Editorial: Gender: do we need it or not?

Abstract

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Over ten years ago, in one of the first editions of “Horizons
of Education” Professor Zygmunt Bauman wrote the following:
We seldom think about the things that do not cause us pain, do
not complicate matters, do not bring us down…If things are the
way we expect them to be, if they do not surprise us, do not sud-
denly behave “against their very nature” and take a strange turn
of events; and if their monotonous identity does not require any
effort from us, things take care of themselves; in other words, if
there is no sign that things will change and can be any different
from what they are (that they are so to speak “a matter of choice”)
– we not perceive them as a “problem” and concern ourselves
with them, we simply do not see them at all. We can live with
them every day but remain quite oblivious to them. We would be
surprised if someone drew our attention to them. We would not
know what this was all about and what someone wanted from us...