Aaron Ivanor Becoming Analysis

Decent Essays
What is gender? Is it whether we are born with a girl’s body or a boy’s or does it have to do with how we are raised? Many people have weighed in on this discussion and in his article, “Becoming
Members of Society: Learning the Social Meanings of Gender”, Aaron H. Devor discusses how he believes that society is what shapes what we believe about gender. What we are told about what makes us male or female, according to Devor, is what determines what gender we determine ourselves to be.
Based on his research, Devor came to the conclusion that children “often believe that people may change their gender with a change in clothing hair style, or activity” showing that how we dress and what we do is how children learn to identify different genders

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Gender is not just the color your eyes or how you choose to wear your hair it’s something that people chose to portray (Crawford,2012). In a typical traditional household, gender is a man being masculine and woman being feminine. The text states that “doing gender” requires a man to be as much of a woman as he is a man and the same applies to women.…

    • 1281 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women. Everyone has a gender and a sex, but they do not always match each other; this is why some people wish to alter their bodies or change the way they present themselves to society. Contrary to popular belief, there are more than just two genders. Some people do not identify as male or female while some identify as both. Gender is not always black or white, there are gray areas as well.…

    • 457 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Although this is true, Devor states, with a scientific study, that “children . . . understand gender as a function of role rather than as a function of anatomy.” This shows the degree to which children have an understanding of the difference between the two categories of masculinity and femininity, but it also represents the claim of which Devor speaks of. Devor’s formal judgement upon the social meanings of gender is critically, if not most significantly, expressed through his language. His interminable use of terms that are associated with his accordance of “socially directed hormonal instructions” exemplifies the unsuitable perception of a specific gender and is depicted as “dominance”, “communication”, and “identity” (53).…

    • 577 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Gender is constructed by the society. Although individuals are born sexed, they are not born gendered. Learning is required for individuals to become masculine or feminine. Children learn to talk, walk and gesture according to their social group’s beliefs of how boys and girls should act (Lorber, 1991). Gender is a human production which relies on everyone continual “doing gender” (West & Zimmerman, 1987).…

    • 1922 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Gender identity is often developed by the time a child reaches the toddler age. By this time, they should have a clear understanding of distinguishing between masculinity and femininity through social roles, customs, and behaviors upon their households (Ramirez, 2015). As a child growing up, I clearly knew what gender I was. I had a strong sense of what being a girl meant and what being a boy is. I knew that being a girl meant having long hair, wearing dresses, and liking the color pink (in my mind that is what I believe being a girl meant at the time).…

    • 729 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The novel I decided to read and analyze was “Two Boys Kissing” by David Levithan. Throughout the novel Levithan describes the day to day lives of seven different teenage boys and the struggles they face because they identify as gay. I will be examining the concepts of constructing gender, being transgender, and the correlation of compulsory heterosexuality and discrimination against LGBT people. Gender is constructed at a very young age.…

    • 1173 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    These roles are constructed by society and through social interactions. Slowly, we can determine which of our behavior receives positive sanctions and we begin to conform to those gender roles. In Spencer Cahill’s “Fashioning Gender Identity,” he explains that adults treat babies differently based on their sex, starting from the earliest days of infancy. This is the beginning of an identity that children begin to develop and eventually goes on to become a sex-class. By associating emotions, attitudes, and even colors with a specific gender, children learn that there are two different types of people.…

    • 932 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Identity is a person 's sense of self-awareness. The terms “gender” and “sex” are often used interchangeably, however, the two words have significantly different definitions. Sex can be argued to refer to the biological essentialism and the idea that we are who we are because of our genetics. On the other hand, gender is associated with the social constructionist theory, presented by Jeffrey Weeks, arguing that the way we are depends on our race, class, and sexuality. Every individual is different within their race, class, and sexuality, therefore, their gender is socially constructed.…

    • 1544 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    Throughout the course of the mid-late 1800’s, cases of both gynocentrism and androcentrism were evident within commonly accepted scientific “fact”. In his analytical paper Women’s Brains, Stephen J. Gould notes the particular biases among multiple leading scientists of the time in relation to the misconceptions about female intelligence. “In the most intelligent races, as among the Parisians, there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains” (Women’s Brains. Gould). Such were the ideas at the time of noted craniometrists, specifically Paul Broca and his disciples.…

    • 1851 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    John Katz believes that in order for boys to become men they must learn how to be boys, first. John Katz states that there is a specific set of “rules” that all boys must automatically follow from a young age. For instance, the rules stated in the text are about hiding your sensitivity and emotions away. If a boy discusses his feelings, fears or problems he is called a “nerd.” The text implies that in order to be a “man” you must be independent and strong.…

    • 760 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Everything concrete between males and females is attributed to sex. On the other hand, gender includes the social behaviors and arrangements that are built around each sex category (Conley, 2015). In other words, gender is only a social position, such that women act different than men do allowing them to live in different orbs of society. Gender…

    • 1810 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    When we are born we are immediately brought into this human-created institution. Instead of uniting us, gender as a structure does a better job at hindering us. Our parents begin dressing us in either pink or blue clothes, buying us either dolls or dinosaurs, setting expectations of how we dress, act and play based upon what gender we were assigned. However, the concept of gender as a social institution also gives us hope that we can change what is acceptable as either male or female and as time goes on we will see more and more change about how we define…

    • 1020 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In order to fully understand how gender is a social construct we must understand, What is gender? The definition of gender is “The state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones). What is gender expression, that being the way express and see gender including, but not limited to gender norms, gender roles. What is being said does not imply that humans are biologically different or that the social effect are not important or real. What is being said is that human have influenced and created the vision of what each gender should do and what way they should act.…

    • 941 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Being a part of a Human Sexuality course has definitely opened my eyes to many different topics and issues that are occurring around the world. I believe I have lived a very sheltered life after learning about some of these topics, because I hadn’t even heard of most of them. I liked to think I knew all there was to know about human sexuality simply because I understood sexual intercourse, STI`s, and using protection. But human sexuality involves much more than those three things. Three of the major topics that have made me really think about how uneducated I was in regards to human sexuality were sexual birth defects, gender identity and gender roles, and sexual assault.…

    • 1301 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Gender is not necessarily indicative of the sex organs with which we are born. When you are talking about male and female, you are referring to sex and not gender. On the other hand, gender is the social construction of a person 's sex. Gender refers to the social definition and cultural expectations of what it means to be man or woman. In addition, some people may identify a gender differently from their sex.…

    • 1643 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays