The terms' sex' and
'gender' mean different things to different feminist theories and neither are
easy or straight forward to characterize. Sketching out some feminist history
of the terms provides a helpful starting point.
Most people ordinarily seem to
think that sex and gender are coextensive. Women are human females, men are
human males.Many feminists have historically disgreed and have endorsed the sex
or gender distinction.Provisionally : ' sex' denotes human females and males
depending on biological features chromosome, sex organs, hormones, and other
physical features. ' 'gender' denotes women and men depending on social factors
such as social role , position, behavior, identity. The main feminist
motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or
the view that biology is destiny.
A typical example of a biological
determinist view is that of Genders and Thompson who,in 1889 ,argued that
social,social, psychological, and behavioral traits were caused by metabolic
state. Women supposedly conserve energy being' anabolic' and this makes them
passive, conservative, sluggish, stable and uninterested in politics. Men
expend their surplus energy (being 'katabolic') and this makes them eager,
energetic, passionate,variable and thereby , interested in political and social
matters. These biological 'facts' about metabolic states were used not
only to explain behavioural differences between women and men but also to
justify what our social and political arrangements ought to be. More
specifically, they were used to argue for withholding from women political
rights accorded to men because (according to Geddes and Thompson) "what
was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of
Parliament" . It would be inappropriate to grant women political rights,
as they are simply not suited to have those rights; it would also be futile
since women (due to their biology)would simply not be interested in exercising
their political rights. To counter this kind of biological determinism,
feminists have argued that behavioral and psychological differences have
social, rather than biological causes. For instance , Someone's behavior
famously claimed that one is not born , but rather becomes a woman and that
"social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so
profound that they appear to be caused by nature". Commonly observed
behavioral traits associated women and men , then are not caused by
anatomy or chromosomes. Rather, they are culturally learned or acquired.
Although biological determinism of the
kind endorsed by Geddes and Thompson is nowadays uncommon , the idea that
behavioral and psychological differences between women and men have biological
causes has not disappeared. In 1970's, sex differences were used to argue that
women shoulD not become airline pilots since they will be hormonally unstable
once a month and therefore unable to perform their duties as well as men. More
recently, differences in male and female brains have been said to explain
behavioural differences; in particular the anatomy of corpus callosum , a
bundle of nerves that connects the rights and left cerebral hemispheres, is
thought to be responsible various psychological and behavioral
differences. For instance, in 1992, a Time magazine article surveyed then
prominent biological explanations of differences between women and men claiming
that women's thicker corpus callosums could explain what 'women's intuition' is
based on and impair women's ability to perform some specialised visual-spatial
skills , like reading maps.Anne Fausto - Sterling callosums cause behavioral
and psychological differences. First, the corpus callosum is a highly variable
piece of anatomy; as a result, generalisations about its size, shape and
thickness that hold for women and men in general should be viewed with caution.
Second, differences in adult human corpus callosums are not found in infants
this may suggest that physical brain difference actually develop as responses
to differential treatment. Third, given that visual-spatial skills can be
improved by practice , even if women and men's corpus callosum differ
this does not make the resulting behavioral differences immutable.
FEMINISTS ARE THE DETERMINISTS.
wow vaani.. It is time that we understand the clear cut difference between sex and gender to erase the misconceptions aout feminism.
ReplyDeleteThank you vaani u opened myeyes to understand the exact behavioural patterns between sex and gender.....
ReplyDelete"BIOLOGICAL DETERMINIST", ANOTHER DESIGNATION FOR WOMEN. THIS IS A QUERY WHICH HAS NOT GOT ITS ANSWER YET, MEN ARE HUMAN MALE AND WOMEN ARE HUMAN FEMALE. THAN WHYB DID THIS TOPIC ARISED?
ReplyDelete