Social Construction Of Gender Summary

Gender: Biologically Determined or Socially Constructed?
In “Gender and Race”, Sally Haslanger argues that gender and race are not purely natural categories; they are socially constructed. Many feminists such as Haslanger and Beauvoir have endorsed the coatrack perspective. In their perspectives, the term sex denotes human males and females depending on biological features whereas gender denotes women and men based on social factors. This basically delegitimizes biological determinism, which is the idea that human behavior is innately determined by biology. Simone de Beauvoir sums up their viewpoint, with the famously claimed statement, that “one is not born, but rather becomes a women”. In this paper, I shall argue, in agreement with Haslanger …show more content…
In some earlier interpretations, sex and gender were looked upon as complementing each other. As in the piece, Interpreting Gender, Nicholson, states that if the body is view through the lenses of social interpretation, then sex is the underlying layer below it. This statement introduces her coatrack perspective where our sexed bodies (male or female) are the coat racks, which provides the foundations in which gender (coats) is constructed (woman or man). Although this perspective shows how these two connect, it also displays how the two can be separable where one can be sexed a female and be gendered a male or vice versa. This coatrack perspective also can apply to gender cross-culturally, where depending on context, one’s sex and gender could have different meanings. From this perspective, it shows that gender differences are not entirely biologically innate and that differences can stem from cultural practices and social expectations based on their culture. This perspective allows biology to have some role, whether it is a minor role or similar interpretations of similar …show more content…
They may feel that this opposition resembles oppositions such as mind/body, or culture/nature, where one term is usually superior to the other. In this case usually the devalued term is associated with women. Therefore, women would be the linked to the devalued term such as body and nature, which maps onto the sex portion of the sex/gender distinction. This means that women would always have some attachment to the body, reproduction, and the private realm in this case. They could argue that the sex/gender distinction could be seen as repressive for women and actually reinforce women’s association with body and sex. Overall, they may feel that although the coatrack perspective worked well to show that biological determinism is false, it is not useful when trying to determine a concrete understanding of what it means to be a woman or man in a given society. They would argue that yes, cultural and historical dimensions play a role in gender, but we cannot distinctly separate the notion of sex from gender because in order to figure out what it means to be a woman or a man, embodiment must be included. Others may also argue that sex and gender are both socially constructed being that sex is gender since although there are more than two sexes, the binary systems have become