Since the 1950s, the term gender has been increasingly used to distinguish a social role (gender role) and/or personal identity (gender identity) from biological sex. Sexologist John Money wrote in 1955, “the term gender role is used to signify all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. Elements of such a role include clothing, speech patterns, movement and other factors not solely limited to biological sex.
Many societies categorize all individuals as either male or female – however, this is not universal. Some societies recognize a third gender – for instance, the Two-Spirit people of some indigenous American peoples, and hijras of India and Pakistan – or even a fourth or fifth. Such categories may be an intermediate state between male and female, a state of sexlessness, or a distinct gender not dependent on male and female gender roles. Joan Roughgarden argues that in some non-human animal species, there can also be said to be more than two genders, in that there might be multiple templates for behavior available to individual organisms with a given biological sex.
There is debate over to what extent gender is a social construct and to what extent it is a biological construct. One point of view in the debate is social constructionism, which suggests that gender is entirely a social construct. Contrary to social constructionism is essentialism, which suggests that it is entirely a biological construct. Others’ opinions on the subject lie somewhere in between.
Disponível em: <http://en.wikipedia.org./wiki/Gender>. Acesso em: 12 set. 2007. [Adaptado].
Vocabulary:
disclose: mostrar
templates: padrões
O objetivo do segundo parágrafo é evidenciar que