Page 96 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

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Geertz, Clifford (1923– ) Geertz, an American-born cultural anthropologist and
currently Professor of Social Science at Princeton University (USA), describes his
approach to understanding culture as being semiotic but not structuralist. That is,
culture is grasped through the interpretation of signs and signifying practices but
does not depend on a structure or universal system of signification. Geertz explores
culture as quite specific meaningful practices and interpretations situated in
particular ordinary and everyday contexts. For Geertz, an understanding of lived
culture requires in-depth ethnographic fieldwork that generates ‘thick descriptions’
of cultural life. As such, his influence within cultural studies has been most directly
felt by those thinkers associated with ethnography and the exploration of lived
culture.
• Associated concepts Constructionism, culture, difference, experience, practice,
realism, signs.
• Tradition(s) Ethnography, hermeneutics, semiotics.
• Reading Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Gender The notion of gender can be understood to be referring to the cultural
assumptions and practices that govern the social construction of men, women and
their social relations. The concept gains much of its force through a contrast with
a conception of sex as the biological formation of the body. Thus, femininity and
masculinity as forms of gender are the outcome of the cultural regulation of
behaviours that are regarded as socially appropriate to a given sex. Given that
gender is held to be a matter of culture rather than ‘nature’, so it is always a matter
of how men and women are represented.
A good deal of feminist writing has sought to challenge what they take to be
essentialism and biological determinism through the conceptual division between
a biological sex and a culturally formed gender. Subsequently, it is argued that no
fundamental sex differences exist and that those that are apparent are insignificant
in relation to arguments for social equality. Rather, it is the social, cultural and
political discourses and practices of gender that are held to lie at the root of
women’s subordination.
However, the sex–gender distinction upon which this argument is based has
itself become the subject of criticism. The differentiation between sex as biology and
gender as a cultural construction is broken down on the grounds that there is in
principle no access to biological ‘truths’ that lie outside of cultural discourses and
therefore no ‘sex’ which is not already cultural. In this view, sexed bodies are always
already represented as the production of regulatory discourses. Judith Butler has

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