In Judith Butler’s essay Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy she discusses sexuality and what actually makes a world livable. Judith is a gay rights activist and doesn’t believe that your gender is not who you are skin deep, but it is who you define yourself as.…
When we have been exposed to a specific role of gender all our lives, it is difficult to accept different scenarios. A different scenario would be when society would not be able to accept a powerful and non-emotional woman, or a very sensitive man. An example of this is children are educated of what roles a man and female play. In Disney movies, such as Aladdin, children are shown roles of women and men. A young girl is given to a man just to own more land. It shows society what role a man has over a woman. Anna Quindlen author of a short essay “Gay” and Gillianne N. Duncan author of “Why Do We Hate Our Bodies?” are examples of how the norms of society shape and make people judge others only because they are different. In “Gay,” Quindlen tells a story about her friend’s friend, about how a family would rather lie about the sexual orientation of their dead son, than tell the truth and be judged…
In today’s society, people tend to group one and an another into different categories according to their own social identity. An individual’s gender identity refers to which group where one belongs to. The attributes assigned to both males and females are different because of gender differences. In “Becoming members of Society: Learning the Social Meanings of Gender” by Aaron Devor, the author argues that factors such as beliefs and behaviors help differentiate the sexual identity of a person. In addition, Devor views sex as an instrument of determining gender. It is believed that there are only two types of sexes that exist. Which are male and female. On the other hand, “Girl”, by Jamaica Kincaid, the mother tries to forces prescribe behavior,…
“Be smart, be strong, live honorably and with dignity, and just hold on” (Fray). Physician assisted suicide or better known as Death with Dignity isn’t your everyday topic or thought, but for the terminally ill it’s a constant want. The Death with Dignity isn’t something that all people or religions are in favor of and nor is the act passed in all states in the United States. Only three states in the U.S. today, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington offer their residents the option to have aid in dying as long as all the requirements are met. Death with Dignity doesn’t effect just the terminally ill person, but as well as family and friends around them creating many conflicting thoughts when opinion if Death with Dignity is truly moral and a choice…
The ideology that gender is socially constructed is a view that has been present in a number of philosophical, sociological and psychological theories. This view shares the understanding that gender is a result of enculturation through a prescribed ideal, and that society deems what is considered socially appropriate behaviour. Carol Vance, a feminist scholar, argues that gender and sexuality are not to be understood as “natural”, but rather as a socially constructed truth (Grewal, Kaplan 29). This reflects that society is shaped globally through social order. Each culture and society shares a social order that is unique to a particular set of customs, values and practices. These customs are engrained within society as individuals share a…
Exploring the construction of hegemonic masculinity, we go through a contradicting state of the definition of manhood. Although contradictions appear, it is socially adapted and able to reside without conflict. Take manhood as this, “We think of manhood as a transcendent tangible property that each man must manifest in the world” (Kimmel, 1994). Meaning that manhood is merely an idea which is drilled into a man’s head by society, “Gender, we said, was an achieved status” (West and Zimmerman, 2015) in other terms, manhood is a socially agreed upon idealization of how men should act or who they should be. In West and Zimmerman’s “Doing Gender”, Hegemonic masculinity is accomplished by the unavoidable categories of sex and gender and ways we act upon them; collaborating together in a socially constructed standard of how to be.…
Butler questions whether these gendered behaviors are natural as they are learned from one’s performance of a “gendered” individual to keep heterosexuality among their culture. If she had it her way, she would simply like to let one subject “be” and see how he/she becomes on his/her own. This would determine the true natural gender of subjects, instead of having them act in specific roles they might not agree with. However, this would never happen as many feminists defend the idea of a concrete identity because they believe it’s crucial for the advancement of interests of women. Butler argues, “My point is simply that one way in which this system of compulsory heterosexuality is reproduced and concealed is through the cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with ‘natural’ appearances and ‘natural’ heterosexual dispositions” (905). Ultimately, Butler is stating it is a mistake to characterize women as possessing the same assets. Because by doing this, gender regulations are reinforced by staying divided into two categories, men and women. But more importantly, where does this leave individuals who are “confused” or “not able to identify” with a…
