Social Construction Of Gender Summary

An analysis of the social construction of gender reveals how gender is defined in our culture. Gender is not innate; it is not apart of our essential nature. Gender is learned, and we learn to “do” gender through social interactions. This means that people act in certain subscribed ways so that others know their gender immediately. If the behavior of a person does not match their appropriate sex category, then it will be considered as committing an act of social deviance.

Goffman argued that gender was a display and it was a display of highly conventional behaviors that were structured through our interaction with each other. This means that depending on a circumstance ones own gender can be displayed or performed accordingly. For instance,

They argued that we have to look at “gender” and “doing gender” as an ongoing activity that is embedded in our everyday interactions. Zimmerman and West present a structure that differentiates between sex, sex category, and gender. Sex is based on biological criteria for categorizing a person as a male or female. Sex category is ways in which society identifies you as belonging to that biological sex without seeing your genitals. To help us understand the three distinctions, they used Coffman’s case study of Agnes and her learning of displaying gender a transsexual

“Doing gender” is a continuing activity and we cannot avoid doing it. We do gender because we know that we are going to be judged by others in our society. By people “doing” gender, the gender binary is continually reproduced thru generations and this reinforces the social structure. When someone was not comfortable with their gender role or did something that was not deemed correct for that gender, society would reinforce social conventions. This would mean that the person would be acting in a way that was deviant, and would be punished. Therefore, this person would be considered as committing an act of social deviance. For example, if I was in public and I needed to use the toilet really badly I wouldn’t use the men’s toilet, regardless of how badly I needed to use it, or how close the men’s toilet was to me. I wouldn’t do that because in our society all female gendered people have a separate public toilet from the male gender, so if I were to use the male gendered toilet, I am afraid what the people around will me say and how they will look at