From: Fiona Moore nydersdyner@yahoo.co.uk
And of course we all know that many people saying something makes it true :)
Right, not always :), but I see Neil, Una and Alison (if not myself...) as intelligent people, and if they're saying something I'm going to listen
:).
Yeah? Can I interest you in some cut-price car insurance?
Gender is fairly straightforward
Really? *I* don't see it that way. There are fascinating variations in gender roles and relative status from society to society, which suggests there's more to it than just eat-drink-man-woman.
As I understand it, there is a fine semantic difference between gender and sex. Sex is biologically determined and depends on what chromosomes you carry (usually XX for female, XY for male, but with aberrant variations like XXY and XYY.) Gender is culturally - or ideologically - determined, and doesn't necessarily correlate with biological sex. It is possible, though rare, for individuals to be of a different gender to their sex - I've heard of one case of a 'woman' who actually possessed fully functioning testes. Phenotypically she was female, and lived her life as such, but genotypically 'he' was male (I'm deliberately playing around with the pronouns here, since such individuals challenge the artificial constraints of the language). This condition was not diagnosed until s/he was middle-aged, IIRC.
; power is a complex combination of lots of factors. Gender can be one of those factors, but it doesn't have to be the defining one. Treating it as the defining factor every time there's a power imbalance between a male and a female doesn't combat sexism; it promotes it.
Not disagreeing with you on that, but I have a problem with saying that power doesn't enter into gender relations. It may not be sexism (Travis
and
Servalan, oo-er!) but to deny that there's a power aspect to *all* relations, including gender ones, is kind of hard.
This can be further complicated by what you mean by sexism. Some of the comments on this list seem to operating from the assumption that sexism includes any discrimination on the basis of sex, whether comitted by a man or woman. This is a valid position. But there are some (guess who) who would say that within a patriarchal society, only men can be sexist, because their discrimination is ideologically codified and thereby sanctioned. This doesn't require the man to be in a more powerful position: if we take the (not uncommon, these days) situation of female boss/male employee, then his opposition to her orders can represent a degree of sexism to their interaction. Even if he does what he's told, but does it his way (because it's *his*) then that could be taken as a manifestation of sexism. But if she makes unreasonable demands on him *because* he's a man, then that is not sexism but a reaction to it.
Neil
Fiona
The Posthumous Memoirs of Secretary Rontane Available for public perusal at http://nyder.r67.net
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