Gender Identity And Identity

Gender is the intersection of the relationships between sex, gender identity, sexuality and gender expression; gender is an achieved status

In our world, cultural identity is the glue that holds us all together; it provides a feeling of importance and understanding that we all need in our daily lives. But this support and positive attitude that often comes with identity can be reversed by people who use these cultural identities to generalize and oppress groups of people as shown in these two pieces of literature. “Immigrants”, by Pat Mora, is a poem that tells the story of multicultural parents that bring their children to the U.S. in the hopes that they will become proper Americans so they will be accepted.. The other piece, “By Any Other Name”, is a memoir by Santha Rama Rau and also follows a similar story about two sisters being oppressed while attending school in British-controlled India. Both “By Any Other Name” and “Immigrants” reflect each other by portraying children growing up in a prejudiced environment, but also have their differences in the unique situations that led the subjects here.

A significant point in Bems’ (1993) chapter in Lens of Gender on gender identity was the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy when it comes to the treatment and development of young boys and girls in society. The first point discussed is how the ‘maternal instinct’ is not so biological as much it is women being confined to the private sphere, in turn having the most interaction with children. This point stood out as I was reading because I have known from a young age I did not want children. Many told me that my opinion would change when I grew older, and when you have your own child being a mother comes naturally. As I reflected I was reminded of the point later made by Bem (1993) that “adults in the child’s community

​​Gender is defined as whatever behaviors and attitudes a group considers proper for its males and females. Unlike sex, gender is something that we learn from the day we are born. “Young children begin to acquire gender role stereotypes at about the same time they develop gender identity and by the age of 3 or 4 most children” (Amanda Youmans). Peers, community, media, religion and our upbringing all play a role in the understanding of our culture and what is considered acceptable for males and females. When the sex of a child is revealed, they are automatically placed into a gender specific role with certain expectations. There are things in this world such as colors, toys, media depiction and taught behaviors that play into these gender roles.

In light of performativity, political transformation via hegemonic cultural practices continues to advocate for gender parody. Overall, the recent exploration of alterity ethics complements performativity politics by exploiting the subversive potential of gender identity as well as female identity. For the oppressed individuals, power should be subverted via political strategy guided by the consequences and punishment with the objective of maximizing the good in the society. In other words, performativity politics described by the recent works of Butler takes the form of action consequentialism. Still, Butler’s politics is reversed by the ethics without coming to a satisfactory position.

Gender identity is the personal conception of being a man or a woman and the society creates standards and comes up with gender roles basing them on existing norms and traditions which will in turn influence gender identity. For instance, most societies associate strength and dominance to be masculine roles while caring and assisting or subordination known to be feminine roles. This clearly makes gender identity be bred within the society. One’s identity is important as it influences his or her life through events like life experiences, how one is being taken or treated, how to do one associate or socialize with others, the type of job one will have to do and also opportunities that may come up favoring a certain type of gender identity. One is also likely to face obstacles or discrimination due to his or her identity.

There really haven’t been many times in my life where there was a conflict between my personal experience and the gender identity that I was expected to conform to. Although I am a bit of an introvert. There have been less cases of these because with people that I choose to surround myself with I make sure that they know that I don’t care what anyone expects me to conform to. “Individuality makes its appearance by being differentiated from other individualities” (Buber, pg. 162). In response, they question me about why their likes, dislikes, and choices are different from mine, and not from society’s.

The construction of a self-identity can be a very complex process that every individual is identity is developed through the lenses of cultural influences and how it is expected to given at birth. Through this given identity we are expected to think, speak, and behave in a certain way that fits the mold of societal norms. This paper aims to explain how gender perform gender roles according these cultural values. I intend to analyze the process in which individuals learned and internalized their respective gender identities, through their cultural background. I will be conducting a set of interviews with the intention to compare my experience as a self-identified male of Mexican descent, to the experience of another male character of Japanese heritage in order to understand how we come to self-identify as masculine in diverged cultures. In this paper, I argue that the construction of gender identities is a direct consequence of societal influential factors such as family values; values that reflect the individual’s culture. This analysis will not only utilize evidence from these identity formations, but also in explaining why and how these self-identities were constructed using both theoretical sources and empirical studies as a framework.

It is my position that gender identity plays more of a role than sexual orientation does. If someone was born a male or female, it doesn’t mean that is how they automatically identify as. Society does try to fit people into the standardized thinking of blue for boys and pink for girls. In time, though that stigma has changed and we are changing our views on how people identify.

The term gender refers to the social construction of female and male identity. It can be defined as more than biological differences between men and women. It includes the ways in which those differences, whether real or perceived, have been valued, used and relied upon to classify women and men and to assign roles and expectations to them. (Henslin, 2012). The significance of this is that the lives and experiences of women and men, including their experience of the legal system, occur within complex sets of differing social and cultural expectations. On the other hand, influences a wide range of career-related attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes. This includes career choice, career experiences, occupational health, work attitudes, other people’s perceptions, and career out¬comes. Therefore, to understand individuals’ careers, it is important to consider gender.

Throughout today’s society, there are multiple views and opinions on whether or not there are more than two genders or if gender is even just a social construct. Each person has their own individual preference on how they express their gender. Therefore, we can no longer assume what someone identifies as just by looking at them. Over the years I have learned more about gender expression and gender identity as I gained friends who were homosexual as well as transgender. I feel as if I was introduced to all of these ways of life at a young age, therefore I can, in some ways, teach those who are uneducated and do not know what to think. I have personally never really thought about the different gender identities I could label myself as but as of right now I identify as a cisgender female

Gender is the intersection of the relationships between sex, gender identity, sexuality and gender expression; an achieved status

Chapter 1: The quote I thought was important was "The symbols people use to describe the sexes (pink or blue, pretty or strong), and the way they interact with others the basis of their sex matters" (pg. 5). The reason why I thought it was important was it is so true how people tend to dress their new born babies in the color that designated to the sex of their babies. But now people are not always dressing their kids in pink or blue. Now people are you gender natural colors.

​The concept of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity and gender expression is essential for people to learn especially those who don’t conform to binary norms. Some students question their sexual identity when growing up since there are pressured by the society to conform to binary standards such as doing boys chores and girls chores. However, some people don't conform to the social expectations of what a boy or a girl should be, these students get confused and try to explore their gender identity. In these interview study, the primary focus will ask personal questions about gender identity and sexual orientation to get an idea of what people go through in their childhood when developing gender expression and the social expectations of their gender.

The textbook Gender Ideas, Interactions, Institutions defines intersectionality as, the fact that gender is not an isolated social fact about us, but instead intersects with our other identities (Wade & Ferree, 2015). Gender intersects with a variety of factors that essentially shape and create our identities. Some examples of intersectionalities include, race, economic class, gender identity, age, ability and disability, immigration status, and sexuality. The authors’ state these intersectionalities help create our gender strategy, which is they define as “finding a way of doing gender that works for us as unique individual who are also shaped by other parts of our identity and the realities of our lives (Wade & Ferree, 2015)”. We can learn many things by taking into account the factors that create our identities, and how these factors create and shape our lives and our places in society. By exploring this topic, can we broaden our understanding of the way privilege and oppression are experienced in peoples lives by looking at gender and its intersections?