Gender. The cultural differentiation of male from female. Gender is all culture and no nature: the only natural aspect of gender is sexual differentiation - a bio/physiological difference upon which is balanced a rickety but enormously elaborate cultural structure of differences which are used to classify and make meaningful the social relations of the human species. Whenever sexual differences are taken as meaningful, we are in the presence not of sex but of gender. The point of insisting on this distinction between sex and gender is that nothing very much can be done about human physiology in the short run, but culture can be transformed. So arguments about what is 'essentially' male or female, or 'masculine' or 'feminine', often justify gender differences as being 'only natural', but this justification is 'only ideological'. Gender is a human and a signifying division; its 'source'in nature is neither here nor there. See binary opposition, patriarchy

//gender role: