ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates gender as a system, that is, they analyze masculinity as well as femininity or rather, since some feminist researchers had done so in the context of Women's Studies, one should say that masculinity now received more sustained attention. It illuminates masculinities and femininities because they moved away from understanding gender in terms of a male/female dichotomy toward models that identify a potentially unlimited number of gender positions, which need not be stable or coherent either. The chapter tends to work with the sex/gender division established by Gayle Rubin and others, according to which 'sex' refers to given, biological bodies, and 'gender' is the cultural construction employed to invest sex with meaning in specific social and cultural contexts. Reflecting on the variable quality of gender and the diversity of gender positions, most scholars in Gender Studies now work with an understanding of gender as a social construction.
