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Article: Gender and Gender Roles
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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GENDER AND GENDER ROLES
GENDER AND GENDER ROLES.
As a term, "gender" refers to the social construction of sex or the psychosocial concomitants to sexed identity. Feminists, in particular, have relied on distinctions between sex as biological and gender as cultural to argue that women's oppression is historical and not inevitable. Yet at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in both feminist theory and popular discourse, "gender" has come to replace "sex" as a term referring to sexual difference in a biological sense. This shifting definition is a result, at least in part, of gender's introduction into modern discourse as a medical concept used to explain a person's felt sense of ...