ABSTRACT

THE MEANING OF GENDER Schemes for classifying human beings are necessarily multiple and highly variable. Different cultures identify and privilege different criteria in sorting people of their own and other cultures into groups: They may stress size, age, color, occupation, wealth, sanctity, wisdom, or a host of other demarcators. All cultures, however, sort a significant fraction of the human beings that inhabit that culture by sex. What are taken to be the principal indicators of sexual difference as well as the particular importance attributed to this difference undoubtedly vary, but, for fairly obvious reasons, people everywhere engage in the basic act of distinguishing people they call male from those they call female. For the most part, they even agree about who gets called what. Give or take a few marginal cases, these basic acts of categorization do exhibit conspicuous crosscultural consensus: Different cultures will sort any given collection of adult human beings of reproductive age into the same two groups. For this reason, we can say that there is at least a minimal sense of the term “sex” that denotes categories given to us by nature.1 One might even say that the universal importance of the reproductive consequences of sexual difference gives rise to as universal a preoccupation with the meaning of this difference.