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Femininity - Wikipedia

Femininity - Wikipedia

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1Overview and history

2Behavior and personality

3Clothing and appearance

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3.1In history

3.2Body alteration

4Traditional roles

Toggle Traditional roles subsection

4.1Explanations for occupational imbalance

4.1.1Role congruity theory

5Religion and politics

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5.1Asian religions

5.2Abrahamic theology

5.3Communism

6In men

7Feminist views

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7.1Julia Serano's transfeminist critique

8See also

9References

10External links

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Femininity

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 4 March 2024.

"Feminine" redirects here. For other uses, see Feminine (disambiguation).

Attributes associated with women

Venus with a Mirror (c. 1555) by Titian, showing the goddess Venus as the personification of femininity

Femininity (also called womanliness) is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with women and girls. Femininity can be understood as socially constructed,[1][2] and there is also some evidence that some behaviors considered feminine are influenced by both cultural factors and biological factors.[1][3][4][5] To what extent femininity is biologically or socially influenced is subject to debate.[3][4][5] It is conceptually distinct from both the female biological sex and from womanhood, as all humans can exhibit feminine and masculine traits, regardless of sex and gender.[2]

Traits traditionally cited as feminine include gracefulness, gentleness, empathy, humility, and sensitivity, though traits associated with femininity vary across societies and individuals, and are influenced by a variety of social and cultural factors.[citation needed]

Overview and history[edit]

The Birth of Venus (1486, Uffizi) is a classic representation of femininity painted by Sandro Botticelli.[6][7] Venus was a Roman goddess principally associated with love, beauty and fertility.

Despite the terms femininity and masculinity being in common usage, there is little scientific agreement about what femininity and masculinity are.[3]: 5  Among scholars, the concept of femininity has varying meanings.[8]

Professor of English Tara Williams has suggested that modern notions of femininity in English-speaking society began during the medieval period at the time of the bubonic plague in the 1300s.[9] Women in the Early Middle Ages were referred to simply within their traditional roles of maiden, wife, or widow.[9]: 4  After the Black Death in England wiped out approximately half the population, traditional gender roles of wife and mother changed, and opportunities opened up for women in society. The words femininity and womanhood are first recorded in Chaucer around 1380.[10][11]

In 1949, French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir wrote that "no biological, psychological or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society" and "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman".[12] The idea was picked up in 1959 by Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman[13] and in 1990 by American philosopher Judith Butler,[14] who theorized that gender is not fixed or inherent but is rather a socially defined set of practices and traits that have, over time, grown to become labelled as feminine or masculine.[15] Goffman argued that women are socialized to present themselves as "precious, ornamental and fragile, uninstructed in and ill-suited for anything requiring muscular exertion" and to project "shyness, reserve and a display of frailty, fear and incompetence".[16]

Scientific efforts to measure femininity and masculinity were pioneered by psychologists Lewis Terman and Catherine Cox Miles in the 1930s. Their M–F model was adopted by other researchers and psychologists. The model posited that femininity and masculinity were innate and enduring qualities, not easily measured, opposite to one another, and that imbalances between them led to mental disorders.[17]

Alongside the women's movement of the 1970s, researchers began to move away from the M–F model, developing an interest in androgyny.[17] The Bem Sex Role Inventory and the Personal Attributes Questionnaire were developed to measure femininity and masculinity on separate scales. Using such tests, researchers found that the two dimensions varied independently of one another, casting doubt on the earlier view of femininity and masculinity as opposing qualities.[17]

Second-wave feminists, influenced by de Beauvoir, believed that although biological differences between females and males were innate, the concepts of femininity and masculinity had been culturally constructed, with traits such as passivity and tenderness assigned to women and aggression and intelligence assigned to men.[18][19] Girls, second-wave feminists said, were then socialized with toys, games, television, and school into conforming to feminine values and behaviors.[18] In her significant 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, American feminist Betty Friedan wrote that the key to women's subjugation lay in the social construction of femininity as childlike, passive, and dependent,[20] and called for a "drastic reshaping of the cultural image of femininity."[21]

Behavior and personality[edit]

See also: Sex differences in psychology, Feminine psychology, and Nature versus nurture

Traits such as nurturance, sensitivity, sweetness,[8] supportiveness,[22][23] gentleness,

[23][24] warmth,[22][24] passivity, cooperativeness, expressiveness,[17] modesty, humility, empathy,[23] affection, tenderness,[22] and being emotional, kind, helpful, devoted, and understanding[24] have been cited as stereotypically feminine. The defining characteristics of femininity vary between and even within societies.[22]

Portrait of Charlotte du Val d'Ognes by Marie-Denise Villers, 1801, Metropolitan Museum of Art (possibly a self-portrait), depicts an independent feminine spirit.[25]

The relationship between feminine socialization and heterosexual relationships has been studied by scholars, as femininity is related to women's and girls' sexual appeal to men and boys.[8] Femininity is sometimes linked with sexual objectification.[26][27] Sexual passiveness, or sexual receptivity, is sometimes considered feminine while sexual assertiveness and sexual desire are sometimes considered masculine.[27]

Scholars have debated the extent to which gender identity and gender-specific behaviors are due to socialization versus biological factors.[5]: 29 [28][29] Social and biological influences are thought to be mutually interacting during development.[5]: 29 [4]: 218–225  Studies of prenatal androgen exposure have provided some evidence that femininity and masculinity are partly biologically determined.[3]: 8–9 [4]: 153–154  Other possible biological influences include evolution, genetics, epigenetics, and hormones (both during development and in adulthood).[5]: 29–31 [3]: 7–13 [4]: 153–154 

In 1959, researchers such as John Money and Anke Ehrhardt proposed the prenatal hormone theory. Their research argues that sexual organs bathe the embryo with hormones in the womb, resulting in the birth of an individual with a distinctively male or female brain; this was suggested by some to "predict future behavioral development in a masculine or feminine direction".[30] This theory, however, has been criticized on theoretical and empirical grounds and remains controversial.[31][32] In 2005, scientific research investigating sex differences in psychology showed that gender expectations and stereotype threat affect behavior, and a person's gender identity can develop as early as three years of age.[33] Money also argued that gender identity is formed during a child's first three years.[29]

People who exhibit a combination of both masculine and feminine characteristics are considered androgynous, and feminist philosophers have argued that gender ambiguity may blur gender classification.[34][35] Modern conceptualizations of femininity also rely not just upon social constructions, but upon the individualized choices made by women.[36]

Philosopher Mary Vetterling-Braggin argues that all characteristics associated with femininity arose from early human sexual encounters which were mainly male-forced and female-unwilling, because of male and female anatomical differences.[37][page needed] Others, such as Carole Pateman, Ria Kloppenborg, and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, argue that the definition of femininity is the result of how females must behave in order to maintain a patriarchal social system.[26][38]

In his 1998 book Masculinity and Femininity: the Taboo Dimension of National Cultures, Dutch psychologist and researcher Geert Hofstede wrote that only behaviors directly connected with procreation can, strictly speaking, be described as feminine or masculine, and yet every society worldwide recognizes many additional behaviors as more suitable to females than males, and vice versa. He describes these as relatively arbitrary choices mediated by cultural norms and traditions, identifying "masculinity versus femininity" as one of five basic dimensions in his theory of cultural dimensions. Hofstede describes as feminine behaviors including service, permissiveness, and benevolence, and describes as feminine those countries stressing equality, solidarity, quality of work-life, and the resolution of conflicts by compromise and negotiation.[39][40]

In Carl Jung's school of analytical psychology, the anima and animus are the two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind. The anima and animus are described by Jung as elements of his theory of the collective unconscious, a domain of the unconscious that transcends the personal psyche. In the unconscious of the male, it finds expression as a feminine inner personality: anima; equivalently, in the unconscious of the female, it is expressed as a masculine inner personality: animus.[41]

Clothing and appearance[edit]

Main articles: Physical attractiveness § Female, and Clothing § Gender differentiation

See also: Gendered associations of pink and blue

In Western cultures, the ideal of feminine appearance has traditionally included long, flowing hair, clear skin, a narrow waist, and little or no body hair or facial hair.[2][42][43] In other cultures, however, some expectations are different. For example, in many parts of the world, underarm hair is not considered unfeminine.[44] Today, the color pink is strongly associated with femininity, whereas in the early 1900s pink was associated with boys and blue with girls.[45]

These feminine ideals of beauty have been criticized as restrictive, unhealthy, and even racist.[43][46] In particular, the prevalence of anorexia and other eating disorders in Western countries has frequently been blamed on the modern feminine ideal of thinness.[47]

Muslim woman wearing a headdress (Hijab)

In many Muslim countries, women are required to cover their heads with a hijab (veil). It is considered a symbol of feminine modesty and morality.[48][49] Some, however, see it as a symbol of objectification and oppression.[50][51]

In history[edit]

In some cultures, cosmetics are associated with femininity.

Cultural standards vary on what is considered feminine. For example, in 16th century France, high heels were considered a distinctly masculine type of shoe, though they are currently considered feminine.[52][53]

In Ancient Egypt, sheath and beaded net dresses were considered female clothing, while wraparound dresses, perfumes, cosmetics, and elaborate jewelry were worn by both men and women. In Ancient Persia, clothing was generally unisex, though women wore veils and headscarves. Women in Ancient Greece wore himations; and in Ancient Rome women wore the palla, a rectangular mantle, and the maphorion.[54]

The typical feminine outfit of aristocratic women of the Renaissance was an undershirt with a gown and a high-waisted overgown, and a plucked forehead and beehive or turban-style hairdo.[54]

Body alteration[edit]

Main article: Body alteration

Body alteration is the deliberate altering of the human body for aesthetic or non-medical purpose.[55] One such purpose has been to induce perceived feminine characteristics in women.

For centuries in Imperial China, smaller feet were considered to be a more aristocratic characteristic in women. The practice of foot binding was intended to enhance this characteristic, though it made walking difficult and painful.[56][57]

In a few parts of Africa and Asia, neck rings are worn in order to elongate the neck. In these cultures, a long neck characterizes feminine beauty.[58] The Padaung of Burma and Tutsi women of Burundi, for instance, practice this form of body modification.[59][60]

In China until the twentieth century, tiny, bound feet for women were considered aristocratic and feminine.

The Kayan people of Burma (Myanmar) associate the wearing of neck rings with feminine beauty.[61]

Traditional roles[edit]

Main article: Gender roles

Teacher in a classroom in Madagascar (c. 2008). Primary and secondary school teaching is often considered a feminine occupation.

Femininity as a social construct relies on a binary gender system that treats men and masculinity as different from, and opposite to, women and femininity.[8] In patriarchal societies, including Western ones, conventional attitudes to femininity contribute to the subordination of women, as women are seen as more compliant, vulnerable, and less prone to violence.[8]

Gender stereotypes influence traditional feminine occupations, resulting in microaggression toward women who break traditional gender roles.[62] These stereotypes include that women have a caring nature, have skill at household-related work, have greater manual dexterity than men, are more honest than men, and have a more attractive physical appearance. Occupational roles associated with these stereotypes include: midwife, teacher, accountant, data entry clerk, cashier, salesperson, receptionist, housekeeper, cook, maid, social worker, and nurse.[63] Occupational segregation maintains gender inequality[64] and the gender pay gap.[65] Certain medical specializations, such as surgery and emergency medicine, are dominated by a masculine culture[66] and have a higher salary.[67][68]

Leadership is associated with masculinity in Western culture and women are perceived less favorably as potential leaders.[69] However, some people have argued that feminine-style leadership, which is associated with leadership that focuses on help and cooperation, is advantageous over masculine leadership, which is associated with focusing on tasks and control.[70] Female leaders are more often described by Western media using characteristics associated with femininity, such as emotion.[70]

Explanations for occupational imbalance[edit]

Psychologist Deborah L. Best argues that primary sex characteristics of men and women, such as the ability to bear children, caused a historical sexual division of labor and that gender stereotypes evolved culturally to perpetuate this division.[71]

The practice of bearing children tends to interrupt the continuity of employment. According to human capital theory, this retracts from the female investment in higher education and employment training. Richard Anker of the International Labour Office argues human capital theory does not explain the sexual division of labor because many occupations tied to feminine roles, such as administrative assistance, require more knowledge, experience, and continuity of employment than low-skilled masculinized occupations, such as truck driving. Anker argues the feminization of certain occupations limits employment options for women.[63]

Role congruity theory[edit]

Role congruity theory proposes that people tend to view deviations from expected gender roles negatively. It supports the empirical evidence that gender discrimination exists in areas traditionally associated with one gender or the other. It is sometimes used to explain why people have a tendency to evaluate behavior that fulfills the prescriptions of a leader role less favorably when it is enacted by a woman.[72][73][74][75][76]

Religion and politics[edit]

The Altai consider shamanism a feminine role.[77]

Asian religions[edit]

Shamanism may have originated as early as the Paleolithic period, predating all organized religions.[78][79] Archeological finds have suggested that the earliest known shamans were female,[80] and contemporary shamanic roles such as the Korean mudang continue to be filled primarily by women.[81][82]

In Hindu traditions, Devi is the female aspect of the divine. Shakti is the divine feminine creative power, the sacred force that moves through the entire universe[83] and the agent of change. She is the female counterpart without whom the male aspect, which represents consciousness or discrimination, remains impotent and void. As the female manifestation of the supreme lord, she is also called Prakriti, the basic nature of intelligence by which the Universe exists and functions. In Hinduism, the universal creative force Yoni is feminine, with inspiration being the life force of creation.

Yin and yang

In Taoism, the concept of yin represents the primary force of the female half of yin and yang. The yin is also present, to a smaller proportion, in the male half. The yin can be characterized as slow, soft, yielding, diffuse, cold, wet, and passive.[84]

Abrahamic theology[edit]

Holy Wisdom: Hagia Sophia

Although the Abrahamic God is typically described in masculine terms—such as father or king—many theologians argue that this is not meant to indicate the gender of God.[85] According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, God "is neither man nor woman: he is God".[86] Several recent writers, such as feminist theologian Sallie McFague, have explored the idea of "God as mother", examining the feminine qualities attributed to God. For example, in the Book of Isaiah, God is compared to a mother comforting her child, while in the Book of Deuteronomy, God is said to have given birth to Israel.[85]

The Book of Genesis describes the divine creation of the world out of nothing or ex nihilo. In Wisdom literature and in the wisdom tradition, wisdom is described as feminine. In many books of the Old Testament, including Wisdom and Sirach, wisdom is personified and called she. According to David Winston, because wisdom is God's "creative agent," she must be intimately identified with God.[87]

The Wisdom of God is feminine in Hebrew: Chokhmah, in Arabic: Hikmah, in Greek: Sophia, and in Latin: Sapientia. In Hebrew, both Shekhinah (the Holy Spirit and divine presence of God) and Ruach HaKodesh (divine inspiration) are feminine.[citation needed]

In Christian Kabbalah, Chokhmah (wisdom and intuition) is the force in the creative process that God used to create the heavens and the earth. Binah (understanding and perception) is the great mother, the feminine receiver of energy and giver of form. Binah receives the intuitive insight from Chokhmah and dwells on it in the same way that a mother receives the seed from the father, and keeps it within her until it's time to give birth. The intuition, once received and contemplated with perception, leads to the creation of the Universe.[88]

Communism[edit]

Porcelain statue of a woman in communist China - Cat Street Market, Hong Kong

Communist revolutionaries initially depicted idealized womanhood as muscular, plainly dressed and strong,[89] with good female communists shown as undertaking hard manual labour, using guns, and eschewing self-adornment.[90] Contemporary Western journalists portrayed communist states as the enemy of traditional femininity, describing women in communist countries as "mannish" perversions.[91][92] In revolutionary China in the 1950s, Western journalists described Chinese women as "drably dressed, usually in sloppy slacks and without makeup, hair waves or nail polish" and wrote that "Glamour was communism's earliest victim in China. You can stroll the cheerless streets of Peking all day, without seeing a skirt or a sign of lipstick; without thrilling to the faintest breath of perfume; without hearing the click of high heels, or catching the glint of legs sheathed in nylon."[93][94] In communist Poland, changing from high heels to worker's boots symbolized women's shift from the bourgeois to socialism."[95]

Later, the initial state portrayals of idealized femininity as strong and hard-working began to also include more traditional notions such as gentleness, caring and nurturing behaviour, softness, modesty and moral virtue,[89][96]: 53  requiring good communist women to become "superheroes who excelled in all spheres", including working at jobs not traditionally regarded as feminine in nature.[96]: 55–60 

Communist ideology explicitly rejected some aspects of traditional femininity that it viewed as bourgeois and consumerist, such as helplessness, idleness and self-adornment. In Communist countries, some women resented not having access to cosmetics and fashionable clothes. In her 1993 book of essays How We Survived Communism & Even Laughed, Croatian journalist and novelist Slavenka Drakulic wrote about "a complaint I heard repeatedly from women in Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, Sofia, East Berlin: 'Look at us – we don't even look like women. There are no deodorants, perfumes, sometimes even no soap or toothpaste. There is no fine underwear, no pantyhose, no nice lingerie[']"[97] : 31  and "Sometimes I think the real Iron Curtain is made of silky, shiny images of pretty women dressed in wonderful clothes, of pictures from women's magazines ... The images that cross the borders in magazines, movies or videos are therefore more dangerous than any secret weapon, because they make one desire that 'otherness' badly enough to risk one's life trying to escape."[97] : 28–9 

As communist countries such as Romania and the Soviet Union began to liberalize, their official media began representing women in more conventionally feminine ways compared with the "rotund farm workers and plain-Jane factory hand" depictions they had previously been publishing. As perfumes, cosmetics, fashionable clothing, and footwear became available to ordinary women in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia and Hungary, they began to be presented not as bourgeois frivolities but as signs of socialist modernity.[98] In China, with the economic liberation started by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, the state stopped discouraging women from expressing conventional femininity, and gender stereotypes and commercialized sexualization of women which had been suppressed under communist ideology began to rise.[99]

In men[edit]

See also: Effeminacy

Flowers and makeup are stereotypically associated with femininity in Western culture.[100][101]

In many cultures, men who display qualities considered feminine are often stigmatized and labeled as weak.[8] Effeminate men are often associated with homosexuality,[102][103] although femininity is not necessarily related to a man's sexual orientation.[104] Because men are pressured to be masculine and heterosexual, feminine men are assumed to be gay or queer because of how they perform their gender. This assumption limits the way one is allowed to express one's gender and sexuality.[105][106]

Cross-dressing and drag are two public performances of femininity by men that have been popularly known and understood throughout many western cultures. Men who wear clothing associated with femininity are often called cross-dressers.[107] A drag queen is a man who wears flamboyant women's clothing and behaves in an exaggeratedly feminine manner for entertainment purposes.

