Page 79 - DSOC202_SOCIAL_STRATIFICATION_ENGLISH

Social Stratification

Notes The distinction is strategically important for some strands of feminist theory and politics,
particularly second wave feminism, because on it is premised the argument that gender is not
biological destiny, and that the patriarchal oppression of women is a cultural phenomenon
which need not necessarily follow from biological sexual differentiation. The distinction allows
feminists to accept some form of natural sexual difference while criticizing gender inequality.
Some third-wave feminists like Judith Butler, French feminists like Monique Wittig, and social
constructionists within sociology have disputed the biological-natural status the distinction
imputes to sex, arguing instead that both sex and gender are culturally constructed and
structurally complicit. Some feminist philosophers maintain that gender is totally undetermined
by sex.
As popularly used, sex and gender are not defined in this fashion. There has been increased
usage of the word “gender” to refer to sexual differences, because of the dual meaning of the
word “sex” as a biological feature as well as meaning the act of sexual intercourse.
Difference between Sex and Gender
Margaret Mead, an American anthropologist, was one of the first to empirically ground the
distinction between the biological and social characteristics of men and women. She did this
rather dramatically through her study of the conceptions of masculinity and femininity among
the Arapesh, Mundugamor and Tchambuli, three societies in the New Guinea Islands (Mead
1935). On the basis of this study, she argued that the Western equation between masculinity
and aggression on the one hand and femininity and nurturance on the other is but one among
a number of possible permutations of traits which have no intrinsic relation with biological
sex. Between them, the three non-Western societies studied by Mead displayed other possible
combinations of these variables. Mead’s study, though contestable on several grounds,
contributed significantly to the shaping of the concept of gender in the latter half of the twentieth
century.
The functionalist notion of ’sex role’ was also a crude precursor of the concept of gender. It
suggested that men and women are socialized into sex-specific roles, namely ‘instrumental’
and ‘expressive’. These roles were regarded as the basis of a complementary relation between
men and women, which along with the sexual division of labour, contributed to a stable social
order. Scholars have questioned the focus of this conceptualization upon ‘individual’ men and
women who are socialized into sex-specific roles. They suggest that gender is something more
than roles performed by men and women just as economy is something more than jobs
performed by individuals (Lorber, 1984). Critics have also pointed out that socialization is
always a precarious achievement and that agency, interpretation and negotiation are a part
and parcel of how gender identities are actually constituted. The distinction between ‘sex’ and
‘gender’, which came to dominate theorization in the sociology of gender in the 1970s, is
premised upon the idea of universality of’sex’ and variability of’gender’. Ann Oakley’s Sex,
Gender and Society (1972) made the sex-gender distinction very popular in sociology. For
Oakley, sex is ‘a word that refers to the biological differences between male and female : the
visible differences in genitalia, the related difference in procreative function. “Gender”, however
is a matter of culture, it refers to the social classification into “masculine” and “feminine”. The
terms (i.e. sex and gender) can be traced back to Robert Staler, an American Psychiatrist, who
used them to deal with cases of individuals whose biological ‘sex’ did not match their ‘gender’.
2. Social Construction of Gender : A social construction (social construct) is a concept or practice
that is the creation (or artifact) of a particular group. When we say that something is socially
constructed, we are focusing on its dependence on contingent variables of our social selves.
The underlying assumptions on which social constructivism is typically seen to be based are
reality, knowledge, and learning.

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