Throughout the decades, human beings from a small age start learning the characteristics of a male and female. Whether it is from media, clothing and to the way one is brought up, society has similar views of what it means to be a man or a women. Men are envisioned to be strong, aggressive, successful, and someone who avoids feminine characteristics. Women are perceived to be submissive, delicate, passive, dependent, vulnerable, having the ability to care for children and at times worthless. These views of gender identity have been engraved in humanities minds due to the amount of exposure to television, advertisements and the way one is raised in their households.…
general. I will examine how these categories influence one other, how these categories influence feminism, and how feminism, in turn, influences them, along with how these categories affect women. Specifically, I will argue that the construction of the 'normative', which helps produce feminist theory discourse and action, perpetually reproduces categories of exclusion, through the notions of representation and identity politics, the production of a split between gender and sex, and through Butlers views on gender and performativity.…
The gendering process frequently involves creating hierarchies between the divisions it enacts. One or more categories of sexed identities are privileged or devalued. In modern western societies, gender divides into two. This is not necessarily the case in other times, places and colures. Gender in the modern west usually refers to two distinct and separate categories of human beings as well as to the division of social practices into two fields. “The gendering of social practices”, according to Beardsley, “may be found, for example in contemporary western societies, in a strong association between men and public life and between women and domestic life, even though men and women occupy both spaces” (10). The more gender differences are narrowed down, the more optimistic scope feminism…
Men and women are considered discrete and are expected to follow specific gender roles, otherwise they are viewed differently. These gender roles are “derived from classical thought, Christian ideology, and contemporary science and medicine.” Since women were paid less than men and had certain jobs, the expectations for them were “derived from these virtues and weaknesses.” men and women, who were poor, sometimes had to do both types of jobs “in order to survive.” There were few cases when stepping out of the gender roles were accepted. Sometimes, men would crossdress and woman would dress as men “in order to gain access to opportunities.” In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” the “separate spheres” began to emerge and many women who didn’t live up to the “mother's” expectation “were censured as prostitutes with uncontrollable sexual desires.” Citizens finally realized “women were excluded from some occupations and activities” so “towards the end of the century new jobs outside the home became available.” Many men were treated harshly if they weren’t masculine, so the expectation for them increased drastically. Though the majority of both genders (male and female) act differently, their “separate spheres” became less and less “separate” at the end of the nineteenth…
Biology alone determines whether a person is female or male, not culture, but cultural myths outline the roles women and men play in society. These cultural myths constitute to the lack of differentiation between sex and gender, imposing the idea of nature versus nurture. While one is born either female or male due to biology, one’s culture ultimately makes one into a woman or a man. Society has predisposed images of what it means to be feminine or masculine. These gender roles limit the individual’s potential, making humans into performers that must conform to their “appropriate” roles. Being a man should not rely on appearing dominant, aggressive, or never admitting to weaknesses, nor should a woman’s life depend on her reproductiveness…
According to www.sdadefend.com, there are approximately 1.6 million abortions in the U.S. every year, which is about 4,383 a day and 3 per minute. That’s an abortion every 20 seconds! Abortion should not be performed unless it concerns the health of the mother that makes her unable to carry a child. There have been many arguments about whether abortion should be legal or not. In an editorial from the Washington Times, entitled “Abortion is no minor matter”, its written that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is pro-choice, wants to delay a 1995 law that requires parental or legal guardian consent for a minor to have an abortion, while the Americans United for Life (AUL), which is pro-life, has supported the Pregnant Women Support Act in 2006 and was an important role in the Harris v. McRae decision that occurred in 1980. There are many things that the government should acknowledge before passing laws about the legalization of abortion, such as the choice of adoption, the dangers of abortion and every human being having the right to live. Conforming to www.womenissues.about.com, life begins at conception of a baby, and abortion is no different from murder because it is taking a human life.…
Do our concepts of gender and sex contribute to the ways we embrace gender and sex in…
Gayle Rubin created the sex/gender system concept in the year 1975. She created this term to offer a new way of thinking about the difference between sex and gender. She defined the sex/gender system as “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied” (WRWC, 2015). The sex/gender system has many explanations that attempt to address how our sex plays a role in how we learn gender. A few of these theories include: cognitive-developmental theory, social learning theory, gender schema theory, social interactions and gender roles, and lastly, performativity theory. In this essay I will explain how the sex/gender system is created and reinforced from the perspectives of feminist theorists.…