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See also: Feminism

Feminist philosophers such as Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir[108] contend that femininity and masculinity are created through repeated performances of gender; these performances reproduce and define the traditional categories of sex and/or gender.[109]

Many second-wave feminists reject what they regard as constricting standards of female beauty, created for the subordination and objectifying of women and self-perpetuated by reproductive competition and women's own aesthetics.[110]

Others, such as lipstick feminists and some other third-wave feminists, argue that feminism should not devalue feminine culture and identity, and that symbols of feminine identity such as make-up, suggestive clothing and having a sexual allure can be valid and empowering personal choices for both sexes.[111][112]

Julia Serano notes that masculine girls and women face much less social disapproval than feminine boys and men, which she attributes to sexism. Serano argues that women wanting to be like men is consistent with the idea that maleness is more valued in contemporary culture than femaleness, whereas men being willing to give up masculinity in favour of femininity directly threatens the notion of male superiority as well as the idea that men and women should be opposites. To support her thesis, Serano cites the far greater public scrutiny and disdain experienced by male-to-female cross-dressers compared with that faced by women who dress in masculine clothes, as well as research showing that parents are likelier to respond negatively to sons who like Barbie dolls and ballet or wear nail polish than they are to daughters exhibiting comparably masculine behaviours.[113]: 284–292 

Julia Serano's transfeminist critique[edit]

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In her 2007 book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, American transsexual writer and biologist Julia Serano offers a transfeminist critique of femininity, notable especially for its call to empower femininity:[113][114]

Serano notes that some behaviors, such as frequent smiling or avoiding eye contact with strangers, are considered feminine because they are practised disproportionately by women, and likely have resulted from women's attempts to negotiate through a world which is sometimes hostile to them.[113]: 322 

Serano argues that because contemporary culture is sexist, it assigns negative connotations to, or trivializes, behaviours understood to be feminine such as gossiping, behaving emotionally or decorating. It also recasts and reimagines femininity through a male heterosexual lens, for example interpreting women's empathy and altruism as husband-and-child-focused rather than globally focused, and interpreting women's interest in aesthetics as intended solely to entice or attract men.[113]: 327–8 

See also[edit]

Feminine psychology

Feminism

Feminization (sociology)

Effeminacy

Gender role

Gender studies

Marianismo

Masculinity

Nature versus nurture

Sociology of gender

Transfeminine

References[edit]

^ a b Shehan, Constance L. (2018). Gale Researcher Guide for: The Continuing Significance of Gender. Gale, Cengage Learning. pp. 1–5. ISBN 9781535861175.

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^ a b c d e Martin, Hale; Finn, Stephen E. (2010). Masculinity and Femininity in the MMPI-2 and MMPI-A. University of Minnesota Press. pp. 5–13. ISBN 978-0-8166-2444-7.

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^ Barbara Tedlock The woman in the shaman's body: reclaiming the feminine in religion and medicine, Random House Digital, Inc., 2005

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^ Karl J. Narr. "Prehistoric religion". Britannica Online Encyclopedia 2008. Archived from the original on April 14, 2015. Retrieved March 28, 2008.

^ Tedlock, Barbara. 2005. The Woman in the Shaman's Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine. New York: Bantam.

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^ a b Fawn, Rick; White, Stephen, eds. (2002). Russia after Communism (1 ed.). London: Cass. ISBN 0714652938.

^ a b Drakulić, Slavenka (2003). How we Survived Communism and even Laughed (1. HarperPerennial ed., repr. ed.). New York: HarperPerennial. ISBN 0060975407.

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^ Halpern, Diane F. and Fanny M. Cheung (2010). Women at the Top: Powerful Leaders Tell Us How to Combine Work and Family. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1405171052.

^ Elias, Ann (2015). Useless Beauty: Flowers and Australian Art. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 45. ISBN 978-1-4438-8457-0. On a global scale, flowers have not only defined femininity but the history of representations of flowers in art has underpinned differences in the sexual categories of masculine and feminine.

^ Beausoleil, Natalie (1994). "Makeup in Everyday Life". In Sault, Nicole (ed.). Many Mirrors: Body Image and Social Relations. Rutgers University Press. p. 33. ISBN 978-0-8135-2080-3. Among everyday appearance practices in contemporary Western society, 'visible' makeup clearly marks the production of 'womanhood' and 'femininity': overall, women are the ones who wear makeup, men do not.

^ "Why do gays fall for straights?" The Advocate, February 17, 1998, 72 pages, No. 753, ISSN 0001-8996, Published by Here Publishing

^ Pezzote, Angelo Straight Acting: Gay Men, Masculinity and Finding True Love, Kensington Publishing Corp., 2008, ISBN 0-7582-1943-1, ISBN 978-0-7582-1943-5

^ Hill, Darryl B (2006). "Feminine" Heterosexual Men: Subverting Heteropatriarchal Sexual Scripts?". Journal of Men's Studies. 14 (2): 145–59. doi:10.3149/jms.1402.145 (inactive January 31, 2024). S2CID 145293218.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2024 (link)

^ Taywaditep, Kittiwut Jod (2001). "Marginalization Among the Marginalized: Gay Men's Anti-Effeminacy Attitudes". Journal of Homosexuality. 42 (1): 1–28. doi:10.1300/j082v42n01_01. PMID 11991561. S2CID 9163739.

^ Fellows, Will, A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture, University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, ISBN 0-299-19684-4, ISBN 978-0-299-19684-4

^ cross-dress." The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004.

^ van den Wijngaard (1997), p. 4.

^ Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York; Routledge.

^ "Sally Feldman – Heights of madness". New Humanist. May 7, 2008. Retrieved November 13, 2011.

^ Scanlon, Jennifer, Bad girls go everywhere: the life of Helen Gurley Brown, Oxford University Press US, 2009, ISBN 0-19-534205-4, ISBN 978-0-19-534205-5

^ Joanne Hollows; Rachel Moseley (February 17, 2006). Feminism in popular culture. Berg Publishers. p. 84. ISBN 978-1-84520-223-1. https://books.google.com/books?

^ a b c d Serano, Julia (2007). Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Berkeley: Seal Press. ISBN 978-1580051545. Until feminists work to empower femininity and pry it away from the insipid, inferior meanings that plague it – weakness, helplessness, fragility, passivity, frivolity, and artificiality – those meanings will continue to haunt every person who is female and/or feminine.

^ Rasmussen, Debbie (2007). "Risk: Feminine Protection (interview with Julia Serano)". Bitch. Archived from the original on September 15, 2013. Retrieved 15 August 2013. The rising visibility of trans, intersex, and genderqueer movements has led feminists—and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the world—to an increasing awareness that m and f are only the beginning of the story of gender identity. With the release of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, Julia Serano offers a perspective sorely needed, but up until now rarely heard: a transfeminine critique of both feminist and mainstream understandings of gender.

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FEMININITY | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary

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the fact or quality of having characteristics that are traditionally thought to be typical of or suitable for a woman: Long hair was traditionally regarded as a sign of femininity. The flowers and cream lace of the dress indicate femininity and delicacy. See

feminine

More examplesFewer examplesParents should be careful about the notions of masculinity and femininity they convey to their children.She feels that working women should not be reluctant to express their femininity.Her soft voice and gentle femininity made her a favourite leading lady in his films.

(Definition of femininity from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press)

Examples of femininity

femininity

They experienced their clothes and appearance as expressive, and closely linked to a sense of their own femininity.

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Thus, men repress their own feelings, devalue femininity because of its emotional side, are afraid of women and disappointing in their relationships with them.

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As her legs became emancipated, markers of her femininity migrated upwards, making her another ambiguous creature.

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Parisian consumption was the opposite, oriented not towards male activity, but towards a consumerism controlled by a femininity that distracted men from productive work.

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The second part concentrated more specifically on exploring their understandings of masculinity and femininity in relation to soldiering.

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Since the late 1970s, critics intrigued by the idea that music can enact gender, have heard their music as somehow embodying femininity.

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The association of masculinity with the cerebral and femininity with the physical perhaps explains women's exclusion from credibility on these grounds.

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These have in common declining social status and degradation of selfimage, as the cultural ideal, youthful femininity, can no longer be met.

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This global interpretation, which is not based in contextualized empirical analysis, assumes a direct mapping among discourse, femininity, and powerlessness.

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Certainly, she rejected - or possibly never even considered - using her femininity to personal and political advantage.

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It is the intersection of assertions of femininity with cultural, class and racial identity which would have enriched this chapter beyond the discussion of dress.

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And, conversely, histories of motherhood - and femininity - seemed so much more important in the development of new gender ideologies and practices.

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Each song draws the listener into an image of femininity while threatening assumptions hinted at in the lyrics.

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Offering formal training for teaching, which implied that women needed to be taught to teach, endangered this understanding of femininity.

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More generally, it reflects the dualistic opposition of masculinity versus femininity and mind versus body that is so prevalent in our culture.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

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These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

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Masculinity vs Femininity: Similarities and Differences (2024)

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Masculinity vs Femininity: Similarities and DifferencesBy

Chris Drew (PhD)

/ October 18, 2023 /

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The distinction between masculinity and femininity primarily concerns societal expectations, behaviors, and social roles typically associated with males and females.

The differences relate to social and cultural understandings about the social behaviors and roles of these two genders, whereas the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ relate to biological understandings of biological sexes.

For a brief introduction, these are the two binary gender identities:

Femininity typically embodies traits related to nurturing, emotional expression, and collaboration (Basow, 1992). Women, for example, are often expected to show more emotion, communicate effectively and non-aggressively, and prioritize nurturing relationships over assertive behavior. Think about a typical film character who is nurturing her children (e.g., Mrs. Doubtfire’s character), or a woman leading a team through conflict resolution rather than dominance.

Masculinity tends to align with traits such as assertiveness, independence, and dominance (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2015). Men are often encouraged to suppress emotion, strive for independence and display assertiveness or even aggressiveness. A real-world example might be a Hollywood action hero, physically strong and emotionally guarded (e.g., James Bond).

As these descriptors are cultural descriptions of expected behaviors, they are not strictly connected to the genders. For example, many women can, and do, exhibit masculine traits to a greater or lesser extent. As such, these traits are seen as socially constructed, and extensive research underscores the spectrum of masculine and feminine behaviors rather than rigidly dichotomous categories.

Contents

show

Masculinity vs Femininity

Masculinity

Masculinity Examples

Femininity

Femininity Examples

Table of Differences Between Femininity and Masculinity

Cultural Variations in Masculine and Feminine Stereotypes

Conclusion

References

Masculinity vs Femininity

Masculinity

Masculinity refers to the qualities, characteristics or roles conventionally associated with men (Kimmel & Aronson, 2011).

Traditionally, many societies value traits such as strength, aggression, and independence in men. These are often internalized by children through media and parental expectations in a process called gender socialization.

Masculinity is not limited to men, as women can, and often do, exhibit masculine traits.

Gender theorists have also explored the concept of “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2015), which refers to a particular configuration of practice that legitimizes men’s dominant position in society and justifies the subordination of women, and other marginalized ways of being male.

An instance demonstrating this can be seen in most superhero movies like “Superman” where the male lead character is depicted as physically dominant, emotionally detached and rescues those in trouble.

See also: Toxic Masculinity Definition and Examples

However, it is vital not to oversimplify or stereotype these traits.

Modern perspectives of masculinity emphasize plurality, intersectionality and fluid dynamics (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014). Plurality suggests that there are many ways to express masculinity, not just a rigid stereotype.

For example, consider the trend of stay-at-home dads, which reflects a valid expression of masculinity contrary to the societal norm. Intersectionality discusses how different factors such as race, class, age or sexual orientation interact with masculinity, which results in varied experiences of it.

The fluid nature of masculinity underscores that it can change within an individual over time due to numerous factors including personal growth or cultural shifts.

Masculinity Examples

The following are traits traditionally associated with hegemonic masculinity. Please note that these are generalized, traditional, and often outdated stereotypes, and do not necessarily apply to every individual.

Physical Strength: Men are often judged by their physical capabilities, such as their strength, endurance, and athletic prowess (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014). An example would be professional athletes like Usain Bolt who are renowned for their physical abilities.

Emotional Control: Men are typically encouraged to suppress their emotions as a sign of strength (Kimmel & Aronson, 2011). Consider the phrase “real men don’t cry,” which discourages emotional vulnerability.

Sexual Prowess: Successfully attracting sexual partners can be seen as a measure of masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2015). For example, fictional characters like James Bond are portrayed as overwhelmingly attractive to women.

Competitiveness: Often, masculinity is associated with the need to compete and win (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014). Corporate leaders like Elon Musk and his competition with other billionaires in the space industry exemplify this.

Dominance: Exerting control in social situations is often seen as a masculine trait (Kimmel & Aronson, 2011). This can be seen in team leaders, such as football captains, who direct and guide their team.

Stoicism: Preserving composure in the face of adversity is considered a masculine virtue (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2015). For example, firefighters remaining calm in dangerous situations.

Financial Independence: Masculinity is often associated with earning power and economic independence (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014). Successful businessmen like Warren Buffett exemplify this trait.

Authority: Men who wield authority, either at home or at work, are often seen as embodying masculinity (Kimmel & Aronson, 2011). Historic world leaders, such as Winston Churchill, can serve as examples.

Autonomy: Emphasizing self-reliance and independence is a commonly upheld masculine trait (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2015). Backpackers traveling alone through challenging terrains embody this characteristic.

Risk-Taking: Men are often expected to be adventurous and willing to confront danger (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014). This trait can be seen in adrenaline pursuits such as skydiving or bungee jumping.

See More Masculinity Examples Here

Femininity

Femininity, fundamentally, characterizes traits, roles, and behaviors typically associated with women in a given society (Brown & Gilligan, 2013).

Traits associated with femininity often include nurturing, empathy, sensitivity, and non-aggressive communication.

As with masculinity, the construct of femininity extends beyond women, as men can, and often do, embody these traits.

Examining femininity critically, it is often linked to the private sphere and associated with the nurturing and caring roles (Lemon, 2016).

These expectations are often structured around homemaking, child-rearing, and other forms of emotional labor.

An example of this expectation might be a character like Marmee March in “Little Women,” who embodies the loving, nurturing, and domestic qualities associated with traditional ideas of femininity.

Contrary to past stereotypical portrayals, modern understandings of femininity acknowledge its complex and diverse nature (Brown & Gilligan, 2013). Femininity is not monolithic; instead, it intersects with other identity aspects such as race, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation, leading to varying expressions and experiences.

A contemporary portrayal of femininity may include a Fortune 500 CEO who leads with compassion and empathy, effectively blending traits typically associated with both femininity and masculinity.

This underscores the emergence of a more fluid understanding of femininity that resists binary categorizations.

