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Women in male dominated careers
Negative effects of gender roles in kids
Negative effects of gender roles in kids
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For this first journal entry, I have chosen to address Judith Lorber’s paper “Night to His Day.” A number of points made throughout the entire article paralleled ideas and concepts I was familiar with due to previously taking a Psychology of Women course at WSU. A few of these points included: West and Zimmerman’s notion of “doing gender,” the idea that men who enter traditionally female-dominated fields lose prestige, the case of David Reimer (Lorber refers to him as “the accidental transsexual”), and the fact that women still do the majority of child-rearing—even if she works full-time. In addition to previous course connections, the part of the paper which recounts how “gender blending” women have been expelled from women’s bathrooms struck a chord with me. I recently donated to a campaign calling for funds to build a gender-neutral bathroom at a school with a high enrollment of trans students. It saddens me when a human being is subjected to judgment or harassment, especially when it comes to something as basic as using the restroom. Finally, I found the idea that a woman could b...
In Susan Faludi’s “The Naked Citadel”, she analyzes the homosocial nature of men as she tries to discover the causes behind sexism and to find out “why men who oppose women’s progress are so angry” (Faludi, 72). The main subject of her reading is the all boys college named the Citadel and its vehement opposition to admitting a female into its ranks. The boys become aggressive and angry about the thought of an independent and unique woman becoming a part of their student body. The thought of it threatens the gendering society established within the Citadel where the boys rely on each other to establish their own gender identities. Gender identities rely a lot upon the shaky foundation of the social dominance of one sex over the other. In today’s
In this world, people go through the process of dealing with both empathy and malice. As a matter of fact, almost everyone has been through times where maybe they feel understood by some and misunderstood by others. Specifically, in the book “Night”, by Elie Wiesel, a character named Madame Schachter goes through the experience of fellow Jews displaying empathy and malice during in result to her behavior. Along with this, the reactions reveal just how inconsiderate we can act when in uncomfortable situations. One example of the malice and lack of sympathy they provided her was during the cattle car ride to Auschwitz. During this ride, she went a bit insane due to the devastating separation of her family. Elie explains, “She received several blows to the head, blows that could have been
Adriana Throughout the narrative Night, the author Elie Wiesel, a young teen who was very confident in his faith, experiences multiple hardships that cause him to question what he once believed to be true. His religion stayed strong until it became obvious to him that God was causing his people to suffer. When Eliezer was just a young boy at fifteen years old, he was extremely interested in Judaism, he wanted to learn everything he possibly could. However, his father did not want him to study the Cabbala until he was thirty years old. Eliezer could not wait this long, so he sought wisdom from a man named Moshe Beadle.
The section in the novel night that painted a dark and angry picture of human nature is when the Jews were fleeing Buna and hundreds of them were packed in a roofless cattle car. The Jews were only provided with a blanket that soon became soaked by the snowfall. They spent days in the bitter cold temperatures and all they ate was snow. For these reasons, many suffered and died. When they stopped in German towns, the people stared at that cattle cars filled with soulless bodies. “They would stop and look at [the Jews] without surprise.” It was a regular occasion for the German people to see suffering Jews and not feel pity. The dark and angry picture of human nature was when a German worker “took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it
During the Holocaust many people were severely tortured and murdered. The holocaust caused the death of six million Jewish people, as well as the death of 5 million non-Jewish people. All of the people, who died during this time, died because of the Nazis’: a large hate group composed of extremely Ignoble, licentious, and rapacious people. They caused the prisoners to suffer physically and mentally; thus, causing them to lose all hope of ever being rescued. In the novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, Elie went through so much depression, and it caused him to struggle with surviving everyday life in a concentration camp. While Elie stayed in the concentration camp, he saw so many people get executed, abused, and even tortured. Eventually, Elie lost all hope of surviving, but he still managed to survive. This novel is a perfect example of hopelessness: it does not offer any hope. There are so many pieces of evidence that support this claim throughout the entire novel. First of all, many people lost everything that had value in their life; many people lost the faith in their own religion; and the tone of the story is very depressing.
