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Lorber, Judith and Susan A. Farrell, eds., The Social Construction of Gender. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publication Inc., 1991, 374 pp., $18.95 softcover.
The Social Construction of Gender is a collection of 18 articles, all but one reprinted from Gender and Society, a journal founded in 1987 by Sociologists for Women in Society. The volume is intended as a textbook aimed at both undergraduate and graduate students on the theory, research, and praxis of feminist constructionism.
The "unified perspective" claimed by the editors amounts to a series of now widely-accepted understandings about gender, rather than a systematic theoretical framework. The focus is structural: gender is seen to be an axis of social order. Feminity/masculinity are categories, socially-defined and maintained in everyday life, as well...