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Anne Dalke's picture

individual or social?

Submitted by Anne Dalke on Mon, 09/27/2010 - 1:58pm.

Thanks for keeping this conversation going....

what i meant was do we have different ways of dividing boys from girls if we're looking @ who gets to go to a woman's college, vs. who gets to participate in women's sports competitions? are the "categories" of boy and girl different, depending on the context? (for example, in sports is it really muscle mass that matters?? and in an educational context..what matters? social experience? why divide the boys from the girls? to give a hand up to those who have experienced gender oppression??).

I'd like to hear you say more about how you understand gender as an individual creation. I thought that is was a socially-agreed-upon category: we think that women look and behave in a certain way, and that men look and behave in a certain way, and get confused when folks don't follow those social scripts (though none of us can ever follow it precisely....) But how can a category be an individual rather than a social creation? And how much are those categories limited (if not determined) by biology?

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