Post AXemM95lACQq9o7Wa0 by Cousin_Isobel@spinster.xyz
(DIR) More posts by Cousin_Isobel@spinster.xyz
(DIR) Post #AXePSI5eK6rcrA1v8q by Cousin_Isobel@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T11:55:47.968162Z
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Can you use the word “gender,” as it would have been used in the 20th century, in a sentence?I know the etymology and the different meanings over time, but I don’t know how to use the 20th century sociological term in a sentence in a way that applies “gender” to a person.That is, I can say, “This society’s gender expectations of women include makeup and high heels,” but I can’t use the 20th century sociological term to say, “My gender is…” or “He is a member of the [fill in the blank] gender.”
(DIR) Post #AXea9t4ThfNTXquQtc by Mynona@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T13:55:43.017841Z
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@Cousin_Isobel At this point gender is a buzzword that obfuscates the oppressive nature of the sex-role framework and I think shouldn't be used
(DIR) Post #AXeb1nJxIbW3Ldqz0S by hyoomin@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T13:30:45.723422Z
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@Cousin_Isobel I get lots of transgendery books in this search result. If I narrow it to newspapers it seems to be used as a synonym for biological sex."There may not be that many female welders or that many male secretaries, but it is not uncommon for men and women to train in fields that society typically considers nontraditional for persons of their gender." Cherokee County Herald, 22 Feb 1995There's another Google thing called "wordgram" (I think) that might have useful results. I will try to dig around later.https://www.google.com/search?q=gender&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1900,cd_max:1999&tbm=bks
(DIR) Post #AXeb1oz77426Va7MnY by hyoomin@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T13:54:02.196502Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@Cousin_Isobel The other tool is Google Ngram, but I don't really know what I'm doing 😁I'm aware of language wizards using these to demonstrate actual changes in language, and slicing up results to show geographical trends and so on. I imagine there's a way to distinguish biological sex, sexual intercourse, gender role, gender-as-a-euphemism-for-sex, gender identity, but I don't know how.https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sex%2Cgender&year_start=1900&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
(DIR) Post #AXelYxtc083JFBzGq0 by Cousin_Isobel@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T16:03:31.125351Z
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@Mynona I know. I just wanted to better understand the 20th-century sociological meaning, which I learned in college but never fully understood, especially in terms of how to use it in a sentence.
(DIR) Post #AXem2zlVcDwFjGW5ia by Cousin_Isobel@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T16:08:56.731643Z
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@hyoomin Thank you. I guess, in this sense, people have “a gender” because everyone lives in a society and is subject to that society’s expectations.
(DIR) Post #AXemM95lACQq9o7Wa0 by Cousin_Isobel@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T16:12:21.620431Z
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@hyoomin Very useful! Wow, it didn’t take long for the term to be taken to mean “sexed soul,” after it began to take off at all. It was a couple of decades at most.
(DIR) Post #AXemNHnSHiydRb6PPE by Connie@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T12:51:05.575545Z
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@Cousin_Isobel “Stereotypical gender roles” was used because males at that time tittered at the word “sex” which is a noun and a verb.
(DIR) Post #AXemTLG8K9jdv8P6fY by Cousin_Isobel@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T16:13:42.121347Z
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@Connie That’s what it often seems like to me, as well. However, there was a narrow period of time when it meant neither sex nor sexed soul, but a sociological concept that doesn’t seem to have lasted long.
(DIR) Post #AXf1ggOCZZ8oX0ztmC by hyoomin@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T18:59:44.511860Z
2 likes, 0 repeats
@Cousin_Isobel Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (1985)"Kessler and McKenna convincingly argue that gender is not a reflection of biological reality but rather a social construct that varies across cultures."So that predates Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble" by five years. And from what I read on Wikipedia, Kessler and McKenna are already leveraging DSD to make their arguments.Notes from the rabbit hole:* Left Hand Of Darkness (1969)* Dialectic of Sex (1970)Are we just recycling history? When is grunge coming back?
(DIR) Post #AXf9hBjqogB7OOsLlw by EmmyNoether@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T20:13:54.437281Z
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@Cousin_Isobel @Connie Yes - round about the time I was teaching undergrads about Sarah Blaffer-Hrdy and the like.“Gender” back then in social science meant “the socially sanctioned roles, occupations, dress codes and stereotypes that a given culture deems appropriate to one sex or the other.”At that time, TIMs were “transexuals” and you’re right, “gender identity” wasn’t a thing.
