Gender
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- For other uses, see Gender (disambiguation).
The word gender describes the state of being male, female, or neither. Some languages have a system of grammatical gender (also known as noun classes); while a noun may be described as "masculine" or "feminine" by convention, this has no necessary connection to the natural gender of the thing described.
Likewise, a wide variety of phenomena may have gendered characteristics ascribed to them, either by analogy to male and female bodies, such as with electrical connectors, or due to social norms, such as interpreting the color pink as feminine and blue as masculine. In social sciences, the word "gender" is sometimes used in contrast to biological sex, to emphasise a social or cultural dimension. The discipline of gender studies investigates the nature of sex and gender in a social context.
Much controversy exists over the extent to which gender roles are simply stereotypes, arbitrary social constructions, or natural innate differences.
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Etymology and usage
Gender comes from Middle English gendre, from Latin genus, all meaning "kind", "sort", or "type". Ultimately from the proto Indo European root, gen, which is also the root for "kind", "king" and many others. It appears in Modern French in the word genre (type, kind) and is related to the Greek root gen- (to produce), appearing in gene, genesis and oxygen. As a verb, it is used for to breed in the King James Bible:
- Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind. — Leviticus, 19:19
According to Aristotle, the Greek philospher Protagoras used the terms masculine, feminine, and neuter to classify nouns, introducing the concept of grammatical gender.
Since the 14th century, the word is also used as a synonym for (biological) sex. Examples:
- The Psyche, or soul, of Tiresias is of the masculine gender — Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia
- I may add the gender too of the person I am to govern — Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey
- Black divinities of the feminine gender — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
- Our most lively impression is that the sun is there assumed to be of the feminine gender — Henry James, Essays on Literature
By 1900, this usage was considered jocular by some. In 1926, Fowler's Modern English Usage suggested that “gender...is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons...of the masculine or feminine g[ender], meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder.”
In some parts of the social sciences, following a usage shift that began in the 1950s and was largely completed in the 1980s, gender has been used increasingly to refer to socially constructed aspects, in contrast to biologically determined, using the word sex for the latter. Example (again from MWofD) “Today a return to separate single-sex schools may hasten the revival of separate gender roles”. Another example: “The effectiveness of the medication appears to depend on the sex (not gender) of the patient”, but “In peasant societies, gender (not sex) roles are likely to be more clearly defined.” This distinction has been advocated vociferously by some, who consider the use of gender as a euphemism for sex incorrect.
In the last half of the 20th century, the use of gender in academia has increased strongly, now outnumbering the occurrences of the word sex in the humanities, social sciences, and arts. However, use of the term gender includes the meaning biological sex, and the distinction between sex and gender is only fitfully observed.Template:Ref
Gender in grammar
Template:Main In linguistics, the term gender refers to various forms of expressing biological or sociological gender by inflecting words. For example, in the words actor and actress the suffix -or denotes "male person" (masculine), and the suffix -ress denotes "female person" (feminine). This type of inflection, called lexical gender, is very rare in English, but quite common in other languages, including most languages in the Indo-European family. Normally, Modern English does not mark nouns for gender, but it expresses gender in the third person singular personal pronouns he (male person), she (female person), and it (object, abstraction, or animal), and their other inflected forms.
When gender is expressed on other parts of speech, besides nouns and pronouns, the language is said to have grammatical gender. For example, in French the sentences Il est un grand acteur and Elle est une grande actrice mean "He is a great actor" and "She is a great actress", respectively. Not only do the nouns (acteur, actrice) and the pronouns (il, elle) denote the gender of their referent, but so do the articles (un, une; "a") and the adjectives (grand, grande; "great"). Modern English does not exhibit this grammatical feature, although Old English did.
Grammatical gender may be partly assigned by convention, so it doesn't always coincide with natural gender. Furthermore, the gender assigned to animals, inanimate objects and abstractions is often arbitrary. Thus, in Latin and Romance languages the word Sol (Sun) is masculine and the word Luna (Moon) is feminine, but, in German and Germanic languages in general, the opposite occurs.
