Sex and Gender Roles, Critiques of
Date
2018
Authors
Robinson, Kathryn
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Volume Title
Publisher
John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Abstract
The term “sex roles” refers to the social functions that are ascribed to individuals based
on their sex. Sex roles was initially the dominant paradigm to explain sexual inequality
in second-wave feminism; its feminist scholarship was role theory. Role theory focused
on practices of socialization into male and female roles, for example, different expectations and behaviors toward male and female infants. Both women’s liberation and the
burgeoning women’s scholarship inspired by the movement sought to challenge dominant assumptions of the “naturalness” of sexual inequality as merely expressions of
biological difference. The oft-quoted statement from Simone de Beauvoir that “one is
not born, but becomes a woman” was the foundation text of this period ([1949] 1953,
249). The positive contribution of role theory was the growing awareness of diversity
in male and female roles across cultures and historical periods and the possibilities
for changing roles and expectations. Anthropologist Margaret Mead had foreshadowed
the sex-roles approach in her influential book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies ([1935] 1959). Although she did not use the terminology of sex roles, her
idea of socialized sex temperament that differed and contrasted between these societies rejected the “naturalness” of socially expressed sex differences and laid the ground
for the idea that differential male and female behavior was socially and culturally constructed. But role theory emphasized bimorphic sex differences, neglecting both similarities between the supposedly divergent sexes and diversity within sex categories.
In rejecting the determining power of biological difference, it also ran up against the
question of what basis individuals were sorted into one category and not the other. And
the implicit answer was the ontology of biological sex difference.
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Book chapter
Book Title
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology
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2037-12-31
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