Femininity Examples

The following are traits traditionally associated with femininity. Please note that these are generalized, traditional, and often outdated stereotypes, and do not necessarily apply to every individual:

Emotional Openness: Women are typically expected to be more open with their emotions (Brown & Gilligan, 2013). A well-known movie character who embodies this would be Julia Roberts’ character in ‘Steel Magnolias’, who readily shares her feelings with those around her.

Nurturing Behavior: Femininity is often associated with nurturing and caring for others (Lemon, 2016). An example can be seen in the role of Florence Nightingale, historically known for her caring nature and dedication to nursing.

Empathy: Empathy, or the understanding and sharing of others’ feelings, is traditionally seen as a feminine trait. A famous example could be Mother Teresa and her profound empathy for the less fortunate.

Verbal Communication: Women are often associated with verbal skills and are often expected to be conversationally engaging (Brown & Gilligan, 2013). Oprah Winfrey, a noted television host and interviewer, is an example who uses these skills masterfully.

Cooperation: Societal expectations often associate femininity with cooperative and collaborative work. An example could be seen in team projects in any professional setting where female team members work constructively to reach a common goal.

Modesty: Cultural norms often link modesty, or humility, with femininity. For instance, Aung San Suu Kyi is often praised for her modest approach in leading her political movement.

Concern for Appearance: Attention to personal grooming and appearance is often associated with femininity. One real-world example is the flourishing beauty and fashion industry largely catering to women.

Flexibility: Adaptability and flexibility, especially emotional, are commonly viewed as feminine traits (Lemon, 2016). An example is evident in many working mothers who juggle multiplicity of roles and adapt to changing circumstances.

Patience: Historically, patience has often been hailed as a feminine virtue. An example could be a teacher like Maria Montessori, who demonstrated patience in her innovative approach to education.

Gracefulness: Gracefulness, such as in movement, manners, or style, is often ascribed to femininity. Many female dancers, like Misty Copeland, embody this trait through their performances.

See More Femininity Examples Here

Table of Differences Between Femininity and Masculinity

MasculinityFemininityTypical Gender StereotypesStrong, assertive, independent, competitive, emotionally reserved.Gentle, nurturing, cooperative, sensitive, emotionally expressive.Roles in Society (traditional view)Expected to be providers, protectors, leaders, decision-makers.Expected to be caregivers, supporters, followers, empathetic listeners.Emotional ExpressionTraditionally discouraged from showing emotions (except anger). Often told to “man up”.Encouraged to express emotions freely. Associated with empathy and compassion.CommunicationDirect, assertive. Prefers to solve problems independently.Indirect, cooperative. Prefers collaboration and discussion.Occupations (traditional view)Careers in politics, science, engineering, military, business.Careers in nursing, teaching, social work, fashion, beauty.Relationship to PowerMore likely to seek power, assert dominance, and take up space.Traditionally less likely to seek power, often adopting supportive or subordinate roles.Physical Appearance (traditional view)Muscular, tall, short hair, less emphasis on clothing and accessories.Soft, petite, long hair, more emphasis on clothing, makeup, and accessories.

This table reflects traditional views on masculinity and femininity. It is important to understand that individuals may identify with traits from both columns or none at all, and that’s perfectly okay.

It’s also crucial to recognize that societal views on gender are changing, with many societies moving towards more fluid understandings of gender roles and characteristics.

Cultural Variations in Masculine and Feminine Stereotypes

Cultural differences in gender norms play a significant role in shaping perceptions of masculinity and femininity (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2015). In fact, some cultures even have multiple different types of genders.

Essentially, what is considered masculine or feminine can vary greatly from one culture to another. Such cultural ideals are deeply embedded and shape individual behavior, identities, and societal norms at large.

In some societies, the concept of masculinity is strictly tied to physical strength, stoicism, and economic prowess (Maass et al., 2016). For instance, in many traditional societies, manual labor and physical strength define a man’s masculinity.

On the contrary, in other societies, mental strength, emotional intelligence, and the ability to provide for the family define masculinity. An example might be the difference in expression of masculinity between the Maasai warriors of Kenya, whose rites of passage include lion hunting, and men in Scandinavian cultures, where gender equality and shared household work is emphasized.

Femininity, as well, can exhibit significant cultural variation.

In some cultures, femininity is tied to domesticity, gentleness, and passivity (Maass et al., 2016). For instance, in many fundamentalist and deeply conservative societies, women’s roles are traditionally restricted to the private sphere: homemaking, child-rearing, etc.

However, in other cultures, femininity can also be associated with strength, leadership, and independence. The Mosuo culture in China, for instance, is a matrilineal society where women are heads of households, and their economic and social status are more prominent, challenging traditional notions of femininity.

See Also: 10 Types of Masculinity

Conclusion

Masculinity and femininity are fluid constructs, molded by cultural norms, values, and historical contexts. Therefore, they are subject to continuous change and redefinition.

References

Basow, S. A. (1992). Gender: Stereotypes and roles. Thomson Brooks/Cole Publishing Co.

Bridges, T., & Pascoe, C. J. (2014). Exploring masculinities: Identity, inequality, continuity, and change. Oxford University Press.

Brown, L. M., & Gilligan, C. (2013). Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development. Harvard University Press. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.151.2.281

Connell, R., & Messerschmidt, J. (2015). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender & Society, 19(6), 829-859. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243205278639

Kimmel, M., & Aronson, A. (2011). The gendered society. Oxford University Press.

Lemon, R. (2016). “Femininity” as a Barrier to Positive Sexual Health for Adolescent Girls. Journal of Adolescent Health, 59(2), 154-159.

Maass, V. S., Cadinu, M., Guarnieri, G., & Grasselli, A. (2016). Sexual harassment under social identity threat: The computer harassment paradigm. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 75(5), 1245–1261. Doi: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0022-3514.85.5.853

O’Neil, M. (2013). Men’s and Women’s Gender Role Journeys: Metaphor for Healing, Transition, and Transformation. Springer Publishing Company.

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Sociology » Sociology of Gender » Femininity and MasculinityFemininity and Masculinity

Femininity and masculinity are acquired social identities: as individuals become socialized they develop a gender identity, an understanding of what it means to be a ‘‘man’’ or a ‘‘woman’’ (Laurie et al. 1999). How individuals develop an understanding of their gender identity, including whether or not they fit into these prescribed gender roles, depends upon the context within which they are socialized and how they view themselves in relation to societal gender norms. Class, racial, ethnic, and national factors play heavily into how individuals construct their gender identities and how they are perceived externally (hooks 2004). Gender identities are often naturalized; that is, they rely on a notion of biological difference, ‘‘so that ‘natural’ femininity [in a white, European, middle class context] encompasses, for example, motherhood, being nurturing, a desire for pretty clothes and the exhibition of emotions’’ (Laurie et al. 1999: 3). ‘‘Natural’’ masculinity, in contrast, may encompass fatherhood, acting ‘‘tough,’’ a desire for sports and competition, and hiding emotions (Connell 1997; Thompson 2000). In both cases, these constructions of gender identity are based on stereotypes that fall within the range of normative femininities and masculinities. Yet, as many sociologists have pointed out, not all individuals fit within these prescribed norms and as such, masculinities and femininities must be recognized as socially constituted, fluid, wide ranging, and historically and geographically differentiated (Connell 1997; Halberstam 1998; Laurie et al. 1999).

Feminist scholars have long addressed the social construction of femininities, particularly in the context of gender inequality and power (Lorber 1994). Early second wave feminist scholars such as Simone de Beauvoir (1980) argued that women’s subordinated status in western societies was due to socialization rather than to any essential biological gender difference, as evidenced in her often cited phrase, ‘‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’’ Many feminist scholars in Anglo Saxon and European countries have emphasized social construction over biological difference as an explanation for women’s ways of being, acting, and knowing in the world and for their related gender subordination (Gilligan 1993). Some feminist scholars have addressed the social construction of femininities as a way to explain wage inequality, the global ‘‘feminization of poverty,’’ and women’s relegation to ‘‘feminine’’ labor markets (e.g., secretarial labor, garment industry, caring labor) and to the so called private realm of the household and family (Folbre 2001). Because feminists were primarily concerned with the question of women’s subordination, masculinities themselves were rarely analyzed except in cases where scholars sought an explanation for male aggression or power. Likewise, hegemonic femininity was emphasized over alternative femininities such that the experiences of women who did not fit into socially prescribed gender roles were either left unexamined or viewed through the normative lens of gender dualisms (Halberstam 1998).

Particularly since the 1980s, at least three areas of research on gender identity have helped shift the debate on femininities and masculinities: (1) masculinity studies, which emerged primarily in the 1980s and 1990s; (2) queer studies and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) studies, including the pivotal research of Butler (1990); and (3) gender, race, ethnic, and postcolonial studies, a trajectory of scholarship in which researchers have long critiqued hegemonic forms of masculinity and femininity on the basis that these racialized constructions helped reinforce the criminalization and subordination of racial/ethnic minorities in industrialized societies and the colonization of both men and women in poor and/or nonwestern regions.

In contrast to feminist scholarship that focused primarily on women’s experiences with femininity, Connell’s (1987) research on ‘‘hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity’’ was among the first to systematically analyze both sets of constructions as they contribute to global gender inequality. Connell argues ‘‘hegemonic masculinity,’’ a type of masculinity oriented toward accommodating the interests and desires of men, forms the basis of patriarchal social orders. Similarly, ‘‘emphasized femininity,’’ a hegemonic form of femininity, is ‘‘defined around compliance with [female] sub ordination and is oriented to accommodating the interests and desires of men’’ (p. 23). Borrowing from Gramsci’s analysis of class hegemony and struggle, Connell develops a framework for understanding multiple competing masculinities and femininities. He argues that hegemonic masculinity is always constructed in relation to various subordinated masculinities as well as in relation to women. Thus, for example, non-European, poor, non-white, and/or gay men tend to experience subordinated masculinities, whereas men of middle class European, white, and/or heterosexual backgrounds tend to benefit from the privileges of hegemonic masculinity.

Especially since the 1980s, scholars of masculinity studies have produced innovative research on various aspects of men’s lives and experiences. Messner (1992), for example, examines men’s identifications with sports as an example of how masculinities are constructed and maintained. Messner analyzes the ‘‘male viewer’’ of today’s most popular spectator sports in terms of the mythology and symbolism of masculine identification: common themes he encounters in his research include patriotism, militarism, violence, and meritocracy. Scholars of gay masculinities have addressed how gay men of various ethnic, racial, class, and national backgrounds have negotiated hegemonic masculinity, sometimes in contradictory ways, and constructed alternative masculinities through their everyday lives (Messner 1997).

Importantly, research on hegemonic masculinities sheds light on how and why masculinity has been largely ‘‘invisible’’ in the lives of men who benefit from hegemonic masculinity and in the field of women’s/gender studies, which tends to focus on the experiences of women. Although there are obvious reasons why the field of women’s/gender studies has focused primarily on women, since women experience gender inequalities more than men, scholars increasingly have pointed out that male socialization processes and identities, as well as masculinist institutions and theories, should be examined as a way to rethink gender inequality. As Kimmel (2002) notes: ‘‘The ‘invisibility’ of masculinity in discussions of [gender] has political dimensions. The processes that confer privilege on one group and not another group are often invisible to those upon whom that privilege is conferred. Thus, not having to think about race is one of the luxuries of being white, just as not having to think about gender is one of the ‘patriarchal dividends’ of gender inequality.’’

Judith Butler’s research on gender performativity has opened space for discussion about the naturalized linking of gender identity, the body, and sexual desire. Butler (1990) argues feminism has made a mistake by trying to assert that ‘‘women’’ are a group with common characteristics and interests. Like socio biologists, feminists who rely exclusively on a sociocultural explanation of gender identity construction also fall prey to essentialism. Many individuals, especially those who define as ‘‘queer’’ or as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans gendered, do not experience gender identity, embodiment, and sexual desire through the dominant norms of gender and heterosexuality. Influenced by Foucault, Butler suggests, like Connell, that certain cultural configurations of gender have seized a hegemonic hold. She calls for subversive action in the present: ‘‘gender trouble,’’ the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of genders, and therefore identity. This idea of identity as free floating and not connected to an ‘‘essence’’ is one of the key ideas expressed in queer theory (EGS 2005).

Butler and other queer theorists have addressed how normative femininities and masculinities play a role in disciplining the lives of LGBT individuals. Halberstam’s (1998) research addresses constructions of ‘‘female masculinity’’ and argues that scholars must separate discussions of gender identity (e.g., masculinities, femininities) from discussions of the body. Women can ‘‘act masculine’’ just as men can ‘‘act feminine’’; how individuals identify in terms of their gender is not and should not be linked to their biological anatomies, however defined. Halberstam’s own research addresses how masculine identified women experience gender, the stratification of masculinities (e.g., ‘‘heroic’’ vs. alternative masculinities), and the public emergence of other genders. Other scholars have examined how medical and scientific institutions have managed normative gender (and sexual) identities through psychological protocols and surgical intervention (Fausto Sterling 2000). This type of research points toward a broader understanding of gender that places dualistic conceptions of ‘‘masculine’’ vs. ‘‘feminine’’ and ‘‘male’’ vs. ‘‘female’’ into question.

Scholars of race, ethnic, and postcolonial studies have addressed how normative femininities and masculinities, which tend to benefit those with racial/ethnic privilege, help rein force a racialized social order in which subordinated groups are demasculinized or feminized in ways that maintain their racial/ethnic sub ordination in society. One example involves the stereotyping of African American men as unruly and hypersexual. The ‘‘myth of the male rapist,’’ as Davis (2001) has discussed, has played a highly destructive role in black men’s lives and has influenced legal, political, and social actions toward them, including their disproportionate criminalization for rape, often based on fraudulent charges. Another example concerns immigrant men racialized as minorities in the US. Thai (2002) illustrates how working class Vietnamese American men have developed innovative strategies to achieve higher status in their communities by marrying middle to upper class Vietnamese women and bringing them to the US. Faced with few marriage options and low paying jobs in the US, working class Vietnamese American men who experience a form of subordinated masculinity seek upward mobility through these transnational marriage networks.

Women of color in the US and working class women in developing countries also face unequal access to hegemonic femininity, as defined in western terms. Hill Collins (2004) addresses how African American women have been hypersexualized in US popular culture, thereby placing them outside the realm of normative femininity according to hegemonic white, western standards. Postcolonial studies scholars have demonstrated how poor women in developing regions (particularly non-white women) have been sexualized by male tourists from industrialized countries and sometimes also by local men (Freeman 2001). More broadly, scholars of masculinities and/or femininities have pointed out how constructions of masculinities and femininities are embedded in social institutions (e.g., the state, economy, nation, educational system) and processes (e.g., social welfare policy, globalization, colonization, political campaigns, popular culture, everyday life) and shape individuals’ everyday experiences and gendered self-perceptions (Connell 1987, 1997; Laurie et al. 1999; Free man 2001; Hill Collins 2004).

Critics have defended normative femininity and masculinity on religious, moral, and/or biological grounds. Some, for example, have argued that these social norms (what Connell would call hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity) are ‘‘naturally’’ aligned with men’s and women’s assumed biological roles in reproduction and/or with their assumed heterosexual desire (see Lorber 1994; Messner 1997). On all sides of the ideological spectrum, individuals have participated in interesting political responses and social movements that either embrace or challenge dominant societal constructions of masculinity and femininity. Some women have joined feminist movements and challenged traditional notions of femininity; whereas other women have joined right wing women’s movements that embrace

traditional gender roles and identities (e.g., Concerned Women for America). Men have formed feminist men’s movements, based largely on the principles of women’s feminist movements, as well as movements to embrace traditional notions of fatherhood, as in the divergent examples of the Christian based (and largely white, middle class) Promise Keepers and the Million Man Marches, first organized in 1995 by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and attended by over 800,000 African American men as part of a movement to reclaim black masculinity (Messner 1997).

Future research on femininities and masculinities will likely be influenced by the recent scholarship in the fields of masculinity studies, queer theory and LGBT studies, and race, ethnic, and postcolonial studies. Although scholars vary in their disciplinary backgrounds and methodological approaches to the study of femininities and masculinities, most would agree that femininities and masculinities can be seen as sets of rules or norms that govern female and male behavior, appearance, and self-image

References:

Butler, (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, New York.

Connell, W. (1987) Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto.

Connell, W. (1997) Hegemonic Masculinity and Emphasized Femininity. In: Richardson, L., Taylor, V., & Whittier, N. (Eds.), Feminist Frontiers IV. McGraw-Hill, New York, pp. 22-5.

Davis, (2001) Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist. In: Bhavnani, K.-K. (Ed.), Feminism and ‘‘Race.’’ Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 50-64.

de Beauvoir, (1980 [1952]) The Second Sex. Random House/Alfred Knopf, New York.

European Graduate School (EGS) (2005) Judith Online. http://egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler.

