From Sex Roles to Gendered Institutions

Abstract

Gender has become, in the last twenty years, part of the everyday language of social science, largely as a consequence of the feminist movement and the accompanying intellectual efforts to better understand the systematic and widespread subordination of women and their domination by men. Although the term is widely used, there is no common understanding of its meaning, even among feminist scholars (Butler 1990). In sociology, feminists began with one view of gender, which has been gradually broadened and changed, although the newer view has not totally displaced the older one. To argue that there are two views of gender within sociology is, of course, to oversimplify a complex discussion containing a number of different positions and overlapping viewpoints. However, casting these positions into two views is, I believe, helpful in highlighting the emergence of a new way of thinking about central institutional processes in our society. In the earlier usage, gender is another word for sex or for women; the study of gender is the study of women, sex roles, or both. Gender, in this view, is an area or a field, but one that is peripheral to the central concerns of sociology, of interest primarily to specialists. In the newer usage, gender is theorized as a basic principle of social structure and cultural interpretation (e.g., Scott 1986; Acker 1988). Rather than being a specialized area within an accepted domain, gender is the patterning of difference and domination through distinctions between women and men that is integral to many societal processes. This way of theorizing gender criticizes and challenges existing frameworks, arguing that women and gender roles cannot just be added to existing theory and that theories that are silent about gender are fundamentally flawed. This more radical view of gender is part of the ongoing development of feminist theory and method; hence the elaboration of gender is still in process. In this essay I explore these different definitions of gender and what it means to talk about gendered institutions. Gender was first employed to emphasize the social and relational nature of differences between women and men in contrast to biological differences between the sexes. Sex was nature and gender was nurture. In the language of sociology, gender roles replaced sex roles, as gender represented more accurately than sex the social construction of identities and roles dividing societies into women and men. Sex and gender were interdependent, but clearly distinguished. Gender was social, thus variable and subject to change, while sex represented the essential and unchanging physical differences in human reproduction. An implicit causal link existed between sex and gender. Positing a clear distinction and a causal link between sex and gender was a useful tactic for those feminist sociologists who took a biosocial view of gender (e.g., Rossi 1984) and saw gendered behavior as at least in part physiologically determined. Although the contribution of physiological differences to social behavior is not settled, for me and others, this distinction between sex and gender became problematic. Variations in actions and feelings among both men and women, as well as similarities between women and men, seemed too great to allow tracing behavior to biological differences. Another problem had to do with the meaning of sex. Sex signifies differences between female and male bodies, such as external genitalia, hormonal production, ovaries and sperm. These differences define the binary categories male and female and serve as signs that persons belong to one or the other. Although the categories are seen as natural, thus prior to social intervention in the form of gender, the identification of certain physical characteristics as the basis for categorizing people and the assignment of