What is "gender"?

Gender, in its simplest definition, is a primary category of identification, and is often based on differentiating sexual and biological characteristics between individuals. It is a category of everyday analysis that we as human beings immediately and instantaneously embark upon as soon we meet someone new: Is that person a man or a woman? However, although gender--like sex--is commonly viewed as a “natural”, “inherent”, or biological aspect of selfhood that revolves around binary categories (male or female), gender is in fact a system of identity that is defined by cultural expectations that are deeply shaped by and embedded in social and economic structures. In effect, gender is something that we learn, perform, and reproduce through codes of appearance, linguistic patterns, behaviour, and personal interactions. From the day we are born, we are being taught how to perform the gender that has been assigned to us. Furthermore, gender is defined differently in different communities and across different identities: caste, religion, economic class, geographic location, language, and cultural practices. And the ways in which various communities have defined gender identity has changed significantly over time.

For example, being a “woman” and performing one’s femaleness means something very different to a woman who is middle-class and educated in Chennai than it does to a Dalit woman from rural India, a rural Mexican woman who has migrated to an urban center in the United States, an Indian woman who is being educated at a university in England, a Black Catholic South African missionary, or hijra or kothi who was born biologically as a man but identifies as a woman. Our performance of and identity through gender is mediated by many other factors that refute the notion that gender is a natural and unchanging aspect of selfhood. A person may change their gender identification, move beyond the male/female gender binary and identify as another gender, or simply shift in some significant way the way in which they express their gender even if they continue to identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

However, no matter how fluid gender may be, there are significant social, cultural, political, and economic structures that act as regulatory mechanisms to reinforce a gender binary and gender stereotypes. As a basic example, we are often taught through what is known as “conventional wisdom” that men are inherently more “rational” in their thought and women are more “emotional.” These are categories of judgement and critique that allow families, schools, and political structures to maintain heterosexual “male” hegemony over women and men who do not perform their gender according to accepted societal norms—both in small ways (“girls aren’t tough enough for sports”, “boys don’t cry”), and in large (“women are more suited to domestic life”, “a man’s place is in the public world—he’s not meant to have emotional relationships.”) These diffuse power structures, known respectively as patriarchy (the subjugation of women through and because of their gender), and heteronormativity (the subjugation of men, women, and third-gendered individuals through and because of the sexualization of their gender performance) are what allow gendered inequality to dominate every aspect our lives and decisions.

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