THE ICFAI UNIVERSITY, DEHRADUN

RESEARCH PROJECT

STUDENT’S NAME: RIYA SINGH

ENROLLMENT NO: 19FLICDDNO1106

BATCH NAME & YEAR: BBA.LLB (HONS) & 1st Year

PROJECT TITLE: FEMINISM AND GENDER

SUBMITTED BY SUBMITTED TO
RIYA SINGH MS. RIA JUNEJA

(FACULTY OF LAW)
TABLE OF CONTENT

Acknowledgement………………………………………………………………3

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………….4

The sex and gender distinction……………………………………………………….5

Gender as socially constructed ……………..………………………………………..6

Women as a group ………………………………………………………………………..7

Problems with sex and gender distinction………………………………………………..8

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………9

BIBLOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………10
 ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to express my special thanks of gratitude to my teacher Ms. Ria Juneja who
gave me this special opportunity to do this wonderful project on the topic “FEMINISM AND
GENDER “ which also helped me in doing a lot of research and I came to know about so
many new things about this particular topic for which I will remain grateful to you.

Secondly , I would like to thank my friends for helping me to complete my project in the
limited time frame with all the valuable content.

RIYA SINGH
INTRODUCTION
Feminism depends on the suspicion that women and men are unique, that for women to be
equivalent to men intends to resemble men, which isn't attractive. Rather than equality,
difference in feminism is based on women having freedom. Woman's rights is a political
development, however you don't need to be a women's activist, or buy in to women's activist
thoughts, so as to peruse any content in a women's activist manner. It is vital , however, to
prioritize constructions of sex and gender. A reading that merely describes a female
protagonist’s movements, actions or characterization is unlikely to satisfy the criteria for a
feminist reading.

Generally numerous women's activists have understood ‘woman’ differently not as a sex
term, but as a gender term that relies upon social and social elements. In so doing, they
distinguished sex being female or male from gender , although most ordinary language users
appear to treat the two interchangeably. More recently this distinction has come under
sustained attack and many view it nowadays with suspicion. Feminist analysis can be
summed up as either as toppling or affirming essentialist thoughts of sex and gender. Sex in
the context means biology and the body the physical form that can be touched, felt and seen,
as well as those parts that cannot be seen such as chromosomes and neurological functions.
Gender, on the other hand is a complex web of behaviours and actions and a social
construction.
THE SEX AND GENDER DISTINCTION

Sex and gender mean different things to different feminist theorists and they are not
straightforward to characterize. Gender is cultural social term to utilize when alluding to
ladies and men as social gatherings. Sex is biological use it when the when the natural
differentiation is prevalent.. According to world health organization Sex refers to the
biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women. Gender alludes to
the socially developed jobs, practices, exercises, and traits that a given society thinks about
proper for people.

 BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM
Numerous people think that sex and gender are coextensive, so a gender difference is
due to nurture, and a sex difference is due to nature. The main feminist inspiration for
making this differentiation was to counter biological determinism or the view that
biology is destiny. Women supposedly conserve energy and this makes them passive,
conservative, sluggish, stable. Men expend their surplus energy and this makes them
eager, energetic, variable and, thereby, interested in political and social matters.
Behaviour is never either nature or nurture. It is always a very complex interweaving
of both. These biological facts about metabolic states were utilized not exclusively to
clarify conduct contrasts among ladies and men yet in addition to legitimize what our
social and political game plans should be. Commonly observed behavioural traits
associated with women and men, at that point, are not brought about by life systems
or chromosomes. Or maybe, they are socially learned or obtained.
 GENDER TERMINOLOGY
In order to differentiate biological differences from social & psychological ones and
to talk about the latter, feminists appropriated the term gender. Until the 1960s, was
frequently used to allude to manly and female words, similar to le and la in French.
Nonetheless, so as to clarify why a few people felt that they were 'caught in
inappropriate bodies'. Gender conceived of as masculinity and femininity is
superimposed upon the ‘coat-rack’ of sex as each society imposes on sexed bodies
their cultural conceptions of how males and females should behave. As time passes, I
suspect that many "gender differences" will be found to actually be "sex differences”
or at least distal by-products of them. For example, I imagine that the dearth of
cultures where women cut their hair short, while men let their hair grow long, is
something more than just a random fluke of consistency in cultural socialization.
 GENDER AS SOCIALLY CONSTUCTED

Society anticipates different behaviours and attitude from boys and girls. Gender
Socialization is the tendency for boys and girls to be socialized in unexpected way.

 Gender socialisation
Boys are raised to fit to the male gender role, and girls are raised to fit to the female
gender or role. A Gender Role is a set of behaviours, and practices, frames of mind,
and character attributes and personality characteristics expected and supported of an
individual dependent on their sex.
Following elements that lead to gender socialisation:
 Influence of science- Experts disagree on whether differences between males
and females result from innate, biological differences or from differences in
the ways that boys and girls are socialized.
 Influence of family - Every culture has different rules and guidelines about
what is appropriate for males and females, and family members may socialize
babies in gendered ways without intentionally following that way.
 Influence of education - As children enter the instructive framework,
conventional desires for boys and girls proceed . Teachers would more
concentrate on boys, approaching them more and challenging them. Because
boys were believed to be more analytical and accepted to be progressively
diagnostic, teachers assumed they would excel in math and science.

