Before you begin, answer this question in as many ways as possible (come up with):
1. Besides being physically different, how would your life be different if you were born to the opposite sex?
Click here to enter information into our Google form.
In addition to social class and race, another area of inequality that sociologists often address is gender. Like race, our society often misuses the term gender. As a result, society makes assumptions about gender and biology that are more of a social construct than biology.
Often, gender is confused and incomprehensible because we are limited by our language. We use the terms “man” and “woman” to refer to both gender and gender. Then, to increase confusion, sexuality is often sex. Many people use the term “gay” or other pejorative to say that something or something is not masculine. So all three of these terms are confused with each other. However, sex, sexuality, and gender are different terms that technically refer to different aspects of us as individuals.
- Sex are individuals of biology born and often attributed to birth.
- Sexuality is the biological attraction with which an individual is born.
- Gender how an individual responds to these two things. It is not a biological but a social construct. Gender can be an internal identity / feeling or an external expression
What does it mean that gender is a social construct?
Sex and sexuality are determined by our nature, but gender is a social construct. Think about how you answered this question at the top of this post. Most of the ways your life would have been different are examples of society treating people differently based on their gender (and sexuality). It creates a certain way of being. So, for example, if I am a heterosexual man, how should I behave? What colors should I like? What clothes should I wear? How should I talk? What sports should I do? Is it suitable for me to cry? Be rude? Do you like violence? Be sensitive? And so on … All this is our gender and all of them are learned reactions.
Gender revelation parties are one example of how a man / woman is used in our language to indicate gender and gender – do these parties really reveal a child’s gender? Will the child be male / female? How do we know?
People tend to be dualistic about the world (and therefore their language). So much of our understanding is too simplistic into dualism: light and dark, wet and dry, high and low, etc … But the reality is that there are so many among these concepts. The same goes for “gender”. Our culture is pushing people to the fringes of the continuum below. This creates a duality between sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and sexual expression. This duality is often referred to as the “gender” binary.
Socially constructed binary
Our culture divides people into two very narrow, opposite ways of being. It does not allow for the expression of gender, sexuality, or gender throughout the continuum.
But in reality, sexual orientation, gender expression, gender identity are constant:
3. Is gender binary or continuum? What does this mean?
What is the evidence that gender changes over time?
Because gender is a social construct, it can be examined using sociological imagination to show that it varies depending on where and when you examine it. Click on this post to read about how gender and cheerleading have changed:
The Manly Origins of Cheerleading from Soc Images shows how amusement has changed from what is considered very masculine to feminine and has become something intermediate.
And from Smithonian, check out this article on pink sexuality.
“It’s really a story about what happened to neutral clothing, ”says Paoletti, who has been researching the meaning of children’s clothing for 30 years. She says children have been wearing beautiful white dresses for up to 6 years for centuries. “It used to be a practical thing to dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached – it has become “Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong way, he will grow up perverted,” says Paoletti.The march towards gender-specific clothing was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue, like other pastels, appeared as baby colors in the mid-nineteenth century, but these two colors were touted as gender markers just before World War I — and even then it took time for popular culture to disintegrate. things to figure out. For example, in 1918. June article from the trade journal Earnshaw Baby Division said: “The generally accepted rule is pink for boys and blue for girls. The reason is that pink, being a more resolute and stronger color, is more suitable for a boy, and blue, which is more subtle and beautiful, is more suitable for a girl.
4. How has our perception of gender changed over time? Use your sociological imagination to explain how one of the examples above proves that gender is a social construct.
More information:
Scene On Radio did an great 10 part series podcasts is about sex from
Duke University Documentary Studies Center, distributed by PRX. The series tries to answer: what’s going on in this male-dominated world? How did we initially get sexism, patriarchy, misogyny? How can we see this better and what can we do? Co-hosts John Biewen and Celeste Headlee address these issues and more. This is a great podcast about social constructing gender:
For more information. see Ferris and Stein pp. 243-247
