I'm ashamed to say, I have forgotten who did it but I remember learning long
ago that one of the presocratic philosophers (in an age when the Greeks were
madly separating everything into categories) applied gender to nouns along
sexual lines to indicate something about their respective characteristics.
The word was, to the best of my knowledge, adopted and adapted to modern
feminist analysis by Gayle Rubin, an anthropologist, in an article. "Traffic
in Women: Notes toward a Political Economy of Sex," in Toward an
Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter, (New York/ London: Monthly Review
Press, 1975). It was Rubin who had the useful idea that biological sex
should be considered separately from socially constructed gender. Alas, now
that the word gender has caught on everywhere but in the New York Times
(where it is still forbidden except in the language column) it has become
all too often a euphemism for "sex" and is therefore losing its usefulness.
That, I regret to say, is true of the discussion on dragons where "sex" is
what we have actually been talking about. On the other side, since
Lacquer's
Making Sex was published at least some feminist scholars think we should
drop "gender" and revert simply to sex to apply to both phenomena. I do not
agree with this but I do wish people would take some pains to keep the two
concepts separate.
Jo Ann
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill East <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tuesday, October 03, 2000 11:33 AM
Subject: Re: dragons - the "it" option
>
>--- [log in to unmask] wrote: > just a reminder that grammatical gender
>and physical gender
>> dont necessarily coincide. as Mark Twain pointed out, in
>> German a girl (madchen) is "it" while a turnip (rube) is "she".
>
>Yes, and in Latin the word for a thing - res - is feminine, while in
>Old English the word for a wife, wif, is neuter, while the word for a
>woman, wifmon, is masculine.
>
>Actually the application of the term "gender" to people is quite
>modern. It was not done even in my younger days. Until about ten
>years or so ago, or twenty at the most, I had never heard the word
>"gender" applied to anything other than words. One talked about the
>sex of a person or an animal, but the gender of the word which denoted
>it.
>
>Oriens.
>
>____________________________________________________________
>Do You Yahoo!?
>Get your free @yahoo.co.uk address at http://mail.yahoo.co.uk
>or your free @yahoo.ie address at http://mail.yahoo.ie
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|