Being Trans gender is when a person’s self identity does not conform with their conventional sex. Talking about people identifying as a transgender individual is a difficult and very controversial topic to discuss. One author, Ruth Padawer has brought the topic to light, presenting us with examples from one of the most prestigious women’s colleges in the United States. In her piece, “Sisterhood is Complicated” from 2014, she ponders on the idea of if people who identify as transgender should be allowed in an all women’s college. In her piece, she states that “Some two dozen other matriculating students at Wellesley don’t identify as women. Of those, a half dozen or so were trans men, people born female who identified as men, some of whom had begun taking testosterone to change their bodies.” All of which made the switch to be transgender after being accepted into the school. So, in a college of all women, some are switching genders and it challenges the idea of an all women’s college. The piece continues to go through and tell us the story of three trans men and their experience at Wellesley college.
Betsy Lucal, "What it means to be gendered me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System."
Barbie is tall, thin, has large hips and a large chest; she is beautiful, blonde, and she loves to shop; overall, Barbie is the feminine ideal. As researchers Jacqueline Urla and Alan Swedlund acknowledge, “little girls learn, among other things, about the crucial importance of their appearance to their personal happiness and to their ability to gain in favor with their friends” (1995:281). Gender roles are both centered around behavior as well as around bodies; this poses huge problems for transgender people, as well as explanations for transphobia; society has, for so long, accepted gender and sex to be synonymous. Because of this, a person whose gender is female and whose body is (rhetorically) male is a frightening and concerning deviant to most people’s understanding of the way in which gender exists. Everything that has to do with ideals for bodies leads to problems for transgender people; whether it is, as Urla and Swedlund also commented, that “...woman’s body was understood through the lens of her reproductive functions” (1995:287), or the general idea of “norms” for body proportions. When considering women’s bodies’ main purpose to be that of reproduction, it is apparent why the concept of transgender people may be concerning; transgender women -- that is, people, assigned male at birth but who live as women -- are women whose bodies cannot reproduce in the way that women are expected to; transgender men -- people assigned female at birth but who live as men -- may still have bodies which are viewed as useful mainly for their reproductive capabilities, but which they do not intend to acknowledge or use as such. When things stray so drastically from a norm which has long been accepted with minimal thought, onlookers panic that other norms will start to change as well. Straying from this norm also
“Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls”: few of our cultural mythologies seem as natural as this one. But in this exploration of the gender signals that traditionally tell what a “boy” or “girl” is supposed to look and act like, Aaron Devor shows how these signals are not “natural” at all but instead are cultural constructs. While the classic cues of masculinity—aggressive posture, self-confidence, a tough appearance—and the traditional signs of femininity—gentleness, passivity, strong nurturing instincts—are often considered “normal,” Devor explains that they are by no means biological or psychological necessities. Indeed, he suggests, they can be richly mixed and varied, or to paraphrase the old Kinks song “Lola,” “Boys can be girls and girls can be boys.” Devor is dean of social sciences at the University of Victoria and author of Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality (1989), from which this selection is excerpted, and FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (1997).
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).
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.
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
The article “What Makes a Woman” focuses on how transgender should not define a woman because they have not lived their whole lives as a women, have not gone through the struggles, complications and life experiences that women go through. The author also brings in the idea of women and men having different brains to support her argument. The author, Elinor Burkett, effectively uses the three appeals of logos, ethos and pathos to get across her message. The first appeal is ethos that mentions other people’s opinions. The second is pathos by showing Burkett’s emotions. And finally, the third appeal is logos, which includes data statistics.
Gender Outlaws (Smith, 2010) breaks the laws of gender by defying gender normative rules that exclude trans, queer and other non-conforming gender expressions often oppressed by “gender-norming rules,” rules, “expected to observe” or be subject to ridicule and often times labeled as freak by those who consider themselves as normal (p. 28). A gender outlaw seeks to, redefine the notion of gender and are carving out spaces of their own” (p. 30).
According to Kate Bornstein and their work Gender Outlaw, “the first question we usually ask new parents is: Is it a boy or a girl?” (46). This question creates a sense of a rigid dichotomy, by which individuals must outwardly conform to either being male or female. Individuals who do not prescribe to this binary concept of gender identity find themselves ostracized from much of society – ignored, ridiculed, and laughed at as an insignificant minority. For this group of people, “either/or is used as a control mechanism,” creating a normative group by which power can be derived from (102). According to Bornstein, the concept of the gender binary being the “natural state of affairs” is one of the most dangerous thoughts proliferated about gender within modern society (105). For individuals who do not conform to this socially created structure, they are seen as opposing the natural order of things, and subsequently, their power is stripped by society, and they are deemed as unnatural and inhuman. These oppressive labels create intense feelings of gender dissonance, and the pressure to conform can often overwhelm the individual, directly resulting in often horrific