The course of Sex and Gander can help give an insight on the different types of ethnographies that exist throughout the world. Ethnography can be defined as the scientific description of the customs of individual people and cultures. Understanding all the different types of cultures and how they function with sex and gender can help someone understand them more because they may not be so closed minded as they once may have been. It can help understand the concept of gender and the factors that impact its creation and expression and interpret and apply theoretical approaches to gender studies. This fits into Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, because you can get the ideal of how this culture approaches and understands …show more content…
One of the main reasons is the perception of differences between masculinity (what society deems appropriate behavior for a “man”) and femininity (what society deems appropriate behavior for a “woman”). As which we have discussed this in class almost every day during debates. From the day we are born we put everything into categories with very distinct meanings. Just like when babies are born they are either given blur or a pink blanket identifying as either a boy whose given blue and a girl who is given pink. But then as the child ages they are still going to experience these distinctions between gender. Boys will be told that they are going to grow up strong, be the head of the household and earn all the money they want in the world. While on the other hand women are expected to find a man that can support her, where she will bear children for her husband (not herself) and all at the same time do daily household chores, cook and also be there for the husband day in and day out. No one ever stopped and thought to ask if the female wanted something more than that. Yes, some women are completely satisfied with staying home and having someone else provide for them but others are not. But in most countries, that is not expected and whether they want to do something with their lives or not they are forced to stay home and tend to the family, house and husbands, just like in El Barrio, where the women …show more content…
Some cultures have been doing things the way they have for centuries and because their ancestors have done that that is what they believe doing is ultimately the only way. People and their cultures usually do not change unless multiple people speak up and try to do something, but even then, it usually takes years for something to change, whether it is something unethical or not. Philippe Bourgois “had managed to gain the trust and long-term friendship of street-level drug dealers in one of the roughest ghetto neighborhoods of East Harlem.” Bourgois brings up the stories of Primo, Caesat, Luis, Tony, and Candy these people that he had gained the trust of gives the readers an insightful view of how their world works. Bourgois spent three and a half years in El Barrio and over those three and a half years he came to understand that “cultures are never good or bad: they simply have an internal logic… suffering is usually hideous; it is a solvent of human integrity…” No matter what is done to help “fix” a culture it will never change it fully there will always be someone who refuses to change and if others see that they do not have to change it might encourage others to do the
In their ethnography Bourgois and Schonberg are studying the culture of a community of heroin injectors from San Francisco, to which they are referred to as the Edgewater Homeless. They follow them in their everyday lives, recording burglaries, panhandling, love affairs, conflicts, alliances, hierarchies and deaths as well as trips to jail, hospitals, and treatment centers. They delve back into the lives of the Edgewater Homeless to analyze what factors lead them to heroin addiction. In class, it was said that cultures are system and the world is a product of culture exposure. However, this is a culture that has been unknowingly produced by the higher power forces of our nation and is constantly looked down on.
This model’s theorists argue that abnormal behavior is best understood in light of the social and cultural forces that influence an individual; as such they address the norms of and people’s roles in society. When Kody was a young boy, society’s cultural forces that had the biggest impact on his life were gangs. Gangs were all around him and because they were all around him, gangs became a normal part of life as they were a big part of south central Las Angeles’s culture. Culture refers to the set of values, attitudes, beliefs, history, and behaviors shared by a group of people and communicated from one generation to the next. There is no doubt in my mind after reading this book and what I have heard about south central Las Angeles that there is a lack of normal values that the majority of the United States shares.
For a long time ago, women just did anything at home: clean the house, wash clothes, cook the meals, and work outside the house and nutrient their children. Then they followed to order from their husband at home, and listen to the words of their husband. In addition, they made many little things in the military: wash clothes, serve the meals, and fix the clothes. The next things that it was convinced me when women had their own value in society. They began to raise their own worth and sense of themselves to build their country even though no one explained to them. People can consider that they endured very much but they did not still accept
Masculinity is always associated with power and control, while femininity is associated with passivity and weakness. As Allan Johnson states, this is related to the fact that “male dominance creates power differences between men and women” (248). So because of the fact that men hold positions of power, they seem more superior to women, creating these stereotypes about each gender. The reason this is important is because when there is an idea of someone being better and people believe it, then it actually happens.... ...
...re taught the roles and because we all act upon them and try to fit the stereotype of the role we embed it deeper into our society. It is a complicated concept that affects many aspects of ideology like class, sexuality, and race. Genders and the stereotypes that go along with them are defied in the film Bridesmaids throughout the whole movie.
