SOC101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Nuclear Family, Student Teacher, Hegemonic Masculinity
2 Dec 2014
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Document Summary
However it"s important to distinguish between sex and gender because these things can refer to one"s identity. Sex is rooted in biology, referring to whether they were born with male or female genitals and hormones. It is often seen as a binary construction- people are localized into one or another category. Male and female are understood as two mutually exclusive categories. Sociologists problematize this assumption because there are intersexed individuals (people with male and female genitals and chromosomes). An example of an intersexed individual is woman hurdler maria patino. She had to prove she was a woman by a doctor"s certificate to compete, however it was found she had male and woman chromosomes. She was stripped of her titles because of this, however they were reinstated later. She was proof that sex cannot be understood as a binary construction. How we define sex can have social consequences.
