The Theories in Gender

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Gender is a socially constructed concept which challenges how individuals and others perceive their selves. It “refers to the performance itself, the ways people accomplish being a man or a woman, a boy or a girl” (Aulette, Wittner 75). The individual and interactionist views on gender correlate with my perceptions of gender based on my early life experiences. Both help to explain the foundations which have formed my understanding of gender. However, the structuralist theory deviates from how I understand gender.
We are all born into a world filled with rules and standards that we must follow. As infants and young children, we do not have a choice in how we are raised and perceive the world. The individual theory states,
Individuals who were socialized into roles that fulfilled societal needs were the key to maintaining the social system. Their socialization involved internalizing social norms as expectations about how to feel, think, and behave in the social roles they inhabited as parents and children, husbands and wives, employers and workers, teachers and students (Aulette, Wi...

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