In the past twenty years the way society looks at the word “gender” is a totally different perception than what they did years ago, according to the Webster’s dictionary, the word “gender” is the state of being male or female. The word gender use to mean male or female, but now it has become this word that people are taking “offensive”. For example, at schools all around there having to make things gender neutral because a group of people are taking things and twisting them to where it can seem offensive. Society is accepting to anything that’s different and not “how it’s supposed to be” because that equals more publicity. Everyone wants to make everything equal to whatever you want to
In this world, everyone is different and unique, so each person has their own opinion and way of thinking. Therefore, it makes masculinity a very controversy subject to talk about. This subject is so big and has many ways to look at it, so it is difficult to say which opinion is right or which opinion is wrong. Everyone has their own way to think of it, so of course they will have their own supporting story or details to support their argument. Opinions of masculinity are different in everyone and the concepts masculinity is changing over time.
There are many different factors that display the “social norm” for genders. Religion plays a role along with social media. Females are to wear pink and play with dolls. As females grow from girls into women. They are supposed to clean, cook, do laundry, and anything their husbands ask them to do. They have the ‘okay’ to show emotions on how they feel about something and not get picked on it. As where boys, they are not allowed to wear pink or play with dolls. They are to wear blue and play with monster trucks or play in the dirt. They are not typically allowed to show emotions. When little boys grow up to be men, they are supposed to go to work, pay the bills, and they typically want their supper on a plate ready when they get home. Katz proclaims in his article, “More than anything else, boys are supposed to learn how to handle themselves.” (59.) Meaning, they are not allowed to show emotions to other kids not even to their own parents. They are just supposed to ‘handle’ themselves. How does a little kid just handle themselves and not show emotions? Pollitt states, “Women’s looks matter terribly in this society, and so Barbie, however ambivalently, must be passed along.” (74.) I must strongly agree with this remark. They do everything you watch on a TV. The TV Ads advertise women with makeup and being tall and skinny. Gardner claims, “By helping children understand the similarities of different
All of these types of programs address the structural aspects of the problem, but Bourgois is also adamant throughout the book that he wants to examine the ways structure and culture interact. In some ways, they can help offset the deficits in dignity that may propel young, poorer men to turn to violence and crime as badges of honor. But I scratch my head thinking about programs that may more directly fill the need on these guy ’s part to be seen as men, real men, given that their gender ideologies seem so foreign and I can not see government, like smaller community based organizations have, providing programs that get into the nitty gritty of people’s lives. Perhaps the government can better fund the private programs that do.
The everyday role of women in many countries is quite different from that defined in
The terms sex, gender and sexuality relate with one another, however, sociologists had to distinguish these terms because it has it’s own individual meaning. Sex is the biological identity of a person when they are first born, like being a male or female. Gender is the socially learned behaviors and expectations associated with men and women like being masculine or feminine. Gender can differentiate like being a man, woman, transgender, intersex, etcetera. Sexuality refers to desire, sexual preference, and sexual identity and behavior (1). Sexuality can differentiate as well like being homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, etcetera. Like all social identities, gender is socially constructed. In the Social Construction of Gender, this theory shows
Women can be raised exactly as men to grow and further themselves through education and be able to have a career and take care of themselves, but only those who truly want their independence will put in the time and effort. In order for women to make the change to be more independent in our male-dominant culture they must be ready to stray from the norms of
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.
Social Construction of Gender Today’s society plays a very important role in the construction of gender. Gender is a type of issue that has raised many questions over the years in defining and debating if both male and female are equal. Today, gender is constructed in four different ways. The The first way gender is defined is by the family in which a child is raised.
The differences between women and men are not solely biological. Our society’s culture has established a set of unwritten cultural laws of how each gender should act, or in other words society has ascribed a stereotype. Men’s gender identity has been one of masculinity, and masculinity is defined as referring to a man or things described as manly. What does manly mean though? Is a male manly if he is “Mr. Fix-it”, or the jock, or if he sits on the couch on Sunday watching football? This latter statement is a stereotype of men, that has been around for decades, and is current as well, but starting with the 1960’s a man’s role started to change, despite the stereotype not changing to accommodate it. For the past 40 years one can see how men have taken on roles stereotypically ascribed to women, such roles including being the “stay-at-home mom”, which we can find an excellent example of in the 1980’s film “Mr.