ABSTRACT
The term “gender” is used in this essay in accordance with the way late-twentieth-century feminists have borrowed the word, to differentiate those socially and politically variable meanings of “masculine” and “feminine” from the more fixed biological meanings. In this sense, the notion of gender is intended, as Donna Haraway (a leading feminist thinker) has suggested, “to contest the naturalization of sexual difference.” Her point is that a wide range of supposed differences between the sexes have been invoked and exploited to support different attitudes toward, and treatment of, the sexes in various social and political contexts. To talk of gender differences in these contexts, rather than differences of sex, is to alert readers to the all too real possibility that such differences may have been socially constructed to serve particular interests.
