SOCI 365 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Sex Assignment, Gender Role, Biomedical Model
5 May 2018
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Lecture 2 – January 9th
Gender and Health: Defining Terms
Sex vs. Gender
• Sex refers to a biological way of distinguishing male from female
o Genitalia, chromosomes, etc.
• The term sex is typically understood to refer to the chromosomal structure
determined at the moment of conception
• Gender is a society’s division of people into differentiated categories of men and
women
o How we differentiate those two genders
• There is no pure uncultured, asocial sex on the one hand and a cultured, social
gender on the other
o They become conjoined as soon as we begin to make meaning out of them
Gender as a Social Construct
• How gender is enacted and understood is not intrinsic
• Gender is created (and continued) through social practices: socialization,
interactions, institutions, organizations, etc.
• Use it to identify people, dictate our behavior, identify ourselves
• We are always recreating gender as a social construct
o When we choose what to wear, how to speak, how to act
• Socialization: how to act in a society and how society reinforces those norms
o The ways in which we learn what it means to be girls and boys, women and
men are rooted in the myriad social institutions that shape our social beings
o Sexual harassment is imbedded in our social institutions
• Through gendered interactions, socialization, and roles and expectations,
individuals are divided into two groups made to be different
o The content of these differences depends on a society’s culture, values,
history
o Gender is different across time, across place
o These differences then continue to create gendered organizations,
institutions, that then continually shape and divide
▪ It’s cyclical
▪ Reinforces the binary of men vs women
Gender on an Individual Level
• At an individual level, gender shapes how we perceive ourselves, how we present
ourselves, and how we are perceived by others
• Sex assignment
o The process of gender construction starts with sex assignment: how we are
classified as a particular sex at birth
▪ Gender gets mapped onto this immediately
• Other assumptions
o This is not to say that there are not also sex differences between males and
females
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