Social Construction Of Gender Analysis

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Social Construction of Gender
In the beginning, individuals used the role of women and men in religion to determine how men and women should treat one another and their roles in society. In the late 1800s, scientific advancements began causing individuals to rely more on science to understand the different behaviors between men and women. Since then there has been a significant increase of individuals wanting to know if the differences in the brains of men and women were the reason for behavioral differences throughout the sex. Today there are many different outlooks on what causes the differences in behavior between the sexes. The socialization theory states that an individual’s gender behavior is based on their interactions with the environment …show more content…

In this subsection, the reader must reconsider what they believe as objects. The author wants us to think as objects as “anything that is not an idea”. Similar to the first section the term to remember in this section is “discursive construction”. Haslanger describes discursive construction as different ways of classifying and describing objects for specific intentions and the results of these classifications. An example would be how individuals categorize and treat other people based on their physical characteristics. The way that people are treated can push them in a specific direction in regards to their gender. The way that society interacts with one another influences the way that children grow up and how they will become members of a society. When an individual grows up seeing certain genders complying with certain gender roles they will believe that is how things are supposed to work and continue that tradition and pass it down to their own children. A race is also something that is a part of social construction according to Haslanger. A race constructionist would argue that an individual is categorized to a certain race based off more than their physical appearance, but also their level of social class and social relations. This goes to show that social construction effects more than just gender, but more of who you are overall as a human …show more content…

She ends this section by using biconditional statements to describe what a makes a man a man and what makes a woman a woman. For example, S is a woman if and only if “i. S is regularly and for the most part, observed or imagined to have certain bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction. S is a man if and only if S is regularly and for the most part observed or imagined to have certain bodily feature presumed to be evidence of a male’s biological role in reproduction” (Haslanger). These statements are not to be used as the concrete definition to what defines a male and a female, but more so as an outlook on the construction of gender.
Personally, I agree with every statement in this article because I am a product of being socially constructed. The way that I chose to carry myself is something that I was taught by being raised by my parents and having only eight brothers to use as an example of who I should be. As I grew older I was constructed into thinking that I must enhance my physical features and take a less argumentative mindset to be considered feminine or even female. After realizing that my life had been socially constructed I began to break out of that and create my own views and

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