Fausto-Sterling, (2000) Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. Basic Books, New York.

Folbre, (2001) The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. New Press, New York.

Freeman, (2001) Is Local : Global as Feminine : Masculine? Rethinking the Gender of Globalization. Signs 26(4): 1007-38.

Gilligan, (1993) In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Halberstam, (1998) Female Masculinity. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.

Hill Collins, P. (2004) Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. Routledge, New

hooks, b. (2004) We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. Routledge, New

Kimmel, (2002) Foreword. In: Cleaver, F. (Ed.), Masculinities Matter! Men, Gender and Development. Zed Books, London, pp. xi xiv.

Laurie, , Dwyer, C., Holloway, S., & Smith, F. (1999) Geographies of New Femininities. Longman, London.

Lorber, (1994) Paradoxes of Gender. Yale University Press, New Haven.

Messner, A. (1992) Power at Play. Beacon Press, Boston.

Messner, A. (1997) Politics in Masculinities: Men in Movements. Sage, Walnut Creek, CA.

Thai, C. (2002) Clashing Dreams: Highly Educated Overseas Brides and Low-Wage US Husbands. In: Ehrenreich, B. & Hochschild, A. R. (Eds.), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. Metropolitan Books, New York, pp. 230-53.

Thompson, C. (2000) The Male Role Stereotype. In: Cyrus, V. (Ed.), Experiencing Race, Class, and Gender in the United States. Mayfield Publishing, Mountain View, CA, pp. 85-7.

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femininity

noun

fem·​i·​nin·​i·​ty

ˌfe-mə-ˈni-nə-tē 

Synonyms of femininity

1

: the quality or nature of the female sex : the quality, state, or degree of being feminine or womanly

challenging traditional notions about femininity and masculinity … the women were visions of powerful femininity.—Alan Shipnuck

2

: woman, womankind

… he was now to contrast her sharply with the best of what the Old World had to offer in the matter of femininity …—Theodore Dreiser

Synonyms

feminity

muliebrity

womanhood

womanishness

womanliness

See all Synonyms & Antonyms in Thesaurus 

Examples of femininity in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Her sturdiness works its way into her performances onscreen: Even in many a period drama, Winslet, for all her femininity, conveys the impression of someone who could hold her own in a street fight.

—Susan Dominus, New York Times, 3 Mar. 2024

The result is sleek and fluid, with a dose of romantic femininity.

—Christina Holevas, Vogue, 15 Feb. 2024

The Shōgun model of femininity, according to which the women are ostensibly subservient but capable of triggering pivotal upheavals, offers juicy material for Hoshi, heartbreaking and unreadable, and Nikaido, who makes her character manipulative and fiercely maternal.

—Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 12 Feb. 2024

Perhaps what’s missing is an essential element of your femininity and the foundation of your spiritual ecosystem: Sensuality.

—Essence, 10 Jan. 2024

Bandit grew up with the idea that femininity meant fashion, spangles, performance.

—Rachel Monroe, The New Yorker, 6 Dec. 2023

In a pop field that’s often dominated by femininity, Newham purposefully embraces their gender fluidity, combining Eighties Jazzercise choreography with David Byrne-esque suiting and sharp lines.

—Ct Jones, Rolling Stone, 28 Nov. 2023

Feminist women despise femininity (i.e. motherhood) according to Chesterton's observations 100 years ago.

—Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, 10 Nov. 2023

Its balconette design and demi-bra cups provide just the right amount of support and femininity while keeping you comfortable thanks to its mesh material.

—Alyssa Brascia, Peoplemag, 10 Feb. 2024

See More

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'femininity.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

First Known Use

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

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The first known use of femininity was

in the 14th century

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Phrases Containing femininity

hyper-femininity

Dictionary Entries Near femininity

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femininity

feminise

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“Femininity.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/femininity. Accessed 12 Mar. 2024.

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Medical Definition

femininity

noun

fem·​i·​nin·​i·​ty

ˌfem-ə-ˈnin-ət-ē 

plural femininities

: the quality or nature of the female sex

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Nglish: Translation of femininity for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of femininity for Arabic Speakers

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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences pp 1584–1588Cite as

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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

Reference work entry

Femininity

Clare M. Mehta3 & Victoria Henry4 

Reference work entry

First Online: 01 January 2020

189 Accesses

Synonyms

Femaleness; Womanhood; Womanishness; Womanliness

Definition

The term femininity is generally used to refer to a set of socialized psychological traits, qualities, and attributes most closely associated with those whose birth assigned gender category is female. Feminine traits and attributes include passivity, submissiveness, gentleness, warmth, helpfulness, compassion, understanding, dependency, emotional expressiveness, and the presence of maternal instinct. These feminine traits have been described as communal traits or a relational orientation. Consequently, an important component of femininity is connecting with, helping and caring for others. Defined in this way, femininity seems to be a straight forward concept, however, it is far more complicated – and potentially problematic – than it first appears. The complexity of femininity is explored in more detail below.

Although femininity and its antonym masculinity are often linked to birth assigned gender categories, it is...

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Download referencesAuthor informationAuthors and AffiliationsBoston Children’s Hospital, Emmanuel College, Boston, MA, USAClare M. MehtaEmmanuel College, Boston, MA, USAVictoria HenryAuthorsClare M. MehtaView author publicationsYou can also search for this author in

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Clare M. Mehta .Editor informationEditors and AffiliationsOakland University, Rochester, MI, USAVirgil Zeigler-Hill Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USATodd K. Shackelford Section Editor informationLakehead University, Orillia, ON, CanadaBeth A. VisserRights and permissionsReprints and permissionsCopyright information© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AGAbout this entryCite this entryMehta, C.M., Henry, V. (2020). Femininity.

In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_1076Download citation.RIS.ENW.BIBDOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_1076Published: 22 April 2020

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Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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Feminist Perspectives on Sex and GenderFirst published Mon May 12, 2008; substantive revision Tue Jan 18, 2022

Feminism is said to be the movement to end women’s oppression

(hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand ‘woman’

in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks

out human females and being a human female depends on various

biological and anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many

feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a

sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural

factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex

(being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although

most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably.

In feminist philosophy, this distinction has generated a lively

debate. Central questions include: What does it mean for gender to be

distinct from sex, if anything at all? How should we understand the

claim that gender depends on social and/or cultural factors? What does

it mean to be gendered woman, man, or genderqueer? This entry outlines

and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender

considering both historical and more contemporary positions.

1. The sex/gender distinction.

1.1 Biological determinism

1.2 Gender terminology

2. Gender as socially constructed

2.1 Gender socialisation

2.2 Gender as feminine and masculine personality

2.3 Gender as feminine and masculine sexuality

3. Problems with the sex/gender distinction

3.1 Is gender uniform?

3.1.1 Particularity argument

3.1.2 Normativity argument

3.2 Is sex classification solely a matter of biology?

3.3 Are sex and gender distinct?

3.4 Is the sex/gender distinction useful?

4. Women as a group

4.1 Gender nominalism

4.1.1 Gendered social series

4.1.2 Resemblance nominalism

4.2 Neo gender realism

4.2.1 Social subordination and gender

4.2.2 Gender uniessentialism

4.2.3 Gender as positionality

5. Beyond the Binary

6. Conclusion

Bibliography

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1. The sex/gender distinction.

The terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ mean different

things to different feminist theorists and neither are easy or

straightforward to characterise. Sketching out some feminist history

of the terms provides a helpful starting point.

1.1 Biological determinism

Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are

coextensive: women are human females, men are human males. Many

feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/

gender distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human

females and males depending on biological features

(chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features);

‘gender’ denotes women and men depending on

social factors (social role, position, behaviour or

identity). The main feminist motivation for making this distinction

was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is

destiny.

A typical example of a biological determinist view is that of Geddes

and Thompson who, in 1889, argued that social, psychological and

behavioural traits were caused by metabolic state. Women supposedly

conserve energy (being ‘anabolic’) and this makes them

passive, conservative, sluggish, stable and uninterested in politics.

Men expend their surplus energy (being ‘katabolic’) and

this makes them eager, energetic, passionate, variable and, thereby,

interested in political and social matters. These biological

‘facts’ about metabolic states were used not only to

explain behavioural differences between women and men but also to

justify what our social and political arrangements ought to be. More

specifically, they were used to argue for withholding from women

political rights accorded to men because (according to Geddes and

Thompson) “what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa

cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament” (quoted from Moi 1999,

18). It would be inappropriate to grant women political rights, as

they are simply not suited to have those rights; it would also be

futile since women (due to their biology) would simply not be

interested in exercising their political rights. To counter this kind

of biological determinism, feminists have argued that behavioural and

psychological differences have social, rather than biological, causes.

For instance, Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that one is not

born, but rather becomes a woman, and that “social

discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so

profound that they appear to be caused by nature” (Beauvoir 1972

[original 1949], 18; for more, see the entry on

Simone de Beauvoir).

Commonly observed behavioural traits associated with women and men,

then, are not caused by anatomy or chromosomes. Rather, they are

culturally learned or acquired.

Although biological determinism of the kind endorsed by Geddes and

Thompson is nowadays uncommon, the idea that behavioural and

psychological differences between women and men have biological causes

has not disappeared. In the 1970s, sex differences were used to argue

that women should not become airline pilots since they will be

hormonally unstable once a month and, therefore, unable to perform

their duties as well as men (Rogers 1999, 11). More recently,

differences in male and female brains have been said to explain

behavioural differences; in particular, the anatomy of corpus

callosum, a bundle of nerves that connects the right and left cerebral

hemispheres, is thought to be responsible for various psychological

and behavioural differences. For instance, in 1992, a Time

magazine article surveyed then prominent biological explanations of

differences between women and men claiming that women’s thicker

corpus callosums could explain what ‘women’s

intuition’ is based on and impair women’s ability to

perform some specialised visual-spatial skills, like reading maps

(Gorman 1992). Anne Fausto-Sterling has questioned the idea that

differences in corpus callosums cause behavioural and psychological

differences. First, the corpus callosum is a highly variable piece of

anatomy; as a result, generalisations about its size, shape and

thickness that hold for women and men in general should be viewed with

caution. Second, differences in adult human corpus callosums are not

found in infants; this may suggest that physical brain differences

actually develop as responses to differential treatment. Third, given

that visual-spatial skills (like map reading) can be improved by

practice, even if women and men’s corpus callosums differ, this

does not make the resulting behavioural differences immutable.

(Fausto-Sterling 2000b, chapter 5).

1.2 Gender terminology

In order to distinguish biological differences from

social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter, feminists

appropriated the term ‘gender’. Psychologists writing on

transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this

sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was often used to refer

to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in

French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they

were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist

Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick

out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount

of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and

large) a person’s sex and gender complemented each other,

separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing

Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality:

transsexuals’ sex and gender simply don’t match.

Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to

distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many

differences between women and men were socially produced and,

therefore, changeable. Gayle Rubin (for instance) uses the phrase

‘sex/gender system’ in order to describe “a set of

arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and

procreation is shaped by human, social intervention” (1975,

165). Rubin employed this system to articulate that “part of

social life which is the locus of the oppression of women”

(1975, 159) describing gender as the “socially imposed division

of the sexes” (1975, 179). Rubin’s thought was that

although biological differences are fixed, gender differences are the

oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how women and

men should behave. Women are oppressed as women and “by

having to be women” (Rubin 1975, 204). However, since

gender is social, it is thought to be mutable and alterable by

political and social reform that would ultimately bring an end to

women’s subordination. Feminism should aim to create a

“genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one’s

sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with

whom one makes love” (Rubin 1975, 204).

In some earlier interpretations, like Rubin’s, sex and gender

were thought to complement one another. The slogan ‘Gender is

the social interpretation of sex’ captures this view. Nicholson

calls this ‘the coat-rack view’ of gender: our sexed

bodies are like coat racks and “provide the site upon which

gender [is] constructed” (1994, 81). Gender conceived of as

masculinity and femininity is superimposed upon the

‘coat-rack’ of sex as each society imposes on sexed bodies

their cultural conceptions of how males and females should behave.

This socially constructs gender differences – or the amount of

femininity/masculinity of a person – upon our sexed bodies. That

is, according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or

female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies

differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby

creating feminine and masculine persons. Distinguishing sex and

gender, however, also enables the two to come apart: they are

separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman,

or vice versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995).

So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism

suggested that gender differences result from cultural practices and

social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by

saying that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders

(women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or

ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a

social practice” (Haslanger 1995, 97). But which social

practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being

of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There

is no consensus on these issues. (See the entry on

intersections between analytic and continental feminism

for more on different ways to understand gender.)

2. Gender as socially constructed

2.1 Gender socialisation

One way to interpret Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but

rather becomes a woman is to take it as a claim about gender

socialisation: females become women through a process whereby they

acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour. Masculinity and

femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how individuals

are brought up. They are causally constructed (Haslanger

1995, 98): social forces either have a causal role in bringing

gendered individuals into existence or (to some substantial sense)

shape the way we are qua women and men. And the mechanism of

construction is social learning. For instance, Kate Millett takes

gender differences to have “essentially cultural, rather than

biological bases” that result from differential treatment (1971,

28–9). For her, gender is “the sum total of the

parents’, the peers’, and the culture’s notions of

what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character,

interests, status, worth, gesture, and expression” (Millett

1971, 31). Feminine and masculine gender-norms, however, are

problematic in that gendered behaviour conveniently fits with and

reinforces women’s subordination so that women are socialised

into subordinate social roles: they learn to be passive, ignorant,

docile, emotional helpmeets for men (Millett 1971, 26). However, since

these roles are simply learned, we can create more equal societies by

‘unlearning’ social roles. That is, feminists should aim

to diminish the influence of socialisation.

Social learning theorists hold that a huge array of different

influences socialise us as women and men. This being the case, it is

extremely difficult to counter gender socialisation. For instance,

parents often unconsciously treat their female and male children

differently. When parents have been asked to describe their

24-hour old infants, they have done so using

gender-stereotypic language: boys are describes as strong, alert and

coordinated and girls as tiny, soft and delicate. Parents’

treatment of their infants further reflects these descriptions whether

they are aware of this or not (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 32). Some

socialisation is more overt: children are often dressed in gender

stereotypical clothes and colours (boys are dressed in blue, girls in

pink) and parents tend to buy their children gender stereotypical

toys. They also (intentionally or not) tend to reinforce certain

‘appropriate’ behaviours. While the precise form of gender

socialization has changed since the onset of second-wave feminism,

even today girls are discouraged from playing sports like football or

from playing ‘rough and tumble’ games and are more likely

than boys to be given dolls or cooking toys to play with; boys are

told not to ‘cry like a baby’ and are more likely to be

given masculine toys like trucks and guns (for more, see Kimmel 2000,

122–126).[1]

According to social learning theorists, children are also influenced

by what they observe in the world around them. This, again, makes

countering gender socialisation difficult. For one, children’s

books have portrayed males and females in blatantly stereotypical

ways: for instance, males as adventurers and leaders, and females as

helpers and followers. One way to address gender stereotyping in

children’s books has been to portray females in independent

roles and males as non-aggressive and nurturing (Renzetti & Curran

1992, 35). Some publishers have attempted an alternative approach by

making their characters, for instance, gender-neutral animals or

genderless imaginary creatures (like TV’s Teletubbies). However,

parents reading books with gender-neutral or genderless characters

often undermine the publishers’ efforts by reading them to their

children in ways that depict the characters as either feminine or

masculine. According to Renzetti and Curran, parents labelled the

overwhelming majority of gender-neutral characters masculine whereas

those characters that fit feminine gender stereotypes (for instance,

by being helpful and caring) were labelled feminine (1992, 35).

Socialising influences like these are still thought to send implicit

messages regarding how females and males should act and are expected

to act shaping us into feminine and masculine persons.

2.2 Gender as feminine and masculine personality

Nancy Chodorow (1978; 1995) has criticised social learning theory as

too simplistic to explain gender differences (see also Deaux &

Major 1990; Gatens 1996). Instead, she holds that gender is a matter

of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early

infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices. In particular,

gendered personalities develop because women tend to be the primary

caretakers of small children. Chodorow holds that because mothers (or

other prominent females) tend to care for infants, infant male and

female psychic development differs. Crudely put: the mother-daughter

relationship differs from the mother-son relationship because mothers

are more likely to identify with their daughters than their sons. This

unconsciously prompts the mother to encourage her son to

psychologically individuate himself from her thereby prompting him to

develop well defined and rigid ego boundaries. However, the mother

unconsciously discourages the daughter from individuating herself

thereby prompting the daughter to develop flexible and blurry ego

boundaries. Childhood gender socialisation further builds on and

reinforces these unconsciously developed ego boundaries finally

producing feminine and masculine persons (1995, 202–206). This

perspective has its roots in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, although

Chodorow’s approach differs in many ways from Freud’s.

