ABSTRACT
This chapter examines current usage of the concept ‘gender’ as loosely synonymous with ‘sex’ and lazily synonymous with ‘women’. It considers the indeterminate and ambiguous construction of the term and proposes a conceptualisation that can be usefully related to political theory and political practice: ‘the way that sex and sexuality become power-relations in society’. Using this perspective, it can be shown that the paradoxical construction of the ‘universal subject’ in politics and political theory as both masculine and de-gendered pushes important activities in society to the political margins and works to make change unthinkable for men.
