ABSTRACT
Gender Frequently still used as a synonym for ‘sex’, as in: ‘she is of the female gender’. The difficulty here is that while gender and sex are most often – though not inevitably – seen as related they are not synonyms or substitutes for each other although, until the interrogations of ‘second wave’ feminism in the 1970s, they tended to be used as such. In 1974, anthropologist Sherry Ortner published a much-anthologized essay, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ which provided a framework with which to begin to disentangle ‘sex’ from ‘gender’. Ortner investigated the ways in which women’s bodies align them with nature (‘doomed to mere reproductive life’) whereas men, lacking ‘natural’ creative functions, assert their creativity ‘ “artificially,” through the medium of technology and symbols’. Ortner’s hypothesis suggested that gender is to culture as sex is to nature, and that gender is the social expression of, and the roles assigned to, gendered dichotomies of men and women. Thus, it could now be appreciated that the nineteenth-century doctrine of separate spheres for men and women, for instance, was built on constructs of gendered identity rather than any inherent predisposition on the basis of anatomy and capacity for childbearing. The debates relating to women’s liberation in the 1960s and 1970s (fuelled by the so-called sexual liberation afforded by the birth-control pill and other reproductive technologies) were also influenced by the work of sexologists, such as Masters and Johnson’s (William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson) Human Sexual Response (1966). Sexologists
