Rethinking sex and gender

Genders and sexualities: exploring the conceptual limits of contemporary educational research

“…Furthermore, it is also important not to conflate a questioning of the configuration of gender with the rejection of the gender as an analytical category. Rather, an emerging challenge may be to think through gender without the immediate recourse to adult defined masculinities and femininities (Delphy 1993).…”

Discrimination at Work: Comparing European, French, and American Law

“…225 Given the complexity and richness of our modern society, and the good that I believe exists in supporting pluralism in our society, it seems essential to me to keep pushing ourselves to understand how both the absence of civil rights for some groups and the acquisition of civil rights for previously marginalized groups will affect different people in society differently. The individual is positioned in part through the ways in which institutions structure the possibility of individuals to express and participate and have their issues addressed.…”

“…224 In this critique, based on theories by Michel Foucault, she goes beyond the traditional distinction between sex and gender to question the individual and sexuality at different times and in different places. In addition to Christine Delphy 225 and Bruno Latour, 226 other researchers work on a certain form of gender deconstruction. In France, despite a probable lag with respect to the United States, where gender studies are more deeply anchored, "throughout its development, the sociology of gender has nevertheless maintained a constant dialogue with the major theoretical frameworks, streams of thought, and even 'schools' of sociology. "…”

The Challenge of the Thought of Sexual Difference within Gender Mainstreaming

“…In the first -originated within the Anglo-Saxon world -a new category has seen the light, the one of "gender", that implies that the social expectations regarding the child and the adult are normed, framed in the collective and individual imaginary in function of the sex and so, in a certain way, the gender, this collective expectation, pre-exists the sex and shapes it (Delphy 1993;Gayle 1975;Nicholson 1994;Oakley 1972;).The second, coming from French and Italian feminist philosophy is called the "thought of sexual difference" and sees the concept of gender as insufficient to capture the interplay between the specificity of women's embodiment and the social and cultural definition of women as devalued 'other'. Therefore, if 'sex' indicates the biological difference between man and woman, and 'gender' the cultural construction that defines men and women, masculine/feminine, 'sexual difference', indicates both the biological data and the symbolic order, i.e.…”