Gender

How often do introductory courses in gender and sexuality studies begin by rehearsing a variation of the following model: “Sex ≠ Gender ≠ Sexuality”? And how pervasive has this relation of embodiment, identity, and desire become given the global export of Anglophone, US epistemologies and taxonomies of gender and sexuality? Part of what is at stake in confrontations over gender is the desire for a proper model, an accurate definition, and the right politics. How many genders are there? Is the twenty-first century defined by the most accurate and inclusive categories of gender to date? Or has the openness of gender “gone too far” in some way, diluting its meaning or undermining social order? What does the success and diffusion of gender mean for non-Anglophone, nonsecular, and nonwestern ways of being and knowing? And where did this very terminology and its distinctions that now anchor academic study come from? Was it not feminists who first introduced the concept and brought it into the mainstream? If what gender is and how it can be defined and distinguished from sex and sexuality are never-ending points of debate and discussion, then gender and sexuality studies might ask instead, Where did the contemporary concept of gender actually come from?