 In this module, we talk about a new idea, a new concept. This is not social order. Don't confuse it with that. This is something new. And every time we define some new concept in our course about language and gender, remember we will relate it with previous talk. So that's why there can be sometimes a kind of repetition of the things we have previously learned. Sociologists and linguists, feminist linguists especially, are those social linguists who are feminist? They think that gender is not something given, such as sex. As I have told you in some previous module, sex is fixed. We are born as male or female. Now nobody can change it. So it is given. We will do what our biological properties will dictate us to do. Naturally, a man or boy would do as biology of a boy demands. Same is the case with girls. But they think that this is not the case with gender. See, we are not mixing up these two terms, sex and gender. Whenever we use this term in sense of sex, we would say it natural gender. Here, I am talking about cultural gender. That's why I have used separate term for natural gender, that is sex. So according to sociologists and linguists, gender is cultural gender is not fixed. Rather, it is constructed in our experiences. It is not something imposed. It is not something external. It is something that we ourselves construct in our experiences with different social roles in different social domains and in different social orders. The construction of gender takes place through language. Because in gender development, we are involved in interactions and interactions do take place in language. So this whole construction is done through language. It is a linguistic construction. Gender is defined by patterns of relations with society at different stages of life. In every new phase of life, we have new relations, patterns of relations and the total, some total of these relations actually is called gender. It is not something predefined. This is the central point. We get gender from different institutions. Here again, the term comes in sense of culture. Different institutions define our cultural expectations as men and women. This is what we are calling cultural gender. So we get it from different institutions, initially family, then peers, then neighbors, and from different public spaces of market, our markets we have called them like home, schools, street games, workplace, media, university. In every situation, we have different experiences. We are controlled by different norms. Yes, we already know these things. Every set of experiences, what happens? We are in a new context. We have new pattern of relation. For that pattern of relation, we have a new set of expectations, cultural expectations. So we add to our construction of gender through this process. Our experiences take place through interactions, definitely, and interactions are realized through language. It means that we are born as males or females or with any other sex category. But what we do in life as men or women, this is not determined by itself. The whole idea behind this talk in this module is that yes, we are born as male and female, but whatever we do or whatever we are expected to do later in our life, it is defined by different contexts and different roles that we perform in society, that we learn through interaction, that we learn through language, that we construct through language. It is also shaped by our interaction with different institutions of society. This relationship between natural sex on one side and cultural gender on the other side has to be linked with each other. They cannot be separated from each other. They are two different concepts, but they have to be linked with each other. They are inseparable. We cannot delink them from each other. So there should be some chain that combines them together. That chain which links them with each other, that is known as gender order, the new term that I have introduced in this module. So the study of gender is, because the chain that binds them together, that we have called gender order, this chain is language. So when we want to study gender order, so we actually want to study the relationship between language and gender and relationship between gender and sex. So this is the rationale behind calling your course as language and gender. Actually we are studying gender order and gender order means that link that relates our natural sex with cultural gender and that link is language.