ABSTRACT
This chapter explores whether gender is a historical kind due to cultural reproduction. It talks about a central claim championed in the work of Elizabeth Spelman and others, who have criticized a very universalist understanding of binary gender categories. The chapter focuses on particular cultural systems and models of gender can further support Spelman’s claim. If a person’s gender is a result of accepted cultural reproduction from a chain of previous models, then each binary gender category may still display variation and change over time. It is not merely that the expression of gender changes over time and places; it is that without the assumption of cross-cultural common models that ground each category “man” and “woman”, there simply is no historical chain uniting all individuals categorized as “women” and all those categorized as “men”. True, one could still say that each individual “woman” is modeled from a gender variant within some cultural system of gender.
