Men, Women, Sex and Gender

Abstract

In 1997, Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate raised the question as to ‘why gender has become a critical orthodoxy; why critics rarely feel the need to justify an analysis of gender, especially in writing by women, to the exclusion of many other issues’; and they go on to warn that focussing exclusively on gender can ‘produce a curiously depoliticised reading of our culture, its history, and its writing’. Janet Montefiore had also urged in 1996 that analysis based primarily on gender tended to ignore other areas of oppression and subordination, as, for instance, social class, race, age, religion.¹ I am in complete agreement with these necessary reminders yet, as Luce Irigaray has said, sexual difference is ‘situated at the junction of nature and culture’, both conditioning language and conditioned by it;² furthermore, it is also crucial to acknowledge that, as Catherine Hall has pointed out, ‘masculinities and femininities are … historically specific and we can trace the changes over time in the definitions which have been in play and in power’.³ Moreover, it is worth bearing in mind Marianne van der Wijngaard’s point, that traits labelled as masculine or feminine are also culturally and historically specific, even when so assigned by scientists; the laboratory is also a product of its era.⁴