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Sociology of gender is a subfield of sociology. As one of the most important social structures is status (position that an individual possesses which effects how they are treated by society). One of the most important statuses an individual claims is gender. [ 1 ]
Gender is used as a means of describing the distinction between the biological sex and socialized aspects of femininity and masculinity. [9] According to West and Zimmerman, is not a personal trait; it is "an emergent feature of social situations: both as an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements, and as a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions of society."
The Oxford Etymological Dictionary of the English Language of 1882 defined gender as kind, breed, sex, derived from the Latin ablative case of genus, like genere natus, which refers to birth. [25] The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED1, Volume 4, 1900) notes the original meaning of gender as "kind" had already become obsolete.
In the sociology of gender, the process whereby an individual learns and acquires a gender role in society is termed gender socialization. [9] [10] [11] Gender roles are culturally specific, and while most cultures distinguish only two (boy/man and girl/woman), others recognize more.
In the Oxford English Dictionary, gender is defined as—in a modern and especially feminist use—"a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes", with the earliest example cited being from 1963. [55]
Feminist sociology also analyses how gender interlocks with race and class to produce and perpetuate social inequalities. [141] "How to account for the differences in definitions of femininity and masculinity and in sex role across different societies and historical periods" is also a concern. [142]
The inclusion of hen challenges preconceived notions of what gender and language can mean together, and proposes new possibilities of how gender is defined outside of a binary system. [25] Along with using the gender binary to categorize human bodies, cultures that obey the binary may also use it to label things, places, and ideas.
Gender is pertinent to many disciplines, such as literary theory, drama studies, film theory, performance theory, contemporary art history, anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics and psychology. These disciplines sometimes differ in their approaches to how and why gender is studied.