Concepts of gender

The vast majority of human groups have a system of two main genders in which there are enormous differences between what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman. This dualistic gender system has often been associated with other dichotomies, such as body/spirit, public/private, nature/culture, light/dark, up/down, outside/inside, yin/yang, right/left, sun/moon.

Cultural norms about gender are more powerful than mere biology, however. In addition to the two primary genders, in some parts of the world a few individuals have been classified as a third or even fourth gender. Some of these individuals are born with ambiguous sexual and reproductive organs and occasionally they are eunuchs, but more commonly they are morpho­logically male or female but understood to be something else. Third genders include two-spirit people found among several Native American peoples, who combined - and in some cases still combine - the clothing, work, ceremonial roles, and other attributes of men and women. They also include the bissu of South Sulawesi, who carried out rituals thought to enhance and preserve the power and fertility of the rulers; the hijra of northern India, who perform blessings at marriages and the births of male children; the xanith in Oman and the mahus in Polynesia, who were morphologically male but performed women's rituals and women’s work, and others in Alaska, the Amazon region, Australia, Siberia, and elsewhere.

Third gender categories suggest that gender is fluid and malleable, but other evidence points to the power of the male/female dichotomy. Children born with ambiguous external sexual and reproductive anatomy - now termed “intersexed” - have generally not been assigned to a third gender, but categorized “male” or “female” at birth, according to the sex they most closely resembled. Since the nineteenth century this gender assignment has sometimes been reinforced by surgical procedures modifying or removing the body parts that do not fit with the chosen gender, generally shortly after birth. Although very recently such surgery has become extremely controversial, the search for an infallible marker of sex differences has continued, now involving chromo­somal and hormonal patterns. Thus dichotomous cultural norms about gender (that everyone should be a man or a woman) often determined (and continue to determine) “biological” sex, rather than the other way around.

The gender dichotomy, along with other dichotomies with which it was associated, has generally been viewed as a hierarchy, with the male linked with the stronger and more positive element in other pairs (public, culture, light, right, sun, etc.) and the female with the weaker and more negative one (private, nature, dark, left, moon, etc.). This gender hierarchy is highly variable in its intensity and manifestations, but it is found in every human group that left written records, and most that did not, including those in which there were and are individuals of third and fourth genders. It is found in every environ­mental condition, social structure, and political system. It has survived every change: every revolution, whether French, Haitian, Scientific, or Industrial, every war, religious transformation, technological development, and cultural encounter. Twentieth-century Russia provides a good example: whether under the czars or the Communists or the post-Soviet government, women still did the shopping and the housekeeping and most of the child care, adding an unpaid “second shift” to their jobs in the paid workforce; these tasks were necessary to keep society functioning, but left women no time for the things that were valued and rewarded, such as further education or political activities.

People's notions of gender shaped not only the way they thought about men and women, but the way they thought about their society in general. As the historian Joan Scott put it in an extremely influential article first published in 1986: “Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.”¹ Thus hierarchies in other realms of life were often expressed in terms of gender, with dominant individuals or groups described in masculine terms and dependent ones in feminine. These ideas in turn affected the way people acted, though explicit and symbolic ideas of gender could also conflict with the way men and women chose or were forced to operate in the world.