Gender as a Social Construct Essay

This question can also be applied to gender. too. Do men and women have languages of their own? If gay men and lesbian women have different languages from heterosexual individuals then do different genders also have different languages? As I looked at the interviews my group conducted with both men and women I found that I could pull out more ‘gendered language’ within…

Gender Roles in Society Gender roles are very prevalent in today’s society. Gender roles are a set of societal norms dictating the types of behaviors which are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for people based on their actual or perceived sex or sexuality. In fact, every baby at birth, they are categorized into male or female. “Gender represents a spectrum of sociocultural roles, identities, and orientations that are distinct from one 's biological sex determined by…

Speak, gender is proven to be a social construct that causes the main obstacles in the plot. From the beginning, gender is shown to be a social construct solidified by the actions of the antagonist, Andy Evans, towards Melinda and girls in general. “Beast: ‘You’re not going to scream. You didn’t scream before. You liked it. You’re jealous that I took out your friend and not you. I think I know what you want.’” (194) This moment shows just how severe the idea of gender being a social…

towards the nurture side of this concept. Vygotsky’s theory states that a child’s interactions with their social and cultural environments shapes who the child will develop into. Through their interactions with their environment and experiences with more skilled adults children develop sharper mental processes and internalize new knowledge. Language is key to this development…

emotions, when complying to this they are “doing gender”. One could argue, as some researchers have, this construct is often carried out in crime. In return, this can account for some differences and disparities in violent crime. Social constructs of gender and doing gender can also be held reliable for differences among violent male and female offenders. For instance, men could be committing violent crimes differently based on them complying with gender norms and the same for violent female…

article Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory by Judith Butler Gender is a difficult term to define. Some people might think it is the external characteristics of a person what marks it, others believe it is what it is what you feel inside, and another may hold that is what society imposes them. This critical review examines an article that argues that “gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo”.…

Similarly Hoyenga and Hoyenga (1993) state that both genes and the environment work together to determine gender. An example of this is Udry’s (2000) study of girl’s exposure to prenatal androgens (male sex hormones) in the womb and how this affected the girl’s socialisation into femininity after birth. Udry (2000) found that girls who were exposed to the male sex hormones in the womb were less accepting to feminine attitudes even though their parents enforced femininity on them later in life.…

Introduction The Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI; Bem, 1974) explores and measures the concept of androgyny using two factors: masculinity and femininity. The instrument has three subscales to measure the construct of androgyny: masculinity, femininity and social desirability (Bem, 1974). The original scale had 20 items each for these three subscales for a total of 60 items. Bem (1979) reduced the number of scale items to 10 for each subscale, maintaining two factors. Other researchers found…

Doing Gender and Acting Woman: Thoughts on Butler’s Gender Performativity or Your Life as a Stage: Rome-who and Julie-what? Butler proposes, in Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, that gender does not precede the social expression of one’s gender identity, but that it is, rather, through those social performances and historic contexts that gender is constituted. Butler adopts de Beauvoir’s concept of the body as a historical situation, and rejects the idea of a precursory agent who…

standpoint theory, and progressive definitions of gender. The idea of gender as a theory rather than a biological fact can be traced back at least to Simone de Beauvoir’s famous assertion in The Second Sex that “one is not born but rather becomes a woman.” In more contemporary discourse, the idea of woman grows more foggy. Gender is a social construct. This means that the idea of gender depends on the society in which one exists,…