‘Nature’ actually produces a variation of combinations of female and male sex characteristics (Fausto-Sterling, 2002a; Hird, 2004; Oudshoorn, 1994). Some individuals have a genetic sex that is different from their hormonal and/or anatomical sex. For example a child might be genetically female (have two X chromosomes and no Y), but have male genitalia. Accurate estimates […]

In western science and common parlance prior to around 1700, women and men were understood not as anatomically different but as two vari­ations of the same sex. In the scientific version of this ‘one-sex’ model women were supposedly ‘imperfect’ versions of men, their genitalia were described as being the same as men’s, but on the […]

If there is one thing people like to feel certain about it is whether a newborn child is a girl or a boy. Until we have that piece of information it is difficult to think about a baby as a person at all and we do not know how to treat ‘it’. How people think […]

Contemporary society is based upon a heteronormative gender order: an order based on the idea that there are two opposite sexes that are attracted to each other. The gender order demands that we categorize people as women or men. People usually try to imitate what are perceived as ‘normal’ femininity or masculinity and the complex […]

The sociological imagination (Mills, 1959) is a way of thinking that is very useful in understanding all sorts of social phenomena, including the social construction of differences between women and men (Jackson, 1998a).This entire book is about the social construction of those differ­ences, so what I say here will provide a framework to aid in […]

It used to be thought that a woman is a woman because of her ovaries alone. As we shall see later, there are many individuals with ovaries who are not women in the strict sense of the word and many with testes who are really feminine in many other respects. (Bell cited in Oudshoorn, 1994: […]

Initially the sociology of gender needed to separate bodies from their social fates (Oakley, 1997: 29). Chapter 2 examines why it was crucial to challenge common sense ideas about sex differences as ‘natural’ because these were used to justify inequalities between women and men. This involved taking on biological determinism and showing that the social […]

There have been attempts to try and understand patriarchy and capitalism as intricately intertwined systems of both material and symbolic production. Dual-systems theorists (see Chapter 4) like Sylvia Walby, for example, concede that material and symbolic factors may have varying and unequal influence in the formation and shifting of inequalities. In her book Theorizing Patriarchy […]

When students new to sociology are trying to make sense of why women and men act in the ways that they do, they often blame ‘the media’. They suggest that the media might be responsible for anything from making women anorexic to encouraging men to be violent. But can this really explain the variety of […]

If you are a young woman you may feel that you have a lot of choice about what you do with your life. It probably seems like you will have more or less the same opportunities in life as your brothers and/or male friends. Young men reading this might feel that women can do whatever […]