Gender is inherently interlinked with other social categorisations of age, sexuality, race, the shape of someone's body and so on.In our daily interactions, we need to be able to 'place people' within a framework of meaning - which we do by drawing on existing cultural narratives. We use our local knowledges to position ourselves in relation to others, which we do by identifying ourselves as belonging to certain categories and not to others. As such, our assumptions about people are cumulatively persuaded by cateogries of gender, race, class, age and so on - these cannot be disentangled or seperated from one another. (Bodi and Davidson 2003)
Thus it is important to recognise multiple femininities and masculinities. i.e. understanding that a disabled woman or a black woman differs from a middle class, white, heterosexual woman.
"Gender is constituated differently in different places, in part, because residents between those places differ in class or racial or other social variables" (Pratt and Hanson 1994)