Gendered Norms In Leisure Spaces

Shanghai Girls is written in the atmosphere of 1937 Shanghai, ‘the Paris of Asia’ . Where the Chinese were influenced by the westernization. The developing Shanghai features the rapidly growing influence of the west over traditional Chinese beliefs.

The process of gender socialization reveals much about how gender identities are formed, but gender is not just a matter of identity: Gender is embedded in social institutions. This means that institutions are patterned by gender, resulting in different experiences and opportunities for men and women. The concept of the term “gendered institutions” means that entire institutions are patterned by gender. In a gendered institution, men and women are channeled into different, and often differently valued, social spaces or activities and their choices have different and often unequal consequences. Gendered institutions are the total pattern of gender relations, which includes the following (Acker 1992): stereotypical expectations, interpersonal relationships, and the division of labor along lines of gender. As well as, the images and symbols that support these divisions and the different placement of men and women in social, economic, and political hierarchies of institutions.

A capitalistic economy exacerbates the marginalization of women which is direct a consequence of the continued normative glorification of masculinity within sports, ensured through women’s unequal representation and sexual objectification within a sports context.

In another scholarly source called, Defying Gender Norms in rural Bangladesh: A Social Demographic Analysis written by Deborah Balk is a statistical analysis of women who defies gender norms in Bangladesh, and figure out why they do so. They try to figure out the women’s decision-making authority inside and outside the home. They did this study to better understand the characteristics of women in their authority. Balk states, “Class inequality and gender inequality have tended to be treated separately in the women’s status literature, which has ignored the role of the class. However, an understanding of an individual women’s status relates closely to both to her class and her gender.”. This relates to the Coquette, because both authors discuss

To understand all modern or early modern states in a general sense is almost impossible; therefore, a narrowing down is necessary here. This paper discusses solely about Japan and China, assumed as “early modern” in this specific context, and the position of women, particularly prostitutes, within them. Drawn from Amy Stanley’s Selling Women and Matthew H. Sommer’s Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China, it addresses the differences and similarities between the women of China and Japan in sex trade to elaborate how women were subject to the gendered order along socio-economic changes.

Deng reforms have not just been economic but also socio-political. No longer does the state attempt to force everyone in the cities to live in public housing provided by their danwei, subject to close scrutiny by other danwei members. Instead, China’s real estate market has boomed, and for the Chinese middle-class in particular, private homeownership is often seen as the ultimate status symbol. Yet, as explored in Li Zhang’s book In Search of Paradise, the emergence of the real estate market and private homeownership is not just a symbol of development and mobility but a critical change in Chinese society. Previously dominated by a society that closely monitored its citizens and strictly regulated their activities and mobility, for the middle-class home ownership has come to symbolize a space of private paradise and sanctuary from the public realm. Women have some benefits from this emergence of privacy and private space. Previously ridiculed and publicly shamed for premarital sex, women are now able to freely date and potentially have sex free from the prying eyes of the

This assumption influences the distaste for or fascination with Shanghai’s culture formed in the national and global frameworks throughout modern Chinese narrative. Shanghai can excel by displaying that it is neither a reduced, twisted and reified adaptation of the Chinese or of the modern, nor a boggy, undifferentiated blend of the two. Alternatively, according to Xudong, the presence of Shanghai urban culture situates in a reterritorialization and deterritorialization, which pursues a various route of flight and creates a varying plane of consistency. In other words, “the modernity and Chineseness of Shanghai can be understood only as something more modern than the modern and more Chinese than the Chinese” (Xudong

The gender division of occupational titles reinforces the traditional gender norms that currently subsist, especially on how women are positioned in today’s society as domestic housewives. The perception of women as domestic housewives of partaking in majority of the household responsibilities compared to men result in their lack of participation in the labour market. The reinforcement of the established gender norms due to occupational segregation encourages women to succeed less thus embedding an idea that they cannot earn an income of their own. This issue can significantly affect single parent women in particular, as they are required to cope with the double burden of limited employment conditions and household duties. Eliminating the gender

The pronounced blurring of gender boundaries can be explained by one of Judith Butler's gender definition, which states that “the body become its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time” (523). This theory allows gender to be understood as an aspect of subjectivity that is socialized but repeated so often that at a point it becomes one’s identity. The role of the culture as an end in the developing process of gender along with the act of ‘doing’ is very important, since “the act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene” (526). Women from the 20th Century who cross dressed were able to adopt and embody a masculine

As a process, gender creates the social differences that define “women” and “men”. In social interaction throughout their lives, individuals learn what is expected, see what is expected, act and react in expected ways, and thus simultaneously construct and maintain the gender order: “The very injunction to be given gender takes place through discursive routes: to be a good mother, to be a heterosexually desirable object, to be a fit worker, in sum, to signify a multiplicity of guarantees in response to a variety of different demands all at once” (Butler, 1990: 45).

What would you expect if there were no social norms dictating the roles that are ideal for people based on their gender? In the current world, social norms are so entrenched in our society that we cannot ignore them. The society has differentiated individual roles to either male or female roles, an indication that though an individual has a unique body and personality, one can never be fully autonomous but will be trapped in the role assigned to him or her by the society. Since I feel comfortable about my life, there is nothing in her arguments implied on my personal life. However, it implies that this is the case for the society around me. Judith Butler states in her essay “Beside Oneself; On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy” that “...when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must) we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed...” (Butler 115), showing that my social location is mainly constructed along gender performance and physical vulnerability by the media, family and the community.

This paper will explore gender roles and how they have been transformed and at times redefined. Many women wanted change and greater roles in society which lead to a movement that eventually questioned and blurred the lines between who the head of the household is and traditional gender roles. This paper will explore what is feminism, what exactly is gender and sex, is gender important, is the role of the male and female really important in today’s society and finally, why must man be men and women be woman?

The term “gender” is often used interchangeably with “sex”. The distinction should be made between gender and biological sex. (Antai, 2012). The US Institute of Medicine in 2001 offered recommendations on these terminologies. (Wizemann & Pardue 2001). They referred to sex as a classification, “generally as male or female, according to the reproductive organs and functions that derive from the chromosomal complement”. (Wizemann & Pardue 2001, p.5).They also suggest that gender should refer to a “person’s self-representation as male or female or how that person is responded to by social institutions on the basis of the individual’s gender presentation” (Wizemann & Pardue 2001, p.5). Implied in this definition of gender is that people perceive or present themselves in a specific way, and that this is the driving force behind how people are treated.

This classification is constructed by discourse with the objective of recreating hegemonic paradigms and perpetuating current power relations. Defining Women and Men as universal categories disguises the interests it serves. Therefore, anything that is defined as natural or universal should be studied critically. She writes, “Signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects” (185). The assumption that there is a pre-discursive body with a pre-determined sexuality and gender sustains oppression against subjugated and marginalized subjects. Disconnected from the body, she suggests, gender can include more than two versions. The analysis of these concepts--or deconstruction-- provides tools to the socially oppressed to fight against the existent social

Thus, more and more profound changes are taking place in the traditionally and social construction of gender roles according to sex, leading to a conception of the masculine and differentiated and hierarchical in terms of importance, according to which they were attributed to the man roles and responsibilities in the public domain, livelihoods, and results orientation, Competitiveness, and strength, and to women 's private, home-based and family-based roles, on the basis of In more emotional and relational characteristics