As Lorber explores in her essay “Night to His Day”: The Social Construction of Gender, “most people find it hard to believe that gender is constantly created and re-created out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and order of that social life” (Lorber 1). This article was very intriguing because I thought of my gender as my sex but they are not the same. Lorber has tried to prove that gender has a different meaning that what is usually perceived of through ordinary connotation. Gender is the “role” we are given, or the role we give to ourselves. Throughout the article it is obvious that we are to act appropriately according to the norms and society has power over us to make us conform. As a member of a gender an individual is pushed to conform to social expectations of his/her group. Lorber grabs the attention of any reader by using some effective strategies and stating that discussing gender is considered equal to “fish talking about water”( Lorber 1). Therefore it meaning that a fish cannot think of living without water and similarly human beings cannot ponder the thought of living without gender. Judith Lorber has also compared the questioning the authenticity of gender to the rising of the sun. So, it is clearly understood that gender, though being practiced inevitably in our daily lives, many of us fail to accept that it is a way of organizing our lives and practicing gender is like practicing to organize our disorganized lives. Lorber uses a very effective example of “doing gender” of a man who carried a female child in a stroller dressing the child in boyish clothes. The man was stared at and people around him found it really shocking that he was performing the role of a woman (because g... ... middle of paper ... ...h reinforces men and women differences by constant process of learning and teaching. Gender tends to be one of the major ways that human beings organize their lives” (Lorber 2). Throughout the article Judith Lorber talked about how gender construction starts right at birth and we decide how the infant should dress based on their genitalia. The authors ideas relates to my life because my friend is about to have a baby girl in a couple of weeks from now and when she is born we are buying her all girly stuff so that everyone else knows she is a girl. My family has already bought her bows for her hair, dresses, and everything was pink and girly. Since society tells us that infants should wear pink and boys should wear blue we went with it. I never thought about this until reading this article and I noticed that gender construction does in fact start right at birth.
Aaron H. Devor argues in his essay “Becoming Members of Society: Learning the Social Meanings of Gender” the gender roles casted by society help shape the definition of gender and that society’s norms aren’t necessarily correct. In America, the two traditional categories for gender are male and female (109). He claims that gender is taught through their culture’s social definitions of gender; children see themselves in terms they have learned from the people around them (110). To support this claim, he introduces the “I”, “me” and “self”; the “I” forms a self-image to oneself as distinctive while the “me” allows one to fit into social norms (111). Together, they form the “self” that allows one to oversee and remove any behavior that is unacceptable
I was assigned to the female sex category at birth and raised as a girl; the very fact that I can state that simple statement and people can get a fairly clear idea how I was raised shows just how intertwined we are with the social construction of gender. Women can relate because they were probably raised in a similar fashion, and men know that they were raised differently than I was. This is one of the many ways our society supports Lorber’s claim that gender translates to a difference among the binary American society operates on (Lorber, pp. 47-48). My parents kept my hair long until I decided to donate it when I was 12 years old, my ears were pierced when I was 8 years old, and
In Devor’s article, “Becoming Members of Society: Learning the social Meanings of Gender” one can better understand how society has a big impact on how gender is perceived. Understanding
In their publication, “Doing Gender, ” Candance West and Don H. Zimmerman put forward their theory of gender as an accomplishment; through, the daily social interactions of a man or woman which categorize them as either masculine or feminine. From a sociological perspective the hetero-normative categories of just sex as biological and gender as socially constructed, are blurred as a middle ground is embedded into these fundamental roots of nature or nurture.To further their ideology West and Zimmerman also draw upon an ethnomethodological case study of a transsexual person to show the embodiment of sex category and gender as learned behaviours which are socially constructed.Therefore, the focus of this essay will analyze three ideas: sex, sex
As meaning making creatures, humans attempt to categorize and definitively understand anything they observe. Although this crusade for understanding is not inherently bad, it often produces unintended negative consequences. As humans sort, classify, and define everything, they simultaneously place everything into a box that constricts creativity and fluidity. Concerning gender, these boxes create harmful conceptions of each person on the planet. Although these conceptions of gender are constructed and not “real” by any means, they have real implications in the process of socialization that influence how each person lives his/her life. In the United States, the commonly socialized “boxes” of gender have done a great
The gender binary of Western culture dichotomizes disgendered females and males, categorizing women and men as opposing beings and excluding all other people. Former professor of Gender Studies Walter Lee Williams argues that gender binarism “ignores the great diversity of human existence,” (191) and is “an artifact of our society’s rigid sex-roles” (197). This social structure has proved detrimental to a plethora of people who fall outside the Western gender dichotomy. And while this gender-exclusive system is an unyielding element of present day North American culture, it only came to be upon European arrival to the Americas. As explained by Judith Lorber in her essay “Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender”, “gender is so pervasive in our society we assume it is bred into our genes” (356). Lorber goes on to explain that gender, like culture, is a human production that requires constant participation (358).
