THE BODY: SEX AND GENDER

However, Buchotz, Liang and Sutton also point out that the term ôgender identityö can be used to refer to the gender that other people attribute to the individual on the basis of what they know from gender role. Here, the term ôgender roleö is said to comprise all of the things a person does to express their gender identity. Thus, gender identity can be self-defined but also socially defined.

Many have noted that the sex of the physical body is not the same thing as gender. It is this difference that is examined in this paper. In particular, this paper looks at the statement, ôThe body does not have a gender. It is genderedö and utilizes sociological and feminist theories to describe precisely what this phrase may mean in terms of differences between oneÆs biological sex and oneÆs gender.

One of the key notions in terms of gendering the body is understandi

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degree of influence and overlap between sex and gender, the prevailing view remains that gender cannot be precisely equated with biological and physiological differences between human females and males. The building blocks of gender are socially constructed statuses. However, there is another element associated with the idea that the body is gendered. Lorber calls this element the ôsex is, gender meansö dimension. While we all inherit a certain biological sex, gender is something we define; it is part and parcel of how we understand ourselves. Sex, on the other hand, exists in itself and does not vary at all as to how humans think about it while gender (and Lorber states that even sexuality) is subject to human thoughts about it. For this reason, Lorber feels that it makes no sense to talk about more than two sexes but it nonetheless makes a good deal of sense to talk about more than two genders. In her discussion of the idea of bodies being gendered, Lorber defines still another dimension of the statement by noting that while sex is genetic, gender is memetic. Sex, Lorber notes, is produced by genes while gender is produced by the action of memes upon sex where memes is a term used to refer to an idea, behavior, style, or u
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Approximate Word count = 1723
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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