Gender Relations
Chapter 6 Summary

This chapter provides an overview of some of the social processes that shape gender relations in contemporary societies. It begins with the idea of gender difference and explores the relationship between the social construction of these differences and the physical reality of the gendered body. It thus demonstrates that there are many forms of masculinity and femininity across time and space. It describes and assesses two major accounts of the individual acquisition of gendered identity, and argues for the necessity of viewing gender as a property of social institutions and of culture as much as of individuals. It goes on therefore to examine the ways in which a gendered society is created. In looking at the gendered society, we detail the way that key institutional areas - divisions of labour, the social organisation of childbirth and childcare, sexuality and popular culture and the media - have been permeated by gender, and considers some of the implications of this for contemporary gender relations.

In each of these areas of social life, people frequently have recourse to explanations in terms of 'naturalness', and so the discussions of childbirth and childcare, of sexuality, and indeed of gender difference itself begin by contrasting biological explanations with social ones. But we also question in this chapter whether biological and social phenomena can be so neatly separated. Even the bodies of men and women, it is argued, are constituted partly by social processes.