Gender, in society today, is clarified as either being male which embodies traits of masculinity or on the other hand being female embodying traits of femininity. However the embodiment of these traits are just actions, decisions, or expressions rather than sexual anatomical features we are born and constrained by. Gender depictions are less a consequence of our "essential sexual natures" than interactional portrayals of what we would like to convey about sexual natures, using conventionalized gestures. (West, Zimmerman p.130) This excerpt reinforces the idea that society should view gender not as a absolute but rather a work in progress during your day to day routine. This capability to accept that gender is something you do rather than something that is leads opens up the tolerance to realize the implications that traditional gender views have impacted
Norms in society do not just come about randomly in one’s life, they start once a child is born. To emphasize, directly from infancy, children are being guided to norms due to their parents’ preferences and choices they create for them, whether it is playing with legos, or a doll house; gender classification begins in the womb. A prime example comes from a female author, Ev’Yan, of the book “Sex, love,Liberation,” who strongly expresses her feelings for feminism and the constant pressure to conform to gender. She stated that “From a very young age, I was taught consistently & subliminally about what it means to be a girl, to the point where it became second nature. The Disney films, fairy tales, & depictions of women in the media gave me a good definition of what femininity was. It also showed me what femininity wasn’t (Ev’Yan).She felt that society puts so much pressure on ourselves to be as close to our gender identities as possible, with no confusion; to prevent confusion, her mother always forced her to wear dresses. In her book, she expressed her opinion that her parents already knew her gender before she was born, allowing them t...
This article was written to bring attention to the way men and women act because of how they were thought to think of themselves. Shaw and Lee explain how biology determines what sex a person is but a persons cultures determines how that person should act according to their gender(Shaw, Lee 124). The article brings up the point that, “a persons gender is something that a person performs daily, it is what we do rather than what we have” (Shaw, Lee 126). They ...
Aaron H. Devor, professor of sociology and formerly Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, portrays in his article, “Becoming Members of Society: Learning the Social Meanings of Gender” from the book Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality, how society affects the stereotypes we have when it comes to the gender. In this article, Devor describes how gender identity begins at a very young age; “Children begin to settle into a gender identity between the age of eighteen months and two years.” Children subsequently grow to understand which specific gender grouping they belong to. Moreover, this also depends on the child’s cultural idea of how each gender is perceived. Gender is lightly shielded in some societies while there are very strict behaviors between men and women in other cultures. Society plays an enormous role in defining
perspective on the concept, arguing that gender is a cultural performance. Her careful reading of
Gender is such a ubiquitous notion that humans assume gender is biological. However, gender is a notion that is made up in order to organize human life. It is created and recreated giving power to the dominant gender, creating an inferior gender and producing gender roles. There are many questionable perspectives such as how two genders are learned, how humans learn their own gender and others genders, how they learn to appropriately perform their gender and how gender roles are produced. In order to understand these perspectives, we must view gender as a social institution. Society bases gender on sex and applies a sex category to people in daily life by recognizing gender markers. Sex is the foundation to which gender is created. We must understand the difference between anatomical sex and gender in order to grasp the development of gender. First, I will be assessing existing perspectives on the social construction of gender. Next, I will analyze three case studies and explain how gender construction is applied in order to provide a clearer understanding of gender construction. Lastly, I will develop my own case study by analyzing the movie Mrs. Doubtfire and apply gender construction.
defining our gender. Our gender starts to define as soon as we are born. If a boy is born
The relationship between sex and gender can be argued in many different lights. All of which complicated lights. Each individual beholds a sexual identity and a gender identity, with the argument of perceiving these identities however way they wish to perceive them. However, the impact of gender on our identities and on our bodies and how they play out is often taken for granted in various ways. Gender issues continue to be a hugely important topic within contemporary modern society. I intend to help the reader understand that femininities and masculinities is a social constructed concept and whether the binary categories of “male” and “female” are adequate concepts for understanding and organising contemporary social life with discussing the experiences of individuals and groups who have resisted these labels and forged new identities.
Wharton (2005:21) views gender as a ‘system of social practices’ which gives rise to gender distinctions and maintains it. What Wharton wants to say is that gender involves the creation of both diffe...