The three main ideas that the author expresses are:
1.- Development of the gender category.
2.- Its uses from the various social disciplines
3.- Possibilities of the category to analyze sexual differentiation.
Feminism of the 1970s emphasized the distinction that human characteristics considered feminine are not derived naturally from their sex, but are acquired through a complex individual and social process.
Joan Scott distinguishes four basic elements of the genre:
1.- Cultural symbols and myths with multiple representations.
2.- Rules about men and women, masculine and feminine.
3.- Social institutions and organizations: kinship, family, labor market, educational institutions, politics.
4.- Identity – mixture of generic identity with subjective identity.
Marta Lamas points out two basic uses of the gender category:
1.- The one that refers to women.
2.- The one that refers to the sexual difference in culture and the sexual relations of the sexes.
From anthropology, the definition or perspective of gender refers to how a given culture elaborates sexual difference.
The historian Manuel Delgado analyzes how men see religion as a machinery for integration and control of society.
Although people are shaped by the history of their own childhood, by past and present relationships within the family and society, the differences between masculinity and femininity do not only come from gender, but also from sexual differences, from the unconscious of what psychic.
Foucault demonstrated that sex is subject to a social construction: sexuality is the most sensitive to cultural changes, fashions and social transformations.
Today we know that sexuality is not natural but has been constructed: cultural symbolization invests value, ‘or not’, in the body and the sexual act.
We need to use the gender perspective to describe how sexual difference operates in cultural practices, discourses and representations.
The author ends by pointing out that female subordination is not natural, nor is heterosexuality. When feminism questions the social inequality of women and men, it leads to the symbolization of sexual differences and the structures that participate. She ends up fantasizing about the utopia of eliminating gender. This path speaks about a more polysexual future and a society where there will only be “bodies and pleasures.”
The aspiration is to achieve a situation in which so-called deviant sexuality is not only tolerated, but is no longer identified as different.
Lamas, Marta (1999). Uses, difficulties and possibilities of the gender category. Papeles de Población, 5(21),147-178.[Consultation date January 8, 2020]. ISSN: 1405-7425. Available at: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=112/11202105