(DIR) Post #AXf9hDQmWY74dpy9KK by EmmyNoether@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T20:14:54.887533Z
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@Cousin_Isobel @Connie There’s also a joke that “gender” as a polite euphemism for sex entered the language due to medics getting fed up with people writing “Yes please” when asked “Sex?”
(DIR) Post #AXfB6rp7aAN16v9Jh2 by hyoomin@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T19:05:45.850155Z
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@Cousin_Isobel Urania was a privately circulated feminist gender studies journal, published between 1916 and 1940. Many of the editors of the journal were connected through the Aëthnic Union, a short-lived feminist revolutionary group formed in 1911.Amongst other content, the journal published articles about feminist movements around the world and compiled information about successful gender-reassignment surgeries.I really must stop.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urania_(journal)
(DIR) Post #AXfBBslfUzOnUGvRzM by Cousin_Isobel@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T20:50:40.464343Z
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@hyoomin This is making it pretty hard to ward off conservative assertions that there is a feminist tie-in to all this gender crap.
(DIR) Post #AXfBcwoAaKRDpx08qu by Cousin_Isobel@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T20:55:34.015263Z
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@EmmyNoether @Connie Back when you were teaching undergrad, could “gender” be applied to individuals at all? Would it be like, “He is an engineer, not a secretary, because of his gender,” but “He cannot get pregnant, because of his sex.”?
(DIR) Post #AXfCqSBPLTOWrYsISW by hyoomin@spinster.xyz
2023-07-13T21:06:13.197576Z
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@Cousin_Isobel There are certainly rhymes and echos, although I think each needs to be interrogated to make sure that we know the actual sex of the authors, just to be sure. 😓Is there a history to cross-dressing? Almost certainly, it seems likely in a genderised society. Including curiosity, having a laugh, explaining away homosexuality, and fetishisation. Would intellectually rigorous feminists have investigated it, and imagined a gender-free utopia? Surely! Could some have followed a slippery slope to actually motivating for sex-free humans? Yes. Nobody's perfect.I don't think an anti-feminist conservative would consider any of this in good faith, they're already looking for gotchas.I'm pretty sure a feminist somewhere has already said all of this, but more clearly and with citations. 😁
(DIR) Post #AXgGr7bpuwNEJplpmy by EmmyNoether@spinster.xyz
2023-07-14T09:14:17.627827Z
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@Cousin_Isobel @Connie I think in pretty much all “thinking” situations, sex was used to mean, well, sex. “Gender” as a euphemism for sex was thought of as an Americanism. (As an aside, it must have been less than a decade ago that I first encountered the American tradition of the gender reveal party and just thought “that’s batshit crazy and icky.”)No-one much outside of social sciences or feminist theory would use the technical word “gender” to mean “socially constructed roles etc. deemed appropriate for one or the other sex.” People in every day life might have talked about sexist stereotypes.We did know about DSDs (though obviously this was pre the sequencing of the human genotype, so not explanations at the level of say translocation of the SRY gene onto a X chromosome). But I remember my parents havning a really good penguin book (one of their pop science books) which went through various forms of “intersex” condition, so I’d come across descriptions of conditions like “guevedoces”, i.e. 5-ARD, way back in the early 80s. (I remember one point in the book where they mentioned an 18th century French physician giving a case study about a “girl” of about 12 or 13 who jumped over a stream “and was horrified to see male genitals reflected in the water” - I would guess that was an early description, somewhat embroidered, of an individual with 5-ARD discovering their genitals had masculinized at puberty).
(DIR) Post #AXsd182CeZApWNQtaC by Connie@spinster.xyz
2023-07-20T03:47:47.463282Z
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@Cousin_Isobel Gender was a grammatical term in gendered languages.
(DIR) Post #AXsdJsWAZHaGtoOEcK by Cousin_Isobel@spinster.xyz
2023-07-20T08:37:06.464429Z
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@Connie Right, and it still is. That’s one of the main reasons we can’t just get rid of it. I was just thinking of the narrow sociological definition, which referred to socially dictated roles for men and women, that I would have learned in about 1998. I understood the definition, but not how the word might be used to mean this in practice.