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1. Historical Background When Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1949 "on ne nait pas femme, on le devient" and when E.M. Parshley translated this in 1953 as "one is not born, but rather becomes a woman", both Beauvoir and Parshley were talking aboutgender. Though the term did not actually come into use at the time of these texts, it was undergoing rapid development twenty years later, and its users and adapters often referred back to Simone de Beauvoir's work on women's socialization. The Women's Movement and the Idea of Gender In the mid to late 1960s, as post-war feminism began to develop a certain momentum along with many of the other protest movements of the time in Western Europe and North America, the notion of gender evolved to complement and extend that of biological sexual difference. Since biological sexual difference hardly seemed adequate to explain the differences inmen's and women's societal roles and opportunities, grassroots women's movements and scholars developed and employed other tools and analytical categories in order to understand these discrepancies. Anglo-American feminist writers and theorists began to refer back to Beauvoir and explore the questions raised by her aphorism. Beauvoir suggests that a baby born with female reproductive organs does not simply grow up to be a woman. She has to turn herself into a woman, or more correctly, she is turned into a woman by the society she grows up in and in response to the expectations that society has of women. The final product 'woman' is a result of education and conditioning, and differs according to the dominant influences she is subject to in the culture, subculture, ethnic group, religious sect, in which she grows up. Early feminist use of the termgender referred to the result of the social process that turns young females into girls, and later into women. This process instills into girls and women the physical, psychological and sociocultural attributes that are typical of a particular time and culture and which, as a rule, differ substantially from the attributes of the men of the same period. It needs to be stressed here that gender refers to the sociocultural construction of both sexes. Feminist thinkers of the late 1960s and early 1970s developed the term in the interests of examining and understanding women's socialized difference from men, and their concomitant cultural and political powerlessness. More recently, though, gender studies have been examining the construction of male attributes and attitudes that are 5 Translation and Gender typical of certain societies and culturesat specific historical moments. Results of such studies have appeared in a number of essay collections (Kaufman 1987; Brod 1987). Other contemporary approaches criticizegender duality, the idea that there are only two types of encultured gender which correspond to the two biological sexes (Butler 1990); theorists and writers working in the area of gay and lesbian studies focus on the gender complexities raised by homosexual contexts andpractices such as cross-dressing or transvestism. For the purposes of this book, however, the main focus will be on ideas of gender applied in the women's movement and in women's studies in order to understand and then undermine, or strategically exploit, the effects of gender identity in women. The women's movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s focused on two aspects of women's difference. First, it tried to show how women's difference from men was in many ways due to the artificial behavioural stereotypes that come with gender conditioning. Sincethese stereotypes were artificial, they could be minimized. Second, the movement de-emphasized differences between women, stressing instead women's shared experiences, their commonality, their solidarity. In other words, it viewed gender as a form of deliberate cultural conditioning that needed to be criticized and rejected , but that also transcended individualcultures and could bond women into a political force (Eisenstein 1983). This led to the "ideological and political conviction that women were more unified by the fact of being female in a patriarchal society than [...] divided by specificities of race and class" (Eisenstein 1983:xvii). The idea of gender as a largely negative aspect of women's conditioning could thus be strategically and politically exploited to bring women together. Gender was understood to be the basis of women's subordination in public and private life, and was viewed as an phenomenon affecting all women—in the household as well as in the workplace, everywhere from the pink-collar ghettos of the...

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