Tristan Potter


1. Gender Theory - History


We, as a species, are obsessed with categorizing each other. Our propensity to find patterns, and then classify those patterns is both an amazing survival technique as well as a societal curse.

Of our many classifications, perhaps none is as relevant and hotly debated in modern Western culture as the difference between men and women; why the difference exists, how it’s created, and what the implications of it are (if any).

The current ideas of gender in Western society, including the roles that we assign to men and women have a deep and somewhat surprising history. Some of our ideas that we take for granted are thousands of years old, while others are mere decades.

Beginning with Aristotle, I investigate the ways that our current ideas of gender were formed, and the more modern and contemporary critiques of those theories.