Sex and Gender

[originally posted on my teaching blog, History Survey, on 5/28/2007]

In history the term "sex" usually refers to biological differences between male and female human beings. There is the female sex and the male sex. With rare exceptions, one's sex is a biological fact. On the other hand, the term "gender" refers to the historically and culturally contingent human constructions of what is masculine and feminine. To make things more complicated, this distinction is itself culturally and historically contingent.

Sex and gender shape human experience in fundamental ways, but how this happens varies across cultures, places, and times. We cannot make any assumptions about what is masculine and feminine. We must look for their meaning in the primary sources produced in that culture. At the same time, we must not assume that notions of masculine and feminine were universal and stable in a given culture. Competing constructions of femininity and masculinity are not just realities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They have often existed in the past too.

RECOMMENDED: Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).