Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The terms “gender” and “sexuality” are relatively new. As recently as the 1960s, “gender” was most commonly a grammatical term applying to nouns in Romance languages. Only recently has it become a critical half of a “sex/gender” system, in which “gender” refers to the social expectations and social roles that are attached to biological sex. “Sexuality” has a longer heritage in its present meaning, appearing in the Oxford English Dictionary in the nineteenth century as “the quality of being sexual or having sex.” Within the past several decades, however, it has come to embrace a spectrum of sexual differences rather than an implicit heterosexuality. The rich and ever-expanding literature dealing with both gender and sexuality testifies to their centrality to today's understanding of structures of power and meaning in the American past.Writing about both gender and sexuality initially emerged in the field of Women's History, a major effort to recover the perspective of over half the population by bringing the background into the foreground, and discovering the difference it made. As the marked category, women were conventionally the “other,” the forces for community, kinship, or propriety accompanying the rugged American individualist on his journey west; the Aunt Polly who set off Mark Twain's American original Huck Finn. In the history of gender and sexuality, however, women were ... log in or subscribe to read full text