The fundamental idea that unites all of the articles is that gender identification and construction is a very complicated process influenced by a wide variety of internal and external factors. Some authors state that gender is something that an individual develops in the course of a lifetime rather than an inherent feature, as opposed to sex, while others argue that there should be no distinction between sex and gender.
For instance, according to Feinberg (1998), every individual "should have the right to choose between pink or blue tinted gender categories, as well as all the other hues of the palette" (p. 193). In simple words, every person has the right to identify himself or herself as a male, female or as an intermediate sex. Lorber (1994) expresses a very similar point of view on the issue of gender and places greater focus on the social aspect of gender construction. In actual fact, "gender and sex are not equivalent, and gender as a social construction does not flow automatically from genitalia and reproductive organs, the main physiological differences of females and males" (Lorber, 1994, p. 56). However, for the majority of people in our contemporary society, it is very important to perceive others strictly as males or females. Therefore, "the pervasiveness of gender as a way of structuring social life demands that gender statuses be clearly differentiated" (Lorber, 1994, p. 58). Schwartz (2007) also discusses the crucial influence of social and cultural aspects on the process of gender construction and identification. He makes a statements that "whatever the culture, its norms about masculinity and femininity are supposed to co-vary with heterosexual enactment, and gender itself is expected to be unambiguous and performed according to the cultural outlines of the moment" (Schwartz, 2007, p. 81).
On the hand, some authors do not differentiate between gender and sex. For instance, Butler "has collapsed the sex/gender distinction in order to argue that there is no sex that is not always already gender. All bodies are gendered from the beginning of their social existence" (Salih, 2002, p. 55).
References
Feinberg, L. (1998). We Are All Works in Progress. In L. Feinberg (Author), Trans liberation: Beyond pink or blue (pp. 193-197). Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Lorber, J. (1994). "Night to His Day": The Social Construction of Gender. In J. Lorber (Author), Paradoxes of gender (pp. 55-65). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Salih, S. (2002). On Judith Butler and Performativity. In S. Salih (Author), Judith Butler (pp. 55-67). London: Routledge.
Schwartz, P. (2007). The Social Construction of Heterosexuality. In M. S. Kimmel (Ed.), The sexual self: The construction of sexual scripts (pp. 80-92). Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
