Gender Issues

Understandings of gender and its social significance have been subject to debate and reconfiguration since early feminist scholars first established a distinction between sex and gender. Sex, it was theorized, was a category based in physiological differences between males and females, while gender was a social and cultural construct that coded a wide range of characteristics and attributes as masculine and feminine. Differentiating the two concepts was thought to deconstruct essentialist ideas that men's and women's roles and aptitudes were biologically determined and therefore natural rather than socially produced and inscribed. Based on the sex/gender distinction, some feminist scholarship argued that power and privilege were disproportionately allocated, favouring masculinity while subordinating femininity and creating an imbalance in power that led to gender inequality. More recent scholarship, however, has critiqued this categorical approach to gender for reproducing binary thinking in which masculinity and femininity are seen as opposites that inhere in male and female bodies. The dichotomy of male/female is simply replaced by dichotomies based on social norms and gendered expectations (masculine/feminine)—thus remaining blind to the diversity that exists within gender categories and the similarities that exist between them. The binaries created between male/female and masculinity/femininity have been exposed as false, as research in both science and social science has shown diversity in both sex and gender, indicating that both concepts are better understood as fluid rather than as static or dualistic.

In the light of these critiques, some current gender scholars advocate a relational approach to understanding gender and gender issues. Defining gender, then, still means taking social structures into consideration, but it is also about the relations between people, bodies and institutions. These relations exist not only between men and women but also among men and among women, while recognizing that even the categories man and woman are variable, fluid and subject to change. As Raewyn Connell suggests, gender [Page 375]is multidimensional, simultaneously encompassing economic relations that involve capital and financial relationships, power relations that involve actors who hold varying degrees of power, emotional relations that occur among and between people and symbolic relations that derive meaning from the structures in which they appear. Gender is the active social process that brings reproductive bodies into this relational history. To engage with gender issues is to enter political discourse that necessarily involves elements of both power and resistance. Given the complexity inherent in defining gender, locating and understanding gender issues in relation to action research necessitate finding points of commonality between theories of gender and the research process itself.