Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Feminism is said to be the movement to end women's oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand ?woman? in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ?woman? picks out human females and being a human female depends on various biological and anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ?woman? differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. More recently this distinction has come under sustained attack and many view it nowadays with (at least some) suspicion. This entry outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender.
1.2 Gender terminology
In order to distinguish biological differences from social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter, feminists appropriated the term ?gender?. Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ?gender? was often used to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ?trapped in the wrong bodies?, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ?sex? to pick out biological traits and ?gender? to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and large) a person's sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals' sex and gender simply don't match.
Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore, changeable. Gayle Rubin (for instance) uses the phrase ?sex/gender system? in order to describe ?a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention? (1975, 165). Rubin employed this system to articulate that ?part of social life which is the locus of the oppression of women? (1975, 159) describing gender as the ?socially imposed division of the sexes? (1975, 179). Rubin's thought was that although biological differences are fixed, gender differences are the oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how women and men should behave. Women are oppressed as women and ?by having to be women? (Rubin 1975, 204). However, since gender is social, it is thought to be mutable and alterable by political and social reform that would ultimately bring an end to women's subordination. Feminism should aim to create a ?genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one's sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love? (Rubin 1975, 204).
In some earlier interpretations, like Rubin's, sex and gender were thought to complement one another. The slogan ?Gender is the social interpretation of sex? captures this view. Nicholson calls this ?the coat-rack view? of gender: our sexed bodies are like coat racks and ?provide the site upon which gender [is] constructed? (1994, 81). Gender conceived of as masculinity and femininity is superimposed upon the ?coat-rack? of sex as each society imposes on sexed bodies their cultural conceptions of how males and females should behave. This socially constructs gender differences ? or the amount of femininity/masculinity of a person ? upon our sexed bodies. That is, according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby creating feminine and masculine persons. Distinguishing sex and gender, however, also enables the two to come apart: they are separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman, or vice versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995).
So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism suggested that gender differences result from cultural practices and social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by saying that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the ?intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice? (Haslanger 1995, 97). But which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There is no consensus on these issues. (See the entry on intersections between analytic and continental feminism for more on different ways to understand gender.)
2. Gender as socially constructed
2.1 Gender socialisation
One way to interpret Beauvoir's claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman is to take it as a claim about gender socialisation: females become women through a process whereby they acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour. Masculinity and femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how individuals are brought up. They are causally constructed (Haslanger 1995, 98): social forces either have a causal role in bringing gendered individuals into existence or (to some substantial sense) shape the way we are qua women and men. And the mechanism of construction is social learning. For instance, Kate Millett takes gender differences to have ?essentially cultural, rather than biological bases? that result from differential treatment (1971, 28?9). For her, gender is ?the sum total of the parents', the peers', and the culture's notions of what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture, and expression? (Millett 1971, 31). Feminine and masculine gender-norms, however, are problematic in that gendered behaviour conveniently fits with and reinforces women's subordination so that women are socialised into subordinate social roles: they learn to be passive, ignorant, docile, emotional helpmeets for men (Millett 1971, 26). However, since these roles are simply learned, we can create more equal societies by ?unlearning? social roles. That is, feminists should aim to diminish the influence of socialisation.
Social learning theorists hold that a huge array of different influences socialise us as women and men. This being the case, it is extremely difficult to counter gender socialisation. For instance, parents often unconsciously treat their female and male children differently. When parents have been asked to describe their 24-hour old infants, they have done so using gender-stereotypic language: boys are describes as strong, alert and coordinated and girls as tiny, soft and delicate. Parents' treatment of their infants further reflects these descriptions whether they are aware of this or not (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 32). Some socialisation is more overt: children are often dressed in gender stereotypical clothes and colours (boys are dressed in blue, girls in pink) and parents tend to buy their children gender stereotypical toys. They also (intentionally or not) tend to reinforce certain ?appropriate? behaviours. While the precise form of gender socialization has changed since the onset of second-wave feminism, even today girls are discouraged from playing sports like football or from playing ?rough and tumble? games and are more likely than boys to be given dolls or cooking toys to play with; boys are told not to ?cry like a baby? and are more likely to be given masculine toys like trucks and guns (for more, see Kimmel 2000, 122?126).[1]
According to social learning theorists, children are also influenced by what they observe in the world around them. This, again, makes countering gender socialisation difficult. For one, children's books have portrayed males and females in blatantly stereotypical ways: for instance, males as adventurers and leaders, and females as helpers and followers. One way to address gender stereotyping in children's books has been to portray females in independent roles and males as non-aggressive and nurturing (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 35). Some publishers have attempted an alternative approach by making their characters, for instance, gender-neutral animals or genderless imaginary creatures (like TV's Teletubbies). However, parents reading books with gender-neutral or genderless characters often undermine the publishers' efforts by reading them to their children in ways that depict the characters as either feminine or masculine. According to Renzetti and Curran, parents labelled the overwhelming majority of gender-neutral characters masculine whereas those characters that fit feminine gender stereotypes (for instance, by being helpful and caring) were labelled feminine (1992, 35). Socialising influences like these are still thought to send implicit messages regarding how females and males should act and are expected to act shaping us into feminine and masculine persons.
