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Gender is social construction
How gender roles affect society
How gender roles affect society
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Recommended: Gender is social construction
Heteronormartive notions of gender create challenges and issues that require a complex process of resolving gender inequalities. In particular, one of the challenges is resolving the inequalities that are reinforced by male and female gender norms. The notion of gender creates a dichotomy in male and female roles. Through socialization processes, we learn to identify specific behaviours as 'masculine' or 'feminine', and boys and girls are taught to perform and display these traits, which become a dominant part of their identities. Western society has constructed gender roles that promote and maintain notions of suitable behaviours and expectations. For instance, males and females are required to act a certain way according to their situational and contextual location. Moreover, gendered behaviour can be seen in the context of families because parents continue gender roles into families, preserving the idea of “doing gender” (West & Zimmerman, 2011). “Doing gender” refers to the process of socially guided perceptions, which make us believe that male and female behaviours are “natural.” Further, these perceptions are routinely embedded within our everyday interactions that claim a specific gender (West & Zimmerman, 2011). Although parents in Western society continue to hold onto traditional roles of parenting, they are slowly recognizing methods that have no gender boundaries. Ideas of masculinity and femininity are reinforced in families to form practices and customs that create an imbalance among genders (Coltrane, 2011). Within heterosexual families, gender role inequalities are reinforced through household labour and domestic work. Furthermore, it is important to analyze this topic in order to understand the problematic notions ...
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...rison, D. and Albanese, P. (2011, in press) Parental Military Deployments and adolescent's housework. Studies in Political Economy, 88 (1).
Margolis, M.L. (2009). Putting mothers on the pedestal. Ontario: Oxford University Press.
Shaw, S.M. (1988). Gender Differences in the Definition and Perception of Household Labour. Family Relations 37(3), 333-337.
Silverman E.L. (2011). The Last Best West: Women on the Alberta’s Frontier, 1880-1930. In M. Kimmel (Ed.), A. Aronson (Ed.), A. Kaler (Ed.), The Gendered Society Reader. (pp. 186-197). Ontario: Oxford University
Smith, D. (1993). The standard north American family. Journal of Family Issues. 14(1), 50-65.
West, C, & Zimmerman, D.H. (2011). Doing Gender. In M. Kimmel (Ed.), A. Aronson (Ed.), A. Kaler (Ed.), The Gendered Society Reader (pp. 28-42). Ontario: Oxford University Ontario: Oxford University Press.
A typical afternoon consists of my dad laying on the couch from a long day at work, and my mom in the kitchen, preparing dinner. Although we live in an era that has predominantly nullified sex-specific social norms, a difference in gender roles still exists within households. What exactly are gender roles? They are fixed, gender specific expectations, established, in this case, among families. These roles of what should socially be considered masculine and feminine have existed throughout many centuries. A particular issue regarding gender roles is, do gender roles in households ultimately affect both the physical and mental development of a child? With thorough research and observations conducted by, Jacquelynne S. Eccles, Janis E. Jacobs,
Enter into any café on the UCSC campus for a prolonged period of time and you are likely to hear the words “gender is a social construct”. Initially you’ll think to yourself, “what a load of granola” this is an expected reaction because for most people the concept of “gender” is natural. Its not until you are able to see how the idea of gender is constructed from physiological differences between males and females as discussed by researcher Miller AE and his team of scientists. Or how men possess great privilege because of gender roles, and women are seen as objects, that you will truly be able to understand that gender is nothing but a social contract. Authors Gloria Anzaldúa, Marjane Satrapi, and Virginia Woolf discuss in their novels Borderlands,
Morris, M. (2000). Some facts and dates in Canadian women’s history of the 20th century. Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, 20(1). Retrieved from http://criaw-icref.ca/millenium.
Wood, J. T. (2011). Gendered lives: Communication, gender, and culture. (9th ed ed., pp. 1-227). Boston,MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Throughout today’s society, almost every aspect of someone’s day is based whether or not he or she fits into the “norm” that has been created. Specifically, masculine and feminine norms have a great impact that force people to question “am I a true man or woman?” After doing substantial research on the basis of masculine or feminine norms, it is clear that society focuses on the males being the dominant figures. If males are not fulfilling the masculine role, and females aren’t playing their role, then their gender identity becomes foggy, according to their personal judgment, as well as society’s.
Wood, J. T. (2013). Gendered lives: communication, gender & and culture (10th ed.). Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
This article was written to bring attention to the way men and women act because of how they were thought to think of themselves. Shaw and Lee explain how biology determines what sex a person is but a persons cultures determines how that person should act according to their gender(Shaw, Lee 124). The article brings up the point that, “a persons gender is something that a person performs daily, it is what we do rather than what we have” (Shaw, Lee 126). They ...
Wood, J.T. (1999). Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender, and Culture, Third Edition. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company.
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.
Kendal, Diana. "Sex and Gender." Sociology in Our Times 3.Ed. Joanna Cotton. Scarborough: Nelson Thomson, 2004. 339-367
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
Kessler, Suzanne J, and McKenna. Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
A functionalist perspective suggests that our society is made up of interdependent parts and that gender roles support its social stability, balance and equilibrium. According to “The Sociology of Gender: Theoretical Perspectives and Feminist Frameworks” by Linda L Lindsey, “In preindustrial societies social equilibrium was maintained by assigning different tasks to men and women. Given the hunting and gathering and subsistence farming activities of most preindustrial societies, role specialization according to gender was considered a functional necessity.” During this time survival was a more difficult task and so men and women had to rely on each other to live. In today’s society, these roles have begun to shift and it is more common to find females providing while males stay at home, but for the majority, our original gender roles are still intact. The functionalist theory even in a contemporary society finds that the survival of the family unit relies on conservative gender roles. This theory is not realistic in today’s society because women are more motivated to be educated and career based, instead of devoting their life to motherhood. Lindsey claims, “ Such a divide is artificial and dysfunctional when families need to cope with the growing
There have been many scholars who have pondered the question of what masculinity really is and how do we define it as a society. Often the question is gender something we really do, do we each shape the course for ourselves or are we molded into a predominate shape? To even begin the long debate to answer questions such as these, one needs to look at the individual role and at the role that institutions have on us.
Wharton (2005:21) views gender as a ‘system of social practices’ which gives rise to gender distinctions and maintains it. What Wharton wants to say is that gender involves the creation of both diffe...