Women's Studies 2260 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Ender Wiggin, Gender Equality, Household Division

• School: Western University
• Department: Women's Studies
• Course: Women's Studies 2260
• Professor: Tugce Ellialti Kose

Document Summary

Scott - gender: a useful category in historical analysis. Battle between definition of gender : biological and socially constructed. Gender is different to people, environments, cultures. Gender might always refer to the ways in which relationships between men and women were conceived, but neither the relationships nor the men and women were taken to be the same in all instances. The point was to interrogate all the terms and so to historicize them. Thesis: too often, gender connotes a programmatic or methodological approach in which the meanings of men and women are taken as fixed; the point is to describe differing roles, not to interrogate them. The focus ought to be not on the roles assigned to women and men, but on the construction of sexual difference itself. (g)ender becomes a way of denoting cultural constructions - the entirely social creation of ideas about appropriate roles for women and men.