Abstract: As feminist sociologists have struggled to understand gender from the standpoint of women as well as that of men, we have found that it operates on at least three planes of human experience. Gender shapes who we are as persons, our preferences, our fears, our ways of relating to the world. Gender is also something we do, a way of conducting ourselves in specific situations, a set of standards to which we hold ourselves and one another accountable. Finally, gender is also an aspect of social organization, the outcome when a society divides labor by sex, assigns the work of meeting human needs to women, and devalues that work. Further, what gender is, how it is understood, and how it works is shaped by class and race relations so the impact of gender on men's and women's lives varies significantly depending on their race/ethnic and economic situations. In sum, what might appear to many people as a naturally occurring dichotomy of two opposite sexes is a multilayered and multiple categoried outcome of a great deal of social effort and organization.
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 2
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