 Gender as feminine and masculine character

The terms masculinity and femininity allude to qualities or attributes normally
connected with being male or female, separately. Customarily, masculinity and
femininity have been conceptualized as far edges of a solitary measurement, with
masculinity at one extreme and femininity at the other. Gendered characters are as far
as supposedly showed like a common gender stereotypical behaviour. Take emotional
dependency. Women are characteristically increasingly passionate and sincerely
subordinate upon others around them, evidently thinking that it’s hard to recognize
their very own advantages and prosperity from the interests and prosperity of their
kids and partners. Women find it hard to distinguish their own needs from the needs
of those around them because they cannot sufficiently individuate themselves from
those near to them and Men are characteristically sincerely withdrawn, inclining
toward a vocation where impartial emotionally detached, preferring a career where
dispassionate and distanced thinking are virtues. These qualities are said to result
from men's well-characterized inner self limits that empower them to organize their
own needs and interests some of the time to the detriment of others' needs and
interests. Feminine and masculine personalities play a crucial role in women's
oppression since they they make females excessively mindful to the requirements of
others and guys genuinely insufficient.
WOMEN AS A GROUP
Feminism is the movement to end the oppression women as a group face. But, how should
the category of women be understood if feminists accept the above arguments that gender
construction is not uniform, that a sharp distinction between biological sex and social gender
is false or (at least) not useful, and that various features associated with women play a role in
what it is to be a woman, none of which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient like
a variety of social roles, positions, behaviours, traits, bodily features and experiences.
Feminists averse to generalizing about the common interests of all women argue that
subsuming women under a general identity obliterates the specificity of female diversity and
women's experiences. Grouping among women, however, is distinctive. Unlike many racial
and ethnic groups in many cultures women have historically lived apart from one other.
However, since the abolition of slavery, has had little option but to live together. This
imposed arrangement has been advantageous in affording opportunities to unselfconsciously
shape distinctive institutions. But women lack the institutionalized bond that even the most
loosely constituted of these communities manifests. Among women generally, there is little
group consciousness seldom except in lesbian communities, are primary relationships
confined to other women, and distinctive cultural traditions must be self-consciously
configured. Women as a group are assumed to share some characteristic feature, experience,
common condition or criterion that defines their gender and the possession of which makes
some individuals women. All women are thought to differ from all men in this respect.

MacKinnon thought that being treated in sexually objectifying ways is the common condition
that defines women's gender and what women as women share. All women differ from all
men in this respect. Further, pointing out females who are not sexually objectified does not
provide a counterexample to MacKinnon's view. Being sexually objectified is constitutive of
being a woman, a female who escapes sexual objectification, then, would not count as a
woman.
PROBLEMS WITH SEX AND GENDER DISTINCTION
The average person does not distinguish between “sex” and “gender” and uses the two terms
interchangeably. This treatment of “sex” and “gender” as synonymous dismisses, whether
knowingly or unknowingly, the considerable conceptual work of gender scholars over the last
thirty years and harks back to essentialist as well as determinist notions of sex, conflating,
among other things, social roles, psychological dispositions, power differences, norms of
grooming and comportment, sexual object choice and reproductive anatomy. Many people,
including many feminists, have ordinarily taken sex ascriptions to be solely a matter of
biology with no social or cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only
two sexes and that biological sex classifications are utterly unproblematic. By contrast, some
feminists have argued that sex classifications are not unproblematic and that they are not
solely a matter of biology. Ultimately, in the late 1960s and early 1970s and beyond, feminists
borrowed and reworked the language of gender, and it is a concept now most commonly associated
with this feminist reworking. What is less commonly known is that the term “gender” as it originally
emerged in research on intersexuality and transsexuality had a very different tenor—even if it was
equally rooted in a conceptual separation from biological sex. The distinction is being highlighted is
particularly prominent in the medical discourse on transsexuality, which will serve as my primary
example, but it is equally present – and in fact originated – in discourse on intersexuality.

Transsexuals argued that, because their gender was both immutable and at odds with their sex, they
required sexual reassignment (a change that was possible), the second wave feminists who used the
term “gender” had different goals. In fact, ironically, many feminists used the exact same
terminology to make precisely the opposite claim, namely that it was gender that could and needed
to be changed, not sex. Although men’s and women’s anatomy may be naturally and undeniably
different, they argued, these differences are not the cause of the social and psychological differences
between men and women (gender), which are actually largely caused by social norms and
institutions—and thus can and should be transformed. If transsexuals and their doctors can be
characterized as wanting to leave gender alone and change sex, feminists sought just the reverse, to
change gender and leave sex out of it. Scientists working on transsexuality did not necessarily share
feminists’ political goals, and in fact often held very restrictive, traditional beliefs about gender .
Further, these early definitions of gender were highly psychological and individualized, ignoring
dimensions of gender that would come to be central to the feminist use of the term, for instance
power differences or the idea of gender as a broad social structure embedded in social institutions.
From a feminist perspective, then, it was necessary to move beyond such conventional,
individualized notions of gender but in the process, the idea that sex can be seen as malleable and
non-binary was also abandoned even though it was not inherently antithetical to feminist positions,
and actually contained an implicit argument against biological determinism. In fact, the shift to a
view of sex as a fixed natural binary that attended the feminist resignification of the sex/gender
distinction has since become a problem – both conceptually and politically – for feminist definitions
of gender.
CONCLUSION
This entry first looked at feminist arguments against biological determinism and the claim
that gender is socially constructed. Next, it analysed women's activist scrutinizes of
predominant understandings of gender and sex, and the differentiation itself. In response to
these concerns, the final section looked at how a unified women’s. First, that gender — or
what it is to be a lady or man — is still very much a live issue. Second, that feminists
women's activists have not so much surrendered the view that sex is about social elements
and that it is (in some sense) unmistakable from natural sex. The jury is still out on what the
best, helpful or (even) the right meaning of gender is. And some contemporary women's
activists still observe there to be an incentive in the first 1960s sex/gender qualification.
BIBLOGRAPHY
 https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/social-psychology/personality/masculinity-and-
femininity/
 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/
 https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-
differences/201110/sex-difference-vs-gender-difference-oh-im-so-confused/