ANTH 1000 Lecture Notes - Judith Butler, Margaret Mead, Gender Trouble

• School: UConn
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: ANTH 1000

Document Summary

Sex refers to physical or biological differences. Gender refers to social roles associated with those differences. But it"s a little more complicated than that. Margaret mead carried out research in papua new guinea in the 1930s. She found different behavior among men and women in different cultural settings. Women were not always submissive, and men were not always aggressive. We learn to be women and men through the cultural construction of gender. In the u. s. , gender is typically learned along a binary framework of masculine and feminine, but this system has many shortcomings. A person with a gender identity that does not nearly fit into this binary may be described as transgender, trans, gender fluid, genderqueer, or gender nonconforming. The term cisgender draws attention to the power and priviledge granted to those who gender identity and performance correspond with their birth sex.