Gender

In a variety of different contexts, gender refers to the masculinity or femininity of words, persons, organisms, or characteristics. The classification into masculine and feminine is analogous to the biological sex of the referent, often by physical or syntactical analogy, linguistic decay, misunderstandings, societal norms, or personal choice. The nature of this categorisation varies depending on the context. For example, gender can be used to refer to the differences in biological sex between two members of a species, or different characteristics of electrical connectors. On the other side, in feminist theory, gender is used to refer solely to socially constructed differences between male and female behaviour, and the gender of a noun in many languages may have nothing to do with the concept described by it.

Social category

Cribbed from old/current gender article with some quotes from Haig. This needs to be expanded. It's easily the most interesting part of the article.

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Since 1950, and increasing part of the academic literarure, and of the public discourse uses gender for the perceived or projected (self-identified) masculinity or femininity of a person. The terms was introduced by Money (1955):

Related Topics:
1950 - Self-identified - Masculinity - Femininity

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: ?The term gender role is used to signify all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. It includes, but is not restricted to, sexuality in the sense of eroticism.?

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A person's gender is complex, encompassing countless characteristics of appearance, speech, movement and other factors not solely limited to biological sex.

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Societies tend to have binary gender systems in which everyone is categorized as male or female, but this is not universal. Some societies include a third gender role; for instance, the Native American Two-Spirit people and the hijras of India.

Related Topics:
Binary - Male - Female - Two-Spirit - Hijra

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There is debate over to what extent gender is a social construct and to what extent it is a biological construct. At the extremes of these views you have constructionism which suggests that it is entirely a social construct and essentialism which suggests that it's entirely a biological construct.

Related Topics:
Social construct - Biological construct - Constructionism - Essentialism

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Gender associations are constantly changing as society progresses. For example, the color pink was considered masculine in the early 1900s and is now seen as feminine.

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In feminist theory

During the 1970s there was no consensus about how the terms were to be applied. In the 1974 edition of Masculine/Feminine or Human, the author uses ?innate gender? and ?learned sex roles?, but in the 1978 edition, the use of sex and gender is reversed. By 1980, most feminist writings had agreed on using gender only for socioculturally adapted traits.

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Other languages

In English, both sex and gender are used in contexts where they could not be substituted ( sexual intercourse; anal sex; safe sex; sex worker; sex slave). Other languages, like German, use the same word Geschlecht to refer both to grammatical gender and to biological sex, making the distinction between sex and gender advocated by some anthropologists difficult. In some contexts, German has adopted the English loan-word gender to achieve this distinction. Sometimes 'Geschlechtsidentitaet' is used as gender (although it literally means gender identity) and 'Geschlecht' as sex (translation of Judith Butler's 'Gender Trouble). More common is the use of modifiers: biologisches Geschlecht for sex, Geschlechtsidentität for gender identity and Geschlechtsrolle for gender role etc.

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