Gendered personalities are supposedly manifested in common gender

stereotypical behaviour. Take emotional dependency. Women are

stereotypically more emotional and emotionally dependent upon others

around them, supposedly finding it difficult to distinguish their own

interests and wellbeing from the interests and wellbeing of their

children and partners. This is said to be because of their blurry and

(somewhat) confused ego boundaries: women find it hard to distinguish

their own needs from the needs of those around them because they

cannot sufficiently individuate themselves from those close to them.

By contrast, men are stereotypically emotionally detached, preferring

a career where dispassionate and distanced thinking are virtues. These

traits are said to result from men’s well-defined ego boundaries

that enable them to prioritise their own needs and interests sometimes

at the expense of others’ needs and interests.

Chodorow thinks that these gender differences should and can be

changed. Feminine and masculine personalities play a crucial role in

women’s oppression since they make females overly attentive to

the needs of others and males emotionally deficient. In order to

correct the situation, both male and female parents should be equally

involved in parenting (Chodorow 1995, 214). This would help in

ensuring that children develop sufficiently individuated senses of

selves without becoming overly detached, which in turn helps to

eradicate common gender stereotypical behaviours.

2.3 Gender as feminine and masculine sexuality

Catharine MacKinnon develops her theory of gender as a theory of

sexuality. Very roughly: the social meaning of sex (gender) is created

by sexual objectification of women whereby women are viewed and

treated as objects for satisfying men’s desires

(MacKinnon 1989). Masculinity is defined as sexual dominance,

femininity as sexual submissiveness: genders are “created

through the eroticization of dominance and submission. The man/woman

difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other.

This is the social meaning of sex” (MacKinnon 1989, 113). For

MacKinnon, gender is constitutively constructed: in defining

genders (or masculinity and femininity) we must make reference to

social factors (see Haslanger 1995, 98). In particular, we must make

reference to the position one occupies in the sexualised

dominance/submission dynamic: men occupy the sexually dominant

position, women the sexually submissive one. As a result, genders are

by definition hierarchical and this hierarchy is

fundamentally tied to sexualised power relations. The notion of

‘gender equality’, then, does not make sense to MacKinnon.

If sexuality ceased to be a manifestation of dominance, hierarchical

genders (that are defined in terms of sexuality) would cease

to exist.

So, gender difference for MacKinnon is not a matter of having a

particular psychological orientation or behavioural pattern; rather,

it is a function of sexuality that is hierarchal in patriarchal

societies. This is not to say that men are naturally disposed

to sexually objectify women or that women are naturally

submissive. Instead, male and female sexualities are socially

conditioned: men have been conditioned to find women’s

subordination sexy and women have been conditioned to find a

particular male version of female sexuality as erotic – one in

which it is erotic to be sexually submissive. For MacKinnon, both

female and male sexual desires are defined from a male point of view

that is conditioned by pornography (MacKinnon 1989, chapter 7).

Bluntly put: pornography portrays a false picture of ‘what women

want’ suggesting that women in actual fact are and want to be

submissive. This conditions men’s sexuality so that they view

women’s submission as sexy. And male dominance enforces this

male version of sexuality onto women, sometimes by force.

MacKinnon’s thought is not that male dominance is a result of

social learning (see 2.1.); rather, socialization is an expression of

power. That is, socialized differences in masculine and feminine

traits, behaviour, and roles are not responsible for power

inequalities. Females and males (roughly put) are socialised

differently because there are underlying power inequalities. As

MacKinnon puts it, ‘dominance’ (power relations) is prior

to ‘difference’ (traits, behaviour and roles) (see,

MacKinnon 1989, chapter 12). MacKinnon, then, sees legal restrictions

on pornography as paramount to ending women’s subordinate status

that stems from their gender.

3. Problems with the sex/gender distinction

3.1 Is gender uniform?

The positions outlined above share an underlying metaphysical

perspective on gender: gender

realism.[2]

That is, women as a group are assumed to share some characteristic

feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines their

gender and the possession of which makes some individuals women (as

opposed to, say, men). All women are thought to differ from

all men in this respect (or respects). For example, MacKinnon

thought that being treated in sexually objectifying ways is the common

condition that defines women’s gender and what women as

women share. All women differ from all men in this respect.

Further, pointing out females who are not sexually objectified does

not provide a counterexample to MacKinnon’s view. Being sexually

objectified is constitutive of being a woman; a female who

escapes sexual objectification, then, would not count as a woman.

One may want to critique the three accounts outlined by rejecting the

particular details of each account. (For instance, see Spelman [1988,

chapter 4] for a critique of the details of Chodorow’s view.) A

more thoroughgoing critique has been levelled at the general

metaphysical perspective of gender realism that underlies these

positions. It has come under sustained attack on two grounds: first,

that it fails to take into account racial, cultural and class

differences between women (particularity argument); second, that it

posits a normative ideal of womanhood (normativity argument).

3.1.1 Particularity argument

Elizabeth Spelman (1988) has influentially argued against gender

realism with her particularity argument. Roughly: gender realists

mistakenly assume that gender is constructed independently of race,

class, ethnicity and nationality. If gender were separable from, for

example, race and class in this manner, all women would experience

womanhood in the same way. And this is clearly false. For instance,

Harris (1993) and Stone (2007) criticise MacKinnon’s view, that

sexual objectification is the common condition that defines

women’s gender, for failing to take into account differences in

women’s backgrounds that shape their sexuality. The history of

racist oppression illustrates that during slavery black women were

‘hypersexualised’ and thought to be always sexually

available whereas white women were thought to be pure and sexually

virtuous. In fact, the rape of a black woman was thought to be

impossible (Harris 1993). So, (the argument goes) sexual

objectification cannot serve as the common condition for womanhood

since it varies considerably depending on one’s race and

class.[3]

For Spelman, the perspective of ‘white solipsism’

underlies gender realists’ mistake. They assumed that all women

share some “golden nugget of womanness” (Spelman 1988,

159) and that the features constitutive of such a nugget are the same

for all women regardless of their particular cultural backgrounds.

Next, white Western middle-class feminists accounted for the shared

features simply by reflecting on the cultural features that condition

their gender as women thus supposing that “the

womanness underneath the Black woman’s skin is a white

woman’s, and deep down inside the Latina woman is an Anglo woman

waiting to burst through an obscuring cultural shroud” (Spelman

1988, 13). In so doing, Spelman claims, white middle-class Western

feminists passed off their particular view of gender as “a

metaphysical truth” (1988, 180) thereby privileging some women

while marginalising others. In failing to see the importance of race

and class in gender construction, white middle-class Western feminists

conflated “the condition of one group of women with the

condition of all” (Spelman 1988, 3).

Betty Friedan’s (1963) well-known work is a case in point of

white

solipsism.[4]

Friedan saw domesticity as the main vehicle of gender oppression and

called upon women in general to find jobs outside the home. But she

failed to realize that women from less privileged backgrounds, often

poor and non-white, already worked outside the home to support their

families. Friedan’s suggestion, then, was applicable only to a

particular sub-group of women (white middle-class Western housewives).

But it was mistakenly taken to apply to all women’s lives

— a mistake that was generated by Friedan’s failure to

take women’s racial and class differences into account (hooks

2000, 1–3).

Spelman further holds that since social conditioning creates

femininity and societies (and sub-groups) that condition it differ

from one another, femininity must be differently conditioned in

different societies. For her, “females become not simply women

but particular kinds of women” (Spelman 1988, 113): white

working-class women, black middle-class women, poor Jewish women,

wealthy aristocratic European women, and so on.

This line of thought has been extremely influential in feminist

philosophy. For instance, Young holds that Spelman has

definitively shown that gender realism is untenable (1997,

13). Mikkola (2006) argues that this isn’t so. The arguments

Spelman makes do not undermine the idea that there is some

characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that

defines women’s gender; they simply point out that some

particular ways of cashing out what defines womanhood are misguided.

So, although Spelman is right to reject those accounts that falsely

take the feature that conditions white middle-class Western

feminists’ gender to condition women’s gender in general,

this leaves open the possibility that women qua women do

share something that defines their gender. (See also Haslanger [2000a]

for a discussion of why gender realism is not necessarily untenable,

and Stoljar [2011] for a discussion of Mikkola’s critique of

Spelman.)

3.1.2 Normativity argument

Judith Butler critiques the sex/gender distinction on two grounds.

They critique gender realism with their normativity argument (1999

[original 1990], chapter 1); they also hold that the sex/gender

distinction is unintelligible (this will be discussed in section

3.3.). Butler’s normativity argument is not straightforwardly

directed at the metaphysical perspective of gender realism, but rather

at its political counterpart: identity politics. This is a

form of political mobilization based on membership in some group (e.g.

racial, ethnic, cultural, gender) and group membership is thought to

be delimited by some common experiences, conditions or features that

define the group (Heyes 2000, 58; see also the entry on

Identity Politics).

Feminist identity politics, then, presupposes gender realism in that

feminist politics is said to be mobilized around women as a group (or

category) where membership in this group is fixed by some condition,

experience or feature that women supposedly share and that defines

their gender.

Butler’s normativity argument makes two claims. The first is

akin to Spelman’s particularity argument: unitary gender notions

fail to take differences amongst women into account thus failing to

recognise “the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political

intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are

constructed” (Butler 1999, 19–20). In their attempt to

undercut biologically deterministic ways of defining what it means to

be a woman, feminists inadvertently created new socially constructed

accounts of supposedly shared femininity. Butler’s second claim

is that such false gender realist accounts are normative. That is, in

their attempt to fix feminism’s subject matter, feminists

unwittingly defined the term ‘woman’ in a way that implies

there is some correct way to be gendered a woman (Butler 1999, 5).

That the definition of the term ‘woman’ is fixed

supposedly “operates as a policing force which generates and

legitimizes certain practices, experiences, etc., and curtails and

delegitimizes others” (Nicholson 1998, 293). Following this line

of thought, one could say that, for instance, Chodorow’s view of

gender suggests that ‘real’ women have feminine

personalities and that these are the women feminism should be

concerned about. If one does not exhibit a distinctly feminine

personality, the implication is that one is not ‘really’ a

member of women’s category nor does one properly qualify for

feminist political representation.

Butler’s second claim is based on their view

that“[i]dentity categories [like that of women] are never merely

descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary”

(Butler 1991, 160). That is, the mistake of those feminists Butler

critiques was not that they provided the incorrect definition of

‘woman’. Rather, (the argument goes) their mistake was to

attempt to define the term ‘woman’ at all. Butler’s

view is that ‘woman’ can never be defined in a way that

does not prescribe some “unspoken normative requirements”

(like having a feminine personality) that women should conform to

(Butler 1999, 9). Butler takes this to be a feature of terms like

‘woman’ that purport to pick out (what they call)

‘identity categories’. They seem to assume that

‘woman’ can never be used in a non-ideological way (Moi

1999, 43) and that it will always encode conditions that are not

satisfied by everyone we think of as women. Some explanation for this

comes from Butler’s view that all processes of drawing

categorical distinctions involve evaluative and normative commitments;

these in turn involve the exercise of power and reflect the conditions

of those who are socially powerful (Witt 1995).

In order to better understand Butler’s critique, consider their

account of gender performativity. For them, standard feminist accounts

take gendered individuals to have some essential properties

qua gendered individuals or a gender core by virtue of which

one is either a man or a woman. This view assumes that women and men,

qua women and men, are bearers of various essential and

accidental attributes where the former secure gendered persons’

persistence through time as so gendered. But according to Butler this

view is false: (i) there are no such essential properties, and (ii)

gender is an illusion maintained by prevalent power structures. First,

feminists are said to think that genders are socially constructed in

that they have the following essential attributes (Butler 1999, 24):

women are females with feminine behavioural traits, being

heterosexuals whose desire is directed at men; men are males with

masculine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is

directed at women. These are the attributes necessary for gendered

individuals and those that enable women and men to persist through

time as women and men. Individuals have “intelligible

genders” (Butler 1999, 23) if they exhibit this sequence of

traits in a coherent manner (where sexual desire follows from sexual

orientation that in turn follows from feminine/ masculine behaviours

thought to follow from biological sex). Social forces in general deem

individuals who exhibit incoherent gender sequences (like

lesbians) to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ and they

actively discourage such sequencing of traits, for instance, via

name-calling and overt homophobic discrimination. Think back to what

was said above: having a certain conception of what women are like

that mirrors the conditions of socially powerful (white, middle-class,

heterosexual, Western) women functions to marginalize and police those

who do not fit this conception.

These gender cores, supposedly encoding the above traits, however, are

nothing more than illusions created by ideals and practices that seek

to render gender uniform through heterosexism, the view that

heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality is deviant (Butler 1999,

42). Gender cores are constructed as if they somehow

naturally belong to women and men thereby creating gender dimorphism

or the belief that one must be either a masculine male or a feminine

female. But gender dimorphism only serves a heterosexist social order

by implying that since women and men are sharply opposed, it is

natural to sexually desire the opposite sex or gender.

Further, being feminine and desiring men (for instance) are standardly

assumed to be expressions of one’s gender as a woman. Butler

denies this and holds that gender is really performative. It is not

“a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts

follow; rather, gender is … instituted … through a

stylized repetition of [habitual] acts”

(Butler 1999, 179): through wearing certain gender-coded clothing,

walking and sitting in certain gender-coded ways, styling one’s

hair in gender-coded manner and so on. Gender is not something one is,

it is something one does; it is a sequence of acts, a doing rather

than a being. And repeatedly engaging in ‘feminising’ and

‘masculinising’ acts congeals gender thereby making people

falsely think of gender as something they naturally are.

Gender only comes into being through these gendering acts: a female

who has sex with men does not express her gender as a woman.

This activity (amongst others) makes her gendered a

woman.

The constitutive acts that gender individuals create genders as

“compelling illusion[s]” (Butler 1990, 271). Our gendered

classification scheme is a strong pragmatic construction:

social factors wholly determine our use of the scheme and the scheme

fails to represent accurately any ‘facts of the matter’

(Haslanger 1995, 100). People think that there are true and real

genders, and those deemed to be doing their gender ‘wrong’

are not socially sanctioned. But, genders are true and real only to

the extent that they are performed (Butler 1990, 278–9). It does

not make sense, then, to say of a male-to-female trans person that

s/he is really a man who only appears to be a woman.

Instead, males dressing up and acting in ways that are associated with

femininity “show that [as Butler suggests] ‘being’

feminine is just a matter of doing certain activities” (Stone

2007, 64). As a result, the trans person’s gender is just as

real or true as anyone else’s who is a

‘traditionally’ feminine female or masculine male (Butler

1990,

278).[5]

Without heterosexism that compels people to engage in certain

gendering acts, there would not be any genders at all. And ultimately

the aim should be to abolish norms that compel people to act in these

gendering ways.

For Butler, given that gender is performative, the appropriate

response to feminist identity politics involves two things. First,

feminists should understand ‘woman’ as open-ended and

“a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot

rightfully be said to originate or end … it is open to

intervention and resignification” (Butler 1999, 43). That is,

feminists should not try to define ‘woman’ at all. Second,

the category of women “ought not to be the foundation of

feminist politics” (Butler 1999, 9). Rather, feminists should

focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our

understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also

within the feminist movement.

3.2 Is sex classification solely a matter of biology?

Many people, including many feminists, have ordinarily taken sex

ascriptions to be solely a matter of biology with no social or

cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only two

sexes and that biological sex classifications are utterly

unproblematic. By contrast, some feminists have argued that sex

classifications are not unproblematic and that they are not solely a

matter of biology. In order to make sense of this, it is helpful to

distinguish object- and idea-construction (see Haslanger 2003b for

more): social forces can be said to construct certain kinds of objects

(e.g. sexed bodies or gendered individuals) and certain kinds of ideas

(e.g. sex or gender concepts). First, take the object-construction of

sexed bodies. Secondary sex characteristics, or the physiological and

biological features commonly associated with males and females, are

affected by social practices. In some societies, females’ lower

social status has meant that they have been fed less and so, the lack

of nutrition has had the effect of making them smaller in size (Jaggar

1983, 37). Uniformity in muscular shape, size and strength within sex

categories is not caused entirely by biological factors, but depends

heavily on exercise opportunities: if males and females were allowed

the same exercise opportunities and equal encouragement to exercise,

it is thought that bodily dimorphism would diminish (Fausto-Sterling

1993a, 218). A number of medical phenomena involving bones (like

osteoporosis) have social causes directly related to expectations

about gender, women’s diet and their exercise opportunities

(Fausto-Sterling 2005). These examples suggest that physiological

features thought to be sex-specific traits not affected by social and

cultural factors are, after all, to some extent products of social

conditioning. Social conditioning, then, shapes our biology.

