Gender uquals SEX ? Part 1 - Gender Theory

The point of view I want to look at in my presentation is theories of gender and mainly I want to focus on the problem of sexual orientation that was presented in the „Notebook of Trigorin” („Notebook of Trogorin” which is Tennessee Williams free adaptation of famous „The Seagull” written by Anton Chekhov over a century ago ) nevertheless the leitmotiv of the play originally was not about human sexuality Tennessee Williams make from it a new motivation for the main character. The performance I had opportunity to see. The play tells story of people involved in triangles of loves and shows the consequences of this kind of relations. Tennesee Williams use the famous play of Chekhow to present problems more adequate to present times.

For many centuries masculine and feminine were treated as an obvious categories and fundaments of invariable social order. Sexual revolution in '60 change the way of perceiving gender as an opposite ends of traditionally formulated continuum dividing social roles between man and women. Those events initiate Feminism as a social movement which in determined way tries to indicate changes in way of perceiving that what is masculine and what is feminine. The philosophy of the movement contribute to reconsider the issue of human sexuality and sexual identity and go beyond traditional frames that demand to perceive as a deviation every sexual behaviour of human incompatible with Christian worldview.

The person who theories dominated the sociological conceptions of the subject in the last decade is Judith Butler. She erases an equal’s sign between sex and gender. In her opinion our sex (male or female) do not indicate our gender and indicate sex drive to opposite sex. Sex and gender are not combined with each other as they seem to be but they are independent and should be perceived and analyzed in different ways. Our gender should be considered in perspective of time and history. Our gender is not defined by who we are in biological sense but by our behaviour what means that our gender is performative. Is defined by the way we want present ourselves to the others. "When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one." [Butler, 1990]