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Gender And Gender Essay

Decent Essays

Gender; a word used often but often misused and, even more so, misunderstood. Through the works of Macionis, Lorber, Sabo and Panepinto, we start to understand the depth and layers of gender. Gender is a socially constructed idea of norms by which society follows causing us to become gendered people. Gendering or “doing gender” comes from the constant gender reinforcement of society and social systems. Macionis (2017) describes gender as “the personal traits and social positions that members of a society attach to being make or female” (p. 125). He goes on to say that gender is a social organization. This social organization then shapes the ways in which we interact with others and think about ourselves (Macionis 2017). In the United …show more content…

The parents are constructing their child’s gender by social interaction and the social systems the child is introduced to.
Gender is ubiquitous. If gender was not categorized so specifically with norms that males and females need to abide by, there would be no need to explain why gender is a human-produced idea. To explain this, Lorber 2005 says, “Gender is such a familiar part of daily life that it usually takes deliberate disruption of our expectations of how women and men are supported to act and pay attention to how it is produced” (p. 120). In fact, she even goes on to say that men and women understand the role of our binary gender system so well that an individual can act out or play the other role easily. Unlike most of the Unites States, some cultures have a tertiary gender system. This tertiary system gives the individual three genders to choose from. In some Native American cultures, this third gender is called Berdache. Someone who is Berdache is a male that is treated female. In India, there is also a tertiary gender system in which the third gender is a male also treated female called Hijras (Macionis and Mead 2017). Mead goes on to conclude that “culture is the key to gender distinctions” (Macionis and Mead 2017: 127). If gender was at all genetic or biological, research would clearly show this but in fact it shows the opposite by using other cultures, often outside of the United States, that show multiple genders with

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