Second, take the idea-construction of sex concepts. Our concept of

sex is said to be a product of social forces in the sense

that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. Standardly,

those with XX-chromosomes, ovaries that produce large egg cells,

female genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘female’

hormones, and other secondary sex characteristics (relatively small

body size, less body hair) count as biologically female. Those with

XY-chromosomes, testes that produce small sperm cells, male genitalia,

a relatively high proportion of ‘male’ hormones and other

secondary sex traits (relatively large body size, significant amounts

of body hair) count as male. This understanding is fairly recent. The

prevalent scientific view from Ancient Greeks until the late

18th century, did not consider female and male sexes to be

distinct categories with specific traits; instead, a ‘one-sex

model’ held that males and females were members of the same sex

category. Females’ genitals were thought to be the same as

males’ but simply directed inside the body; ovaries and testes

(for instance) were referred to by the same term and whether the term

referred to the former or the latter was made clear by the context

(Laqueur 1990, 4). It was not until the late 1700s that scientists

began to think of female and male anatomies as radically different

moving away from the ‘one-sex model’ of a single sex

spectrum to the (nowadays prevalent) ‘two-sex model’ of

sexual dimorphism. (For an alternative view, see King 2013.)

Fausto-Sterling has argued that this ‘two-sex model’

isn’t straightforward either (1993b; 2000a; 2000b). Based on a

meta-study of empirical medical research, she estimates that 1.7% of

population fail to neatly fall within the usual sex classifications

possessing various combinations of different sex characteristics

(Fausto-Sterling 2000a, 20). In her earlier work, she claimed that

intersex individuals make up (at least) three further sex classes:

‘herms’ who possess one testis and one ovary;

‘merms’ who possess testes, some aspects of female

genitalia but no ovaries; and ‘ferms’ who have ovaries,

some aspects of male genitalia but no testes (Fausto-Sterling 1993b,

21). (In her [2000a], Fausto-Sterling notes that these labels were put

forward tongue–in–cheek.) Recognition of intersex people

suggests that feminists (and society at large) are wrong to think that

humans are either female or male.

To illustrate further the idea-construction of sex, consider the case

of the athlete Maria Patiño. Patiño has female

genitalia, has always considered herself to be female and was

considered so by others. However, she was discovered to have XY

chromosomes and was barred from competing in women’s sports

(Fausto-Sterling 2000b, 1–3). Patiño’s genitalia

were at odds with her chromosomes and the latter were taken to

determine her sex. Patiño successfully fought to be recognised

as a female athlete arguing that her chromosomes alone were not

sufficient to not make her female. Intersex people, like

Patiño, illustrate that our understandings of sex differ and

suggest that there is no immediately obvious way to settle what sex

amounts to purely biologically or scientifically. Deciding what sex is

involves evaluative judgements that are influenced by social

factors.

Insofar as our cultural conceptions affect our understandings of sex,

feminists must be much more careful about sex classifications and

rethink what sex amounts to (Stone 2007, chapter 1). More

specifically, intersex people illustrate that sex traits associated

with females and males need not always go together and that

individuals can have some mixture of these traits. This suggests to

Stone that sex is a cluster concept: it is sufficient to

satisfy enough of the sex features that tend to cluster together in

order to count as being of a particular sex. But, one need not satisfy

all of those features or some arbitrarily chosen supposedly

necessary sex feature, like chromosomes (Stone 2007, 44).

This makes sex a matter of degree and sex classifications should take

place on a spectrum: one can be more or less female/male but there is

no sharp distinction between the two. Further, intersex people (along

with trans people) are located at the centre of the sex spectrum and

in many cases their sex will be indeterminate (Stone 2007).

More recently, Ayala and Vasilyeva (2015) have argued for an inclusive

and extended conception of sex: just as certain tools can be seen to

extend our minds beyond the limits of our brains (e.g. white canes),

other tools (like dildos) can extend our sex beyond our bodily

boundaries. This view aims to motivate the idea that what counts as

sex should not be determined by looking inwards at genitalia or other

anatomical features. In a different vein, Ásta (2018) argues

that sex is a conferred social property. This follows her more general

conferralist framework to analyse all social properties: properties

that are conferred by others thereby generating a social status that

consists in contextually specific constraints and enablements on

individual behaviour. The general schema for conferred properties is

as follows (Ásta 2018, 8):

Conferred property: what property is conferred.

Who: who the subjects are.

What: what attitude, state, or action of the subjects

matter.

When: under what conditions the conferral takes

place.

Base property: what the subjects are attempting to

track (consciously or not), if anything.

With being of a certain sex (e.g. male, female) in mind, Ásta

holds that it is a conferred property that merely aims to track

physical features. Hence sex is a social – or in fact, an

institutional – property rather than a natural one. The schema

for sex goes as follows (72):

Conferred property: being female, male.

Who: legal authorities, drawing on the expert opinion

of doctors, other medical personnel.

What: “the recording of a sex in official

documents ... The judgment of the doctors (and others) as to what sex

role might be the most fitting, given the biological characteristics

present.”

When: at birth or after surgery/ hormonal

treatment.

Base property: “the aim is to track as many

sex-stereotypical characteristics as possible, and doctors perform

surgery in cases where that might help bring the physical

characteristics more in line with the stereotype of male and

female.”

This (among other things) offers a debunking analysis of sex: it may

appear to be a natural property, but on the conferralist analysis is

better understood as a conferred legal status. Ásta holds that

gender too is a conferred property, but contra the discussion in the

following section, she does not think that this collapses the

distinction between sex and gender: sex and gender are differently

conferred albeit both satisfying the general schema noted above.

Nonetheless, on the conferralist framework what underlies both sex and

gender is the idea of social construction as social significance:

sex-stereotypical characteristics are taken to be socially significant

context specifically, whereby they become the basis for conferring sex

onto individuals and this brings with it various constraints and

enablements on individuals and their behaviour. This fits object- and

idea-constructions introduced above, although offers a different

general framework to analyse the matter at hand.

3.3 Are sex and gender distinct?

In addition to arguing against identity politics and for gender

performativity, Butler holds that distinguishing biological

sex from social gender is unintelligible. For them, both are

socially constructed:

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct

called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender;

indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence

that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no

distinction at all. (Butler 1999, 10–11)

(Butler is not alone in claiming that there are no tenable

distinctions between nature/culture, biology/construction and

sex/gender. See also: Antony 1998; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik

1999.) Butler makes two different claims in the passage cited: that

sex is a social construction, and that sex is gender. To unpack their

view, consider the two claims in turn. First, the idea that sex is a

social construct, for Butler, boils down to the view that our sexed

bodies are also performative and, so, they have “no ontological

status apart from the various acts which constitute [their]

reality” (1999, 173). Prima facie, this implausibly

implies that female and male bodies do not have independent existence

and that if gendering activities ceased, so would physical bodies.

This is not Butler’s claim; rather, their position is that

bodies viewed as the material foundations on which gender is

constructed, are themselves constructed as if they provide

such material foundations (Butler 1993). Cultural conceptions about

gender figure in “the very apparatus of production whereby sexes

themselves are established” (Butler 1999, 11).

For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how

we understand gender shapes how we understand sex (1999, 139). Sexed

bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed and sex

categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of

the world. Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves discursively

constructed: they are the way they are, at least to a substantial

extent, because of what is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are

classified (for discursive construction, see Haslanger 1995, 99). Sex

assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative (Butler 1993,

1).[6]

When the doctor calls a newly born infant a girl or a boy, s/he is

not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the

doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act (see the entry on

Speech Acts).

In effect, the doctor’s utterance makes infants into girls or

boys. We, then, engage in activities that make it seem as if sexes

naturally come in two and that being female or male is an objective

feature of the world, rather than being a consequence of certain

constitutive acts (that is, rather than being performative). And this

is what Butler means in saying that physical bodies never exist

outside cultural and social meanings, and that sex is as socially

constructed as gender. They do not deny that physical bodies exist.

But, they take our understanding of this existence to be a

product of social conditioning: social conditioning makes the

existence of physical bodies intelligible to us by discursively

constructing sexed bodies through certain constitutive acts. (For a

helpful introduction to Butler’s views, see Salih 2002.)

For Butler, sex assignment is always in some sense oppressive. Again,

this appears to be because of Butler’s general suspicion of

classification: sex classification can never be merely descriptive but

always has a normative element reflecting evaluative claims of those

who are powerful. Conducting a feminist genealogy of the body (or

examining why sexed bodies are thought to come naturally as female and

male), then, should ground feminist practice (Butler 1993,

28–9). Feminists should examine and uncover ways in which social

construction and certain acts that constitute sex shape our

understandings of sexed bodies, what kinds of meanings bodies acquire

and which practices and illocutionary speech acts ‘make’

our bodies into sexes. Doing so enables feminists to identity how

sexed bodies are socially constructed in order to resist such

construction.

However, given what was said above, it is far from obvious what we

should make of Butler’s claim that sex “was always already

gender” (1999, 11). Stone (2007) takes this to mean that sex

is gender but goes on to question it arguing that the social

construction of both sex and gender does not make sex identical to

gender. According to Stone, it would be more accurate for Butler to

say that claims about sex imply gender norms. That is, many

claims about sex traits (like ‘females are physically weaker

than males’) actually carry implications about how women and men

are expected to behave. To some extent the claim describes certain

facts. But, it also implies that females are not expected to do much

heavy lifting and that they would probably not be good at it. So,

claims about sex are not identical to claims about gender; rather,

they imply claims about gender norms (Stone 2007, 70).

3.4 Is the sex/gender distinction useful?

Some feminists hold that the sex/gender distinction is not useful. For

a start, it is thought to reflect politically problematic dualistic

thinking that undercuts feminist aims: the distinction is taken to

reflect and replicate androcentric oppositions between (for instance)

mind/body, culture/nature and reason/emotion that have been used to

justify women’s oppression (e.g. Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999).

The thought is that in oppositions like these, one term is always

superior to the other and that the devalued term is usually associated

with women (Lloyd 1993). For instance, human subjectivity and agency

are identified with the mind but since women are usually identified

with their bodies, they are devalued as human subjects and agents. The

opposition between mind and body is said to further map on to other

distinctions, like reason/emotion, culture/nature,

rational/irrational, where one side of each distinction is devalued

(one’s bodily features are usually valued less that one’s

mind, rationality is usually valued more than irrationality) and women

are associated with the devalued terms: they are thought to be closer

to bodily features and nature than men, to be irrational, emotional

and so on. This is said to be evident (for instance) in job

interviews. Men are treated as gender-neutral persons and not asked

whether they are planning to take time off to have a family. By

contrast, that women face such queries illustrates that they are

associated more closely than men with bodily features to do with

procreation (Prokhovnik 1999, 126). The opposition between mind and

body, then, is thought to map onto the opposition between men and

women.

Now, the mind/body dualism is also said to map onto the sex/gender

distinction (Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The idea is that gender

maps onto mind, sex onto body. Although not used by those endorsing

this view, the basic idea can be summed by the slogan ‘Gender is

between the ears, sex is between the legs’: the implication is

that, while sex is immutable, gender is something individuals have

control over – it is something we can alter and change through

individual choices. However, since women are said to be more closely

associated with biological features (and so, to map onto the body side

of the mind/body distinction) and men are treated as gender-neutral

persons (mapping onto the mind side), the implication is that

“man equals gender, which is associated with mind and choice,

freedom from body, autonomy, and with the public real; while woman

equals sex, associated with the body, reproduction,

‘natural’ rhythms and the private realm” (Prokhovnik

1999, 103). This is said to render the sex/gender distinction

inherently repressive and to drain it of any potential for

emancipation: rather than facilitating gender role choice for women,

it “actually functions to reinforce their association with body,

sex, and involuntary ‘natural’ rhythms” (Prokhovnik

1999, 103). Contrary to what feminists like Rubin argued, the

sex/gender distinction cannot be used as a theoretical tool that

dissociates conceptions of womanhood from biological and reproductive

features.

Moi has further argued that the sex/gender distinction is useless

given certain theoretical goals (1999, chapter 1). This is not to say

that it is utterly worthless; according to Moi, the sex/gender

distinction worked well to show that the historically prevalent

biological determinism was false. However, for her, the distinction

does no useful work “when it comes to producing a good theory of

subjectivity” (1999, 6) and “a concrete, historical

understanding of what it means to be a woman (or a man) in a given

society” (1999, 4–5). That is, the 1960s distinction

understood sex as fixed by biology without any cultural or historical

dimensions. This understanding, however, ignores lived experiences and

embodiment as aspects of womanhood (and manhood) by separating sex

from gender and insisting that womanhood is to do with the latter.

Rather, embodiment must be included in one’s theory that tries

to figure out what it is to be a woman (or a man).

Mikkola (2011) argues that the sex/gender distinction, which underlies

views like Rubin’s and MacKinnon’s, has certain

unintuitive and undesirable ontological commitments that render the

distinction politically unhelpful. First, claiming that gender is

socially constructed implies that the existence of women and men is a

mind-dependent matter. This suggests that we can do away with women

and men simply by altering some social practices, conventions or

conditions on which gender depends (whatever those are). However,

ordinary social agents find this unintuitive given that (ordinarily)

sex and gender are not distinguished. Second, claiming that gender is

a product of oppressive social forces suggests that doing away with

women and men should be feminism’s political goal. But this

harbours ontologically undesirable commitments since many ordinary

social agents view their gender to be a source of positive value. So,

feminism seems to want to do away with something that should not be

done away with, which is unlikely to motivate social agents to act in

ways that aim at gender justice. Given these problems, Mikkola argues

that feminists should give up the distinction on practical political

grounds.

Tomas Bogardus (2020) has argued in an even more radical sense against

the sex/gender distinction: as things stand, he holds, feminist

philosophers have merely assumed and asserted that the distinction

exists, instead of having offered good arguments for the distinction.

In other words, feminist philosophers allegedly have yet to offer good

reasons to think that ‘woman’ does not simply

pick out adult human females. Alex Byrne (2020) argues in a similar

vein: the term ‘woman’ does not pick out a social kind as

feminist philosophers have “assumed”. Instead,

“women are adult human females–nothing more, and nothing

less” (2020, 3801). Byrne offers six considerations to ground

this AHF (adult, human, female) conception.

It reproduces the dictionary definition of

‘woman’.

One would expect English to have a word that picks out the

category adult human female, and ‘woman’ is the only

candidate.

AHF explains how we sometimes know that an individual is a woman,

despite knowing nothing else relevant about her other than the fact

that she is an adult human female.

AHF stands or falls with the analogous thesis for girls, which can

be supported independently.

AHF predicts the correct verdict in cases of gender role

reversal.

AHF is supported by the fact that ‘woman’ and

‘female’ are often appropriately used as stylistic

variants of each other, even in

hyperintensional

contexts.

Robin Dembroff (2021) responds to Byrne and highlights various

problems with Byrne’s argument. First, framing: Byrne assumes

from the start that gender terms like ‘woman’ have a

single invariant meaning thereby failing to discuss the possibility of

terms like ‘woman’ having multiple meanings –

something that is a familiar claim made by feminist theorists from

various disciplines. Moreover, Byrne (according to Dembroff) assumes

without argument that there is a single, universal category of woman

– again, something that has been extensively discussed and

critiqued by feminist philosophers and theorists. Second,

Byrne’s conception of the ‘dominant’

meaning of woman is said to be cherry-picked and it ignores a

wealth of contexts outside of philosophy (like the media and the law)

where ‘woman’ has a meaning other than AHF.

Third, Byrne’s own distinction between biological and social

categories fails to establish what he intended to establish: namely,

that ‘woman’ picks out a biological rather than a social

kind. Hence, Dembroff holds, Byrne’s case fails by its own

lights. Byrne (2021) responds to Dembroff’s critique.

Others such as ‘gender critical feminists’ also hold views

about the sex/gender distinction in a spirit similar to Bogardus and

Byrne. For example, Holly Lawford-Smith (2021) takes the prevalent

sex/gender distinction, where ‘female’/‘male’

are used as sex terms and ‘woman’/’man’ as

gender terms, not to be helpful. Instead, she takes all of these to be

sex terms and holds that (the norms of) femininity/masculinity refer

to gender normativity. Because much of the gender critical

feminists’ discussion that philosophers have engaged in has

taken place in social media, public fora, and other sources outside

academic philosophy, this entry will not focus on these

discussions.

