Gender is gender in English, as opposed to sex.
Gender refers to the innate biological attributes of men and women, and gender is a cultural component, which is the difference in roles, behaviors, thoughts and emotional characteristics between women and men developed through social practice.
The concept of "gender" greatly promoted the development of women's liberation movement and feminism.
At the beginning of the 20th century, feminist thought initially developed, and after World War II, feminist movement flourished.
First, the proposition of gender is a criticism of physiological gender, and it is proposed that men and women should be understood from the social and cultural background.
Secondly, the proposition of gender emphasizes the influence of "acquired" on "innate" and points out that social systems, laws and values discriminate against women, resulting in political, cultural and economic oppression.
Third, the road to equality between men and women needs to establish an equal social system and create an equal culture.
There are two kinds of biological gender: one is physiological gender, and the other is social gender, in which social gender refers to animals.
Physiological gender refers to the difference in physiological structure between men and women, which corresponds to the word sex in English.
Gender refers to the gender characteristics and differences between men and women based on physiological gender under social and cultural construction, that is, the understanding of gender differences formed by social culture, as well as the group characteristics and behavior patterns of men and women formed in social culture, which is manifested in the fixed expectations of society for the roles played by men and women in life, marriage, culture, education, economy, politics and other fields, and corresponds to the word gender in English.
For example, when we were growing up, our parents, teachers and friends told us forcibly or imperceptibly that boys should be strong and brave and girls should be gentle and considerate.
Physiological gender is an innate sexual characteristic of animals, which does not differ from race, nationality, region and country, while social gender is acquired and is the result of the interaction of social changes and socio-political, economic and cultural factors. Different historical periods, different political systems, different economic systems and different social and cultural traditions will produce different gender relations.
Therefore, gender is a dynamic concept with the characteristics of historical stages, sociality and plasticity.
The historical stage of gender refers to the different gender role patterns caused by different expectations of men and women in different historical periods; Sociality refers to the gender construction formed by the interaction of political, economic and cultural factors in different societies, that is, different societies have different gender systems; * * * Plasticity shows that the formation of gender is not cultivated spontaneously or consciously by a special group, but the result of mutual shaping of the two sexes in the same society.
However, with the development of research, the above description of gender is increasingly unsatisfactory: the description of gender cannot reveal the fundamental reason why the concept of gender is accepted.
In other words, the description of gender, gender relationship and gender system in gender theory only expresses obvious sociological "common sense".
The crux of the problem lies not in the existence of gender, gender consciousness and gender relationship, but in how gender, gender consciousness and gender relationship are constructed. It is from this critical issue that the western gender theory gradually found its own logical starting point by constantly examining the real gender world, put forward a series of concepts and categories, formed a new knowledge system about gender issues, and devoted itself to revealing two core issues: First, in the long development history of various countries and nations, are gender awareness and gender concepts more based on biological and physiological knowledge, or are cultural narratives and system construction determined by historical and social relations? Second, even if there are biological and physiological differences between the two sexes, are these differences consciously exaggerated?
Gender regards gender relationship as the most basic social relationship and considers it as the essential reflection of social relationship. By analyzing gender relations, we can find the root and essence of social relations and social systems, thus making gender theory a powerful tool for political, economic and socio-cultural analysis.
First of all, gender reveals the economic essence of gender relations, and holds that gender relations, as a basic social relationship, are essentially a reflection of production relations.
Gender relations, like the concepts of class, nation and country, are unequal relations between the two sexes in their possession of means of production and fruits of labor in economic life.
This unequal relationship has been blocked from people's sight for a long time because it overlaps with various relationships such as class, nationality and country.
Secondly, gender, as an analytical tool, profoundly reveals the political essence of gender relations, that is, "sex politics" or "gender politics".
A major feature of western political thought is the "dualism" and "dichotomy" originated from Plato and Aristotle.
From the perspective of gender theory, the "dualism" and "dichotomy" of western political theory not only create the opposition between private sphere and public sphere, between nature and culture, but also create the opposition between male and female worlds.
In the binary opposition between the private sphere and the public sphere, the public sphere represents rationality, restraint, order and harmony, while the private sphere represents ethics, emotion, disorder and chaos, so the public sphere is superior to the private sphere in essence and restricts the private sphere.
Similarly, in the opposition between nature and culture, culture is the conquest of nature, and the evolution of civilization is the conquest of the natural kingdom by human wisdom such as science and technology.
The opposition between men and women is only the reflection of the first two opposites in social life. Therefore, the female world corresponds to the private field, not the natural field, and the male world corresponds to the public field, not the cultural field. This theory is not perfect. For most animals, the private world has nothing to do with the public world and gender.
Besides race, rank or class, gender is also a basic political form in western society.
Politics uses all possible forms to exercise power, and patriarchy is the root of all other forms of power. Our society, like all other historical civilizations, is a patriarchal society.
Gorillas, lions and hippos also belong to this patriarchal society, but their patriarchy is not as advanced as human beings. On the contrary, bees, wasps, wasps, ants, wolves, spotted dogs, naked moles and elephants are matriarchal societies.
Thirdly, gender theory is a new social and cultural analysis tool, and its uniqueness lies in how to describe and shape gender relations from the perspective of both sexes in history.
On the basis of acknowledging the biological nature of gender, gender theory pays more attention to the accompanying sociality.
Perhaps gender theory, as an analytical tool, shows its own critical edge too much, but such criticism and deconstruction make us deeply understand the nature of gender, thus accurately defining the key to male and female problems.