Cisnormativity

Development of Theories of Gender

Societies across Asia, Africa, and the Americas have long had more than two traditionally recognized genders, and each society has its own approach to gender. For example, there may be several genders like those of the Bugis people of Sulawesi, Indonesia, who have five distinct genders. Gender may not be a central organizing principle in other societies. For example, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí describes how a person’s role, which has been classified as “gender” by colonial scholars, can change entirely depending on the context of a social interaction and explained that the concepts of “woman” and “man” were not fundamental categories of human difference in Yorùbá society prior to colonization. Oyèwùmí critiqued biological essentialism in Eurocentric feminist notions of gender.

Unfortunately, modern academic theories of gender have largely ignored thought from outside of English-speaking and European traditions. Within the Greco-Roman tradition that influenced European thinking, Galen’s (b. 129 C.E.) theory of bodily humors determined people’s views on what constituted a man or a woman. This approach differs from many contemporary views, as Galen held that when bodily humors changed, people would then metamorphose into having the physiological characteristics of another binary gender. It is important to note that Galen’s ancient Hellenistic approach, which was dominant in Europe until the 1500s, did not differentiate clearly between gender and sex—the latter of which, in the English-speaking sense, is a 20th-century development. In many European languages, there are no traditional words that can be readily adapted to differentiate these two concepts. Outside of Greco-Roman thought, there were, and still are, many societies in which shifting between gender/sex categories could be achieved through self-declaration or public ritual. Such societies place varying degrees of importance on social and physical aspects of gender/sex.

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