Researching Sex and Culture
Tip: Define your terms to be clear about what your paper will discuss.
Sex
From the Oxford English Dictionary
4a.The distinction between male and female, esp. in humans; this distinction as a social or cultural phenomenon, and its manifestations or consequences; (in later use esp.) relations and interactions between the sexes; sexual motives, instincts, desires, etc.
4b. Physical contact between individuals involving sexual stimulation; sexual activity or behaviour, spec. sexual intercourse, copulation. to have sex (with): to engage in sexual intercourse (with).
"sex, n.1." OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/176989. Accessed 8 November 2018.
- Oxford English Dictionary This link opens in a new window A comprehensive dictionary that also traces the development of English words from approximately 1150 AD up to the present day. Click on "Simple search" in the lower left corner of the database page to be able to search for words in the definitions, quotations, and more.
Tip: Use synonyms for your terms in your searches. Academic databases use scholarly terms to best identify the subjects they discuss.
Gender and Gender Roles
From the Dictionary of American History
As a term, "gender" refers to the social construction of sex or the psychosocial concomitants to sexed identity. Feminists, in particular, have relied on distinctions between sex as biological and gender as cultural to argue that women's oppression is historical and not inevitable. Yet at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in both feminist theory and popular discourse, "gender" has come to replace "sex" as a term referring to sexual difference in a biological sense. This shifting definition is a result, at least in part, of gender's introduction into modern discourse as a medical concept used to explain a person's felt sense of his or her lived identity as a sex.
Hausman, Bernice L. "Gender and Gender Roles." Dictionary of American History, edited by Stanley I. Kutler, 3rd ed., vol. 3, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003, pp. 515-521. Gale Virtual Reference Library, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3401801664/GVRL?u=men90178&sid=GVRL&xid=33b6d437. Accessed 10 Oct. 2018.
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