4. Women as a group

The various critiques of the sex/gender distinction have called into

question the viability of the category women. Feminism is the

movement to end the oppression women as a group face. But, how should

the category of women be understood if feminists accept the above

arguments that gender construction is not uniform, that a sharp

distinction between biological sex and social gender is false or (at

least) not useful, and that various features associated with women

play a role in what it is to be a woman, none of which are

individually necessary and jointly sufficient (like a variety of

social roles, positions, behaviours, traits, bodily features and

experiences)? Feminists must be able to address cultural and social

differences in gender construction if feminism is to be a genuinely

inclusive movement and be careful not to posit commonalities that mask

important ways in which women qua women differ. These

concerns (among others) have generated a situation where (as Linda

Alcoff puts it) feminists aim to speak and make political demands in

the name of women, at the same time rejecting the idea that there is a

unified category of women (2006, 152). If feminist critiques of the

category women are successful, then what (if anything) binds

women together, what is it to be a woman, and what kinds of demands

can feminists make on behalf of women?

Many have found the fragmentation of the category of women problematic

for political reasons (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Bach 2012; Benhabib 1992;

Frye 1996; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Martin 1994; Mikkola 2007;

Stoljar 1995; Stone 2004; Tanesini 1996; Young 1997; Zack 2005). For

instance, Young holds that accounts like Spelman’s reduce the

category of women to a gerrymandered collection of individuals with

nothing to bind them together (1997, 20). Black women differ from

white women but members of both groups also differ from one another

with respect to nationality, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and

economic position; that is, wealthy white women differ from

working-class white women due to their economic and class positions.

These sub-groups are themselves diverse: for instance, some

working-class white women in Northern Ireland are starkly divided

along religious lines. So if we accept Spelman’s position, we

risk ending up with individual women and nothing to bind them

together. And this is problematic: in order to respond to oppression

of women in general, feminists must understand them as a category in

some sense. Young writes that without doing so “it is not

possible to conceptualize oppression as a systematic, structured,

institutional process” (1997, 17). Some, then, take the

articulation of an inclusive category of women to be the prerequisite

for effective feminist politics and a rich literature has emerged that

aims to conceptualise women as a group or a collective (e.g. Alcoff

2006; Ásta 2011; Frye 1996; 2011; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000;

Stoljar 1995, 2011; Young 1997; Zack 2005). Articulations of this

category can be divided into those that are: (a) gender nominalist

— positions that deny there is something women qua

women share and that seek to unify women’s social kind by

appealing to something external to women; and (b) gender realist

— positions that take there to be something women qua

women share (although these realist positions differ significantly

from those outlined in Section 2). Below we will review some

influential gender nominalist and gender realist positions. Before

doing so, it is worth noting that not everyone is convinced that

attempts to articulate an inclusive category of women can succeed or

that worries about what it is to be a woman are in need of being

resolved. Mikkola (2016) argues that feminist politics need not rely

on overcoming (what she calls) the ‘gender controversy’:

that feminists must settle the meaning of gender concepts and

articulate a way to ground women’s social kind membership. As

she sees it, disputes about ‘what it is to be a woman’

have become theoretically bankrupt and intractable, which has

generated an analytical impasse that looks unsurpassable. Instead,

Mikkola argues for giving up the quest, which in any case in her view

poses no serious political obstacles.

Elizabeth Barnes (2020) responds to the need to offer an inclusive

conception of gender somewhat differently, although she endorses the

need for feminism to be inclusive particularly of trans people. Barnes

holds that typically philosophical theories of gender aim to offer an

account of what it is to be a woman (or man, genderqueer, etc.), where

such an account is presumed to provide necessary and sufficient

conditions for being a woman or an account of our gender terms’

extensions. But, she holds, it is a mistake to expect our theories of

gender to do so. For Barnes, a project that offers a metaphysics of

gender “should be understood as the project of theorizing what

it is —if anything— about the social world that ultimately

explains gender” (2020, 706). This project is not equivalent to

one that aims to define gender terms or elucidate the application

conditions for natural language gender terms though.

4.1 Gender nominalism

4.1.1 Gendered social series

Iris Young argues that unless there is “some sense in which

‘woman’ is the name of a social collective [that feminism

represents], there is nothing specific to feminist politics”

(1997, 13). In order to make the category women intelligible,

she argues that women make up a series: a particular kind of social

collective “whose members are unified passively by the objects

their actions are oriented around and/or by the objectified results of

the material effects of the actions of the other” (Young 1997,

23). A series is distinct from a group in that, whereas members of

groups are thought to self-consciously share certain goals, projects,

traits and/ or self-conceptions, members of series pursue their own

individual ends without necessarily having anything at all in common.

Young holds that women are not bound together by a shared feature or

experience (or set of features and experiences) since she takes

Spelman’s particularity argument to have established definitely

that no such feature exists (1997, 13; see also: Frye 1996; Heyes

2000). Instead, women’s category is unified by certain

practico-inert realities or the ways in which women’s lives and

their actions are oriented around certain objects and everyday

realities (Young 1997, 23–4). For example, bus commuters make up

a series unified through their individual actions being organised

around the same practico-inert objects of the bus and the practice of

public transport. Women make up a series unified through women’s

lives and actions being organised around certain practico-inert

objects and realities that position them as women.

Young identifies two broad groups of such practico-inert objects and

realities. First, phenomena associated with female bodies (physical

facts), biological processes that take place in female bodies

(menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth) and social rules associated with

these biological processes (social rules of menstruation, for

instance). Second, gender-coded objects and practices: pronouns,

verbal and visual representations of gender, gender-coded artefacts

and social spaces, clothes, cosmetics, tools and furniture. So, women

make up a series since their lives and actions are organised around

female bodies and certain gender-coded objects. Their series is bound

together passively and the unity is “not one that arises from

the individuals called women” (Young 1997, 32).

Although Young’s proposal purports to be a response to

Spelman’s worries, Stone has questioned whether it is, after

all, susceptible to the particularity argument: ultimately, on

Young’s view, something women as women share (their

practico-inert realities) binds them together (Stone 2004).

4.1.2 Resemblance nominalism

Natalie Stoljar holds that unless the category of women is unified,

feminist action on behalf of women cannot be justified (1995, 282).

Stoljar too is persuaded by the thought that women qua women

do not share anything unitary. This prompts her to argue for

resemblance nominalism. This is the view that a certain kind of

resemblance relation holds between entities of a particular type (for

more on resemblance nominalism, see Armstrong 1989, 39–58).

Stoljar is not alone in arguing for resemblance relations to make

sense of women as a category; others have also done so, usually

appealing to Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’

relations (Alcoff 1988; Green & Radford Curry 1991; Heyes 2000;

Munro 2006). Stoljar relies more on Price’s resemblance

nominalism whereby x is a member of some type F only

if x resembles some paradigm or exemplar of F

sufficiently closely (Price 1953, 20). For instance, the type of red

entities is unified by some chosen red paradigms so that only those

entities that sufficiently resemble the paradigms count as red. The

type (or category) of women, then, is unified by some chosen woman

paradigms so that those who sufficiently resemble the woman paradigms

count as women (Stoljar 1995, 284).

Semantic considerations about the concept woman suggest to

Stoljar that resemblance nominalism should be endorsed (Stoljar 2000,

28). It seems unlikely that the concept is applied on the basis of

some single social feature all and only women possess. By contrast,

woman is a cluster concept and our attributions of womanhood

pick out “different arrangements of features in different

individuals” (Stoljar 2000, 27). More specifically, they pick

out the following clusters of features: (a) Female sex; (b)

Phenomenological features: menstruation, female sexual experience,

child-birth, breast-feeding, fear of walking on the streets at night

or fear of rape; (c) Certain roles: wearing typically female clothing,

being oppressed on the basis of one’s sex or undertaking

care-work; (d) Gender attribution: “calling oneself a woman,

being called a woman” (Stoljar 1995, 283–4). For Stoljar,

attributions of womanhood are to do with a variety of traits and

experiences: those that feminists have historically termed

‘gender traits’ (like social, behavioural, psychological

traits) and those termed ‘sex traits’.

Nonetheless, she holds that since the concept woman applies

to (at least some) trans persons, one can be a woman without being

female (Stoljar 1995, 282).

The cluster concept woman does not, however,

straightforwardly provide the criterion for picking out the category

of women. Rather, the four clusters of features that the concept picks

out help single out woman paradigms that in turn help single out the

category of women. First, any individual who possesses a

feature from at least three of the four clusters mentioned

will count as an exemplar of the category. For instance, an

African-American with primary and secondary female sex

characteristics, who describes herself as a woman and is oppressed on

the basis of her sex, along with a white European hermaphrodite

brought up ‘as a girl’, who engages in female roles and

has female phenomenological features despite lacking female sex

characteristics, will count as woman paradigms (Stoljar 1995,

284).[7]

Second, any individual who resembles “any of the paradigms

sufficiently closely (on Price’s account, as closely as [the

paradigms] resemble each other) will be a member of the resemblance

class ‘woman’” (Stoljar 1995, 284). That is, what

delimits membership in the category of women is that one resembles

sufficiently a woman paradigm.

4.2 Neo-gender realism

4.2.1 Social subordination and gender

In a series of articles collected in her 2012 book, Sally Haslanger

argues for a way to define the concept woman that is

politically useful, serving as a tool in feminist fights against

sexism, and that shows woman to be a social (not a

biological) notion. More specifically, Haslanger argues that gender is

a matter of occupying either a subordinate or a privileged social

position. In some articles, Haslanger is arguing for a revisionary

analysis of the concept woman (2000b; 2003a; 2003b).

Elsewhere she suggests that her analysis may not be that revisionary

after all (2005; 2006). Consider the former argument first.

Haslanger’s analysis is, in her terms, ameliorative: it aims to

elucidate which gender concepts best help feminists achieve their

legitimate purposes thereby elucidating those concepts feminists

should be using (Haslanger 2000b,

33).[8]

Now, feminists need gender terminology in order to fight sexist

injustices (Haslanger 2000b, 36). In particular, they need gender

terms to identify, explain and talk about persistent social

inequalities between males and females. Haslanger’s analysis of

gender begins with the recognition that females and males differ in

two respects: physically and in their social positions. Societies in

general tend to “privilege individuals with male bodies”

(Haslanger 2000b, 38) so that the social positions they subsequently

occupy are better than the social positions of those with female

bodies. And this generates persistent sexist injustices. With this in

mind, Haslanger specifies how she understands genders:

S is a woman iff [by definition] S is

systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political,

legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a

target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features

presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in

reproduction.

S is a man iff [by definition] S is

systematically privileged along some dimension (economic, political,

legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a

target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features

presumed to be evidence of a male’s biological role in

reproduction. (2003a, 6–7)

These are constitutive of being a woman and a man:

what makes calling S a woman apt, is that S is

oppressed on sex-marked grounds; what makes calling S a man

apt, is that S is privileged on sex-marked grounds.

Haslanger’s ameliorative analysis is counterintuitive in that

females who are not sex-marked for oppression, do not count as women.

At least arguably, the Queen of England is not oppressed on sex-marked

grounds and so, would not count as a woman on Haslanger’s

definition. And, similarly, all males who are not privileged would not

count as men. This might suggest that Haslanger’s analysis

should be rejected in that it does not capture what language users

have in mind when applying gender terms. However, Haslanger argues

that this is not a reason to reject the definitions, which she takes

to be revisionary: they are not meant to capture our intuitive gender

terms. In response, Mikkola (2009) has argued that revisionary

analyses of gender concepts, like Haslanger’s, are both

politically unhelpful and philosophically unnecessary.

Note also that Haslanger’s proposal is eliminativist: gender

justice would eradicate gender, since it would abolish those sexist

social structures responsible for sex-marked oppression and privilege.

If sexist oppression were to cease, women and men would no longer

exist (although there would still be males and females). Not all

feminists endorse such an eliminativist view though. Stone holds that

Haslanger does not leave any room for positively revaluing what it is

to be a woman: since Haslanger defines woman in terms of

subordination,

any woman who challenges her subordinate status must by definition be

challenging her status as a woman, even if she does not intend to

… positive change to our gender norms would involve getting rid

of the (necessarily subordinate) feminine gender. (Stone 2007, 160)

But according to Stone this is not only undesirable – one should

be able to challenge subordination without having to challenge

one’s status as a woman. It is also false: “because norms

of femininity can be and constantly are being revised, women can be

women without thereby being subordinate” (Stone 2007, 162;

Mikkola [2016] too argues that Haslanger’s eliminativism is

troublesome).

Theodore Bach holds that Haslanger’s eliminativism is

undesirable on other grounds, and that Haslanger’s position

faces another more serious problem. Feminism faces the following

worries (among others):

Representation problem: “if there is no real group of

‘women’, then it is incoherent to make moral claims and

advance political policies on behalf of women” (Bach 2012,

234).

Commonality problems: (1) There is no feature that all women

cross-culturally and transhistorically share. (2) Delimiting

women’s social kind with the help of some essential property

privileges those who possess it, and marginalizes those who do not

(Bach 2012, 235).

According to Bach, Haslanger’s strategy to resolve these

problems appeals to ‘social objectivism’. First, we define

women “according to a suitably abstract relational

property” (Bach 2012, 236), which avoids the commonality

problems. Second, Haslanger employs “an ontologically thin

notion of ‘objectivity’” (Bach 2012, 236) that

answers the representation problem. Haslanger’s solution (Bach

holds) is specifically to argue that women make up an objective type

because women are objectively similar to one another, and not simply

classified together given our background conceptual schemes. Bach

claims though that Haslanger’s account is not objective enough,

and we should on political grounds “provide a stronger

ontological characterization of the genders men and

women according to which they are natural kinds with

explanatory essences” (Bach 2012, 238). He thus proposes that

women make up a natural kind with a historical essence:

The essential property of women, in virtue of which an individual is a

member of the kind ‘women,’ is participation in a lineage

of women. In order to exemplify this relational property, an

individual must be a reproduction of ancestral women, in which case

she must have undergone the ontogenetic processes through which a

historical gender system replicates women. (Bach 2012, 271)

In short, one is not a woman due to shared surface properties with

other women (like occupying a subordinate social position). Rather,

one is a woman because one has the right history: one has undergone

the ubiquitous ontogenetic process of gender socialization. Thinking

about gender in this way supposedly provides a stronger kind unity

than Haslanger’s that simply appeals to shared surface

properties.

Not everyone agrees; Mikkola (2020) argues that Bach’s

metaphysical picture has internal tensions that render it puzzling and

that Bach’s metaphysics does not provide good responses to the

commonality and presentation problems. The historically essentialist

view also has anti-trans implications. After all, trans women who have

not undergone female gender socialization won’t count as women

on his view (Mikkola [2016, 2020] develops this line of critique in

more detail). More worryingly, trans women will count as men contrary

to their self-identification. Both Bettcher (2013) and Jenkins (2016)

consider the importance of gender self-identification. Bettcher argues

that there is more than one ‘correct’ way to understand

womanhood: at the very least, the dominant (mainstream), and the

resistant (trans) conceptions. Dominant views like that of

Bach’s tend to erase trans people’s experiences and to

marginalize trans women within feminist movements. Rather than trans

women having to defend their self-identifying claims, these claims

should be taken at face value right from the start. And so, Bettcher

holds, “in analyzing the meaning of terms such as

‘woman,’ it is inappropriate to dismiss alternative ways

in which those terms are actually used in trans subcultures; such

usage needs to be taken into consideration as part of the

analysis” (2013, 235).

Specifically with Haslanger in mind and in a similar vein, Jenkins

(2016) discusses how Haslanger’s revisionary approach unduly

excludes some trans women from women’s social kind. On

Jenkins’s view, Haslanger’s ameliorative methodology in

fact yields more than one satisfying target concept: one that

“corresponds to Haslanger’s proposed concept and captures

the sense of gender as an imposed social class”; another that

“captures the sense of gender as a lived identity”

(Jenkins 2016, 397). The latter of these allows us to include trans

women into women’s social kind, who on Haslanger’s social

class approach to gender would inappropriately have been excluded.

(See Andler 2017 for the view that Jenkins’s purportedly

inclusive conception of gender is still not fully inclusive. Jenkins

2018 responds to this charge and develops the notion of gender

identity still further.)

In addition to her revisionary argument, Haslanger has suggested that

her ameliorative analysis of woman may not be as revisionary

as it first seems (2005, 2006). Although successful in their reference

fixing, ordinary language users do not always know precisely what they

are talking about. Our language use may be skewed by oppressive

ideologies that can “mislead us about the content of our own

thoughts” (Haslanger 2005, 12). Although her gender terminology

is not intuitive, this could simply be because oppressive ideologies

mislead us about the meanings of our gender terms. Our everyday gender

terminology might mean something utterly different from what we

think it means; and we could be entirely ignorant of this.

Perhaps Haslanger’s analysis, then, has captured our everyday

gender vocabulary revealing to us the terms that we actually employ:

we may be applying ‘woman’ in our everyday language on the

basis of sex-marked subordination whether we take ourselves to be

doing so or not. If this is so, Haslanger’s gender terminology

is not radically revisionist.

