Gender and Sexuality

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Recommended: Relationship between gender identity and sexuality

One can say that there are definitely connections between gender and sexuality. Gender and sexuality can combine to make a huge difference in people’s lives. There are social influences around sexuality that influence us all. Expectations about how women and men, boys and girls, should behave as well as how everyone will be either male or female pervade society. And as a man or female it is believed that one must act and behave completely heterosexual and stay in line with these socialized gender stereotypes. Heterosexuality and homosexuality depend on sex and gender as concepts. Gender typing and social stigmas around sexuality are two things that are very prevalent in society today.
Sociologists have argued that people learn gender roles and gender stereotypes through socialization. Gender role socialization often reinforces gender inequality because men and women are expected to fulfill their specific “gender roles”. We live in a society where there are only two perceived genders. Gender is implicated in homophobia more generally and in “fag discourse” specifically. In this paper I will talk about the connections between gender and sexuality.
The article “What it Means to be Gendered Me” by Betsy Lucal examines how gender is structured and socialized in the US. It also examines the social construction of gender and the implications of gender. Gender is pervasive in our society with people constantly attributing gender to other people because it is what we are socialized to do. Betsy Lucal provided an analysis of her experiences as a woman whose appearances often leads to gender misattribution due to the fact that there are “two and only two” genders (Lucal, 301). These socialized gender types make it hard for people who don’...

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...“male” and label those that deviate from the social norm as homosexual. Fag Discourse is less about sexuality and more about maintaining gender inequality and the boundaries of masculinity. Gender is implicated in Fag Discourse in the way that the hetero-normative nature dictates what makes and what doesn’t make a faggot. Attributed gender roles tell one how to behave appropriately.
Gender roles and sexuality are always being constructed and reconstructed. We live in a gendered world in which there are both behavioral and appearance rules. We learn our gender identities as soon as we are born due to the fact that parents begin gendering their children from their very first knowledge of such children. There seems to be normative conceptions of both femininity and masculinity.
“Gender displays are simply read as evidence of one of the two categories” (Lucal, 312)

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