Chapter 3: The Shadow and the Substance: The Sex/Gender Debate

Wendy Cealey Harrison

The shadow and the substance: The sex/gender debate In spite of the foundational implications of the distinction between ‘sex’and ‘gender’for feminism, this chapter seeks to explore ways of reconciling the two concepts, so that a unified field of feminist research could be developed, one that encompasses consideration of bodies in the analysis of the social and cultural and that identifies in those bodies, and the interpretation of those bodies, the unmistakable impact of the social and cultural environments within which they exist. This requires recognizing that the mind that creates these environments is both brain and social and cultural product. The challenge for feminism is to produce a social science that recognizes and understands the biological, without taking biological characteristics as a given, and a biology that takes full account of the fact that human beings are pre-eminently social and cultural creatures who, in shaping the world around them, also ...

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