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Reflections on understanding gender identity
Nature vs nurture in gender
Nature vs nurture in gender
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Recommended: Reflections on understanding gender identity
In “ Learning to be Gendered” authors Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet both argue that being a man or a women is more than a sexual organ it's the way society and parents have taught you what male and female should be.This is shown when the authors state “thus the dichotomy of male and female is ground upon which we build shelves from the moment of birth.(737)”In this quote the authors urge whether the separation or contrast between men and women dependent on the way they are taught to be from birth.The authors insist that society begins to gender you from birth.According to the authors society does this when as soon as the child is born in the “hospital nurseries provide pink caps for girls and blue caps for boys.(737)”In other words
In today’s society, it can be argued that the choice of being male or female is up to others more than you. A child’s appearance, beliefs and emotions are controlled until they have completely understood what they were “born to be.” In the article Learning to Be Gendered, Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell- Ginet speaks out on how we are influenced to differentiate ourselves through gender. It starts with our parents, creating our appearances, names and behaviors and distinguishing them into a male or female thing. Eventually, we grow to continue this action on our own by watching our peers. From personal experience, a child cannot freely choose the gender that suits them best unless our society approves.
Judith Lorber wrote in the piece “Night to His Day”, for the individual, gender construction starts with assignment to a sex category on the basis of what the genitalia looks like at birth” (324). The first thing that children are seeing when they come into this world are the separation of colors based on what gender you are. They kids are being given toys that differ depending on which sex organs you were born with. All of these norms are being introduced into kids lives and they start the gender divide at a very young age. Children begin to understand the normalness of sexism before they can even say there first
Betsy Lucal, "What it means to be gendered me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System."
In this article, Shaw and Lee describe how the action of labels on being “feminine” or “masculine” affect society. Shaw and Lee describe how gender is, “the social organization of sexual difference” (124). In biology gender is what sex a person is and in culture gender is how a person should act and portray themselves. They mention how gender is what we were taught to do in our daily lives from a young age so that it can become natural(Shaw, Lee 126). They speak on the process of gender socialization that teaches us how to act and think in accordance to what sex a person is. Shaw and Lee state that many people identify themselves as being transgendered, which involves a person, “resisting the social construction of gender into two distinct, categories, masculinity and femininity and working to break down these constraining and polarized categories” ( 129). They write about how in mainstream America masculinity and femininity are described with the masculine trait being the more dominant of the two. They define how this contributes to putting a higher value of one gender over the other gender called gender ranking (Shaw, Lee 137). They also speak about how in order for femininity to be viewed that other systems of inequality also need to be looked at first(Shaw,Lee 139).
In the article "Night to His Day" Judith Lobber gives her insight on the social construction of gender. She talks about how men and women have been taught by society to fit into the gender of there genitalia. She explains that this has been going about since the beginning of time. Lobber explains that gender is one of the major ways human beings organize their lives. Judith argues that gender and sex are not the same things. Your gender is not determined by your genitalia. It is decided by your experiences, the way you act, think, and sometimes genetics. In the article Lobber says " Individuals are born sexed but not gendered, and they have to be taught to be masculine or feminine"(Lobber 8). I personally am not sure what my stance on this
The doctors initial assignment of sex to a newborn is by anatomical possession of male or female genitalia. Sex categorisation follows in the exhibit of socially constructed identities to sex such as clothing, from the moment the newborn is assigned as being biologically male it is then reasserted by dressing the baby in blue clothing a hegemonic notion of masculinity. Gender stems from sex category and its relationship with it, living up to the conventions of your sex category - with the the accomplishment of what is taken to be one’s “natural” or “essential” nature (Goffman, 1977).
The second a baby is born the gender they are born with influences how people treat them. The gender they are born with will influence what they wear, what toys they play with, how they are treated etc. Gender is not rooted in the brain or genetically determined but environmentally determined. By defining the importance of recognizing that gender is not rooted in the brain and genetically determined and by refuting those who claim that gender is predetermined at birth and rotted in the brain by presenting cases of children who have identity issues based on their preferred sexuality and how they were raised, one will be persuaded that gender is not predetermined and rooted in the brain and that the way we are raised determines how we see our gender. Is gender rooted in the brain automatically or does America’s culture teach girls to play with dolls and boys to play with cars?
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.
Gender is a cultural construct, completely unrelated to one’s sex assigned at birth. Nevertheless, in American culture one is assigned a specific gender the minute they are born. When we enter the world, the doctor immediately exclaims, “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl,” and the baby is swaddled in the gender identifying blue or pink blanket. Parents and the medical community even subject intersexual infants to painful and unsuccessful sex assignment surgery to fit this gender norm.
From the moment a person is born and often earlier, that person is categorized by their gender and will spend the rest of their life facing the questions of identity and appropriate behavior respective to their gender. Diana Kendall defines gender as “the culturally and socially constructed differences between females and males found in the meanings, beliefs, and practices associated with “femininity” and “masculinity” (Kendall 303), and socialization as “the lifelong process of social interaction through which individuals acquire a self-identity and the physical, mental, and social skills needed for survival in society” (Kendall 75). Gender socialization begins at or before birth and is perpetuated by the parents’ views on gender, is reinforced
Over the decades, a significant mark of the evolution of gender is the increasing social phenomenon in how society conceptualizes gender. Gender is a system of social practices for characterizing people as two different categories, femininity and masculinity and arranging social relations of inequality on the basis of that difference (Ridgeway & Correll 2004). Gender-neutral parenting (GNP) refers to raising children outside of the traditional stereotypes of girls and boys. It involves allowing children to explore their innate personalities and abilities rather than confining them into rigid gender roles that society has shaped. It can be argued that it is through socialization children discover how to operate in gendered structures, learn
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.
What differentiates one’s gender from one’s sex? Sex is biological while gender is social. In this sense, a person whose sex is female can have a male gender if some of the tasks she does are more attributed to males. But society has greatly erased this distinction and instead created gender differences that relate to one’s sex. While biological differences do not lead to gender differences, society has created these separate spheres to differentiate between who they consider as a male or a female and have carefully intertwined it in everyday life as seen with messages understood from the media, schools and a child’s first year along with each family’s struggle to attain the dream of an “ideal family.”
Our gender identity comes from the our DNA; the nature side of this argument. However that is not to say that the environment we grow up in can’t affect our views. As children, we learned through observation and reproduction. We would watch others, our parents, teachers, peers, and then try and reproduce those actions. If a young boy sees his father at the gym lifting weights, or if a young girl sees her mom in the kitchen making dinner, these kids may try and follow in those same paths. In addition, with new technology, parents have an influence over their child long before they have been delivered. With ultrasound, parents can find out the sex of the baby, and then plan for the delivery based on the results. Gender specific names, clothes, toys, and even aspirations are prepared for the child before they even enter our world. So these kids arrive to an environment that is seemingly predetermined for them.
The most important thing I learned in this class is that gender is a social construct. Social construction shows that “as a society we create standards to identify and categorize normal behavior from deviant behavior” (Sosa’s gender and biology lecture). This can be seen in children before they can walk by categorizing genders and dressing females in pink and boys in blue. Social construct can be as simple as labeling and categorizing eggs, bacon, and toast as a breakfast meal and a hamburger as a lunch or dinner meal. As discussed in Asbell’s lecture social construct is reinforced through many types of discourses. For example, females are often described or implied to be the weaker sex, gentle, and sensitive in contrast to men which are described