Caster Semenya is a black athlete track star from South Africa and is a gold medal winner for the 800 meters at the 2009 World Championships with the fastest time of the year finishing the race with 1:55.45 time and after this event many have questioned her gender due to her masculine physique and built. Everyone believed that there was no way a woman can be running that fast of a time and demanded that she take a drug test, so the IAAF (International Association of Athletic Federations) did a test and they have found no type of performance enhancing drugs in her system, then what comes next is that many believed she wasn’t a women. So the IAAF performed a gender test just in a short period of time after they did a drug test and found out that Caster Semenya has both female and male organs so she could not be categorized as a male or a female and labeled her as a hermaphrodite. This brings a problem for IAAF for whether or not she has a competitive advantage in competing with women in races even though she could not be categorized as a woman or a man in competition and there wasn’t a separate race for hermaphrodites. It was a very controversial on how the IAAF first did a drug test and found nothing since they believed she was doing performance enhancing drugs and after that they did a gender test which brought some historical athletes in protesting the gender test and one of those athletes was Michael Johnson who is a retired sprinter and many have said the reason of this scrutiny has to be with her race as well since she was a black athlete.
There were many forms of popular culture that came to form with this athlete. Caster Semenya was viewed in society to be seen as male due to her physical appearance. Her body was very mus...
... middle of paper ...
...s gender identity. Caster Semenya’s harsh observation has led me to believe that equality among all races hasn’t been fully achieved and when you’re black and achieving success, it just brings more attention and question marks on whether your successes are fair and meeting the rules and regulations or what most people think is that they have somewhat and unfair advantage when it comes to their success.
Works Cited
Ortner, S. (1996) Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? Retrieved from http://moodle.csun.edu
Fausto-Sterling, A. (1993, April) The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough Retrieved from http://moodle.csun.edu
Hookes, B. (1992) Reconstructing Black Masculinity Retrieved from http://moodle.csun.edu
Blanche, C. Dealing with Gender Huffington Post Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blanche-capel-phd/dealing-with-gender_b_641220.html
Reese, C. (2000). Biological Differences Establish Gender Roles. Male/female roles: opposing viewpoints (pp. 18-19). San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press.
Literary devices are important in short stories because in the story, it will help the readers understand things that may of happened, or irony with an object that is important to the character. By doing this, it helps the readers to understand the character more and their back story. If the writer didn’t show anything from the past when he was trying to add flashbacks then it will come across differently to the reader depending on the readers out take and their personal experience.
To begin, I think it is important to analyze the difference between “sex” and “gender”. Up until researching for this paper, I though that the two terms were interchangeable in meaning, rather, they are separate ideas that are connected. According to Mary K. Whelan, a Doctor of Anthropology focusing on gender studies, sex and gender are different. She states, “Western conflation of sex and gender can lead to the impression that biology, and not culture, is responsible for defining gender roles. This is clearly not the case.”. She continues with, “Gender, like kinship, does have a biological referent, but beyond a universal recognition of male and female "packages," different cultures have chosen to associate very different behaviors, interactions, and statuses with men and women. Gender categories are arbitrary constructions of culture, and consequently, gender-appropriate behaviors vary widely from culture to culture.” (23). Gender roles are completely defined by the culture each person lives in. While some may think that another culture is sexist, or dem...
Halberstam, Judith. "An Introduction to Female Masculinity: Masculinity without Men." Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.1-43. Print.
In “The Gender Blur: Where Does Biology End and Society Take Over?” Deborah Blum states that “gender roles of our culture reflect an underlying biology” (Blum 679). Maasik and Solomon argue that gender codes and behavior “are not the result of some sort of natural or biological destiny, but are instead politically motivated cultural constructions,” (620) raising the question whether gender behavior begins in culture or genetics. Although one may argue that gender roles begin in either nature or nurture, many believe that both culture and biology have an influence on the behavior.
In the “The Skating Party” by Merna Summers, we learned about Uncle Nathan’s past. In the introduction, we were introduced to Maida, who was being told about the time her uncle wanted to get married. The conflict of the story was that Nathan really liked two girls, Delia and Eunice. When Nathan discovered that Delia was already married, he decided to pursue a long-lasting relationship with Eunice in the rising action. Eventually, Eunice and Nathan became engaged and had a skating party to celebrate. At the climax of the story, Eunice and Delia went off skating together and fell through the ice. In the falling action, Nathan came in time to save one of them, Delia. Finally in the resolution, Nathan admitted that he was fully aware of who was who and he saved Delia instead of Eunice.
