Culture and Gender

Abstract

That gender is a matter of culture, as feminist theory articulated in the early 1970s, has become a foundational element of contemporary social science and the humanities. The term gender was introduced in feminist theory to underscore that the ways individuals are understood as men or women are profoundly shaped by cultural norms and values rather than being a simple consequence of biological or physiological characteristics, namely their sex. Thus, in the determination of maleness and femaleness, cultural factors and meaning-making processes play a crucial role. Once gender is assigned at birth, a culturally driven process of gendering begins, guiding children toward adopting distinct gender role expectations and developing dispositions aligned with what is deemed appropriate for a particular gender within prevailing cultural norms. These differentiated gender roles generate unequal distributions of resources and opportunities, thereby producing and sustaining systems of gender inequality. Because culture is constitutive of gender, the concept of gender directs attention not only to the interpretation of gendered difference but also to the relations of power and the mechanisms through which hierarchical structures are reproduced, normalized, and naturalized.

Although gender is fundamentally shaped by cultural processes, it is important to acknowledge that culture is a complex and multifaceted concept, leading to considerable variation in how their relationship has been theorized. Given that children internalize values and norms through primary socialization, it is not surprising that substantial research attention has been devoted to identifying the cultural practices that shape the beliefs, ideas, and ideals guiding their expectations regarding the gender roles. Language has also been a significant area of inquiry, both in terms of how linguistic structures may be biased toward the masculine, thereby shaping speakers’ perceptions, and in terms of how patterns of language use themselves are structured by gender, and consequently, language as a practice contributes to the reproduction of gender regimes. Research has further examined the relationship between culture in the narrower sense, including the arts, music, painting, and literature, and gender. Gender shapes artistic careers, cultural consumption, and representations in ways that systematically disadvantage women across fields of cultural production. Finally, the relationship between culture and gender is problematized through the context-dependent nature of gender regimes, demonstrating that gender identities and regimes are shaped by culturally and historically specific conditions that cannot be adequately understood if Western epistemic categories and notions are imposed.