Sexual Determinism and Conceptions of Gender

Within the first few paragraphs of Joan W. Scott's "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" the author offers up the a growing definition of contemporary conceptions of gender. Academics and feminists alike have begun to approach gender "as a way of referring to the social organization of the relationship between the sexes" (1053). In reading this it struck me as a congenial definition considering the implications of Denise Riley's argument in Am I that Name? Riley flushes out the historical conceptions of sex and gender by analyzing the multifarious character traits attributed to the female sex in English society since the 1500s. In the course of this exposition Riley shows that that sex, in her case specifically female, has been characterized as closer to Nature, more in tune with social activities, equal in religious rights but not intellectual, and a host of other ascribed beliefs about gender. Deterministic and historically specific beliefs about the female sex, for Riley, have caused a rift to form in Feminism. Riley identifies feminists across the temporal spectrum as torn between characterizing women as different and singular because of their sex and arguing that gender and femininity are complete constructs and sexual differences are ephemeral. Riley argues that this division has prevented feminists from seeing the manifest ambiguity of sex. Feminists must recognize the socially constructed nature of sex as well as the all too real effects gender determinism has had on perceptions of sex. I think that Riley has the right idea when she writes that to engage this ambiguity "a history of several categories...would be demanded in order to glimpse the history of one" (14). Though Scott provides an excellent definition of gender as a social organization it does not accommodate for the many other social facets which affect gender perceptions. If gender truly is not a social construct, the only method by which we can determine this is to treat gender as a construct and attempt to delineate the variety of other factors which inform and define sex.