The Multiple Realities of Sameness and Difference: Ideology and Practice

Gender distinctions as dichotomous categories are perpetuated and maintained by social mechanisms and are socially constructed. Part of this social construction is reproduced by many social scientists who adopt mainstream cultural categories of gender and, through theoretical or methodological biases, fail to question them, or who, by their own practices, reinforce them. This analysis is an overview of the epistemological and methodolical practices that reinforce gender distinctions and neglect reporting of similarities. Rejecting several models used to explain cultural differences, an alternative mode of analysis—multiplicity and proteanism—is proposed as a more productive perspective in the analysis of gender.