Gender

This term has gradually emerged as a counterpoint among many notions that deal with the relations between the feminine and the masculine. Genre (gender) comes from “gendre”, which was in use until the 16th century and is derived from the Latin genus, “race”, “birth”. In philosophy, it is opposed to “species”; the sense of race has disappeared as well as that of sex, which is now only present in “engender” or “generation”. What dominates is the idea of grouping or category: thus we say genre humain (the “human species”). The sense of sort or type appears in genre de vie (“way of life”), bon genre (“right kind”) or mauvais genre), “bad kind”).

This term made a comeback in the 1960s in the United States under the influence of Robert Stoller (1968) who described “gender identity”, even if he acknowledged that Evelyn Hooker was the first to introduce this notion in her correspondence with John Money. It has since enjoyed great success, largely thanks to gender studies that have developed a line of reflection with multiple aspects and orientations.

It is worth noting that in the course of the debates, the term gender has many different definitions depending on the author. While psychoanalysis is concerned by this approach, it does not make a univocal usage of the term. As for the current adherents of the term gender, they do not use its Freudian sexual component in their

conception of psychic life. Jean Laplanche has suggested a notion of gender that would include the field of sexology and a linguistic gender linked to language. This division clearly expresses the difficulty surrounding the issue. In another order of ideas, Juliet Mitchell has proposed a reading of D.W. Winnicott that understands gender as “social sex”, even though he himself did not use this term. On the other hand, in a fragment of analysis that has since become famous (Winnicott, 1971), he plunges us into the heart of his interpretative style when he considers a male patient's identity disorder.

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