Yes, the rear axle is what houses the "gear". Stock is a 3.27 gear. The gear acts as a torque multiplier to spin the rear wheels. Since you have a 3.27 gear now, the driveshaft has to turn 3.27 times to spin the wheels once. Most people upgrade to a 4.10 or 4.30 gear to accelerate faster. If you install a 4.10 gear the driveshaft will spin 4.10 times to spin the wheels once. While this would make it seem like you are having the motor work harder to spin the wheels that same 1 time over, you are getting to the upper RPM's faster which is where our cars make power....in the upper RPM range.
Since your car has an Independent Rear Suspension it won't be that cheap. A lot of people will do a 4.10 gear swap, aluminum driveshaft (since it's spinning faster now the aluminum shaft basically eliminates vibration), and computer chip to match the speedomoter (since MPH is calculated by variables that you will change with the gear change).