Or, the sex/gender difference that is not just one?
(This post includes research from my graduate that is excellent assistant Lucia Lykke. )
Not long ago I had been corrected by another sociologist: “Phil – ‘female’ and ‘male’ refer to one’s intercourse, maybe maybe maybe not gender. ”
Feminists — including feminist sociologists — have made progress that is important drawing the conceptual difference between intercourse and sex, with intercourse the biological and gender the social groups. With this, perhaps, we could observe that gendered behavior wasn’t just a manifestation of sex groups — related to your term “sex roles” — but a socially-constructed collection of methods layered in addition to a crude biological base.
Lucia informs me personally we are able to date this to Simone de Beauvoir in the next Sex. In 1949 she penned:
It seems, then, that each feminine person is not always a female; to be therefore considered she must share for the reason that mystical and threatened truth called femininity.
Later, she added, “One is certainly not created, but instead becomes, a female. ” And also this is really what Judith Butler put straight straight down since the base of the gender/sex difference, calling it “the distinguished contribution of Simone de Beauvoir’s formulation”:
Continue reading “Why I do not defend the sex-versus-gender distinction”