Social Construction Of Gender

We tend to live in a society conceptualized on the notion that women and men have diverse bodies, unique capabilities, different desires, and needs. Gender comes out as the common output of differences between masculinity and femininity, thus, different from the concept of sex describing biological differences between females and males. From a sociological perspective, gender is a social construction or an outcome of the social environment. In the definitional aspect, social construction relates to the processes by which ideas on how things should work undergo conceptualization into social reality. Before the emergence of the sociology of gender in the 1970s, Functionalists focused on the exploration of the differences in the sex roles in the
Based on this argument, behaviors are outputs of various factors inclusive of culture, class, religion, age, body shape, and sexual preference. “The word gender, then, refers to the symbolism of masculinity and femininity that we connect to being male-bodied or female-bodied” (Wade and Ferree p. 5). Construction of gender theory highlights the active role and involvement of boys and girls in the construction of the gendered identities. This highlights the feministic understanding or conceptualization of the issue of gender. In such instances, it is ideal to highlight that women and men have the potentiality of taking up different masculinities and femininities, which might contradict each other in different situations. Evidently, this construction of gender identities: varieties of femininities and masculinities, tends to be dynamic rather than static. In an expression of this argument, feminists believe that contextual societal forces such as the media, learning institutions, and religious practices have enormous implications on shaping the behaviors, thus, the platform for the selection and incorporation of appropriate forces into different versions of gender. It is possible to use these attributes in the determination of the nature of an individual into men or women within the
This relates to the sociological concept of sexism, which defines prejudice against individuals within the society based on their biological sex. On the other hand, it is possible to conceptualize sexism as a preference for the masculinity, thus, enormous implications of patriarchy in the societal interactions and associations. Sociology of gender also associates with the integration of the gender binary among women. In such instances, it is possible to define women with reduced social status, as well as lower material rewards. Notably, such conceptualization of gender associates with the prioritization of the expectations, needs, and interests of men in the society. The approach is an expression of most elements of the traditional societies in which masculinity had enormous implications on the social order and stability in agreement with the functionalist perspective. One of the critical features in the sociology of gender is the family as the functional unit of the society. Similarly, factors such as media, learning institutions/education, politics, and cultural attributes are vital in the social construction of