Gender

Gender emerged as a major area of interest in the social sciences in the 1970s. Not that differences between men and women had previously passed unnoticed; since the Enlightenment, this entailed an attention to the cultural and social conditions of women's disadvantage. Yet the very genealogy of the notion of gender in the social sciences is linked to the consolidation of feminist thought and the increased awareness that the differences between men and women are sustained by social institutions, reinforced by cultural frames, and encrusted with power relations. The term gender not only corresponds to the need to stress the social construction of difference but also points to the fundamentally relational nature of social identities coded by gender difference: via the notion of gender, accent is placed on the fact that what is essential is not so much masculinity or femininity but their varied arrangements and relations. Masculinity and femininity are indeed reciprocally constituted by a system of relations of conflict and co-operation, force and consent, repulsion and desire. Gradually, social scientists have come to understand that gender is not yet another social dimension of difference to be added on top of other social boundaries (class, ethnicity, generation, etc.) but rather constitutes a deep-seated master identity in everyday life that intersects—sustains or contradicts—all other social identities and roles. While it certainly emerged from the desire to explore the differences between men and women, the notion of gender has in time problematized the very male/female dichotomy. This has occurred by revealing the implicit and yet normatively sustained associations between gender, sex, and sexuality on which a rigid dichotomy is grounded. Thus gender scholars have pointed to the various dimensions of gender identities: their relations to sexuality, on the one hand, and to sex and sex categorization, on the other. Studies on sexual identities divergent from the heterosexual norm have helped problematize dichotomous frames and arrangements, with gay and lesbian studies as well as queer theory becoming increasingly visible. Finally, the notion of gender has helped open up the unity of the two terms in the dichotomy, pointing to the various “genderisms” (Goffman 1977) that make up the categories of “man” and “woman,” acknowledging [Page 629]how varied, multilayered, and contradictory ordinary gender identities are.

While it has come to characterize a very lively, often interdisciplinary, area of study, the notion of gender has appeared far from given during its fairly short career in the social sciences. When feminist thought initially provided a systematic context for exploring gender, it endorsed a medically derived distinction between sex and gender. Gender was defined as those symbolic differences that are built on the biological dissimilarities apparent in the two sexes. Early socialist feminists were striving to redress the gender blindness of much classical sociology by conceptualizing the interdependence of capitalism and patriarchy, but in doing so, they tended to naturalize the male/female dichotomy at a biological level. Since the late 1980s, though, an important part of feminist theory has turned to a more radically constructivist approach, one wherein culture and everyday practices, including consumption, have become increasingly important. A turn to culture is partly a result of the influence of post-structuralism thought, identified with the works of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and others. Contemporary gender studies have developed a criticism of the earlier gender/sex division that inscribed sex in a dehistoricized biological difference. Together with a politics stressing the diversity among women, gender has become understood not as a cultural representation of a biological given but as the process that produces in the body the possibility of two distinct sexes.

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