Sex
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Gender can refer to the (biological) condition of being male or female, applied to humans, animals, plants, and other sexual species. In this sense, the term is a synonym for sex, a word that has undergone a usage shift itself, having become a synonym for sexual intercourse. In a study of scientists' usage of "gender" and "sex", Haig wrote:
- Among the reasons that working scientists have given me for choosing gender rather than sex in biological contexts are desires to signal sympathy with feminist goals, to use a more academic term, or to avoid the connotation of copulation.Template:Ref label
See sex-determination systems and sexual differentiation (for Homo sapiens); also evolution of sex.
Social category
Since 1950 an increasing part of the academic literature, 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)Template:Ref:
- “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.”
A person's gender is complex, encompassing countless characteristics of appearance, speech, movement and other factors not solely limited to biological sex.
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.
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 social constructionism which suggests that it is entirely a social construct and essentialism which suggests that it's entirely a biological construct.
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.
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.
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.
Other uses
Connectors and fasteners
In electrical and mechanical trades and manufacturing, each of a pair of mating connectors or fasteners is conventionally assigned the designation male or female. The assignment is by direct analogy with animal genitalia; the part bearing one or more protrusions, or which fits inside the other, being designated male and the part containing the corresponding indentations or fitting outside the other being female.
Examples:
- A power cord on a lamp or appliance terminates in a (male) plug; it connects to a (female) socket in a wall or on an extension cord.
- Co-axial cables used for video or other high-frequency signals are normally terminated, at both ends, in a connector comprising an inner pin and an outer fixed or rotating shell; these are conventionally reckoned as male.
- A nut is female and a bolt is male.
The gender of a connector is determined by the structure of its primary functional components, e.g., the conductors of an electrical connector, or the load-bearing parts of a fastener, and not by secondary features such as covers, shields or handles that may be installed for environmental protection, safe operation, etc.
Connectors are also classified into plugs and receptables (or sockets, jacks); plugs are often male and receptables often female, but this is not always so. For example, the C13 IEC connector used to connect many desktop computers is female plug that fits into a male receptacle (however the electrial contacts still match the standard gender usage, the male receptacle has male electrical prongs, but a female plastic shell). A device called a gender changer may be used to join two connectors of the same gender, for example, to extend one video cable with another. Certain connector designs involve paired identical parts each containing both protrusions and indentations; the term hermaphrodite is used for such devices. The SAE connector is an example of a hermaphrodite connector.
Music
In Western Music theory, chords and scales are grouped into modes called major and minor, traditionally related to masculine and feminine. By analogy, the major scales are masculine (clear, open, extrovert), while the minor scales are given feminine qualities (dark, soft, introvert). German uses the same word (Tongeschlecht), and the words Dur (from latin durus, hard) for major and moll (from latin mollis, soft) for minor.
- See Major and minor.
References
- Template:NoteTemplate:Note labelHaig, D. (2004) The inexorable rise of gender and the decline of sex: social change in academic titles, 1945-2001. Archives of Sexual Behavior 33: 87-96. [1]
- Template:NoteMoney, J. (1955) Hermaphroditism, gender and precocity in hyperadrenocorticism: Psychologic findings. Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital 96, 253–264.
- Chafetz, J. S. Masculine/feminine or human? An overview of the sociology of sex roles. 1st ed. 1974, 2nd ed. 178. Itasca, IL: F. E. Peacock.
See also
- androgyny
- femininity
- gender bender
- gender differences
- gender identity
- gender role
- Gender Studies
- homosexuality
- Judith Butler
- Judith Halberstam
- list of transgender-related topics
- List of gender names
- masculinity
- Queer
- Queer Studies
- stereotype
- third gender
- transgender
External links
- Gender, Poverty and Development
- WikEd - Gender Inequities in the Classroom
- WikEd - Gender Differences
- Children’s Gender Beliefsca:Gènere (sociologia)
es:Género (desambiguación) eo:Socia genro fr:Genre sexuel la:Genus ja:ジェンダー he:מגדר it:Genere (sociologia) mk:Пол nn:kjønn no:kjønn ru:Гендер pt:Gênero simple:Gender ko:젠더 zh:性別 (文化)