Historically throughout the earliest centuries, the term gender and sex has been a vital focus in distinguishing the overlap between gender differences. Matlin’s book, Psychology of women, explains that gender similarities of females are at most similar to men, however, considering that culture influences individual’s beliefs; women are expected to behave the way culture entitles us to (Matlin, 2008, p.8). In contrast, the book also reveals that women and men are different from one another in terms of social and intellectual skills according to biological inheritance (Matlin, 2008, p.9). These two perspectives expose valid reasons in terms of the roles that men and women play in society. Even though feminists and female psychologists imply that both men and women are exactly the same, there is however, a strong statistical correlation related to the comparison of men and women according to different brain wiring, strength and endurance (York, n.d., para.10).
Within todays sporting community, certain aspects of sport and its practices promote and construct ideas that sport in general is a male dominated. Sports media often provides an unequal representation of genders. Women athletes are regularly perceived as mediocre in comparison to their male equivalents (Lenskyj, 1998). Achievement in sport is generally established through displays of strength, speed and endurance, men usually set the standards in these areas, consequently woman rarely reach the level set by top male athletes. Due to this, the media significantly shows bias towards male sports while we are ill-informed about the achievements in the female sporting community. On the occasion that a female athlete does make some form of an appearance in the media, images and videos used will usually portray the female in sexually objectified ways (Daniels & Wartena, 2011). This depiction of female athletes can cause males to take focus solely on the sexual assets of the athlete in preference to to their sporting abilities (Daniels & Wartena, 2011). Sexualisation of sportswoman in the media is a prevalent issue in today’s society, it can cause physical, social and mental problems among women of all ages (Lenskyj, 1998).
The first perspective is that women are disadvantaged at any sport. Some people reiterate the difference of men and women in sports. This is influenced by strength and the natural power men hold, comparable to women. Rodriguez questions “Is this because female athletes don’t have what it takes to make it in the world of sports or could it be more of a social issue?” This perspective seems to be a social issue based on the notable skills women acquire vs. the apparent judgments of gender issues. The second perspective is the idea that women deserve and inherently earn their right of equal attention and equal pay. “Sometimes, the secret to equality is not positive discrimination, it 's equal terms. It 's the shrug of the shoulders that says "what 's the difference?" The moment worth aspiring for is not seeing people celebrate the world-class female cricketer who competes at comparatively low-level male professional cricket, but the day when people are aware that she does, and don 't find it notable at all” (Lawson). Lawson makes it a point to confirm the biased notions against women in sports and relay an alternative worth working toward and fighting for. Both outlooks can be biased but only one has factual evidence to back it up. The second perspective reviews an ongoing gender issue. This problem is welcome for change depending on society’s
socially learned (264). In other words, gender is a category and the characteristics attributed to
Society created the role of gender and created an emphasis on the differences between the two genders. Alma Gottlieb states: “biological inevitability of the sex organs comes to stand for a perceived inevitability of social roles, expectations, and meanings” (Gottlieb, 167). Sex is the scientific acknowledgment that men and women are biologically different; gender stems from society’s formation of roles assigned to each sex and the emphasis of the differences between the two sexes. The creation of meanings centers on the expectations of the roles each sex should fill; society creates cultural norms that perpetuate these creations. Gender blurs the lines between the differences created by nature and those created by society (Gottlieb, 168); gender is the cultural expectations of sexes, with meaning assigned to the diff...
...her heritage and the rich history of womankind. The female athlete must be sensitive to this and show that, even as she succeeds in a traditionally male arena, she can satisfy this most basic of feminine ideals.
Female athlete coverage in the media is a complication due to far less coverage than male athletes receive. Statistics show that females already receive less than ten percent of coverage, although this is much more than they received just a short time ago. Shauna Kavanagh said in an article that when she was younger, female sports were never on TV. “All of my sporting heroes were males,” she said. Although strides have been made for female athlete’s, there is still a long ways to go. Kavanagh secondly went on to express that she feels the press does not cover woman athletics imperfectly; they simply don’t publicize them enough. People are still much more interested in ma...
Lorber, J. (1994). Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender. Paradoxes of Gender (pp. 54-67). New Haven: Yale University Press.
discussed here is ‘gender’. At first, it is important to understand what gender is? The literal