Saul (2006) argues that, despite it being possible that we unknowingly

apply ‘woman’ on the basis of social subordination, it is

extremely difficult to show that this is the case. This would require

showing that the gender terminology we in fact employ is

Haslanger’s proposed gender terminology. But discovering the

grounds on which we apply everyday gender terms is extremely difficult

precisely because they are applied in various and idiosyncratic ways

(Saul 2006, 129). Haslanger, then, needs to do more in order to show

that her analysis is non-revisionary.

4.2.2 Gender uniessentialism

Charlotte Witt (2011a; 2011b) argues for a particular sort of gender

essentialism, which Witt terms ‘uniessentialism’. Her

motivation and starting point is the following: many ordinary social

agents report gender being essential to them and claim that they would

be a different person were they of a different sex/gender.

Uniessentialism attempts to understand and articulate this. However,

Witt’s work departs in important respects from the earlier

(so-called) essentialist or gender realist positions discussed in

Section 2: Witt does not posit some essential property of womanhood of

the kind discussed above, which failed to take women’s

differences into account. Further, uniessentialism differs

significantly from those position developed in response to the problem

of how we should conceive of women’s social kind. It is not

about solving the standard dispute between gender nominalists and

gender realists, or about articulating some supposedly shared property

that binds women together and provides a theoretical ground for

feminist political solidarity. Rather, uniessentialism aims to make

good the widely held belief that gender is constitutive of who we

are.[9]

Uniessentialism is a sort of individual essentialism. Traditionally

philosophers distinguish between kind and individual essentialisms:

the former examines what binds members of a kind together and what do

all members of some kind have in common qua members of that

kind. The latter asks: what makes an individual the

individual it is. We can further distinguish two sorts of individual

essentialisms: Kripkean identity essentialism and Aristotelian

uniessentialism. The former asks: what makes an individual

that individual? The latter, however, asks a slightly

different question: what explains the unity of individuals? What

explains that an individual entity exists over and above the sum total

of its constituent parts? (The standard feminist debate over gender

nominalism and gender realism has largely been about kind

essentialism. Being about individual essentialism, Witt’s

uniessentialism departs in an important way from the standard debate.)

From the two individual essentialisms, Witt endorses the Aristotelian

one. On this view, certain functional essences have a unifying role:

these essences are responsible for the fact that material parts

constitute a new individual, rather than just a lump of stuff or a

collection of particles. Witt’s example is of a house: the

essential house-functional property (what the entity is for, what its

purpose is) unifies the different material parts of a house so that

there is a house, and not just a collection of house-constituting

particles (2011a, 6). Gender (being a woman/a man) functions in a

similar fashion and provides “the principle of normative

unity” that organizes, unifies and determines the roles of

social individuals (Witt 2011a, 73). Due to this, gender is a

uniessential property of social individuals.

It is important to clarify the notions of gender and

social individuality that Witt employs. First, gender is a

social position that “cluster[s] around the engendering function

… women conceive and bear … men beget” (Witt

2011a, 40). These are women and men’s socially mediated

reproductive functions (Witt 2011a, 29) and they differ from the

biological function of reproduction, which roughly corresponds to sex

on the standard sex/gender distinction. Witt writes: “to be a

woman is to be recognized to have a particular function in

engendering, to be a man is to be recognized to have a different

function in engendering” (2011a, 39). Second, Witt distinguishes

persons (those who possess self-consciousness), human

beings (those who are biologically human) and social

individuals (those who occupy social positions synchronically and

diachronically). These ontological categories are not equivalent in

that they possess different persistence and identity conditions.

Social individuals are bound by social normativity, human beings by

biological normativity. These normativities differ in two respects:

first, social norms differ from one culture to the next whereas

biological norms do not; second, unlike biological normativity, social

normativity requires “the recognition by others that an agent is

both responsive to and evaluable under a social norm” (Witt

2011a, 19). Thus, being a social individual is not equivalent to being

a human being. Further, Witt takes personhood to be defined in terms

of intrinsic psychological states of self-awareness and

self-consciousness. However, social individuality is defined in terms

of the extrinsic feature of occupying a social position, which depends

for its existence on a social world. So, the two are not equivalent:

personhood is essentially about intrinsic features and could exist

without a social world, whereas social individuality is essentially

about extrinsic features that could not exist without a social

world.

Witt’s gender essentialist argument crucially pertains to

social individuals, not to persons or human beings: saying

that persons or human beings are gendered would be a category mistake.

But why is gender essential to social individuals? For Witt, social

individuals are those who occupy positions in social reality. Further,

“social positions have norms or social roles associated with

them; a social role is what an individual who occupies a given social

position is responsive to and evaluable under” (Witt 2011a, 59).

However, qua social individuals, we occupy multiple social

positions at once and over time: we can be women, mothers, immigrants,

sisters, academics, wives, community organisers and team-sport coaches

synchronically and diachronically. Now, the issue for Witt is what

unifies these positions so that a social individual is

constituted. After all, a bundle of social position occupancies does

not make for an individual (just as a bundle of properties like

being white, cube-shaped and sweet do not

make for a sugar cube). For Witt, this unifying role is undertaken by

gender (being a woman or a man): it is

a pervasive and fundamental social position that unifies and

determines all other social positions both synchronically and

diachronically. It unifies them not physically, but by providing a

principle of normative unity. (2011a, 19–20)

By ‘normative unity’, Witt means the following: given our

social roles and social position occupancies, we are responsive to

various sets of social norms. These norms are “complex patterns

of behaviour and practices that constitute what one ought to do in a

situation given one’s social position(s) and one’s social

context” (Witt 2011a, 82). The sets of norms can conflict: the

norms of motherhood can (and do) conflict with the norms of being an

academic philosopher. However, in order for this conflict to exist,

the norms must be binding on a single social individual.

Witt, then, asks: what explains the existence and unity of the social

individual who is subject to conflicting social norms? The answer is

gender.

Gender is not just a social role that unifies social individuals. Witt

takes it to be the social role — as she puts it, it is

the mega social role that unifies social agents. First,

gender is a mega social role if it satisfies two conditions (and Witt

claims that it does): (1) if it provides the principle of synchronic

and diachronic unity of social individuals, and (2) if it inflects and

defines a broad range of other social roles. Gender satisfies the

first in usually being a life-long social position: a social

individual persists just as long as their gendered social position

persists. Further, Witt maintains, trans people are not

counterexamples to this claim: transitioning entails that the old

social individual has ceased to exist and a new one has come into

being. And this is consistent with the same person persisting and

undergoing social individual change via transitioning. Gender

satisfies the second condition too. It inflects other social roles,

like being a parent or a professional. The expectations attached to

these social roles differ depending on the agent’s gender, since

gender imposes different social norms to govern the execution of the

further social roles. Now, gender — as opposed to some other

social category, like race — is not just a mega social role; it

is the unifying mega social role. Cross-cultural and trans-historical

considerations support this view. Witt claims that patriarchy is a

social universal (2011a, 98). By contrast, racial categorisation

varies historically and cross-culturally, and racial oppression is not

a universal feature of human cultures. Thus, gender has a better claim

to being the social role that is uniessential to social individuals.

This account of gender essentialism not only explains social

agents’ connectedness to their gender, but it also provides a

helpful way to conceive of women’s agency — something that

is central to feminist politics.

4.2.3 Gender as positionality

Linda Alcoff holds that feminism faces an identity crisis: the

category of women is feminism’s starting point, but various

critiques about gender have fragmented the category and it is not

clear how feminists should understand what it is to be a woman (2006,

chapter 5). In response, Alcoff develops an account of gender as

positionality whereby “gender is, among other things, a

position one occupies and from which one can act politically”

(2006, 148). In particular, she takes one’s social position to

foster the development of specifically gendered identities (or

self-conceptions): “The very subjectivity (or subjective

experience of being a woman) and the very identity of women are

constituted by women’s position” (Alcoff 2006, 148).

Alcoff holds that there is an objective basis for distinguishing

individuals on the grounds of (actual or expected) reproductive

roles:

Women and men are differentiated by virtue of their different

relationship of possibility to biological reproduction, with

biological reproduction referring to conceiving, giving birth, and

breast-feeding, involving one’s body. (Alcoff 2006, 172,

italics in original)

The thought is that those standardly classified as biologically

female, although they may not actually be able to reproduce, will

encounter “a different set of practices, expectations, and

feelings in regard to reproduction” than those standardly

classified as male (Alcoff 2006, 172). Further, this differential

relation to the possibility of reproduction is used as the basis for

many cultural and social phenomena that position women and men: it can

be

the basis of a variety of social segregations, it can engender the

development of differential forms of embodiment experienced throughout

life, and it can generate a wide variety of affective responses, from

pride, delight, shame, guilt, regret, or great relief from having

successfully avoided reproduction. (Alcoff 2006, 172)

Reproduction, then, is an objective basis for distinguishing

individuals that takes on a cultural dimension in that it positions

women and men differently: depending on the kind of body one has,

one’s lived experience will differ. And this fosters the

construction of gendered social identities: one’s role in

reproduction helps configure how one is socially positioned and this

conditions the development of specifically gendered social

identities.

Since women are socially positioned in various different contexts,

“there is no gender essence all women share” (Alcoff 2006,

147–8). Nonetheless, Alcoff acknowledges that her account is

akin to the original 1960s sex/gender distinction insofar as sex

difference (understood in terms of the objective division of

reproductive labour) provides the foundation for certain cultural

arrangements (the development of a gendered social identity). But,

with the benefit of hindsight

we can see that maintaining a distinction between the objective

category of sexed identity and the varied and culturally contingent

practices of gender does not presume an absolute distinction of the

old-fashioned sort between culture and a reified nature. (Alcoff 2006,

175)

That is, her view avoids the implausible claim that sex is exclusively

to do with nature and gender with culture. Rather, the distinction on

the basis of reproductive possibilities shapes and is shaped by the

sorts of cultural and social phenomena (like varieties of social

segregation) these possibilities gives rise to. For instance,

technological interventions can alter sex differences illustrating

that this is the case (Alcoff 2006, 175). Women’s specifically

gendered social identities that are constituted by their context

dependent positions, then, provide the starting point for feminist

politics.

5. Beyond the Binary

Recently Robin Dembroff (2020) has argued that existing metaphysical

accounts of gender fail to address non-binary gender identities. This

generates two concerns. First, metaphysical accounts of gender (like

the ones outlined in previous sections) are insufficient for capturing

those who reject binary gender categorisation where people are either

men or women. In so doing, these accounts are not satisfying as

explanations of gender understood in a more expansive sense that goes

beyond the binary. Second, the failure to understand non-binary gender

identities contributes to a form of

epistemic injustice

called ‘hermeneutical injustice’: it feeds into a

collective failure to comprehend and analyse concepts and practices

that undergird non-binary classification schemes, thereby impeding on

one’s ability to fully understand themselves. To overcome these

problems, Dembroff suggests an account of genderqueer that they call

‘critical gender kind’:

a kind whose members collectively destabilize one or more elements of

dominant gender ideology. Genderqueer, on my proposed model, is a

category whose members collectively destabilize the binary axis, or

the idea that the only possible genders are the exclusive and

exhaustive kinds men and women. (2020, 2)

Note that Dembroff’s position is not to be confused with

‘gender critical feminist’ positions like those noted

above, which are critical of the prevalent feminist focus on gender,

as opposed to sex, kinds. Dembroff understands genderqueer as a gender

kind, but one that is critical of dominant binary understandings of

gender.

Dembroff identifies two modes of destabilising the gender binary:

principled and existential. Principled destabilising “stems from

or otherwise expresses individuals’ social or political

commitments regarding gender norms, practices, and structures”,

while existential destabilising “stems from or otherwise

expresses individuals’ felt or desired gender roles, embodiment,

and/or categorization” (2020, 13). These modes are not mutually

exclusive, and they can help us understand the difference between

allies and members of genderqueer kinds: “While both resist

dominant gender ideology, members of [genderqueer] kinds resist (at

least in part) due to felt or desired gender categorization that

deviates from dominant expectations, norms, and assumptions”

(2020, 14). These modes of destabilisation also enable us to formulate

an understanding of non-critical gender kinds that binary

understandings of women and men’s kinds exemplify. Dembroff

defines these kinds as follows:

For a given kind X, X is a non-critical gender

kind relative to a given society iff X’s members

collectively restabilize one or more elements of the dominant gender

ideology in that society. (2020, 14)

Dembroff’s understanding of critical and non-critical gender

kinds importantly makes gender kind membership something more and

other than a mere psychological phenomenon. To engage in collectively

destabilising or restabilising dominant gender normativity and

ideology, we need more than mere attitudes or mental states –

resisting or maintaining such normativity requires action as well. In

so doing, Dembroff puts their position forward as an alternative to

two existing internalist positions about gender. First, to Jennifer

McKitrick’s (2015) view whereby gender is dispositional: in a

context where someone is disposed to behave in ways that would be

taken by others to be indicative of (e.g.) womanhood, the person has a

woman’s gender identity. Second, to Jenkin’s (2016, 2018)

position that takes an individual’s gender identity to be

dependent on which gender-specific norms the person experiences as

being relevant to them. On this view, someone is a woman if the person

experiences norms associated with women to be relevant to the person

in the particular social context that they are in. Neither of these

positions well-captures non-binary identities, Dembroff argues, which

motivates the account of genderqueer identities as critical gender

kinds.

As Dembroff acknowledges, substantive philosophical work on non-binary

gender identities is still developing. However, it is important to

note that analytic philosophers are beginning to engage in gender

metaphysics that goes beyond the binary.

6. Conclusion

This entry first looked at feminist objections to biological

determinism and the claim that gender is socially constructed. Next,

it examined feminist critiques of prevalent understandings of gender

and sex, and the distinction itself. In response to these concerns,

the entry looked at how a unified women’s category could be

articulated for feminist political purposes. This illustrated that

gender metaphysics — or what it is to be a woman or a

man or a genderqueer person — is still very much a live issue.

And although contemporary feminist philosophical debates have

questioned some of the tenets and details of the original 1960s

sex/gender distinction, most still hold onto the view that gender is

about social factors and that it is (in some sense) distinct

from biological sex. The jury is still out on what the best, the most

useful, or (even) the correct definition of gender is.

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How femininity has changed over the past 50 years, according to a new study | The Independent | The Independent

femininity has changed over the past 50 years, according to a new study | The Independent | The Independent Jump to contentAsia EditionChangeUK EditionUS EditionEdición en EspañolSign up to our newslettersSubscribe nowLog in / Register IndependentBig in America Push notificationsSubscribeMenuNewsNewsUKUSWorldUK PoliticsBrexitHealthBusinessScienceSpaceNews VideosSportSportFootballParis 2024 OlympicsFormula 1Rugby UnionCricketTennisBoxingUFCCyclingGolfBettingSport VideosVoicesVoicesEditorialsLettersJohn RentoulMary DejevskyAndrew GriceSean O’GradyCultureCultureFilmTV & RadioMusicGamesBooksArtPhotographyTheatre & DanceCulture VideosLifestyleLifestyleShoppingTechMoneyFood & DrinkFashionLove & SexWomenHealth & FamiliesRoyal FamilyMotoringElectric Vehicles Lifestyle VideosTravelTravelUK Hotel ReviewsNews & AdviceSimon CalderCruisesUKEuropeUSAAsiaAustralia & New ZealandSouth AmericaC. 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Read our privacy noticeFemininity today is associated with being independent, outspoken, compassionate and kind, a new study has found.The research reveals how the idea of femininity has evolved over the decades - 50 years ago, 53 per cent of people said to be feminine meant to be “a good mother and caring", while 41 per cent of people considered being “delicate and sweet” an essential part of being a woman.Now, however, attitudes have evolved, as the study of 2,000 women by Always Platinum reveals. RecommendedOver half of millennial women don’t identify as feminist - here's whyToday, women are striving to show compassion and kindness, be good friends and promote other females in the workplace.More than half (58 per cent) of UK females describe the modern woman as independent, 48 per cent as resilient and 44 per cent as ambitious.The study also found that 26 per cent of people believe it’s in their 30s that women find the perfect balance of being soft and strong - almost nine in 10 believe it’s possible to be assertive and get what you want in life whilst still being caring.The research confirms what many people will have already known about how the notion of femininity has evolved. As society makes positive steps towards gender equality, what it means to be masculine has also come under scrutiny.Many people have made strides to debunk concept of ‘toxic masculinity’ - the idea that being a man involves being aggressive, stoic and dominant over women.One of the ways this has been seen is through men speaking out about their mental health - influencers such as Ben Bidwell are leading the charge, arguing that the phrase “man up” is problematic.As what it means to be feminine evolves, masculinity seems to be developing too.More aboutfemininityJoin our commenting forumJoin thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their repliesComments1/1How femininity has changed over the past 50 yearsHow femininity has changed over the past 50 yearsWomen are no longer so concerned with being delicate, caring and sweet✕Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this articleWant to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? 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