Feminist scholarship on the debate of ‘Sex’ and ‘gender’

Abstract

Gender a much contested term has been employed in multiple senses within the feminist discourse. It has been a continuously evolving concept. Early Feminist intervention came to describe gender as a sociological or cultural construct and negate the long standing misunderstood proposition of ‘biological determinism’ which equated it with the natural category ‘sex’. Since then, feminist interpretations have taken the understanding of the term in different and progressive channels. The distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ has been a successful and useful concept for feminism and was further reshaped with the advent of postmodern feminism. The postmodern feminists debated and questioned the cultural construction of both, ‘sex’(the biological category) within the postmodernism is seen as constructed as ‘gender’(social category) and ‘gender’ progressed from being conceptualised from something that individuals have (through socialisation), to something that they perform. Feminists not only questioned the mainstream ‘essentialism’ but also facilitated the study of the ‘local’ and its negotiations with wider social structures.

Keywords: Gender, Sex, Feminist