Gender
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Gender", in common usage, refers to the differences between men and women. Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that gender identity is "an individual's self-conception as being male or female, as distinguished from actual biological sex."<ref>Gender Identity, Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2007.</ref> Although "gender" is commonly used interchangeably with "sex," within the academic fields of cultural studies, gender studies and the social sciences in general, the term "gender" often refers to purely social rather than biological differences. Some even view gender as a social construction rather than a biological phenomenon.
Many languages have a system of grammatical gender, a type of noun class system: nouns may be classified as masculine or feminine (e.g., Hebrew, Arabic, French) or may also have a neuter grammatical gender (e.g., Sanskrit, German, Polish). In such languages, this is essentially a convention, which may have little or no connection to the meaning of the words. Likewise, a wide variety of phenomena have characteristics termed gender, by analogy to male and female bodies (such as with the gender of connectors and fasteners) or due to social norms. People whose gender identity feels incongruent with their physical bodies may identify themselves as intersex, transgender or genderqueer. [1] [May 2007]
