2. ON THE GENDER CONSTRUCT

I'm in my final year of high school (five days of classes left; yay!) and the New South Wales curriculum has an Extension English course. There are a whole bunch of modules the teacher can choose from in it, and at my school we have studied the module 'Language and Gender'. It is fascinating.

We've looked at a bunch of gender theorists, like Deborah Tannen, Keith and Shuttleworth, Dale Spender and Robin Lackoff, all of whom point out language traits which they categorise as either masculine or feminine. Men's language and women's language. For example, Tannen says that women make requests while men give orders.

What really interested me, though, was a court room study done by O'Barr and Atkins. They found that the language that people used wasn't actually determined by their sex, but instead by their status. So, people with high status, like the judge, used 'masculine' language, even if they were a woman, and people with low status used 'feminine' language. O'Barr and Atkins re-named 'women's language' as 'powerless language'.

The conclusion that can be reached from this is that the differences between men's and women's language aren't determined by sex; they are socially and culturally imposed differences. Surely that's got to get us thinking - what other differences are imposed upon us? Is there actually any difference (other than physical difference) between men and women?


At this point I think a couple of definitions are in order. The most concise and clear definitions I've found are from Literary Terms: A Practical Glossary. It states:

"in the social sciences, researchers use the terms sex and gender to refer to different kinds of division.

• Sex is used to refer to biological difference, while
• gender is used to refer to social and cultural differences that are built upon sexual difference."

And that brings me to the point of the post; gender is a social construct. The sex we are born does not determine our gender - instead, society teaches us to behave in certain ways which they view as being appropriate for our sex.

I cannot see this as a good thing. It is the worst form of discrimination; people are brought up in a culture of gender inequality, and taught that it is simply because of some inherent or 'natural' difference. People are systematically conditioned to impose this discrimination upon themselves.

I hate the gender construct most of all because it is rampant in my life. I have made my fair share of jokes about men who are effeminate or women being butch, and I conform to a lot of the expectations society has for women. The gender construct affects almost every aspect of society, making it almost impossible to escape.

There is hope though. With the 'boys are good at maths, girls are good at English' myth slowly being destroyed, and transgender people being acknowledged in society I think people are starting to realise that they don't have to conform to the fallacious expectations which have been forced upon them from birth.

* * * * *

The most beautiful and intelligent exploration of the separation between sex and gender may be Virginia Woolf's Orlando. The novel is a mock-biography documenting the life of the character Orlando, whose sex spontaneously changes. The sex change, however, does not change anything about the inner person.

"Orlando had become a woman - there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity."

Your biological sex has no power to define you unless you endow it with that power. The more aware we as a society become of our self inflicted limitations, the more able we become to fight what Soulforce's Director of Development, Haven Herrin, termed 'the gendermonster', and to find that (like all our other childhood monsters) it was just a figment of our imaginations.