Wrestling With Gender: Gender and Gender-Neutrality in the Mirror of the History of Scholarship

The history of feminism and gender studies is fraught with constant struggles to find applicable definitions for sex, gender, and sexuality, and understand their relationships and differences. This paper attempts to go through various theories in this regard, tracing their variations and evolutions through time, with a particular focus on gender elimination and discrimination. Some important issues explored in this research include experimentation with language, scientific investigations, and sociological research in the hope of defining and combating gender. Moreover, some manifestation of gender-neutrality patterns in literary works throughout ages and among nations have been represented in various degrees. The survey at hand, drawing on Foucault and Butler’s theories on power and gender performativity, asserts the relative independence of sex, sexuality, and gender from each other as well as the nonessential role of them in the game of discrimination, relegating this role instead to power relations and personal perceptions. Literature, with its vast imaginative capacities and persuasive force, has been introduced as the site where all these intellectual endeavors of various fields about gender have converged, creating metaphors for a possible discrimination-free world, and effecting inevitable changes in the perceptions of their readers.