Gender
From Freepedia
- For other uses, see Gender (disambiguation).
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.
Controversy surrounds the reasons, history, validity, and usefulness of many of these classifications.
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Etymology and usage
Gender comes from Middle English gendre, ultimately from latin genus, all meaning "kind", "sort", or "type". It appears in Modern French in the word genre (type, kind) and is related to the Greek root gen- (to produce), appearing in 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 — 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.”
From Maven's Word of the Day:
- Despite such pronouncements, which may be found in similar forms in many usage books, the use of gender to refer to sex has been increasingly common in the last several decades. This use of gender is comparably common, if not more common, than the equivalent use of sex. A few examples from this year: "The state has to justify any discrimination based on race, gender, national origin [etc.]" (New Republic); "No residential college at Yale prohibits visits by either gender" (New York Times Magazine); "Can clever readers really tell a writer's gender from his or her prose?" (Harper's). The growth of this usage, sometimes blamed on "feminists," is probably a result of the increased frequency of the word sex in the sense of sexual intercourse; gender is employed to avoid the potential physical connotations of sex.
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. (Haig, 2004)
Grammatical gender
Main article: grammatical gender
In linguistics, grammatical gender refers to a classification of nouns into classes, including masculine and feminine. The rules of grammar of many languages requires this classification to be reflected in the behaviour of associated words. Curzan illustrates this with a “highly contrived” example in Old English:
- Seo brade line wæs tilu and ic hire lufod.
- (Literal translation:) That broad shield was good and I her loved.
The noun lind (shield) is grammatically feminine, and forces the pronoun seo (the, that) and the adjectives brade (broad) and tilu (good) to appear in their feminine forms. Notably for Modern English speakers, the pronoun hire, referring back to lind, is feminine, adopting the grammatical gender of the referent. By comparison, Modern English uses natural gender, where the noun's class agrees with the sex (or sexlessness) of the referent:
- That broad shield was good and I loved it.
Here, the shield is understood as a sexless object, and is referred to by the neuter pronoun, it.
Gender in Indo-European languages
There are many indications that the Proto-Indo-European language in an early stage of its existence had no signs of gender at all. The terminations of the names of father and mother, peter and mater, for example, are exactly the same. The idea of gender was first suggested by the difference between man and woman, male and female, and, as in so many languages at the present day, was represented not by any outward sign but by the meaning of the words themselves. When once arrived at, the conception of gender was extended to other objects besides those to which it properly belonged. The primitive Indo-European did not distinguish between subject and object, but personified objects by ascribing to them the motives and powers of living beings. Accordingly they were referred to by different pronouns, one class denoting the masculine and another class the feminine, and the distinction that existed between these two classes of pronouns was after a time transferred to the nouns. As soon as the preponderant number of stems in o in daily use had come to be regarded as masculine on account of their meaning, other stems in o, whatever might be their signification, were made to follow the general analogy and were similarly classed as masculines. In the same way, the suffix i or ya acquired a feminine sense, and was set apart to represent the feminine gender. Unlike the Semitic languages, the Indo-Europeans were not satisfied with these two genders, masculine and feminine. As soon as object and subject, patient and agent, were clearly distinguished from each other, there arose a need for a third gender, which should be neither masculine nor feminine, but denote things without life. This third gender was fittingly expressed either by the objective case used as a nominative (e.g. regnum), or by a stem without any case ending at all (e.g. virus),
In modern Indo-European languages, genders typically include feminine, masculine and neuter. Latin has these three, but in many of its modern descendants, such as French and Spanish, the neuter gender has all but disappeared. For objects with sex, the grammatical gender almost always agrees with the sex, but there are exceptions. [...] there are elaborate (and mostly incomplete) rules to define the gender of a word. For example, in German, all nouns ending in -ung (corresponding to -ing in English) are feminine, and car brand names are masculine. Words with the diminutive ending -lein or -chen are always neuter, thus the grammatical genders of Mädchen (girl) and Fräulein (young woman) are neuter. In some local dialects of German, all nouns for female persons have been shifted to the neuter gender, but the female gender remains for some words denoting objects.
English generally exhibits gender only in third-person singular pronouns (he, she, and it), with the masculine and feminine genders used only for persons or higher animals, and some sometimes objects in colloquial speech as in 'Isn't she a beauty?'.
Gender in other language families
In many languages, such as Eskimo and Choctaw, its place is taken by a division of objects into animate and inanimate, while in other languages they are separated into rational and irrational. These classifications are sometimes called noun classes instead of genders.
Sex
Main article: Biological sex
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 reproduction.
Haig:
- "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."
See sex-determination systems and sexual differentiation (for homo sapiens).
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.
Since 1950, and 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):
- “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 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
Fasteners and connectors
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 receptable. 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,
Music
In Western Music theory, chords and scales have 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
- 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.
- Haig, D. The inexorable rise of gender and the decline of sex: social change in academic titles, 1945-2001. Archives of Sexual Behavior 33: 87-96, 2004 [1]
- Money, J. Hermaphroditism, gender and precocity in hyperadrenocorticism: Psychologic findings. Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, 96, 253–264, 1955.
- [2]
See also
- androgyny
- female bodybuilding
- feminity
- gender bender
- gender identity
- gender role
- Gender Studies
- homosexuality
- masculinity
- Queer
- Queer Studies
- stereotype
- third gender
- transgender
