What is sex and what is gender?
In this week’s reading one thing that stood out to me was Judith Butler discussion about sex and gender. Here she sites Beauvoir saying that s she: “Claims that “woman” is a historical idea and not a natural fact, she clearly underscores the distinction between sex, as biological facticity, and gender, as the cultural interpretation or signification of that facticity…to be woman is to have to become a woman to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of “Woman” to induce the body to become a cultural sign” (902) Here a clear distinction is made between “biological sex” (Referring only to chromosomes XX, XY because sex here does not include sexuality) and “cultural Gender” which is as the quote states a cultural and historical ideology of what a woman and also a man should be. This “cultural Gender” is not natural because as it has been mentioned you have to become a woman (or man) according to social construct. Since gender is created and molded by culture it is not static but changes through time and we can observe some of the changes it can undergo in one another reading assigned for this week which is Michel Foucault “The History of Sexuality”, here he talks about aspects that have influenced and affected sexuality. He talks about the 19th century and how religious laws and civil laws focused sexuality only with in marriage relations and how fragmentation’s of these laws gave way to characters like “Don Juan”. I think the distinction between sex and gender is important to keep in mind especially keeping in mind that gender is culturally constructed. And Kosofsky in the article “epistemology of the closet” mentions that: “She is , however, a term that extends beyond chromosomal sex. That its history of usage often overlaps with what might now more properly be called gender is only one problem.”(915) This wrongfully use of terms is dangerous in my point of view because in a way we start to think that these gender difference that are culturally constructed are somehow biologically and we might start erroneously calling them sex differences. Then Kosofsky says that gender is always put as a binary as opposites but then the question arises when talking about sex what is so different between xx and xy? This question also arises in feminist studies. There is a culturally constructed idea that male and female are different, but if we compare similarities with differences, there are a lot more similarities that differences between males and females. Yet even today when there are studies done in psychology a lot more emphasizes and even media attention given to studies that find differences between males and females compared to those that find similarities. This show how embedded these cultural constructs are in our society.
