ABSTRACT
The binary conception of gender is also politically conservative in that it is based ultimately on taken-for-granted ideas about genital reproductive anatomy. At least it is rationalized in the terms of the anatomical difference between the sexes. Contrary to conventional understanding, however, conceptions of gender and sexual practices have not been identical all through history, and they more or less vary from one culture to another. Some feminists have argued that one major consequence of the universalization and hierarchization of maleness is the stripping away of women's identifying gender. In one argument the linguistic practice leaves women genderless, absent from gendered discourse or, at best, pushed to its margins and admitted into language only on an ad hoc basis. Freud's view of gender development is that it is androgynous at its core, specific gender choices being resultants of fields of force occurring in the setting of ambivalence, loss, repression, and oblique returns of the repressed that signal, more or less.
