3 Gender Stacy

The Modern English term "gender" derives from the Middle English gendre, an Anglo-Norman loan word derived from the Latin genus, meaning "kind," "type," or "class." Gendre was used from the late fourteenth century onward to designate masculine and feminine as types or categories of people, as when the narrator in Thomas Usk's The Testament of Love (c.1385-1387) asserts confidently that there are no other genders besides masculine and feminine, and that anything lacking one of these natural genders (e.g., inanimate objects) has no gender, except through the conventions used by grammarians: "no mo genders, ben there but masculyn and femenyne, al the remenaunt ben no gendres but of grace in facultie of grammer" (145). The Anglo-Latin term that corresponds most closely to the Middle English gendre is sexus, as indicated in /Elfric's late tenthor early eleventh-century Glossary, in which he defines sexus as "werhad o35e wifhad" (manhood or womanhood), and describes the sexes as falling into two distinct categories: "mas \ \verhades mann. femina wifhades mann" (mas I mascula: a person of manhood; femina: a person of womanhood; Attfrics Grammatik und Glossar, 297). The Old English terms that correspond most closely to sexus are had or gesceap, which may be translated, respectively (and loosely), as "condition" or "state of being" and as "form" or "shape." Gendre, sexus, had, and gesceap all accord more closely with our modern sense of sexual difference (as opposed to gender), and although there are many Old English terms, such as werliCj "rnanly," or wiflic, "womanly," for describing sociocultural roles or behaviors that tend to be assigned to sexed bodies, there is no general, abstract term similar to the modern concept of gender that might serve to distinguish between biologically sexed bodies and the cultural ground which both produces and houses them.