The set of behavioural, cultural, psychological, and social characteristics and practices associated with masculinity and femininity. The notion of gender was used in Second Wave feminism to separate individual attitudes and actions from physiology in order to undermine the biological determinism thesis which holds that cultural attitudes are simply a reflection of the specific nature of the body. By contrast, feminism claimed that attitudes are fluid with respect to biological sex and that it is culture rather than nature which shapes these. As Beauvoir, Simone de famously put it, one is not born a woman. Gender is rather an identity one adopts or creates. American ethnomethodology Harold Garfinkel and American sociologist Goffman, Erving argue that gender identity is something that has to be learned and constantly managed. Their work chimed well with American psychologist Robert Stoller who showed that in the case of sex reassignment surgery it was a relatively simple procedure to correct the body, but much more problematic to undo the learned social behaviour. It was further argued by feminism that the very notion of gender is itself influenced and shaped by other equally powerful cultural forces such as race and class, there being a significant difference in terms of relative opportunities between being a white middle-class woman living in a western city and a poor non-white woman. In recent times, work on gender has been dominated by Butler, Judith, who argues that the sex/gender distinction should be regarded as regulatory apparatus that positions sex as ânaturalâ so as to make gender roles appear ânormalâ. Society, she argues, calls upon us to perform masculinity and femininity and though it appears that we may choose between the two, the crucial point is that we cannot choose not to have any gender at all. Thus gender is a highly ambivalence category in Butlerâs view. As Haraway, Donna points out in an extended essay on the question of gender in Simians, Cyborgs and Women (1991), the sex/gender distinction is also an artefact of the English language---German, for instance, uses only one word, Geschlecht, to encompass both meanings, while not coinciding exactly with either---and other cultures confront this issue in different ways, according to different social and cultural pressures. Further Reading: C. Colebrook Gender (2004).