Gender Roles
GENDER ROLES. Gender roles are the culturally defined behaviors deemed appropriate for a man or a woman. A role is essentially performative. One learns how to play a masculine or feminine role, what is acceptable and what is not, how one should behave, think, evaluate oneself and others in a gendered manner. While age, ethnicity, class, and many other factors also have culturally prescribed norms, gender is the most universal and salient social organizing principle.
Sex and Gender
Following Margaret Mead's influential work Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), feminist studies made a distinction between sex, regarded as biological, and gender, which is culturally constructed. Thus with few exceptions, one is born male or female according to chromosomal makeup and secondary sexual characteristics. One is socialized into masculine or feminine roles through culture. The link between maleness and masculinity and femaleness and femininity is made to appear natural and therefore unchangeable, constructing power and dominance hierarchies that generally leave men in control of women and children. Gender hierarchies are legitimized by recourse to ideology, ritual, and mythology.
Gayle Rubin coined the term sex/gender systems to describe the way in which kinship systems define roles and statuses in a manner that often contradicts genetic relationships.
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