With this week’s readings, many interesting articles were discussed but the one that struck me the most would be Christine Delphy’s article, “Rethinking sex and gender.” This specific article brought about points and perspectives that I had never experienced before prior to the reading. What was even more shocking, however, was when I discovered that some of the fallacies that Delphy had mentioned in the article were already ingrained in myself. For example, within Delphy’s first examination she points out that there is a hidden assumption that sex precedes gender since it is a biologically derived characteristic and this was an assumption that I found to make myself. Even though I thought that this article would just be another simple read for me, it turned out that it was quite the enlightening experience as it provided insight into how gender roles and classification developed as well as providing a lot of interesting arguments. However, what I connected with most would be the later part of the article that specifically focuses on the topics of hierarchy and division. …show more content…
Within this type of system, sexual characteristics as genitalia are given very little or even no significance and gender does not exist. This was a very new type of equality for me that I had never thought of before since it wasn’t suggesting that males, females, and other genders have to strive for complete equality. Instead, it suggested that the classifications of male, female, and other genders should instead be abolished so that everyone can be treated with the same sense of “sameness.” This type of perspective was one that made me very conflicted since one hand I did believe it to be ingenious, but on the other hand I disagreed with it since, to me, it seemed as if it was taking away a portion of an individual’s
Throughout my reading of Deborah Blum’s, “The Gender Blur: Where Does Biology End and Society Take Over?” I have to admit that I had some mixed feelings. My initial reaction upon first glance, was that the essay was very intriguing. The title was inviting, the topic was argumentative, and the opening was captivating. However, after reading further and analyzing it from a rhetorical perspective, I admit that I was disappointed. Although Blum did indeed demonstrate examples of each ethos, pathos, and logos appeals, filling her writing with facts after facts, the overall writing was not well put together.
In today’s society, it can be argued that the choice of being male or female is up to others more than you. A child’s appearance, beliefs and emotions are controlled until they have completely understood what they were “born to be.” In the article Learning to Be Gendered, Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell- Ginet speaks out on how we are influenced to differentiate ourselves through gender. It starts with our parents, creating our appearances, names and behaviors and distinguishing them into a male or female thing. Eventually, we grow to continue this action on our own by watching our peers. From personal experience, a child cannot freely choose the gender that suits them best unless our society approves.
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,
As meaning making creatures, humans attempt to categorize and definitively understand anything they observe. Although this crusade for understanding is not inherently bad, it often produces unintended negative consequences. As humans sort, classify, and define everything, they simultaneously place everything into a box that constricts creativity and fluidity. Concerning gender, these boxes create harmful conceptions of each person on the planet. Although these conceptions of gender are constructed and not “real” by any means, they have real implications in the process of socialization that influence how each person lives his/her life. In the United States, the commonly socialized “boxes” of gender have done a great
Suggested roles of all types set the stage for how human beings perceive their life should be. Gender roles are one of the most dangerous roles that society faces today. With all of the controversy applied to male vs. female dominance in households, and in the workplace, there seems to be an argument either way. In the essay, “Men as Success Objects”, the author Warren Farrell explains this threat of society as a whole. Farrell explains the difference of men and women growing up and how they believe their role in society to be. He justifies that it doesn’t just appear in marriage, but in the earliest stages of life. Similarly, in the essay “Roles of Sexes”, real life applications are explored in two different novels. The synthesis between these two essays proves how prevalent roles are in even the smallest part of a concept and how it is relatively an inevitable subject.
Gender order according to our text is labeled as “hierarchal” (2008), stating that “Men dominate women in terms of wealth, power, and social position, but not all men dominate all women” (2008). While this may be true, it is creating a divide between the two genders. This divide is apparent by looking at the pay scales between men and women, and even how the genders are looked at in terms of jobs or college admissions. Looking at today’s society however, women are slowly rising to compete with their male counterparts, in many ways, from education, government, and even television, for example Oprah Winfrey.
In the book Difference Matters, Brenda J Allen, begins writing about how gender matters in society. One of the main topics that she talks about is how in today’s society the male gender is the more predominate gender. As the reader, she has brought to mind many new ways to view how males earn more money then females, how we classify jobs as masculine or feminine, and also how society excepts males’ vs females to act and preform in the work force.
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).
Written within the 20th volume of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy is an entry by a young feminist named Kathleen Okruhlik. Within this entry she postulates the idea that biological studies and sciences are under the falsification of sexism, the idea is that the male has always been the primary subject of study and too this day still maintains focus on the male over the female. She also explains as to how the biological studies focus on the male and how it mates, while the female is the ideal figure always represented for being submissive. The entire image that has been a painted over the years, all the work and research done has been under a somewhat undeniable account of sexism. The general study of the biology has been influenced from
" The Social Construction of Gender" touched on how Western society views gender. This article pointed out historically how women and men appear to be separate species entirely. And that even though physiologically we are similar, male and female, we are of an opposite class. The male and female class should not be labeled how our bodies function for we are all individual and unique. If a scientist views a female to be female based on the fact that physiologically she menstruates, than what is a female that ceased menstruation or never began to? Is she only half woman? Is a male not a ...
As we discuss the articles of Anne Fausto- Streling, “The Five Sexes, Revisited” and Marjorie Garber, “The Return to Biology” in class we came to see how these two articles could bring up such controversy. As they question our perspective on human nature as we have always known it to be, from “The Five Sexes, Revisited” stating “absolute dimorphism disintegrates even at the level of basic biology” (176), to “The Return of Biology” saying “Society mandates the control of intersexual bodies because they blur and bridge the great divide” (184). We see many different aspects on how human biology or culture is more than what meets the eye. All I can begin to say is everything we, as the human species, do revolves around dimorphism no matter the questions or contradictions that may arise. The idea that only two sexes exist is still firmly maintained in our society as how things are suppose to be aka the “norm”.
Lorber grabs the attention of any reader by using some effective strategies and stating that discussing gender is considered equal to “fish talking about water”( Lorber 1). Therefore it meaning that a fish cannot think of living without water and similarly human beings cannot ponder the thought of living without gender. Judith Lorber has also compared the questioning the authenticity of gender to the rising of the sun. So, it is clearly understood that gender, though being practiced inevitably in our daily lives, many of us fail to accept that it is a way of organizing our lives and practicing gender is like practicing to organize our disorganized lives.
If the definition of gender is taken to be “the structure of social relations that centres on the reproductive arena, and the set of practices...that bring reproductive distinctions between bodies into social processes” (Connell 2002, p. 10), then both the structures
Gender is such a ubiquitous notion that humans assume gender is biological. However, gender is a notion that is made up in order to organize human life. It is created and recreated giving power to the dominant gender, creating an inferior gender and producing gender roles. There are many questionable perspectives such as how two genders are learned, how humans learn their own gender and others genders, how they learn to appropriately perform their gender and how gender roles are produced. In order to understand these perspectives, we must view gender as a social institution. Society bases gender on sex and applies a sex category to people in daily life by recognizing gender markers. Sex is the foundation to which gender is created. We must understand the difference between anatomical sex and gender in order to grasp the development of gender. First, I will be assessing existing perspectives on the social construction of gender. Next, I will analyze three case studies and explain how gender construction is applied in order to provide a clearer understanding of gender construction. Lastly, I will develop my own case study by analyzing the movie Mrs. Doubtfire and apply gender construction.
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...