Analysis Of The Lens Of Gender By Sandra Bem

While reading “Gender,” an essay by Jack Halberstam, the topic of sexism was brought to the forefront of my mind. It has been brought up more often in conversation in the modern era, issues such as how a few cruel insults pertain to female reproductive anatomy and, in a sense, degrade females and ultimately identify them, as well as femininity, as inherently “bad”. Such a thought stemmed from how Halberstam touches on the “problematic stabilization of the meaning of ‘women’ and ‘female’”: meaning there is no room for argument when it comes to your gender—you’re either a girl or not. You either fit into a strict mold, or you do not.

The perpetuity of prejudice against women, that continues today, encounters origins in several creation myths. In a Greek creation myth, woman was created by Zeus as a punishment for the misdeeds committed by Prometheus and the rest of mankind. Zeus created woman “making her external appearance desirable in order to trick man into accepting the wickedness inside her. Although woman has the appearance of a goddess, this external covering, like Prometheus’s fat, merely disguises and masks reality – her thievish nature and her lies.” In the Christian creation, woman was created by God as a helper for man. Also, whereas man was made from dust, woman was made from one of man’s ribs; this has allowed theologians to focus on woman’s metaphysical inferiority and her

Throughout my selected text, Johnson focuses on the church along with the subsequent androcentric image of God, and how it impacts woman around the world. She explains that throughout history, with the help of the church’s patriarchal nature and society’s values as a whole, woman have been seen “as a ‘defective male’…that must live in obedience to her [male counterpart,]…[ and who are often also referred to as the] ‘second sex’” (Johnson 92). This

Towards the end of ‘On the Equality of the Sexes’, Murray specifically invokes the story of Adam and Eve, a story used for centuries to depict women as the sinners, to turn the argument against itself and argue that Adam, or the men, are the real sinners in the Bible, as Adam knowingly breaks the rules while Eve was innocently deceived by the serpent. “Adam could not plead the same deception,” says Murray, “nor ought we to admire his superiour strength, or wonder at his sagacity”, implying that people overestimate the skills of men while dismissing the intellect of women as commonplace. The bigger takeaway from Murray’s invocation of Adam and Eve is that it shows the audience that she is trying to make her argument more relatable by putting gender equality in the framework of the Bible, a piece of work that was not only a religious text, but a way of life for most people in Murray’s time. By analyzing the Bible through a feminist lens and swapping the roles of Adam and Eve, Murray saved women’s reputation as the repenting sinners, but in mentioning the Bible to justify her point, Murray ultimately retreats back to the practice of relying on others’ words to make her ideas worthy of public consumption.

This article begins with a controversial belief that the Bible is hostile to women. Bringing to light the creation and fall of Genesis, and how it shows weakness in women. The main point of this article is to reread and understand the stories. Thus disproving both feminist and yahwist beliefs. Adham, Phyllis uses defines this term as a word with androgynous meaning, showing that it was not one person rather one identity which incorporates 2 sexes. Phyllis then pulls up another point showing that while most think Eve coming second was a bad thing, she views it as a “climax” of the story . The point of Phyllis Trible’s article is not to show dominance of women rather equality. She does this by delving into the original scripture and breaking it down. In class Mr. McCormack had discussed how translations of the bible are very difficult, this is important because the creation stories are full of translation misconceptions . I will also delve into historical and geographical contexts . The creation stories are not a literal translation, people often do not delve

Since the beginning of evolution, females have been subjected and objectified based on their gender. History taught us that when during the 19th century, Charles Darwin, an English naturalist and geologist stated in his papers “The Origin of Man” (1859) and “Descent of Man” (1871) that men were superior to women. Unfortunately, such subjections to women still persist today; in politics, education, labor and surprisingly in science.

With few exceptions, our male dominated society has traditionally feared, repressed, and stymied the growth of women. As exemplified in history, man has always enjoyed a superior position. According to Genesis in the Old Testament, the fact that man was created first has led to the perception that man should rule. However, since woman was created from man’s rib, there is a strong argument that woman was meant to work along side with man as an equal partner. As James Weldon Johnson’s poem, “Behold de Rib,” clearly illustrates, if God had intended for woman to be dominated, then she would have been created from a bone in the foot, but “he

In Sandra Bem's The Lenses of Gender (1993), Bem's last focus is on how the concepts of androcentrism and gender polarization create a gendered identity and form our society's institutions. The most significant aspect to this piece was if men and women were different, and if so, how to handle that difference in a society. It is very difficult to read this book as a women in America because the concept of equality seems so easy to me. Treating everybody with the same respect is a natural response for me, and to know that in this androcentric country I will not have enough time for my children is heartbreaking. With that said, in the passage a valuable point is made,

“The social construction of gender comes out of the general school of thought entitled social constructionism. Social constructionism proposes that everything people "know" or see as "reality" is partially, if not entirely, socially situated. To say that something is socially constructed does not mitigate the power of the concept. These basic theories of social constructionism can be applied to any issue of study pertaining to human life, including gender. This is

The history of the world is a complex arrangement of happenings and occurrences that have shaped the current state of civilization. At a fundamental level, history is the driving force behind every element of society that exists today. Within history, there are several factors that have and continue to determine the way in which our society functions. One of the most significant of these factors is gender. Today, conceptions, viewpoints and ideas surrounding gender are always changing. It is this fluidity of thought that ultimately allows society to progress forward and create change. However, gender has not always been as openly discussed. Tracing back through history, gender has consistently been a point of identity among humans.

Gender Matters is a collection of various essays on feminist linguistic texts analysis, by Sara Mills. Mills develops methods of analyzing literary and non-literary texts, in addition to conversational analysis based on a feminist approach. The author draws on data from her collection of essays gathered over the last two decades on feminism during the 1990s. The essays focus on gender issues, the representation of gender in reading, writing, and in public speaking. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of feminists’ analysis of sexism in literature and the relation between gender and politeness. The article is informative for my research paper, as my

West and Zimmerman claim that gender is not something we are but something we do.

Gender subjectivity is another important aspect of the debate around gender because it focuses on a move away from the idea of innate sexual identity characteristics that divide human beings into male and female (Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, 2014). This type of view challenges the essentialism of sexual difference into something more then a binary between male vs. female, heterosexual vs. homosexual, etc., as it recognizes that these dichotomies are problematic because the term of gender encompasses a whole range of identities across a spectrum. In particular ideas like what does it mean to be equal? (Butler) and seeing division of gender into binary conceptions of identity can be seen as a process of ‘othering’ (de Beauvoir) are some of the areas that this topic examines.

The Bible is controversial on the matter of gender equality. There are numerous contradictions about the status of women in Christian society. Historically, the most prominent interpretation has been rather negative toward women. The Christian Church, with principally male authority, emphasizes the idea that women are inferior to man. They focus on Eve’s sin leading to a punishment that “her husband will have authority over her.” (Drury, 34)

In 1990 Judith Butler first published her book Gender Troubles, where she questions gender roles. Butler theorizes that gender, as in male and female, is a type of societal/gender colonialism created to keep people who do not fall within the gender roles from being part of the mainstream society. In her 1999 preface, in which she addresses the impact her book had in the decade since its original publication, Butler expresses the concern she had with the “heterosexual assumption in feminist literary theory (61).” Butler utilizes the works of other feminist philosophers to further demonstrate the inconsistency, and disconnect between fighting for women rights and fighting for human rights. Judith Butler makes an interesting argument on the failure to recognize the spectrum of gender, however, she makes a compelling argument on the use of language perpetuating a patriarchal society.