Gender

Gender is present in many of our daily activities – in our clothing choices, our eating habits, our employment tasks and the domestic labour we carry out in the home. But gender is more than activities; we also use gender to differentiate ourselves from others and to know ‘who we are’ in the world. For those of us who, for the most part, ‘fit’ or appear to fit within the dominant gender order, gender gives some kind of ontological security, a sense that we ‘belong’. The perceived importance of gender for personhood has led to the concept ‘gender identity’ becoming ‘perhaps the commonest way of understanding the presence of gender in personal life’ (Connell, 2002, p. 85). But what is gender identity exactly? How do we belong to a gender group? How is it that there can be multiple types of masculinity and multiple types of femininity? What happens when we do not belong, when gender identification fails to fall neatly into commonly held understandings? And how have gender practices, identifications and belonging been impacted by the rapid global changes we have experienced in recent times? This chapter attempts to address these questions by drawing on historical and cultural accounts of gender as well as influential theories of gender power and practice