Profile of the research area
Sociology of gender differentiation mainly addresses two questions: i) whether members of a society categorize between male and female, and ii) in what kind of social situation they refer to it. Further, we explore how these differentiations are accomplished and what kind of social consequences they imply. Differences of gender are assumed to be mostly independent from biological characteristics and that these attributes vary due to historical and cultural context. Respectively it is neither essential to divide people into exactly two categories of gender and/or sex nor to make a distinction by reasons of physical differences. We assume that this principle of contingency also applies to other forms of categorizing people, namely by ethnic origin, social class or disability.
