Homosexuality in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

One's sex, Millet asserts, is biologically determined, but one's gender is a social construct created by society. Our sex, which is biologically determined, fixed and stable, is different from our gender, which is mutable and attributive. Because gender is a product of social ideas, feminist declare the gender should not and must not shape the identity of what it means to be a woman (Bressler 256).
             By asserting that gender must not shape a woman's identity, feminist theorist attack the long-held classical humanist belief called essentialism, which asserts that the true essence or identity of human being is composed of finite and fixed properties that are essential components of what it means to be human. Essentialists believe that our sexuality and our gender are determined by our essential features. Nothing - not society, education, or spiritual beliefs- can change this unchangeable core, our essence (256-57).
             Many feminist theorists and critics of the latter part of the twentieth century reject unchangeable human essence and accept what is known as social constructivism. Social constructivists reject essentialism's belief in unalterable human essence but assert that gender is socially constructed term and concept. Words such as homosexual, heterosexual, male and female are likewise constructed (Bressler 257).
             Moreover, Derrida believed that Western metaphysics is based on a system of binary operations: good/bad, honesty/falsehood, up/down and so forth. In each these binary operations, one concept (the numerator) is superior or privileged and the second (the denominator) is inferior or unprivileged (Bressler 257). Like most patriarchal society which male is the superior sex and female consider being inferior.
             Ross C. Murfin concurs: gender is a construct, "an effect of language, a culture, and its institutions." Gender, not sex, makes an older man open the door for a young woman, and gender makes her expect it, resent it, or experience mixed feelings.