has undergone a usage shift to include sex or even to replace the latter word. Although this gradual change in the meaning of gender can be traced to the 1980s, a small acceleration of the process in the scientific literature was observed when, in 1993, the Food and Drug Administration started to use gender instead of sex. Gender is now commonly used even to refer to the physiology of non-human animals, without any implication of social gender roles.

In the English literature, the trichotomy between biological sex, psychological gender, and social sex role first appeared in a feminist paper on transsexualism in 1978. Some cultures have specific gender-related social roles that can be considered distinct from male and female, such as the hijra of India and Pakistan.

The social sciences have a branch devoted to gender studies. Other sciences, such as sexology and neuroscience, are also interested in the subject. While the social sciences sometimes approach gender as a social construct, and gender studies particularly do, research in the natural sciences investigates whether biological differences in males and females influence the development of gender in humans; both inform debate about how far biological differences influence the formation of gender identity.

Gender identity and gender roles

Main articles: Gender identity and Gender role

Gender identity is the gender a person self-identifies as. One's biological sex is directly tied to specific social roles and expectations. Judith Butler considers the concept of being a woman to have more challenges, owing not only to society's viewing women as a social category but also as a felt sense of self, a culturally conditioned or constructed subjective identity. The term "woman" has chronically been used as a reference to and for the female body; this usage has been viewed as controversial by feminists, in the definition of "woman". There are qualitative analyses that explore and present the representations of gender; feminists challenge the dominant ideologies concerning gender roles and sex. Social identity refers to the common identification with a collectivity or social category that creates a common culture among participants concerned. According to social identity theory, an important component of the self-concept is derived from memberships in social groups and categories; this is demonstrated by group processes and how inter-group relationships impact significantly on individuals' self perception and behaviors. The groups people belong to therefore provide members with the definition of who they are and how they should behave in the social sphere.

Categorizing males and females into social roles creates binaries in which individuals feel they have to be at one end of a linear spectrum and must identify themselves as man or woman.Globally, communities interpret biological differences between men and women to create a set of social expectations that define the behaviors that are "appropriate" for men and women and determine women’s and men’s different access to rights, resources, power in society and even health behaviors. Although the specific nature and degree of these differences vary from one society to the next, they typically favor men, creating an imbalance in power and gender inequalities in all countries. According to Spade and Valentine (2011), there is no universal definition of expectations or responsibilities of gender. Many cultures have different expectations based on gender, but there is no universal standard to a masculine or feminine role across all cultures.

Philosopher Michel Foucault claims that as sexual subjects, humans are the object of power, which is not an institution or structure, rather it is a signifier or name attributed to "complex strategical situation". Because of this, "power" is what determines individual attributes, behaviors, etc. and people are a part of an ontologically and epistemologically constructed set of names and labels. Such as, being female characterizes one as a woman, and being a woman signifies one as weak, emotional, and irrational, and is incapable of actions attributed to a "man". Judith Butler said that gender and sex are more like verbs than nouns. She reasoned that her actions are limited because she is female. "I am not permitted to construct my gender and sex willy-nilly," she said. "[This] is so because gender is politically and therefore socially controlled. Rather than 'woman' being something one is, it is something one does." More recent criticisms of Judith Butler's theories critique her writing for reinforcing the very conventional dichotomies of gender.

Social assignment and the idea of gender fluidity

See also: Sex assignment

According to gender theorist Kate Bornstein, gender can have ambiguity and fluidity. There are two contrasting ideas regarding the definition of gender, and the intersection of both of them is definable as below:

The World Health Organization defines gender as the result of socially constructed ideas about the behavior, actions, and roles a particular sex performs. The beliefs, values and attitude taken up and exhibited by them is as per the agreeable norms of the society and the personal opinions of the person is not taken into the primary consideration of assignment of gender and imposition of gender roles as per the assigned gender. Intersections and crossing of the prescribed boundaries have no place in the arena of the social construct of the term "gender".

The assignment of gender involves taking into account the physiological and biological attributes assigned by nature followed by the imposition of the socially constructed conduct. The social label of being classified into one or the other sex is obligatory to the medical stamp on the birth certificate. Gender is a term used to exemplify the attributes that a society or culture constitutes as "masculine" or "feminine". Although a person's sex as male or female stands as a biological fact that is identical in any culture, what that specific sex means in reference to a person's gender role as a woman or a man in society varies cross culturally according to what things are considered to be masculine or feminine. The cultural traits typically coupled to a particular sex finalize the assignment of gender and the biological differences that play a role in classifying either sex is interchangeable with the definition of gender within the social context.

In this context, the socially constructed rules are at a cross road with the assignment of a particular gender to a person. Gender ambiguity deals with having the freedom to choose, manipulate and create a personal niche within any defined socially constructed code of conduct while gender fluidity is outlawing all the rules of cultural gender assignment. It does not accept the prevalence of the two rigidly defined genders "man" and "woman" and believes in freedom to choose any kind of gender with no rules, no defined boundaries and no fulfilling of expectations associated with any particular gender.

Both these definitions are facing opposite directionalities with their own defined set of rules and criteria on which the said systems are based.

Social categories

"Rosie the Riveter" was an iconic symbol of the American homefront in WWII and a departure from gender roles due to wartime necessity.

Most societies have only two distinct, broad classes of gender roles, masculine and feminine, that correspond with the biological sexes of male and female. When a baby is born, society allocates the child to one sex or the other, on the basis of what the genitals look like. However, some societies explicitly incorporate people who adopt the gender role opposite to their biological sex; for example, the two-spirit people of some indigenous American peoples. Other societies include well-developed roles that are explicitly considered more or less distinct from archetypal female and male roles in those societies. In the language of the sociology of gender, they comprise a third gender, more or less distinct from biological sex (sometimes the basis for the role does include intersexuality or incorporates eunuchs). One such gender role is that adopted by the hijras of India and Pakistan. Another example may be the Muxe (pronounced [ˈmuʃe]), found in the state of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, "beyond gay and straight."

The Bugis people of Sulawesi, Indonesia have a tradition that incorporates all the features above. Joan Roughgarden argues that some non-human animal species also have more than two genders, in that there might be multiple templates for behavior available to individual organisms with a given biological sex.

[In July 2012 Gopi Shankar, a Gender activist and a student from The American College in Madurai coined the regional terms for genderqueer people in Tamil, Gopi said apart from male and female, there are more than 20 types of genders, such as transwoman, transmen, androgynous, pangender, trigender,, etc., and ancient India refers it as Trithiya prakirthi. "

Measurement of gender identity

Early gender identity research hypothesized a single bipolar dimension of masculinity-femininity—that is masculinity and femininity were opposites on one continuum. As societal stereotypes changed, however, assumptions of the unidimensional model were challenged. This led to the development of a two-dimensional gender identity model, in which masculinity and femininity were conceptualized as two separate, orthogonal dimensions, coexisting in varying degrees within an individual. This conceptualization on femininity and masculinity remains the accepted standard today.
Two instruments incorporating the multidimensional of masculinity and femininity have dominated gender identity research: The Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) and the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ). Both instruments categorize individuals as either being sex typed (males report themselves as identifying primarily with masculine traits, females report themselves as identifying primarily with feminine traits), cross sex-typed (males report themselves as identifying primarily with feminine traits, females report themselves as identifying primarily with masculine traits), androgynous (either males or females who report themselves as high on both masculine and feminine traits) or undifferentiated (either males or females who report themselves as low on both masculine and feminine traits). Twenge (1997) noted that, although men are generally more masculine than women and women generally more feminine than men, the association between biological sex and masculinity/femininity is waning.