 Introduction of the topic first. One view of language and gender is, their relationship is, in which we take gender as something given, something fixed, fixed by birth. We are either born men or women. And the other view is that society, not individuals, defines their gender and gender roles in norms, norms of dress, norms of talk, norms of dealing with others in society at home. And choice of professions and whether one would have power over the other. Agency means that a person can be in the role of agent. Agent is called that entity which has power which can control others. One view is that gender is given. The other view is that society defines gender. Another view is, this time the view comes from sociocultural anthropology. Anthropology is the study of human society. It can be divided into two main subfields, you can say. One is social anthropology or sociocultural anthropology. It studies an entire range of cultures and societies in the world including western, non-western or even primitive society. On the other side is sociology. Sociology studies only, cultures and societies which belong to the west. Only western societies and cultures are its focus. So the difference between sociocultural anthropology sometimes regarded and sociology is just of range of study. Sociocultural anthropology has wider range than sociology. We are not dealing with here physical anthropology that studies human societies with reference to evolution. Evolution of human beings on this earth. So this view that we are going to discuss now has been offered by sociocultural anthropologist. He is Vygotsky. Vygotsky is a psychologist and his views are also relevant with anthropology. His views being a Russian psychologist are related with anthropology and we will see it now. He says that it is not society. Rather our activities, our actions in society, they define what will be our gender. So he relates gender with action or you can say according to Vygotsky and sociocultural point of view. Gender is a social action. So this is totally a different point of view from all the previous points of views which we have discussed so far. And for him as I said he takes it as social action or activities. He says that gender is our activity or performance in society. And from this sometimes this point of view is also known as performative theory of gender. A person is not seen in this point of view. A person is not seen as male or female rather seen as teacher, army officer, cameraman, producer, engineer regardless whether he or she is man or woman. So here biological sex does not define our gender. Rather our activities, our actions, our involvement in different domains of life, they define who we are, what is our gender. So in this way gender is purely a cultural category. It is not a biological category or natural category. That's why we use two terms in this course. One is natural gender. If you remember the beginning modules, we defined different concepts regarding the course where we defined natural gender in terms of sex, male and female. And there was another term, cultural gender. This is how society in culture define gender. So here we have introduced another point of view that doesn't come from feminist language. That doesn't come from socio-linguish but it comes from socio-cultural anthropologist especially from Waigatsgi who says that gender is not something given, gender is assigned by our activities.