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From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.EDU (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: sex/gender
Message-ID: <8907221845.AA03632@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
Date: 22 Jul 89 19:02:18 GMT
References: <12411@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
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Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu


[originally submitted Tue Jul  4 06:17:25 1989, lost in mail and
finally posted... -clt]

In article <12411@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>, by rshapiro@bbn.com (Richard Shapiro):

>...  Gender, on the
>other hand, has been abstracted from its linguistic context to refer to
>the social and psychological manifestations of sex, i.e.  masculine and
>feminine.

Gender in its linguistic context already refers to a social and
psychological manifestation of sex, since language is social and
psychological.

>... In other words, it's much more than semantics. As soon as you
>begin to derive social differences from physical ones, you start on the
>slippery slope of natural gender.

But when you refer to gender as a manifestation of sex, you've already
conceded such a derivation, haven't you?

Let's reflect on that notion "natural gender" in language.  It's
arguable that gender is natural in language, since many languages have
gender or classifier systems.  And for those languages that have a
masculine/feminine gender system, it's natural to classify males as
masculine and females as feminine.  I don't think there's any getting
around that.  If that weren't so, we wouldn't say it was a
masculine/feminine gender system -- it's true by definition.  But
there isn't anything natural about a gender system being
masculine/feminine; at least, I don't think so.  Other, very
differently derived classifier systems are found.  Navaho, I've read,
has 7 genders; Bantu languages typically have a few more than that;
Quechua, according to a study by Brent Berlin, has a system with over
200 categories.

So, linguistically, gender may be natural, but it's not naturally
masculine versus feminine.

>...  If there really
>were natural genders, than feminism would seem to be in big trouble, it
>would seem to be flying in the face of the undeniable facts of nature,

And, anyhow, even if there do turn out to be some facts of nature to
fly in the face of, what's wrong with that?  Does anyone really think
it's always good to do what comes naturally?

			Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu